What Was Your First Amazon Order?

So there's a thing going around Twitter, which I read about on a blog, about your first Amazon order.

Let’s play a game. Go to Amazon, to “Your Orders,” and with the year drop-down, find the earliest year listed… and then RT and tell us what the FIRST thing you ever bought on Amazon was. Bonus points for it being nearly 20 years ago. 🙂 #BabysFirstAmazon

We've been using Amazon for a while, so I went and looked up my first order. Unsurprisingly, it was a pile of books.


Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages edited by Carol Braun Pasternack


The Formation of the Medieval West: Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians by Michael Richter


The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture and the State) by Jack Goody


From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 by M.T. Clanchy


The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretations in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries by Brian Stock


Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millenium by Patrick J. Geary

This stack of page-turners ran me $196.45 on 29 April 1999. I was a senior at Long Beach State University, studying (in case you can't tell) medieval history. I'd talked my way into a graduate seminar, and was writing a paper on literacy in the Middle Ages. These were books I wanted but couldn't get at the university library. Or at least, the ones that didn't cost $$$ each to purchase. There were a few of those, and I got some of them later on, but not with this order.

Looking at the covers now, I want to go upstairs to where all my history books are still in boxes from when we moved, dig some of these out and reread them. Or in actuality, read them through for the first time. While researching for my paper, I didn't read any of the books I used all the way through. I dug through the table of contents and the index to find the useful bits; I didn't have time to actually read all the books I consulted cover-to-cover. But I'm still interested in this topic, and seeing these books again makes me want to settle in and really read them.

I never did finish my bachelor's degree. I'd been having trouble most of my adult life with "getting sick" and losing days or weeks or a month off of work or school. I'm a good enough scholar that I can lose two weeks or even a month out of the middle of a term, and (if the instructor would let me, which was a coin-toss) make up all the work, get good grades on the exams, and pull a stack of As out of the wreckage. But my illnesses, which were a combination of nausea and exhaustion and general... yuck, were getting worse and worse.

Finally, after watching me spend a month lying on the livingroom couch alternately sleeping and staring at the ceiling, my husband dragged me to a therapist, who sent me to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed bipolar disorder.

There's another Amazon order from later that year that marks when that happened; my doctor told me to get some books and read about the condition. (The thing where you lie on a couch for an hour talking to your P-doc doesn't happen anymore. You see a therapist if you want to talk. Your P-doc manages your meds. Appointments after the first diagnostic visit were fifteen minutes, so he wanted me to educate myself as much as I could.) Here's my Amazon order from 22 November 1999:


An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison


A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness by Patty Duke

I chose these two books to start with because the titles suggested the authors didn't BS around about their conditions. Jamison has a PhD in Psychology, IIRC (I'm pretty sure that's it, and that she's not a Psychiatrist, which is an MD specialty) and was diagnosed after she'd been practicing for a while. Patty Duke was an actress I'd seen in a number of things, so there was some familiarity there, at least on my part. I've always been a direct sort of person, and the lack of pussyfooting around in how they described their conditions appealed to me. I learned a lot from their books.

I wasn't aware at the time, but that diagnosis -- marked by the purchase of those books -- was the end of my scholastic career. I had plans to go for a PhD in History, and then teach and do research, and write books of my own. After a couple of years with my P-doc, during which I tried an array of different meds, different dosages and combinations, never with much improvement, I asked him straight out if I could go back to school. It'd been a while and I was getting antsy. He looked me in the eye and said that going back to school would be an expensive mistake.

Well. Okay then.

I was only a couple of classes short of what I absolutely needed to graduate. I spent a ridiculous amount of time getting an AA degree (and now I know why), and took a huge number of lower division history classes, many more than I needed, because they looked interesting. When I transferred up to Long Beach State, their registration system had me listed as a Senior from the day I set foot onto campus because of my transferrable unit count. Which was nice when it came time to get in line to register.

And although I only needed upper division courses, I spent three years at Long Beach State before finally crashing and burning out; the bottleneck was the Latin classes I needed in order to be able to work with primary sources, so I wandered around the history department, with brief forays into a few others, again taking a lot of classes I didn't strictly need, because they looked interesting. I know a lot about history, the European Middle Ages in particular, plus a few other areas that struck my fancy at the time, although I'll admit I'm a bit rusty at this point. I've always wished I'd gotten my scholarly act together sooner, so at least I'd have had my doctorate before everything blew up, and could legitimately write nonfiction on the subject, even if I wasn't up to teaching classes every day.

Although if I'd been able to do that, it would've been because I wasn't bipolar in the first place and I wouldn't have had the problems later anyway. Circular wishing, and all that.

I've written fiction most of my life, and I am published now. I enjoy what I do and find it fulfilling. Still, there's a wistfulness there, if I let myself dwell on it.

Angie

Writing Characters Who Aren't Like You

Someone on a mailing list posted this link (thanks Lyn!) and I had to pass it on. Daniel Jose Older, an SFF writer and editor, wrote an article called 12 Fundamentals of Writing "The Other" (And The Self). If you write, or have considered writing, about characters who are different from you in some basic way, this'll give you some good stuff to think about.

I particularly like #5 -- "Racist writing is craft failure." Absolutely. It's easy to reach for obvious traits or characteristics without thinking about it, and have your hand fall onto a racist (sexist, homophobic, etc.) cliche. If bigoted cliches end up in your story, they're like any other cliches and make the writing weaker and more shallow.

Good stuff, check it out.

Angie

Shooting Open Locks

So you're a writer and your character wants to shoot a lock off a gate or a door or something, to get to where they need to be. Does that actually work? What kind of gun/ammo would you need? How many shots? Let's find out!

Seriously, this is a fun video. :)



Also, that dude is a pretty awesome shot. O_O

Angie

Your Brain on Fiction

A writer friend on a mailing list linked to an article called Your Brain on Fiction, which talks about how the brain responds when one is reading fiction.

It seems that reading vivid adjectives or active verbs stimulates the same parts of your brain that activate when you're actually experiencing the adjective or doing the verb. For example:

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark.

This also works with social interactions. Reading about characters going through emotional experiences and relationships makes readers more able to understand other people, empathize with them, and navigate social situations.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.)

Although that last bit made me wonder. It sounds weird that kids would pick up more about social interaction from movies than from television, and I don't really buy the "going to the movies with parents" thing. When a little kid is really into a TV show, they're going to want to talk about it, whether or not Mom or Dad knows who all Spongebob's friends are. And what about watching movies on TV? Maybe they meant to differentiate between watching television and going to a movie theater, rather than between TV shows and movies. It still sounds iffy; I'd have liked to get more info on that.

Still, this is pretty cool. Definitely click through and read the whole thing.

Angie

Writers' Police Academy

The 2015 Writers' Police Academy schedule has been posted. This is the most exciting event we've ever offered, by far. We even have a full-size Boeing 727 jet onsite where you'll learn to handle unruly and dangerous passengers. There's time on indoor firing ranges (pistol and rifle), a forensic lab, investigating bloodstain patterns, riding in patrol cars as they skid out of control, performing the PIT maneuver on a suspect vehicle as it flees from your patrol vehicle, door breaches and searching buildings for armed bad guys (yes, there'll be actual door-breaching and shooting involved this year), lots of fire, sirens, smoke, interacting with police academy recruits and firefighters, and much, much more. And, as always, there's lots of heart-thumping action, including a few surprises. OMG, this one's over the top!

Registration opens February 14, 2015

Event Registration – $375

Registration fee includes lunch at the police academy on Friday and Saturday, including a Wisconsin tailgate party as one of the meals, transportation to and from the academy and hotel, and the Friday night reception.

Sisters in Crime is offering a discount for members. Details are listed on the WPA "Schedule" page. If you are not a member you should join now to receive the generous discount!

* We again anticipate an overwhelming response once registration is open. Space, even though there's more of it this year, is limited. Therefore, all slots are first-come/first served. You will not want to miss this one of a kind, exciting weekend. Registration begins at 11 a.m. on February 14, 2015. Remember -- the event sold out in 6 hours last year so be ready to sign up the moment registration opens.

Click through for a photo of the event site -- they're at a public safety training center with great facilities.

Angie

Amazing Historical Archery

Like most people, I grew up thinking that the ultimate display of archery skill was the stationary shooter aiming at a target. When I was in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism -- a sort of learn-by-doing history club) I learned about war archers, who massed behind the infantry and shot arrows in volleys, aiming high shoot their arrows in parabolic arcs over the heads of their own fighters to come down onto the enemy. War archers in the SCA counted on the massing of arrows for effectiveness, to make them difficult or impossible to dodge.

Lars Andersen studied historical documents and illustrations and has learned to shoot the way combat archers shot in pre-gunpowder days. This guy is amazingly fast, accurate, versatile and mobile. Watching this video makes me want to dive into historical fantasy just so I can write about a serious archer. :) Check it out:



Thanks to BoingBoing for sharing this.

Angie

WorldCon Part 2

Another panel I made it to was John Scalzi's "A Trip to the Creation Museum." I'd previously read Scalzi's blog post about the visit and had a great time reading it. I knew it'd be even more fun in a room full of like-minded folk, so I made sure to get there to hear it live -- I even managed to get a seat. :)

Scalzi explained in the panel how this came about. The Creation Museum (which is exactly what you think it is) was built within a reasonable distance of Scalzi's home, and someone asked if he was going to go. He explained exactly how unlikely it would ever be that he'd visit such a place, even under considerable duress. A bunch of people thought it'd be hilarious for him to go, though, so he finally made a deal -- he'd go if the people who thought it'd be hilarious raised $250, which he would donate to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. He says on his blog:

As of 11:59 and 59 seconds (Pacific Time) last night, the "Drag Scalzi's Ass to the Creation Museum" donation drive raised $5,118.36. That's 256 times the admission price to Creation Museum, a multiple I find both amusing (from a dork point of view) and gratifying, since it means what tiny bit of income the creationists running the museum gain by having me pass through the door will be utterly swamped by the amount I'm going to send to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Would that it worked that way for every admission to that place.

For those of you who were wondering, some statistics: The first milestone for this fundraiser, the $250 to get me to go at all, got passed within the first hour of posting the challenge. The $1000 mark got passed about 12 hours later. The $5,000 marker got passed last night sometime between 6 and 11pm, while I was out on a date with my wife, celebrating our anniversary. I'm particularly pleased about hitting the $5k mark. The least amount donated was $1; the most was $300. More than one person donated more than $250, usually with the notation "Ha! Now you HAVE to go!" Multiples and variations of $6.66 were amusingly common, although the $5 suggested amount was the amount most received.

The people at Americans United were reportedly delighted by the donation, if a bit bemused by the curiously specific amount. :)

The panel was indeed humorously awesome and I'm very glad I went. The visit report is funny too, scaled down a bit to take the solo experience into consideration. Highly recommended.

I went to another panel that I'm not going to name specifically, since I want to do a bit of constructive analysis, although I suppose anyone who gets ahold of the program book could figure out which one it was, since I have to give some detail to get my point across. :/

All right, fine, it was on world creation for writers, how to create a realistic world for your science fiction story. I've been to such panels before, and they've all gone pretty much the same way, which isn't a compliment. What tends to happen is that there are several scientist types on the panel, one or two who are into the astronomy and planet creation end of things, and one or two who are into the smaller scale geology and biology end. The logical thing to do is to start out with the creation of the star system and the planets, talking about dust clouds and star spectra and magnetic fields and galactic arms and gravity and such. You have to have all that before you can have any small scale geology, much less anything biological, so starting with the bigger picture makes sense.

The problem is that the panelists get used to the idea that the stars-and-planets people are doing all the talking at the beginning, and... they usually just keep on doing all the talking. One person in particular has been on every similar panel I've ever attended; this individual really likes to talk, to jump in, and even to interrupt. To give the person credit, they're a good speaker and know a lot about the subject and are very eager to share that knowledge, which is cool. But, as has often happened before, this person plus the other stars-and-planets person ended up doing about 85% of the talking. The biologist did about another 10-12%, and the geologist squeezed in whatever shards of speakage were left.

This isn't an ideal way to run a panel, and the moderator did nothing to get things under control.

Again, there was a lot of great info presented here, but it was frustrating to watch all the same. And judging by the look on the geologist's face through the last third or so of the panel, that person might well be thinking twice next time an invitation shows up to be on panels. Or maybe their lunch didn't agree with them. At any rate, they didn't seem to be having a great time.

I think (if anyone cares what I think) that in future it'd be better to split this panel into two. Let the stars-and-planets people have a panel all to themselves. They'll do a great job with it, and it'll end up being essentially the same panel they've given for however many years, without the bother of having to talk over and interrupt those other folks. Give the smaller-scale geologists and the biologists -- maybe add a botanist and an oceanographer to round things out -- their own panel, talking about smaller scale landforms, climates, biomes, and what sorts of life might develop under different conditions. That'd be at least as useful to SF writers as the stars-and-planets panel, and separating them out seems to be the only way to give the smaller scale planetbuilding speakers a chance to get more than five sentences in edgeways. Everyone wins.

Angie

I'm Back! WorldCon Part 1

WorldCon in Reno was a lot of fun, and one of the best run conventions I've attended. I've worked almost 50 conventions and conferences, so I can often spot problems from the front of the house. I didn't spot anything here; even the Masquerade and Hugo Ceremony both started within a few minutes of their scheduled times, which is pretty amazing. :) I got to hang with friends, went to more panels than I usually go to in half a dozen conventions, and generally had a great time.

Jim and I flew in on Tuesday, got our badges, and had the evening free to relax and check out the program schedule before things officially started on Wednesday. We stayed at the Atlantis, the main convention hotel, which is attached to the convention center with a (very very) long skyway. It was quite a hike from our room to the panels and such at the CC, but I was happy not to have to walk outside, where the temperatures were distinctly uncomfortable, especially for someone who's become acclimated to Seattle weather. Although in contrast with the heat outside, looking out the skyway windows we could see the hills above Reno, and one of them still had snow on it. O_O Wow. Reno itself is about four thousand feet up, so the top of that hill (which is probably a mountain, officially) is probably a mile up or close to it; that must be why the shaded slopes were still snowy. Still, it's an odd sight in the northern hemisphere in August, especially when one is wishing for more AC.

The first panel I attended was the most useful -- Mary Robinette Kowal, who's a puppeteer and voice actor as well as a writer, did a panel called "Giving an Effective Reading." It was opposite the Opening Ceremony, but it was a wonderful panel and I'm very glad I went. I thought I had a general idea of reading aloud -- I'd done it in school, after all, as I'm sure everyone has -- but I was still nervous about my ability to read my own work in front of an audience.

She started with story selection, looking at things like the number of characters, the way the language lends itself to interpretive reading, and making sure your selection is a complete whole, even if it's a chunk of some larger story. When she got into using the voice like an instrument, Ms. Kowal had us go through a number of exercises, demonstrating different aspects of voice, including things I'd never heard of or thought about, like the placement of your voice -- which part of your mouth resonates when you're speaking. This was very ?? when she first described it, but the results were cool.

The panel was less than an hour long so she sort of rushed through a number of topics, but she has a great collection of posts on reading aloud on her blog. Highly recommended for any writer who might want to read their work to an audience. Hint: Don't wait till the night before to click through the link. :)

That's a good wrap for now -- more next time. [wave]

Angie

Sorting Through More Submission Calls

Dear Editor,

If you want submissions from any writer who isn't a newbie him- or herself, you have to demonstrate that you know what you're doing, that you know how the business works, and that you know the customary nomenclature. Specifically, something like this:

By submitting the story to the [We'reAllNewbies] Publishing, the writer transfers all print and electronic publication rights to the [We'reAllNewbies] Publishing editorial team. If the work is not chosen for publication, at the time the author is informed of this, all rights revert to the author. If the work is chosen, the author may not republish the story in print or electronic format until one year after the date of publication of the full anthology.

you've guaranteed that I and likely many other writers will never submit anything to you, ever.

Look, the last line shows that your heart is (probably) in the right place, sort of. I'm pretty sure I know what you mean -- that if you choose Joe's story, you expect him to sign a contract granting you exclusive rights for a year, so he doesn't, say, post the story for free on his web site, making your anthology worth that little bit less to readers. I'm even willing to assume that you only mean to take English language rights, even though that's not what you're saying.

Because what you're saying is that as soon as Joe sends you his story, you own (not have an option on, but own) ALL print and electronic rights -- serial, anthology, e-book, webzine, arguably audio, everything -- immediately, in ALL languages, EVERYWHERE. Do your homework; the big kids don't play this way. Assuming this would even hold up in court, this is an outrageous rights grab that only a clueless newbie writer would submit to. And it's an outrageous rights grab that only a publisher who's a blatant predator or a clueless newbie would attempt.

I'm willing to be generous and bet you're just clueless. Making yourself look this clueless, though, when you're trying to get experienced writers to submit their work to you is a bad idea. Don't do it. Learn how things are done and what the customary practices are in this business, then ask people to trust you with their fiction and their money.

Unless of course you actually are a blatant predator and are hoping clueless newbies will fall for your trick.

[Just FYI, your antho theme looked interesting. I'm not touching it, though, nor am I linking to it.]

Angie

Sorting Through Submission Calls

I've been spending a lot of time looking at submission calls, particularly for my anthology listing posts but also in general. I've noticed a few things that turn me off, that make me less eager to send a story to a given market, and thought it'd be fun (interesting, informative -- at least entertaining) to make a list. Stealing a gimmick from one of my favorite review sites...

Dear Editors:

== If there's nothing in your submission call about what you plan to pay your writers, I'll assume you're not planning to pay us, and respond accordingly. Note that I shouldn't have to click through to some other page to find the pay rate; if you're paying then that info should be in the main call wherever it shows up, and if you're not then that should be in the main call wherever it shows up. If you're doing a for-the-love antho, step up and say so.

== When your list of things you won't accept includes "anything racial" or similar, I have to wonder exactly what you mean by that. If it means you won't take any racist work, why not say "anything racist?" Refusing to take any "racial" stories could easily be interpreted to mean you only want stories about white people -- is that really what you intended?

== Glitches and errors in your submission call make me wonder about your editing skills.

== If your web site is hard to read because of choices you've made (medium to light text on a lighter but not white background, eye-searing colors, text of any color over a full color photo such that random words and letters fade into the background, that sort of thing) I'm going to wonder about what kind of cover you'll choose, and whether I'd want my name on it.

== If your call is buried in your forum (and nowhere else clearly obvious) where topics churn often and there's no permanent link to the vital submission info, I'll wonder whether your records (scheduling, editing, sales, cash flow, etc.) are as chaotically organized as your communication with potential contributors. And about your professionalism in general -- is it really not worth it to you to put up a simple web site with basic info in a stable format?

== Everyone's entitled to their preferences, but if your guidelines page is dominated by an abusive, multi-paragraph rant about (for example [cough]) the stupidity and incompetence of any writer idiotic enough to ever use a semicolon, be aware that I'll back away slowly and never submit anything to you, ever. And I'd probably do the same even if I didn't generally use semicolons, 'cause dude, chill!

Anyone else have any to add...?

Angie

Speculative Law

I've recently found a really wonderful blog written by a couple of attorneys, and I have to share. It's called Law and the Multiverse, and it's full of great legal discussions of questions you'll never run into in a law review.

For example, what are the legal issues related to being immortal? I have an immortal character in my Hidden Magic series, so that post was particularly welcome.

Another post was about characters who are invulnerable or otherwise incredibly difficult to kill -- how would that affect crimes committed against them, such as murder and assault? Is it actually attempted murder if you knew at the time that your victim wouldn't die when you shot him 72 times?

There's a discussion of outlawry that starts with its historical precedents and projects it into a present or future where there are criminals conventional law enforcement can't deal with, and another discussion about resurrection, probate law and insurance.

The blog is oriented around comic book universes -- superheroes and supervillains -- but the info here would be useful for an SF world too, or a world where paranormal creatures or powers exist, or an urban fantasy type setting. And besides, it's just fun to read. Highly recommended.

Angie

Misc. Links

New animals discovered in Borneo, an economist's analysis of digital content as a public good, a professor of digital media's thoughts about avatars for characters of color in computer games, and a really hilarious journal post.

New Animals Discovered in Borneo -- I think my favorite is the stick insect, like a walking stick only a bit over half a meter long, pictured walking up the side of a guy's head. Oh, and props to the guy, too, for having guts. :) The flame-colored snake is gorgeous, and the lungless frog makes me think about aliens for an SF story.

Why Content Is a Public Good -- this is a guest post by Milena Popova on Charlie Stross's blog. She talks about public and private goods, and rival and excludable goods, and the various combinations and how the market works (or doesn't) to distribute or control the distribution of the various types. I've never seen the subject (primarily e-books and music, but also applies to movies and such) discussed from this point of view before. She starts at the beginning and explains the vocabulary for people who don't have econ degrees. Definitely worth a read.

Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell -- Prof. Harrell talks about avatars in computer games and the lack of variety available in avatar types, particularly for players of color who'd like their avatar to represent them as they are, particularly if they want a decent range of options beyond skin color. This is a familiar issue in gaming, but it also applies to books.

How often can a reader of color find a character who's like them in mainstream genre fiction? Or a female reader in an adventure-oriented genre? Sure, we can appreciate and empathize with characters who aren't like us, but white readers don't have to do that very often, and never at all if they don't want to. A series of characters who are all basically alike can give readers who are different the impression that this author or series or genre isn't for them, and can give a writer who is different the impression that a genre doesn't welcome their viewpoint. It benefits all of us to encourage a variety of character types in the media we consume, which (for those of us who are creators) means including a variety of character types in the media we create.

I Has a Sweet Potato by Littera-Abactor on LJ -- I'm pretty sure I haven't linked this here before, but it's hilarious so even if I have, there's no harm done. :D

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren't starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.

[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.]

[From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Me, yelling: What the hell are you doing?
Me: *makes haste for the kitchen and finds dog there*
Dog: *picks up entire raw sweet potato, which is what was causing the baseball bat noise, and flees for the bedroom*
Me: *chases dog, retrieves most of sweet potato, less the portion which has disappeared into dog's gullet*
Dog: See? STARVING.
Me: ...That can't be good for you. It's a RAW SWEET POTATO.
Dog: I had to do it. I haven't been fed. Ever.
Me: You realize you aren't normal. Normal dogs don't steal raw sweet potatoes.
Dog, sadly: I was badly brought up.
Me: Yes. Yes, you were.
Dog: By people who starved me.
Me: Oh, no. I am not doing this again.
Me: *exits the room, bearing sweet potato*

There's more. Definitely more. :D Click through and read the whole thing.

Oh, and I got an acceptance on a story called "Unfinished Business," which is a sequel to A Hidden Magic, yay! :D It's short and funny and is basically erotica, picking up on something a couple of supporting characters were doing about two-thirds of the way through the book. It's scheduled for release on 26 June, just a month after HM, which is great timing.

Angie

Reject and Resubmit, and a Great Resource

One of the stories I have out on submission bounced last night, although with a nice paragraph of personal comments, including the fact that they found the story "intellectually interesting." Hey, I'll take that. :) Also some comments on POV which might be valid, but reworking it as suggested would take like 90% of the suspense out of the story, so I think I'll keep it as-is and see what a few other editors think.

(I've decided to stop specifying which stories I'm discussing in the back-and-forthing, unless/until they sell. We know it's all supposed to be about the story and nothing else, but human nature says that making it easy for an editor to exercise the Google-fu and see that sixteen editors before them have bounced the story is probably not a great idea. [wry smile])

I also signed up with Duotrope and threw them a few bucks. I've been using them on and off for a while now and they're a great resource; it's only fair to contribute. For anyone who hasn't been there, Duotrope provides submission info on like a bazillion fiction and poetry markets. Their searches are easy to do and provide all the basic info you need to sort through markets, with quick links to the market's own web site for more detailed info.

Signing up lets you create an account (which is free, by the way) and gives you access to a personal database to track your submissions. You can enter info about your stories, which lets you run quicker targetted searches when it's time to send something out. It also tracks how long a story's been out, how long it took the market to respond, and what kind of response you got; collecting that info lets them display, on the market's page, what their minimum, mean average, median and maximum response times have been over the past year, what their accept/reject percentage is, how often they reject with a form versus a personal note, etc.

Good stuff, highly recommended.

Angie

Hanging With Wolves

Jim and I spent yesterday (Sunday) at Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, in southern California in Lucerne Valley. Well, at the sanctuary, plus driving up and back with some friends; I think we spent at least half the day in the car. It was worth it, though.

Wolf Mountain is smaller than I was expecting, but Tonya, the woman who owns the place, said that they're working on moving to a larger property. They have several packs which have to be kept isolated from one another -- I got the impression that they might fight if they were kept together, although I might be mistaken -- so while they have several larger enclosures with room for the wolves to trot around and play and bury things, bigger would be better.

The enclosures are behind double fencing; you have to go through one level of chain link fence into a series of corridors which lead to the wolf enclosures themselves. Visitors who are just wandering around and don't necessarily have a staffer paying close attention to them can't stick fingers into the enclosures this way, or do anything else dumb.

Once a staffer invited us back, he said that the thing to do is lay the back of your hand flat against the fence, so the wolves can sniff you. I'm there on the left; on the right is the friend who drove us, one of my husband's co-workers. Sometimes I got licked as well as sniffed, and sometimes they tried to rub the side of their head against my hand, although that wasn't very effective through the fence. Some of them would stand there, leaning against the fence, wanting scritchies, although that was kind of awkward too.

There was a huge group ahead of us -- about twenty or so people I think, so we just hung out waiting for them to finish. It was a shame in that that many people interacting with the wolves and giving them treats (chicken and turkey legs, dog cookies) got them tired and kind of full, but the good part was that after they left it was nice and quiet and we had the place to ourselves, the four of us. We were shown around and introduced to all of the wolves, told their names and where they came from. (All of which I promptly forgot, because my memory sucks and I didn't have anything to take notes with, so apologies for a lack of specifics.)

The wolves at the sanctuary were rescues of one sort or another. Sometimes people bred them and couldn't keep them anymore. Sometimes people bred them badly -- the dark wolf in the picture above, and a lighter brown mixed-color one in the same enclosure who's not in that picture, were siblings from the same litter, bred from parents who were siblings. That's not a great idea, but people do it anyway. There were other wolves at the sanctuary who were inbred also; Tonya said that one of them was aging more rapidly than he should, that he was twelve but looked more like a sixteen-year old wolf. People get wolves and think breeding them is cool, but don't learn about them or about how to do it properly. All the adult wolves at Wolf Mountain are fixed; the two siblings above are still considered puppies, and just a little over a year old, but they'll be neutered soon. There are barely resources to take care of the wolves they rescue from bad situations as it is; adding more by letting them breed would be irresponsible and Wolf Mountain doesn't do that.

Some of the wolves were rescues from Alaska, where dens were being burned out because wolves were supposedly taking game which "belonged" to sport hunters. The fact that wolves take the very old, the very young, the sick and the injured, none of which are interesting trophies to sport hunters, didn't seem to matter; they made a good try at eradicating the wolves from that area anyway. Wolf Mountain got some cubs rescued from dens in the targetted area.

A few of the wolves were in smaller enclosures. Some of the wolves were waiting for a larger one to be built for them -- we could see the construction site off to one side -- but one was there because he'd had an injury and needed to be by himself for a while, and another was there because she'd been fighting with the others and needed to be isolated. The larger enclosures are ideal, of course, but the smaller ones were still a decent size for one wolf, and hopefully most of the wolves in them will be out soon.

Because we were patient and quiet -- not difficult in comparison with the previous large and noisy group -- Tonya took us into one of the enclosures where she said she doesn't usually bring any of the visitors. Jim and I sat on a rock and the very handsome boy in the picture here came up to meet us. He wasn't terribly interested in the cookies -- we'd seen him burying a turkey leg earlier, so I guess he was full -- but I got some kisses anyway. That was pretty awesome.

In one of the other enclosures, one of the wolves was kicking back on top of her platform. (I think it was a female.) You can't see in this picture, but they'd dug a den underneath this platform, which is boxy rather than just flat. I think a couple of the other platforms in other enclosures had dens underneath them too. Whenever we saw the wolves napping, though, they were always on top, or just on the ground somewhere. Maybe they went underneath at night? Anyway, this one had some cookies she was sort of mildly interested in (those are cookie bits in front of her in the pic) and we went up to pet her and give her some scritchies while she ate. I'd started at the base of her neck and was scratching fairly hard down her spine and had just hit her butt, just above the base of her tail. Most dogs like that a lot, and she seemed to think it was pretty cool too, judging by the look on her face. :) Her outer coat was coarse, not terribly soft to pet but good for moving through underbrush and shedding rain.

Oh, and someone did ask about the wolves digging out of the enclosures. Tonya said they bury the chain link four feet down, to prevent any escapes. She also mentioned that some of the wolves had once been frightened by a rabbit; wolves have to be taught to hunt, and if they're not then they have no clue where their food comes from. Keeping them in is as much for their own good as anyone else's. [grin]

This was a great day and we all had a wonderful time. I hope they do get to move to a larger property; I'm sure all the wolves would appreciate more running-around space. If you're ever in the area, check out their web site; you can make appointments for visiting from Thursday through Sunday. It costs $20 per person for a one-hour tour, or $50 for a half-day visit with a private tour, which is what we did. It was definitely worth it, and an awesome experience.

Angie

Racism, Cultural Appropriation, and Completely Missing the Point

A white writer who's apparently been watching the fall-out from the Cultural Appropriation Discussion of Doom* which has been sweeping across the internets and somehow managed to miss the most important parts, posts here.

I love how he states up front that there are Two Sides To The Issue (look, Ma! I'm being fair!) but then only snarks at one side. Smooth.

Aside from that, though, what I see as a white writer who in all honestly has been there up until a very few years ago, is that this guy and others like him are seeing this:

1) White Writer Writes Story About Characters Of Color (COC)

2) People of Color (POC) Tear Out White Writer's Eyeballs

He's seeing only the most obvious, shallowest layer of the interaction. Or looked at another way, he's seeing only the loudest, brightest bits of the interaction. Either way, he's missing the (slightly) quieter bits that happened in between those two events. Actually, it looked like this:

1) White Writer Writes Story About COC

2) POC Calmly Offer Concrit, Pointing Out Some Racist Issues

3) White Writer Acknowledges Error, Thanks POC and Apologizes

4) White Writer's Friends Interpret The POC's Statement As Telling Their Friend "You Are A Filthy Racist!!!" And Respond In Writer's Defense With Snarky Chainsaws And Racist Flamethrowers

5) POC Stomp Friends For Their Racist Attack [EDITED because "flame" has connotations which don't fit here.]

6) White Writer Gets Defensive, Attacks On Behalf Of Friends

7) POC Tear Out White Writer's Eyeballs

What's really frustrating about this is that if the sequence had stopped after 3) then everyone and everything would've been cool. Barring that, if folks like Mr. Levine had actually seen what really happened, and noticed steps 2-6 in between 1 and 7, he'd have known exactly how to prevent 4-7 from happening to him, wouldn't have gone into a fit of frozen terror, and could've had a quiet discussion with his friends -- maybe made a post to his journal -- talking about how he does his best when writing COC but realizes that he might make some inadvertent mistakes, and how he'd welcome and appreciate concrit from anyone who sees a problem in his portrayals and treatments, letting said friends know that he would not want them to come dogpiling onto anyone who might ever point out to him that his Black female is behaving stereotypically in Paragraph 12 or whatever. There you go, that's all it takes.

He doesn't see that, though. All he sees is a bunch of POC and their allies swooping down with their flamethrowers for no good reason he can tell. That makes it an uncontrollable situation from his POV. Since he can't think of anything he could do to prevent it happening to him, or to keep a racial concrit discussion in his journal from turning into a mushroom cloud, he feels helpless and afraid.

Anyone who's actually studied the issue of racism knows that there are plenty of journals and web sites all over the place explaining what's what and how to deal with this stuff. Mr. Levine doesn't know that, though, and because he already believes he knows everything there is to know about racism -- what's to know, after all, besides not hating people for their skin color? [sigh] -- he's never thought to go looking. He doesn't know what he doesn't know, so he sees only the most shallow and blatant characteristics of a conversation or interaction about racism.

I realize that the fact that it's ignorance rather than malice at work here doesn't make any practical difference from the POV of a POC. If someone punches you in the nose, it really doesn't matter whether they meant to do it or were just flailing around blindly -- it hurts the same either way. And when you get "accidentally" punched in the nose on a daily basis, it gets harder and harder to give a damn that 90% of the punches weren't deliberate.

From my POV, though, as a white person who used to be like Mr. Levine but has since learned better -- I stood up and took a good verbal/textual smacking-around back in '06, and it blasted me out of my rut, or at least up onto the rim of the crater, where I can see the territory I have still to explore -- I see what's going on with him and have some hope that he, too, might some day learn better. He has to want to, and he has to realize he needs to, and then he has to go out and put in the time and effort to educate himself. It's possible, though. He's annoying right now, yes, but there's a potential cool, aware person in there. I'll keep a set of virtual fingers crossed for him.

[*If you've missed the CADoD, start here, read the linked posts, then keep clicking the green right-arrow at the top of each link-list post to go on to the next list of links and repeating, until you get it or your brain fries. Note that in some, particularly the first one, most of the "good stuff" is in the comments. Or if you only want to read two posts, read this for an example of concrit regarding race, this for an example of how to respond to concrit regarding race, and the comments to the second link for how not to respond if a writer friend of yours gets racial concrit.]



RESOURCES TO START WITH:

Internet Posts

How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism -- if you only read one, read this one.

Ally Work -- Suggested Reading -- an excellent list of links.

The Angry Black Woman's Required Reading List -- another very good list of links, particularly the first one, "Anger Does Not Equal Hate."

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack -- if you're white and are sure you don't get any benefit from it, read this. Or even if you know what white privilege is, read this anyway because it's excellent.

White Privilege in SF/Fantasy -- a more specific analysis, great to read right after the one directly above this.

Excuses, Excuses -- great post, but I particularly love the roller-skating race analogy.

[Added] Ursula K. Le Guin on the TV Earthsea -- the writer responds to television's whitewashing of her characters.


Books

Writing the Other -- Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Aquaduct Press

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race -- Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., Basic Books

Angie

Corsetted Waistline

If you write historicals set in a period where women corsetted down to waist measurements less than twenty inches, here are some reference photos. The link goes to Snopes, to an article debunking the claim that the pictured woman has had ribs surgically removed. The photos are real, but she's never had surgery; it's all from corsetting. The lady in question has a 15" waist, described as being "about the same size as a regular jar of mayonnaise."

The look is kind of grotesque, actually, but I do recognize that silhouette from late-period Victorian photos. I remember one or two photos of women with waistlines just like this, and (apparently also just like these photos) the descriptions claimed that the women had had the floating ribs surgically removed. We see here that that's not necessary to achieve this look.

The woman in the pictures, Cathie Jung, said that the floating ribs are flexible and they just moved over time. It makes sense, actually.

Another thing that's interesting is that Ms. Jung is 71, and didn't start corsetting until she was in her forties. That's another Victorian myth blasted -- the idea that you can't have a really tiny waist unless you start corsetting as a child or young teen. I think it was more likely the fact that women started looking for husbands at a very young age back then, and wanted to have the perfect look by their mid-teens. Display packaging and all that.

Angie

When Ignorance Is More Than Annoying

It's always annoying to be reading a book, even a work of fiction, and come across places where the writer is pretty clearly faking it and doing a horrible job. When there are things you know are false being blithely tossed about, with no apparent plot-related reason for stretching the truth or twisting a fact, it's hard not to think some scornful thoughts about the writer who couldn't be bothered.

I majored in history, emphasis on the Middle Ages in Europe, and whenever I see a character in 12th century France eating turkey, or a 10th century English castle with enough bedrooms to open a modern-style hotel, or any medieval characters anywhere speaking and acting as though it were perfectly normal for everyone they know to be born, live until about age thirty and then drop dead, I start talking to the book and what I have to say probably wouldn't please the book's author even a tiny bit. These kinds of problems are easily fixable with minimal research and thought, and the incorrect information is rarely vital to the plot. But even I have to admit that the particular flavor of ignorance being spread here is only annoying, and not actually harmful to anything but the general level of knowledge and intelligence among the populace.

There are some topics, though, where false information in fiction can be actively harmful. One of them is BDSM.

I've unfortunately become accustomed to writers of BDSM fiction who don't know what they're talking about. Despite the many who are knowledgeable about the subject (and just damn good writers), there are unfortunately a few others who think that the whole BDSM thing is "cool" to write and who just sort of dive in with the most rudimentary knowledge, most of it false. That's bad enough, and whenever I see people commenting on these twisted, full-of-crap stories to say that they never knew anything about BDSM before but they're learning So Much from this story!! I start swearing and feel a strong urge to throttle the writer.

Up until now, most of the writers I'd entertained thoughts of killing were amateurs -- people who write stories for fun and post them online for anyone to read for free. This is still bad but at least their audience is pretty limited. Right now, though, I'm up visiting my mom and I was browsing through her bookcases. I found an anthology of BDSM stories (yes, I have an incredibly cool and open-minded mom) and sat down to read. There are four stories in this book and I'm a few pages into the second one, and so far we're two-for-two on writers who don't know what the hell they're talking about. These are professional writers, who were paid money for their stories and whose books are being sold in bookstores all over the country and for all I know all over the world. That's a huge potential audience, and I find this horrifying.

So how is this different from the historical errors? It's different because people who believe this crap can actually get hurt. It's different because the BDSM community is already grossly misunderstood by the more conservative end of the population, and having people end up in the hospital -- or dead -- because they tried some dangerous practice without understanding it and without knowing what precautions to take and with no clear step-by-step instructions is the sort of thing which could hit the news and convince that many more people that there should be laws against all this "perverted" stuff. And the fact that the people who were hurt or killed got their information from some ignoramus who wasn't even a member of the BDSM community isn't going to matter one bit.

And in the case of the amateur fiction, or possibly even electronically published professional fiction, depending on how some reporter or politician decides to slant the story, the outrage could spill over onto the internet in general. There again, there are plenty of people already who think the internet is dangerous and should be regulated and censored. If someone ends up hurt or maimed or killed because of bad information they got off the internet, whether from a web site or a blog post or an e-book, that could easily sway public opinion that much farther to the regulation and censorship side, which would affect all of us who hang out here, whether we're into BDSM specifically or not.

Some of the ignorance is perfectly harmless. One of my favoite writers wrote a story a while back where the female protag needed to go undercover as a prostitute, to try to get close to a villain with a strong streak of kink who was known to regularly patronize a certain BDSM house. The protag and her boyfriend (who was also an agent and had Issues with her doing this in the first place) hired a professional dominatrix to teach our heroine the basics, in hope that she could pull off her masquerade as a pro herself and fool the villain. The supposed professional trainer gave them a "flogger" made of velvet ribbons tipped with feathers, saying that after all, it was supposed to be pleasurable. [facepalm]

This was incredibly stupid, but it wasn't actually harmful. Anyone who read this book and then decided to try a velvet-and-feathers flogging session with their significant other probably wouldn't find it terribly exciting, or even very stimulating, but they'd have a hard time actually getting hurt, unless they had a strong feather allergy or something.

[And to this day I truly hope that the writer originally had this scene written as a realistic training session, but had it vetoed by an uptight publisher. I really hope that. Because otherwise my respect for this writer would have to take a huge nosedive.]

But when I read a story where a sub is branded against her will, and then goes into agonies of guilt for thinking negative thoughts about the "Dom" who did it to her, because a True Sub never ever thinks things like that about a Dom, I really need to slap someone. When I read about a sub who's incapable of allowing herself to take pleasure in sex unless there's pain involved as well, because she doesn't feel she deserves to enjoy sex unless she's being punished at the same time, and her Dom thinks this is normal, that's another slap I owe someone. When I read about a large BDSM community where a sub has to "prove" to the group at large that he's worthy to serve a Dom (any Dom) by demonstrating that he can take a certain amount of pain by being whipped long and hard in public, I just have to headdesk and then wish I could slap the writer. When I read about a Dom who binds and gags his sub, then leaves him alone in the house for an extended period, I want to get out the baseball bat.

All of these are actual examples from stories I've read. All of them show a serious ignorance of the basic philosophy and mindset of someone who's into BDSM, and do it in a way which could get an ignorant newbie badly hurt or even killed, either because of a specific practice which is incredibly unsafe, or a more general mindset held up as an ideal which in actual fact could lead someone into a dangerous situation with either a predator masquerading as a Dom or just some other ignorant idiot who doesn't know any better. With any luck, a reader who's curious about kink will find someone knowledgeable to play with, or at least to use as an info resource. Or as a last resort, there are plenty of good information sources (non-fictional ones) online, for someone who prefers to do their research in private, although someone starting all the way back from square one might have some trouble sorting out the good ones from the iffy ones, especially if they're not willing to take the time and trouble to cross-check information with multiple sources.

But if the reader goes up to their boyfriend or wife or whomever, who's just as ignorant as they are, and says, "Hey, this sounds like fun -- let's try it!" then the results could be dire.

Normally I'm willing to assume that adults are adults and capable of taking responsibility for their own decisions. And likewise, I think people who depend on any "facts" they've gleaned from a piece of fiction, without double-checking them with a non-fictional source, are kind of stupid and deserve whatever results.

On this subject, though, and in the current social and political climate, a sufficiently harmful outcome could conceivably end up splattered all over not only the dummy who took a piece of fiction as fact, but also all over other people who were minding their own business and doing nothing wrong. Whether it makes it that much harder for legitimate members of the BDSM community to go about their lives without being sneered at or scorned, or whether it provides that last bit of ammunition some technophobic politician needs to convince a voting majority that Something Must Be Done about the internet, the consequences of this particular flavor of ignorance could spread a lot farther and cause much more damage than out-of-period turkeys.

I have no idea what to do about this, except perhaps to issue an open plea for publishers of BDSM fiction to make sure their editors who handle these books know enough about the practice to weed out the ignorant and clueless stories. That won't do anything about the amateur end of the problem, but at least the professional end -- the one with the much larger audience and international reach -- could police itself and make sure it doesn't spread any horrifically bad information. Which would, incidentally, also make the stories much more enjoyable to read.

Angie

Research vs. Invention

Candy Proctor wrote an interesting post today about that authentic feel a reader gets when fiction sounds real, whether it actually is or not. It's an interesting post (and I'm still pondering the concept of "aboutness") but it made me think about the trade-off we need to make whenever we don't have extensive personal experience or some other acquired expertise in the topic(s).

I think there's room for well done fakery in most areas of fiction. No one expects a writer to look up absolutely every fact about everything used or shown or talked about in a story, and sometimes doing so would be a bad idea even if we could. Using a real restaurant -- with the name, location and staff accurately described -- when a character gets a raging case of food poisoning there and dies is a good way to get sued, for example. But even beyond the grasp of the lawyers, a well crafted fake will often work just as well as the real info, at least for the majority of your readers. Weaving research with invention is a valuable skill and writers who are good at it can surround the reader with a seamless mesh of rich detail which all flows and hangs together.

I do like accuracy when I read, of course, but I also like my favorite writers to publish more often than once every five years. [wry smile] And from the writer's point of view, even if the need to earn a decent paycheck a bit more often isn't an issue, it can be frustrating and unsatisfying for a writer or anyone else to put so much prep work into projects that they only get results two or three times per decade. Some people have the mindset to make this sort of schedule satisfying, but for everyone else there's a reasonable balance which can be achieved.

I think the trick is to figure out who your audience is and make some sort of decent squint-and-roll-the-dice estimate as to about how many of them are likely to know more about [whatever] than you do, and make your researching decisions from there. Diminishing returns become a factor eventually and if you get to a point where another year of research will only cut down your nasty letters and sarcastic reviews from, say, five to three, maybe it's not worth the time spent. You might have to just accept that there's going to be some small fraction of readers out there who'll be sneering, but if the vast majority will be reading and nodding and reccing, you're still well ahead of the game.

Not that anyone can estimate reactions that closely, but it's definitely possible to hop onto Google and start reading reviews and other commentary in the genre (and preferably the subgenre) you're writing in. What do the readers want? What do they praise? What do they laugh at? This is really basic information, and for that matter one might hope that anyone writing in a given genre would have already read enough in that genre to know these things, but I've read plenty of stories where it was pretty clear the writer did not know the genre even that well and I'm sure others have too. Even someone new to a genre can find out what the readers like and dislike and scorn with just a few hours spent blog-hopping, though, and I can think of a writer or two who engineered their own downfall by (apparently) not bothering.

Or maybe they just didn't pick up on the subtleties.

One writer wrote a murder mystery a number of years ago set at a science fiction convention. Theme mystery series are popular and this could've been a neat idea, but it was pretty clear to me, as someone who's attended and worked SF conventions for a very long time, that this writer's actual experience of SF cons was extremely minimal, to the point where I doubt she'd ever attended a general SF con of any size. The book was published by TSR (the company which at the time owned the Dungeons and Dragons property) and there was some speculation among friends of mine at the time that maybe TSR had sprung for a couple of free passes to gaming conventions, which are unfortunately very different from science fiction conventions. Or maybe they just described them to her. It was particularly frustrating because so many small details were correct, but they just underscored the major clunkers. Whatever the reason, though, I and a number of others spent the entire book wincing and eyerolling over errors, which was a shame because the writing was decent and the mystery itself was interesting.

It's one thing to get a few minor details wrong, but when the entire setting sounds fake and third-hand to anyone who's actually been there, you've got a serious problem. Especially with something like a theme mystery, where the whole point is to market the books to a special interest group, you're deliberately courting readers who'll know where all your duct taped patches are. :/ It's like writing a police procedural and forgetting about Miranda, or writing a war story about submarines and completely ignoring pressure, or having your hard-SF characters hop into their reaction rocket and fly out to Rigel by lunchtime. These are incredibly basic errors and would signal to any reader at all familiar with the genre that the writer was faking and not doing a very good job of it.

Comparing time and effort spent in research versus your skill when it comes to invention, and balancing the result against the likely return in reader satisfaction is a valuable skill whenever you're writing about things you aren't already an expert at. It requires a strong familiarity with the intended audience, though, and a misstep can do considerable damage to both the story and the writer's reputation.

Angie

Worldbuilding as an On-Going Process

Fantastical worldbuilding seems to be the topic of the day, with WrittenWyrdd and Charles Gramlich both talking about it. They both made some good points and it got me thinking about something I've noticed here and there, especially in science fiction stories.

WW made the point that things are changing pretty quickly, and that someone who was born ninety years ago has seen a huge amount of change in his lifetime. That's very true and the rate of change has been increasing. And yet how often do SF books set in the far future, whether the setting is a future Earth or a planet colonized long ago, where the culture changed only so far and then stopped? It's as though the writer needed Setting X for the story, so they explained how it came to be that things changed from what we have now to what they've got then, and then it all froze and has remained static ever since.

A ship full of religious zealots who believe it's sinful to read on Wednesdays and that long pants are an abomination unto their god leave Earth to build the perfectly moral society. They find a nice planet, build their colony and ban reading on Wednesdays and all pants longer than the knee. A thousand years later when the story takes place, they're still religious zealots, they still don't read on Wednesdays and they still toss the protagonist in prison for wearing long pants.

Seriously? What's the likelihood that any culture stays that static for that long? Even assuming a static environment, which in itself is pretty far-fetched, this would be unbelievable. But on a newly colonized planet, where the people have to deal with alien plants and animals and geology and weather and who knows what other conditions, where any food stock they brought with them has to be adapted, where completely unforeseen dangers and problems and challenges will force them to adapt their habits and values and priorities in order to survive in this strange and possibly deadly place -- a thousand years later they're still rabidly anti-long-pants? Ummm, right. Sure.

The guy WW knows who just turned ninety has seen not only great technological changes, but also huge changes in attitudes and morals and values and priorities. The expectation of what's "normal" has changed several times since 1917, and society has adapted each time. Your average American in 2007 has a much different world view from that of your average American in 1917, or even 1957.

And if there's anything we know about large groups, it's that they're going to disagree. More than two people can't agree on where to go for lunch, much less on what government policy should be. Heinlein once said that a committee is a creature with six or more legs and no brain, and snark aside, I think he was pretty much on it.

So how is it that our entire religious society is still monolithically anti-long-pants after a thousand years? We're supposed to believe that every single generation grew up in absolute accord with the beliefs of their elders? They somehow completely eliminated teenage rebellion, and the desire of the young to be new and different just because? They eliminated the tendency toward factional divisions, and the really useful technique for an opposition party of proposing something different from what the party in power espouses, just to be different? They completely forbade all scientific and technological innovation, and are still using the technology their ancestors brought to the planet, since significant technological change always brings social change with it? (And yeah, in too many stories they still are using the same exact technology their ancestors were. [sigh])

Things just don't change once and then stop. Or if they did, then that's a major issue and big enough to dominate a book all by itself, explaining why and how. Realistically, though, human societies continue to evolve. Sometimes it's slower and sometimes it's faster but they always do change, and they keep changing, and then they change again. Writers who are developing new worlds for science fiction need to keep this in mind.

How did your society begin? What was the baseline? How and why did it change after that? What was the new baseline? Then what changed, and how and why? Then what changed? And then what changed? The farther in the future (or at least, the farther from your baseline) your story is set, the more change you need to work out, a whole series of changes which are all logical or at least believable. The readers might never see a lot of this info (but we're used to that, right? readers rarely see more than ten or twenty percent of our research and development no matter what genre we're writing in) but the writer needs to know it so that everything hangs together. And if the writer doesn't know how a civilization (or a character or an institution or whatever) got from point A to point Q, it'll show.

Charles talked about wanting to see the exotic in fiction, and the exotic is what makes SF -- and fantasy, and horror -- especially creative and memorable. But just as too many books don't show enough change, it's also too common to see what are presented as differences, as exotic and strange and weird, being just rehashes of our mainstream culture. If all a writer's familiar with is American culture, or Western Civilization, that's not a very large pool from which to draw, especially when you're looking for really basic characteristics of a society.

Take the economy. It's always just a given that there'll be some sort of even-exchange economy. Whether what's exchanged is money -- some sort of symbology representing work or production -- or whether the exchange is a direct bartering of goods and services for other services and goods, it's rare to find a future society, or even an alien society, which works any other way. And yet there are other ways of organizing things.

Families, for example, tend to run on true communism -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If Mom is a programmer and makes $65K a year, then that's what she does and that's what she contributes to the family. If Dad is a wood carver and travels to craft fairs on weekends selling his nature carvings, and takes care of the house and looks after the kids during the week around time spent at his carving, then that's what he does. If Sam is fifteen and can cook dinner every night and do all the yard work and laundry for the family, then that's what he does. If Chrissy is five and puts away her toys and cleans the bathroom (sorta) once a week, then that's her contribution. No one expects Chrissy to eat less food or go without shoes just because she doesn't contribute much of anything to the upkeep of the family. No one expects Sam to grow up with crooked teeth just because braces are horribly expensive and his cooking and chores don't add up to "enough" to "repay" the family for that expenditure. This system works for just about all of us and yet hardly any future or alien societies use it.

But okay, that's communism and there's a knee-jerk negative response toward it in the US. There are other systems, though. The potlatch system awards status to people or families who give away a lot of stuff to others in the community. In that kind of society, the status and admiration is worth more than wealth, so people accumulate stuff just so they can give it away in exchange for status. And reciprocity is like barter but not so direct -- more a system where people do favors for each other, give things to people who need them and get things from other people. There's a general awareness of who's given you things or done favors but not the strict record keeping that a money economy has, or the right-now exchange of value for value that a barter system uses.

Most of these alternative systems work best for small groups, but SF writers are supposed to be imaginative and good at extrapolating. If a society got to, say, the classical period on a communistic or potlatch or reciprocal system of exchange (and the Roman Empire did have a bit of the potlatch about it, with the Senators spending a lot of their personal income on public works and facilities and celebrations, because it was expected of their class and they'd lose status and influence if they didn't) how could that be tinkered with to last through the Middle Ages? The Industrial Revolution? The Information Age?

What new systems -- economic, political, social -- might settlers on a new planet come up with? After all, they're starting fresh. They can do whatever they want. What new and different systems might they invent and try out? And then how might those systems change in a generation or three? A century or three? A millenium or three?

There are more options than are immediately obvious in the industrialized world. An anthropology class (or even a good text or two) is a great source for ideas and will give a writer some notion of just how many different ways people all over the planet have organized themselves. When writing aliens, or even human societies far enough away from ours, it pays to give them customs and institutions and social organizations different enough from ours that they actually feel alien, different, exotic. And once you've got that, keep in mind that the society will change over time. A society with a dynamic history behind it will always feel more realistic than one which has apparently been stuck in the same rut for the last fifty generations.

The exotic is all about change, though. Whether your society starts with "us" and then evolves away, or starts somewhere strange and different and then evolves to be even more strange and different, it's not an alien (or elven or nether plane) society if it sounds like it was lifted right out of Iowa.

Angie

Writers and Research

In BookEnds LLC today, Jessica posted about "The Things Authors Know," talking about interesting things writers come across while researching their fiction.

Have you ever found yourself at a cocktail party quoting some new and interesting fact only to suddenly recall that it came from fiction? I’m always amazed by the things you can learn by books and the odd facts that authors know.

I've learned a lot through the fiction I've read, but one of the most important things I've learned is never to just assume that what's in a story or novel is accurate. [rueful smile]

My addiction to historical romances started young; I was twelve when my mom began sharing hers with me. In high school I read a couple of Scottish Clan books and had a brief obsession with Culloden and the '45. Unfortunately the one book (novel, remember?) I had which dealt with it in any detail said that it was in 1845 rather than 1745. What's even better is that I did a paper on Culloden for my senior Western Civ class and used this (historical romance) book as my main source. (Hey, I was seventeen. [duck])

I actually used a nonfiction book to "check" my facts, per my teacher's direction [cough] and when I saw that the dates in the history book were different I decided that the historian who wrote it had obviously made a mistake. I used "1845" in my paper from beginning to end, and stood in front of the class the day it was due and gave a presentation in front of everyone based on that date.

My teacher had this horribly confused expression on his face and he asked me (rather timidly, in the way of someone who's not quite sure he'd had enough coffee that morning) whether I was sure it was 1845. Being nothing if not self-confident back then, I assured him I was. He obviously didn't check because I got a B on the paper.

[facepalm]

I eventually ended up majoring in history (although my focus was neither Scotland nor the eighteenth (or even nineteenth) century) but one of the things I learned long before getting back to college (long story) was to be skeptical about everything. Just because someone's a published writer, even if they have a string of degrees after their name, doesn't mean they're not mistaken or biased or possibly even stupid.

And a fiction writer might bend and twist history (or anything else) deliberately and for good story-related reason. I came to love writers like Judith Tarr, who includes author's notes in her books explaining exactly what she messed with and why, and where the more fantastical ideas came from. I don't at all mind a writer who twists reality (or just uses a less-respected [cough] theory) in order to improve the story, so long as they own up to the twisting.

As for my own example of being mistaken, biased or possibly just stupid, I'm very glad none of my later history professors ever saw that paper on Culloden. :D

Angie