anghara

Don't expect updates there any time soon, but it's there for what it's worth. And it has some of my publication dates wrong, but doesn't want to let me at them to (easily) fix them, so they'll stay up for now until I have time to waste trying to get them sorted.

Someone said this wanted to be "Facebook for writers" - I'm inclined to agree, but there it is. Just in case. For anyone who wants to know anything serious about me, go to my REAL website

So I'd like to ask an open question - is there a writing-related topic or theme that you would like to see me write about...?

Comments are open for suggestions. Good suggestions which inspire me to essaylets will be stored for possible future occasions...

EDIT - this month's essay topic chosen (from this list) and uploaded, will go live on Storytellersunplugged on March 30th.

Other topics filed away for possible future use. COmments are still open, should you wish to add to the list.

Thanks for playing!

There was this woman, this morning.

She wore a jacket with fake fur at cuffs and hem and hood, and polyester trousers, and carried a gleaming white fake crocodile-skin bag with gilt chain handles. She’s Jewish, she speaks three languages (English, French and Hebrew – that’s how I know she’s Jewish). She lives in Toronto, Canada, in a condo which she bought with the money which was her half of the settlement in the divorce after her marital home was sold, but the condo is in her brother’s name for legal reasons. She was in New York for a cousin’s wedding; there were 624 people there, and the food was very good, and she danced all night – and there were some 400 people at her own wedding – and she was married for 12 years before she got the divorce. And she has a 19-year-old son who is “still a baby”, but who left home at 17 to go to college and shares a flat at a University in a town which his mother does not live in with another young man because, well, young men will be young men and he can “have girlfriends there and do whatever he wants” without his parents knowing. He doesn’t like talking on the phone and he never calls his mother so she doesn’t telephone him either because he doesn’t like talking to her and he NEVER calls and so she emails him instead and asks him how he is and he's like, "Okay" (which seems to be just as bad as the phone situation but I guess at least it's in writing...)Oh yes, his name is Alexander and she always calls him that but he doesn’t like that either and likes to go by Alex. And he was named for his great-grandfather, his mother’s grandfather. Who is dead. And she likes to go to singles dances in Toronto because she was trained as a dancer, she used to dance on point shoes and “perform in front of an audience” so she likes dancing and she used to teach dancing at an old folks home (old folks on point shoes? the mind boggles...) and she actually met her husband – her ex, that is – at a dance when they were both twenty years old and at college but even though they knew two months into the relationship that it was “Serious” they didn’t get engaged until she was twenty five. And she likes “going to school” so she just gets any diploma or certificate that’s going, and she hangs them all on the wall in her condo, and the “other” wall (don’t ask me…) has her son’s awards and achievements and certificates, and she has “more than fifty” pictures of her son in the apartment, on walls and on shelves, and here, she had some pictures with her, this is her son right there, isn’t he handsome, he is so tall, he’s six foot – his father was six foot two so that’s probably where he gets the height because she herself is only five foot three although that’s quite tall, you know, but some women are taller than her and others are shorter and her own father was a six-footer so maybe that’s where she gets her own height (such as it is) from and her father was from Montreal but she lives in Toronto now and her divorce was pretty awful because her lawyer was a crook who charged her for all sorts of stuff he didn’t actually do but then she got her cousin to be her lawyer and he sorted everything out – he’s an HONEST lawyer, not like the crook, and she wrote a letter by golly, and the Canadian Lawyers Association ("or whatever they are called, you know") can actually PULL THE LICENCES of lawyers like that so she wrote the letter because she felt they ought to know. And she won a crossword lottery something or other – entry fee $1, prize $10000 – and her sister-in-law didn’t believe her until she showed her the receipt from the lottery people and now she has the crossword and that receipt framed because it really WAS a one in a million chance and she used the money to pay off bills and for her son’s education so it went to a “GOOD CAUSE” and now she likes to go and gamble because she always wins something, she just has to think that something is lucky and it turns out to be lucky (human rabbit’s foot, that one…) And where was the bus driver from? Did he have children? Here are some tips about how to raise them when he DID get some (he didn’t own to any actual progeny at this moment in his life, but hey, advice is always useful, eh). And she’s renovating the condo so she had to really think about this trip even with all the lucky lottery winnings so she found a cheaper way to get from Toronto to New York which is you get a bus to Buffalo (“you’ve all heard of Buffalo?...”) and flying to New York and it’s really only half an hour in the air because the rest of the time you’re going up or coming down, and really, did anyone know about Buffalo? It snows a lot there, but not as much as in Toronto, or perhaps more…

I deliberately did not paragraph that screed.

This woman was another passenger in the shuttle that took me from my Rye hotel to JFK. We shared the van for some forty minutes – she, I, the driver and another hapless passenger who happened to sit next to her – and honestly, she did not SHUT UP for the entire trip. She was still talking to the driver as he was coming back into the van after he had dropped her off at La Guardia, in order to take me the rest of the way into JFK. I know it’s mean and catty but I really do have a glimmer of understanding as to why her marriage ended in divorce. The poor man probably left in order to hear himself think. I was in her company for forty minutes and I was already ready to run screaming; that martyr of a husband endured this for twelve years. Or maybe she built up to it, I don’t know. But HOOOOOOOOLY COW she couldn’t stand the sound of silence. Or she was in love with her own voice.

Or maybe she was just lonely and going back to her empty condo in Toronto, and was clinging desperately to an opportunity to hear herself talk and know that other human ears were listening.

I don’t know. But one of the saddest things that can happen to you as a person is to have the only feeling in others of your species as you leave them be one of profound relief.

She still had a wait at the gate, and then that flight, and then the bus ride from Buffalo to Toronto. I wonder if she simply re-wound and started again with a fresh audience.

ANYWAY, I have to point out that I am posting this blog on the plane. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have on-board WiFi. This is… pretty nifty. (Especially since I get to check mail, and if everything goes like it went on the outward leg I could not seem to connect to the San Francisco airport wireless network at all, at all – so this is my fix for the day. From the blue skies above America, I send you greetings…

Had a reading at 11:30 and a signing at 12:00 (EASTERN time, for those who are perplexed at the time shown by my LJ which still appears wedded to Pacific Time), both now done, and my con is officially over. I swung past the dealers' room and signed what remained of their stock of my books, picked up what remained of my swag at the freebie tables - not that much, in both cases - and am now back in my room for a bit awaiting a friend's release from final dealer's room duties so that we can go get lunch. After that, it's a question of waiting to exhale, really, until tomorrow morning and the airport shuttle that will arrive to bear me hence at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning.

If all goes according to the way it went on the way over here, I will not be able to connect to the San Francisco airport WiFi which swears it is there but won't let me on any sites and even maintains that it can't find google.com. So I may be online for the rest of today, and then again whenever it is that I get home tomorrow. Radio silence witll therefore ensue over the intervening period.

Okay.Back to that story now. I need to get it DONE.

Evidence here

Yes, I know. Yes, I was writing earlier. Now I am waiting for the badge-and-program-doling-out-room to hurry up and open (the first time I asked they thought it might be at one-ish. After that, they said, three. Now it's four - but that's on an official sign on the door so I'm inclined to treat it as official...) After I get that done, I need to go eat something. After that, well, we will see what the program has on offer for tonight.

Tomorrow, hit the ground running, three or four panels more or less back to back, dinner with friends in the evening, I won't really have time to take a deep breath. Sunday should be easier - only a couple of items on the program that I am required for - and then I have to go and try and check into my flight and print my boarding passes (need to go to the hotel's business center for that, as I haz no printer) and early on Monday it's home James and somehow I just know I'm going to wake up suddenly one of these moments and it'll be Monday morning and the weekend will have done its "Huh? WHere'd it go?" things...

Still working on that story. Turning out a little... complicated.

See you later.

(And I STILL need a con icon.)

...but already the next con down the pike is in, and here's what I'll be doing at Norwescon in April (they also included a list of parties and receptions and whatnot but I'll take those off and just give you the actual programming - if we're at the same party, I'll just see you there...):

Norwescon 32 Itinerary For: Alma Alexander
 
Thursday
 
Story-Crafting From Your Subconscious               5:00 PM          Cascade 9
Do your characters surprise you? Is your outline giving you fits? Do strange things keep happening in your narrative? Find out why that's a good thing, in this light-hearted program item.
Josh Palmatier, Wolf Lahti, Alma Alexander, Rhiannon Held, Ted Butler
 
Reading:  Alma Alexander                                       6:00 PM          Cascade 3
Cybermage – Book 3 of the YA "Worldweavers" trilogy - Rated G
Alma Alexander
 
 
Friday
 
Creating Emotion-Driven SF/F                               10:00 AM       Cascade 7
Speculative fiction is often called the fiction of ideas, but wonderful ideas will never see print unless they create an emotional impact.  Learn to begin with emotion and then wrap the story around character to affect the reader.
Brenda Cooper, Jeff Soesbe, Alma Alexander, Grá Linnaea, Warren Hammond
 
Writing Magic 101                                                    11:00 AM       Cascade 9
What rules you need to establish when writing with magic in a story?
Renee Stern, Kevin Radthorne, Jen Brozek, Alma Alexander
 
Plot, Setting, and Characters: Who's on First?      4:00 PM          Cascade 9
Do you create wonderfully realistic characters, but then find your plots wandering around lost, searching for a resolution?  Are the worlds you create lush and vibrant, but your characters speak like they're all clones?  Come for a hands-on discussion of how to find the proper balance that will bring everything together in your stories.
Kevin Radthorne, Ken Scholes, Erin Tidwell, Wolf Lahti, Alma Alexander
 

Saturday
 
How do you name your characters?                        9:00 AM         Cascade 8
This is a sweeping generalization, but naming conventions in SF tend to be conservative, at least for human characters.   The way an author handles names says something about the assumptions underlying a story (including the root assumption that sentient creatures are individuals), while the very sound of a character's name may add to the sense of the milieu, as fantasy writers well know. How could names also include such alien possibilities as clan, hive, guild, chemicals, colors…and other distinguishers?How many stories do we read set in distant futures or other worlds in which people have names that sound like my neighbors' (two names to a customer, family name last)? This is not realistic because it assumes the continued cultural dominance of a US or Western-centered world indefinitely.
Alyx Dellamonica, Alma Alexander, Kim Ritchie, Leah Cuttter
 
Writing the Young Female Protagonist                  10:00 AM       Evergreen 3
>From Podkayne of Mars to Alanna of Tortall, young girls have often been vivid and well-loved characters in science fiction and fantasy. How does one write such a character? If you yourself are not a young girl, how can you get into the mindset to make your character believable?
Brenda Cooper, Alma Alexander, Rosemary Clement-Moore, Dierdre Phoenix, Mike Moscoe
 
Autograph Session 2                                                 Noon               Evergreen 1 & 2
Grab your books!  Our Guests of Honor and many of our pros will be available for autographs.
R.A. Salvatore, Geno Salvatore, Todd Lockwood, Alma Alexander, Carol Berg, Paul Chadwick, Brenda Cooper, Jim Glass, Mark Henry, Jak Koke, Lisa Mantchev, Juliana McCorrison, Joshua Palmatier, Kevin Radthorne, The Reverend en Fuego, Mary Rosenblum, Lorelei Shannon, G.Robin Smith, Bruce Taylor, Christine Winters, Janine Ellen Young
 
Writer's Workshop: #1                       6:00 PM          Baker
Elven Twilight
Erin Tidwell, Alma Alexander, John Pitts, Carol Berg
   
Sunday
 
Writers Workshop: #2                                    10:00 AM       Rainier
Frost Bites
Kim Ritchie, KL Young, Paul Melko, Alma Alexander



As you can see I will be quite the busy little pro...
 

Question 4: If a book comments on something important to you
personally, how does it affect the ways in which you discuss it with
others, especially with those who say, it’s just a story!

NOTHING is “just a story”. Or, rather, EVERYTHING is.

History is just somebody’s story. Usually there’s been some sort of battle – of wits, or of real blood and iron – and the story you’re reading is the version that the victors have promulgated. But it’s still just a story. The losers have their stories too. Sometimes it’s instructive to go looking for them.

And also, what happens when your understanding of a particular sf/f
world is drastically different to the understanding of others? (for
example, Harry Potter -- charming school stories with good, evil and magic?
or corrupting our young people? or perpetuating a sexist, racist, and
classist paradigm?) -- and does it matter when the book (story, whatever)
was written?

But whoever said that you or ANYBODY else are going to be reading the same book, ever, even when every word in it is identical between your two copies? I’ve had readers come up to me asking sincere questions about issues I swear I never deliberately introduced into my own books. I’ve also had readers, frustratingly, miss what I thought were perfectly obvious issues which I DID put in, but which had somehow, in the alchemy of story, become invisible to them.

Yes, in a way it matters when the book was written because accepted attitudes varied so much between locations and eras. The N*** word used by Mark Twain in the Huckleberry Finn books may be deeply offensive to the modern reader but at the time and the place that the book is set that word was THERE, and adulterating a book like that to pander to modern sensibilities removes a layer of verisimilitude from the book. I am particularly vexed when I read books set in Roman or similar times where characters spout thoroughly modern opinions because the author figured that might make them more sympathetic to the modern reader. There is a limit to how far you can take that and beyond that limit you are unravelling the fabric of your own world faster than you can weave it and no reader will be able to suspend enough disbelief to participate in it fully.

It is flat impossible to write for every possible interpretation of a given set of words – you would have to have the mind and the breadth of vision of a God to be able to understand everything about everybody, to know the contects of every single person’s duffle bag as they slog along the road of life. You write a story – and after it’s out of your hands it’s between the story and the readers. They may have issues with the story. While “issues” are often something that you can take on board and fix in your head and do better (or try to) in your next story – it’s also true that you could not posssibly have known about every issue from every reader. You owe the reader the best story that you could write. What they discover in it… is more often than not something that you never thought that you had said. As a writer, this is something that you have to live with.

Another question is, how does your own baggage, or the
bringing thereof, affect the way you read sf/f? and at what point does the
story become an effective way for dealing with RL things?

Here’s the thing – I don’t think you can help your own baggage. Likely it’s been packed for you by the generations that came before and you inherit vast swathes of stuff that may be heavy or old or outdated and it’s perfectly possible to pause by the roadside on your journey through life, put down your duffel bag, root around through it, and discard the things that you think you no longer need or want – but until you do that you’re stuck carrying the damned thing around. We grow as human beings and hopefully we learn as we grow, which is why it is possible to have an educated opinion (at some point in your life) about what is discard-able without damage. But what if something you don’t want to discard, some precious link to a time you remember fondly or to a person you remember with love, starts to become a problem?..

That’s where story and RL meet and intersect. It’s those I-can’t-help-it moments that come up from the bottom of the duffel bag when you least expect them. Some writer you have never known might come up with a story, or a paragraph, or a sentence, or a word, which brings up some moth-eaten, one-eyed, threadbare teddybear from the bottom of your bag and you bawl because you forgot you still carried that bear, half-forgot that it had ever really existed, and seeing it again out in the light of day is suddenly more than you can bear/

Guy Gavriel Kay is particularly good at pushing my emotional hot buttons – and other people’s too, as I found out when a member of the audience at one of his readings which I attended a few years ago stood up to tell him that she ran a rape counseiling service and that she sometimes gave the husbands and the boyfriends of the rape victims a passage of his to read – the rape of Jennifer by the Dark God of Fionavar. And the men gave back the passage in tears, and said “NOW I understand.” For me, the trigger sentence was “Tigana, may the memory of you be a blade in my soul” – to this day I don’t know how Guy Kay, from prosperous peaceful settled Canada, knew what it felt like to have your country, your identity, your past snatched away from you - but he does, and that sentence in Tigana encapsulates it for me. I cannot read it and not weep.

I’ve heard it said that fantasy is the sugar coating on the bitter pill of reality – that, when they are coated with the “sugar” of the fantasy, the bitter insides are more easily swallowed, assimilated, internalised and fundamentally made a part of the reader’s own mindscape and values. True fantasy is not all fluff and fairy wings. True fantasy is the raw truth of our own world, enacted in a place removed from our own in time and space and context, made “safer” for us by virtue of the fact that it does not affect us directly or physically, but nevertheless giving us a chance to look it in the eye and confront its demons and – in the best of all possible worlds – learn enough about ourselves and our ways to be able to exorcise the worst of the demons from inside our souls.

You LJ folks might have heard of Flycon, the international internet con-a-palooza with authors and artists and other publishing professsionals, oh my - from all over, from the UK, the USA, Australia... - which is taking place on the Internets this weekend.

I can haz panels.

Full schedule (and it's worth a look) is at the Flycon LJ community page, but I'm going to be taking part as follows, for those who might want to drop in:

Fri 13th, 5 PM US Pacific time
They may do things differently there but I'm reading from here
(fellow panelists a_d_medievalist, RJ Anderson, Maureen Kincaid Speller)

Fri 13 9 PM US Pacific time
Author chat with moi, and since this is mid-afternoon in the Antipodes I am particularly looking forward to the possibility of seeing some of my Australian/NZ friends dropping in...

Saturday 14th 4 PM US Pacific time
For the Newbie (A panel on what you can get out of conventions if you haven't done 'the circuit' before or on a regular basis)

I still haven't QUITE figured out where I'm supposed to be when, URL-wise, but I'll do it by Friday afternoon, I promise.

I haven't geared up to be a direct part of the Dealers Room, but anyone interested in a (possibly signed) copy of any of my books, or in signed bookplates, may contact me via LJ at any time.

Look forward to seeing you around the con "halls" of cyberspace -

I hear that there is a resurrection in the works. This is pretty cool news.

The issue-that-was-to-have-been-the-last is out now (although I haven't, myself, been able to put my mitts on a physical copy yet) - and it contains a review of "Cybermage", by our own oneminutemonkey who has graciously allowed me to repost it here for others who may have the same problem as me in the getting hold of the actual magazine:

" Thea has finally come into her own as an elemental mage and world
weaver - not bad for a girl formerly lacking in magic. For the time being,
she’s still stuck at the Wandless Academy until she masters her
abilities. Then she’s called in to help with the mystery of a strange
white cube, which leads into an epic quest that spans multiple worlds and
times in order to restore the power of the greatest mage the world has ever
known. Once again, she’ll have to face off against the enigmatic Alphiri
and the cunning Coyote, with more at stake than ever before. She’ll need
all of her wits and powers, as well as her friends, to solve this problem.
With its unique blend of alternate history, oddball magic theory, memorable
characters, and a fascinating plotline, Cybermage is a satisfying
conclusion to the Worldweavers trilogy. I hope the author returns to this
setting someday. "

(Re. that last... there is, of course, an idea... but it's all very nebulous at the moment, more later when it coalesces into something solid... But in the meantime, nice review, that - and from now on these are my BOoks of Oddball Magic Theory. That has a lovely ring to it [grin])