If you don’t already know about the issues plaguing SFWA at the moment, this is a post you can probably skip, but the short version is: I have recently seen a whole bunch of members of my professional organization behave like assholes all over the internet. To be totally clear: I’m talking about people who hold repugnant, racist, sexist, homophobic views. Not people who stumble sometimes on difficult issues or communicate awkwardly or get blindsided by our own prejudice–those things are true of me, and you, and everyone else. No, I’m talking about people who are actively working to make my professional organization unwelcoming to me. Calling for women to shut up when they’ve been sexually harassed. Calling for less diversity among the membership. I am SO NOT OKAY with this. I’ve been watching a number of people I respect leaving the organization due to this hostile environment. I wish they could stay, because they’re the people I want to associate with in my professional association! But I understand and respect their choice. I am choosing differently. Partly, it’s privilege: I have the energy to keep up with the political discussion, vote, and just plain stick around long enough to […]
2012 in Review
Some statistics from the writing trenches this year: Rejections nearly tripled vs previous years. Not an accident–submissions also nearly tripled. Acceptances dropped, with no new pro sales in this calendar year–only reprints. Of course I feel less than happy about that, but I see it as a result of a strategic change I made: I focused on my novels in the early part of the year, and didn’t finish any new stories until quite late in the year (and still haven’t finished the final drafts of a couple of them). I now have a nice crop of things that are ready, or almost ready, to submit in the new year. I got to see my work reprinted in not one but two print anthologies, which was pretty exciting–I now have two lovely paperbacks on my desk, between bookends which are optimistically huge and heavy, built to bracket a whole lot more books. I remain less prolific than I would like, and too easily derailed by life events. My goals for 2013 include constructing a writing plan that will hold steady not only in the weeks where everything is golden, but in the weeks where I have a three-day migraine, a […]
In which I play with Babelfish
Here’s a paragraph from the middle of the story I’m working on. I used Babelfish to translate it into Mandarin and back again. …It was a bit clearer in the original. “The new cat, the starting, strolls by to smell the decision in mine face. His student opened in the shadow width. He invested his nose to me, and his whisker has itched my cheek.” Here’s something from the first scene: “In the air, contains the fat wool one kind of sickness warm smell or the cotton material: I imagined a rug merchant to try from any clean 50 year stain once was jewelry bright kilim.” In slightly less random news, I am officially a member of SFWA, as of today. Also, I recently sold a story to PodCastle, and this will be my first audio publication. […]