This afternoon mikedawsoncomic , John Kerschbaum and myself did our reading/signing brunch at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn. I've done a bunch of signings in my day but this was one nice event. There were free mimosae and muffins to be had, our books were well stocked and the atmosphere was great. Bergen Street feels more like a book store than a comics shop (most of the shelving is taken up by graphic novels and collections, with floppies only accounting for about 15% of the display space. It's neat, well organized and well stocked: http://www.bergenstreetcomics.com
Thanks to Tom and Amy for putting on a great event!
Mike did record the talk with is portable mp3 player so hopefully if the sound isn't too terrible we'll present it as episode 7 1/2 of the Ink Panthers Podcast. Stay tuned, and thanks to everyone who came!

The Comic-Con programming schedule for Sunday, July 26 is up. Here's what I might be going for.

10:00-11:00 Dr. Who— Actor David Tennant, writer/executive producer Russell T Davies, director Euros Lyn, and executive producer Julie Gardner discuss their creative process and experiences working on BBC America's Doctor Who—television's longest-running sci-fi series—with exclusive clips and a Q&A session. Ballroom 20

Um... that's pretty much it, really. And I suspect I'll have to start queueing at dawn, if not before. Or... now, actually.

America's right wing: Uglier and more despicable with each passing day...


Then, of course, there's this. And this. And (not surprisingly) this.

Well, Sharee and I have our plane tickets for Montréal, so I guess we're really going to do it. We'll be arriving late on Saturday the 1st, playing tourist in the city for the next few days, then checking in to the Delta Centre Ville on the 6th for the World Science Fiction Convention. I've wanted to go to Montréal for a long time, so this is pretty exciting. Anybody have any recommendations for what to see and do there? The Jardin Botanique is already on the list. It looks like the convention is being held right next door to the old part of the city, Vieux-Montréal.

Amusingly, a friend was talking about Salvia just the other day.  Tis legal in the UK.

From pope_guilty

I think I forgot to mention I was *going* to Readercon, but now I am back. However, I haven't read LJ since Friday at about noon, so please let me know if there is anything I need to see.

Readercon was fun, and it was good to see people; if you were there and I missed seeing you, I'm sorry to have missed you.

I would like Radiohead albums.

All I have is in rainbows.

This is a problem.

Dear internet, please help.

Thanks!



EDIT- GOT! Thanks!!!

Well, today's work was plagued by oversleeping, lack of focus, and needing to do laundry, but I did get through about forty pages of Chill revisions. I'm quitting here, even though it's the middle of Chapter 12 and I wanted to finish two chapters because I've added about 1500 words, Chapter 11 is really long, and the next thing I have to do is add a whole new scene. And I'm kind of too vague and addled to write a third scene today, so I think I'm g oing to finish the laundry and go start dinner and come back to this tomorrow.

The good news is that this revision is going remarkably well. There's a lot of work to be done, but I'm feeling competent and calm about all of it--everything that needs doing is well within my capabilities. That's rather a nice sensation, and not one I'm overly familiar with. I hope it doesn't mean I'm slacking off and failing to push myself to excel, but rather that I've had a skill jump between the end of this novel and now.

Anyway, for the time being I'll take it. I'm on page 242, and I am confident that I can have the book done by the end of the week, thereby averting my editor's wrath and Saving The Ranch.

Of course, since I am obliged to be rewriting Chill exclusively currently, The Steles of the Sky is flirting with me something fierce, waving promising worldbuilding details under my nose and so on. I hope I find a place to put the thing about the museum beetles. Current quandary, figuring out whether the language of science in this world should be PersiUn or Chinotese, since there are no Latinot languages in this continuum.

La.

Oh, the quandaries that make up my life.

In a locked post, one of my friends was talking about feeling sure she knew how to write nonfiction but also feeling sure she didn't know how to write fiction, and wondering what the differences are.

For me, they overlap significantly. I'm not prepared to say that they're identical, because writing 750 words on Hilbert spaces for an encyclopedia and writing 750 words of short-short story are not at all similar for me. But, for example, telling a story about my cousin and telling a story about one of my characters are not all that dissimilar. I think most people tell stories about their family and friends naturally, without necessarily identifying what they're doing or how they're doing it, so it's harder to apply it to fictional characters because it feels like your ordinary conversational stories are just saying what really happened, and with fiction, that's not an option.

( details, details )

I wonder if people tend to organize their thinking for approaching a large fiction project similarly to the way they organize their thinking for approaching a large nonfiction project. I know I do, but this is one of the times I don't really want to generalize from one example. I know that there are people who outline very formally and others who outline informally and still others who don't like to outline at all. I'm in the middle group for both fiction and nonfiction, but I'm wondering if others see it the same way. Also I like to do a bunch of research, think about where I might be going, outline informally, do a bunch more research, and then fix all the ways I was wrong before about where I thought I might be going. I like fixing the ways I was wrong before. It's so soothing! Hey, I was wrong, and the sky did not fall in! I was wrong, and now I am not-wrong, hurrah! Or at least less wrong! Hurrah!

If anybody else wants to talk about anything they've found useful across the fiction/nonfiction boundary, my friend might find it helpful, and I might find it interesting. Please feel free.

If you haven't written a lot of fiction, you probably can't write good fiction right off the bat. This is not anything bad about you. It's just that it's a skill, like anything else is a skill; unless you're a Mary Sue, you don't expect to be able to pick up your first wind instrument ever and sound like Louis Armstrong on the first day. So if you've mostly written nonfiction and you're making your first venture into fiction, when the little voice says, "I can't write fiction, I don't know how," you can answer it cheerfully, "No, that's true, I don't. But I can learn." You hit a lot of wrong notes when you're learning a new instrument, and if you're trying something like the oboe, you break things a lot and your tone is painful to all listeners for awhile, and that's okay. Practice really does help. You don't have to start out knowing everything you need to know. It's like the rest of life that way.

I was downtown, so I stopped by one of my favorite cemeteries.



 
( Many more under the cut. . . )

Is the new DVD of the 1969 Doctor Who story, The War Games, eligible for next year's Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form?

Or can the extras be considered eligible for Best Related Work?

Finncon is fini. Parris and I have just staggereed back to our hotel room from the dead reindeer party. The party is still going strong and we would love to have stayed longer... till sunset, at least... but we have to be up early tomorrow to catch a ferry to Estonia, where I'll be doing a signing in Tallinn. Then the next day it's back across the sea to Helsinki again, just long enough to set off for Turku, where I've got another signing.

Finncon was terrific. The warmth and hospitality we've found here has completely ruined my image of Finland as a frozen wasteland. Who knew? The sauna was fun too. And then there were all the cute anime girls in costume offering free hugs...

Thanks to all my Finnish friends. Now off to Estonia!

Heh. Told ya! (See my entry for July 1, 2009.) Keep puppies long enough, and you just don't want to give them back. And so it was that Carol and I wrote a check for Redball the other day, just before his eight-week birthday, and added him to the Duntemann bichon pack. (The photo above is earlier, from just before he was seven weeks old.) "Redball" is what (in the publishing industry) we call a working title. His real name may be something else entirely, and we won't know until he tells us. As of this morning he weighs four pounds two ounces, and is gaining a little less than an ounce a day.

The other two puppies have also been sold and are on their way to new homes, one in Albuquerque and another in Ohio. Bella (their mother) is back home now, though for health reasons her owner is looking to reduce the size of her own pack and is trying to find adoptors for Bella and several other bichons.

Red was definitely missing his mother and brothers last night, and even though he had a cozy Sherpa bag on the nightstand right next to Carol's side of the bed, he fussed until 10:30 or so. Carol got up twice to take him to his litter pan to potty, and he's doing pretty well in the housebreaking department for one so young. Pan/pad training works: QBit was pad-trained from an early age and rarely has accidents in the house. (Aero, well, is not so well-trained...)

Although we won't know for sure for another month or so, it looks like Red will be show-quality, and Carol is considering showing him. (He'll probably make his show debut at next year's Bichon Frise Nationals in Indianapolis.) In the meantime, we're happy to have him romping around on the laundry room floor, grabbing QBit's hind leg and jumping on Aero's back. The big guys have been extremely tolerant of Red's rowdiness, especially Aero, who's taken the brunt of the biting. Red has a habit of grabbing the end of Aero's tail and hanging on for the ride while Aero tries to flee. Even so, Aero will roll on his back and bat at Red with his front paws, trying to be a good sport.

I'll post better and more current photos as we get them. He rarely stands still long enough to get a good shot, especially with the latency of our digital cameras. We do, however, have some wonderful movies. They're only small like this for a few weeks. We're trying our best to enjoy every minute.

You know him, you either love him or loathe him: there is no middle ground for most. Yeah, you know who I mean...the guy who used to be called the enfant terrible of science fiction until he got too old for the title; the author of both award-winning fiction and scalding essays on society and media (and the occasional—okay, frequent—in-person public rant); the man who gave us "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream; helped give us some of the best parts of Star Trek and Babylon 5; and provided decades of real-life entertainment watching him scandalize half of fandom with his behavior and inspire the other half by going all Don Quixote on some of the biggest, nastiest windmills around. Yep, the one and only (thank all the gods that ever were or will be; I am not at all sure the Universe could stand two of him!) Harlan Ellison.

Now a company called (how utterly, wonderfully apropos for this subject!) Creative Differences has produced a documentary film about the man, his life and his work called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Robin Williams, Neil Gaiman and other luminaries in and out of our favorite genre appear in the film talking to and commenting on Harlan, as does Harlan himself, overflowing as usual with piss and vinegar from both present-day scenes and excerpts from previous filmed and taped interviews over the course of over a half century's toil in literature, film and television writing.

I don't have that much more to say about Harlan that I didn't already say in this rather long LJ entry from nearly three years ago, so I'll only add that the film even features an original song about him from someone calling himself The Jazz Butcher. You can listen to it on the website, streaming for free; it seems to me well qualified as "found filk," depending on whether or not the songwriter is actually a fan in the sense filkers usually mean. The film's premiere was held in 2007, and a video of said premiere is on the homepage, but no indication is readily apparent as to whether the film itself is now available for purchase or viewing. My suggestion? Google and Amazon searches, which I'll be doing; I wanna see this thing...and I strongly suspect my Songbird, also an Ellison fan, will want to as well. It spares no dirt, pulls no punches and leaves no doubt about its subject...kind of like Harlan.

My days are SO hectic I didn't even journal the arab world championship last week, but today's highlight was watching a river snake undulating upon itself in the water at my feet, and this soon after one of my more interesting snake dreams.
That is all.

Mike is Aristotle

Over on FaceBook, I took the "Which Great Philosopher Are You" quiz, and I turned out to be Aristotle. 

Heh. 

Could do worse, sez I. 

www.facebook.com/profile.php

On my first working day in Bosnia in January 1997, orienting myself in the National Democratic Institute's office in Tuzla, I noticed that there is an area of that city called "Irac" - "Irishman". I never found out why, and I am still wondering.