11/29/2008

Holy smokes!

I'd been going to leave my Thanksgiving-menu post at the top for another day or two, so y'all could admire my Iron-Chef-like prowess in the kitchen, but I must change those plans. My buddy Jason, whose writings you can find all over the place now (and a good thing, too), pointed me to a review of Canterbury 2100, the anthology in which my "The Miner's Tale" appears. The review, written by Tansy Rayner Roberts and posted on the Not If You Were the Last Short Story community blog, includes this:
"The Miner's Tale," by Laura E Goodin, is the story that stood out for me as the absolute best of the collection, and the one which I think would most effectively stand on its own, beyond the framing story. This was a powerful, gut-kicking story about amateur espionage, as a small group of desperate miners struggle to prove their discovery that the material they are mining for is not just something that could easily kill them, but create deadly weapons. The characters and their struggles really got to me, and I was completely gripped from beginning to end.
I'm stunned. Stunned.

Oh, I forgot: you can buy the book here. Non-Aus people, it's not up on Amazon yet, but if you buy it from this link, I guess you can send an email to ask how much postage is to where you are.

11/27/2008

Thanksgiving cooking frenzy is WELL under way.

The pumpkin pie is made. (Alas, I'm still on a path in getting pie crust that doesn't put up a fight. Still, the filling smells good, despite not having any fresh ginger, or any ginger at all, for that matter. I reckon that bit of carefully hoarded maple syrup I added has covered the gap nicely.)

The blueberry-cornbread stuffing with onion and sage is made, and waiting for the quite-massive turkey to finish defrosting.

The sweet potatoes have been peeled, cut up, and boiled, and are awaiting their ultimate destiny: to be combined with honey, pecans, pepperoni, and red pepper, and roasted a whole lot.

The green beans are cut up and blanched, and are chilling in the fridge (literally and figuratively) to await their ultimate destiny: to become seared green beans with sesame, garlic, and chili.

The mushrooms are chopped, ready to be fried in butter when the time comes.

Gravy will materialize, if I feel like it, at the end of the process. There are no mashed pototoes this year at the actual Thanksgiving feast, but it occurs to me that a bit of gravy would make a nice addition to leftovers.

Houston has said he will procure a nice bottle of rosé.

Have I forgotten anything? It seems like it's an awful lot of food for just three people, but I'm sure to have left something out that I'd desperately wanted to serve this year.

Oh, wait — I did forget: cherries and mangoes, both more or less in season here, as an adjunct to dessert. It's an advantage of a southern-hemisphere Thanksgiving.

11/25/2008

NaNo update: strange days.

I've been deliberately keeping the NaNo updates to a very low level this year (after all, you've already seen me drag myself through it once; can another year be very much different? That's why they invented blog archives). But there are two interesting phenomena in this year's Week Four. First, suddenly the words are cascading out, which for me is a very unusual feeling. I don't know how long it's going to last, but I'm making hay while the sun shines. Second, the closer I get to finishing, the more terrified I get that I'm not going to finish. Something will happen. I'll get sick, or hit by a bus, or something, and I won't be able to finish. And I'm so close. I wonder if I can write the remaining 7,000 words (or so) tomorrow, and take all the suspense out of things.

In other news, don't forget: I have unilaterally declared December 2008 to be International Sendout Month. Join me! Send those pieces out in the world to seek their fortune! Why should they live in your basement, eating your Doritos and running up your water bill? Time for them to grow up and look for a place of their own!

Oops.

The Voyager posts about Clarion have already started.

11/24/2008

Writin' Rations™

For those times when the wordcount is depressingly low and the deadline is depressingly near, a quick lunch:
  • 1 pane di casa roll from Baker's Delight (or similar 6" or so sub roll)
  • Two or three tablespoons of spaghetti sauce from that jar in the back of the fridge (warning: check for beasties!)
  • Two or three tablespoons of ricotta cheese

Mix the cheese and the sauce in a bowl. Cut the roll in half lengthwise. Spread the mixture on the roll halves. If the roll is fresh, just broil it until the topping is browned or bubbling or whichever indicator of doneness you prefer. If the roll is a day or two old, bake the assembly in the oven (helps freshen the roll back up again).

Eat quickly while catching up on podcasts. Trying to type while eating this dish is not recommended, as it's slightly drippy and crumb-prone. Return to writing with a full stomach and the virtuous feeling that comes of eating nice food that is relatively easy on the planet. (I'm currently listening to a radio program that is earnestly telling me just how horrible for the planet it is for me to eat meat.)

Curious about Clarion?

My good Clarion buddy Jason informs us that next week, HarperCollins's spec-fic imprint, Voyager, will be posting on their blog some writings from various people associated with Clarion (specifically, Clarion South). These postings might give you a bit of an idea as to what people experience there.

It is, sadly, too late to apply for the January-February 2009 Clarion South. But there are other Clarions (in the States), and, frankly, it's not too early to start planning to apply to the 2011 Clarion South. You need to write your best stuff for the application, arrange the time off work, save the money and/or identify grants-making bodies who might help, get your family's emotional support, etc. etc. It's a genuine quest, and requires a bit of preparation to be successful.

If you're interested in my experiences at Clarion South, read my blog archive for January and February 2007.

I have to say, no matter what kind of writing you end up doing, you could do worse than give spec-fic a try and see if you can get into one of the Clarions. The things I learned there have also definitely improved my playwriting and my adventure-fic (non-fantastical) writing as well. And, years later, things are still seething and transmuting in my subconscious (in a good way, I think) as a result of those six unbelievable weeks.

11/22/2008

Is your latest work-in-progress a hideous mystery to you?

Go here: www.wordle.net. Click "Create." Paste the text of the offending document into the window and click "Go." You will presently be given a graphic that shows the most frequent words in your text in sizes relative to their frequency. You can see at a glance where your attention is lingering most, which characters have the highest profile, and which plot devices and tricks of language are looming far larger than you ever thought.

Here's the word cloud for my current NaNo opus. It's got turtles. And guess what the main character's name is!

11/19/2008

In the perilous world of reverse-engineering.

Regular readers of this blog may remember my raptures over the spiced hot chocolate we had in Belgium. Tonight was my first shot at trying to recreate it. The family's verdict: "Ow, ow!" (family member A); "Hoo, hoo, hoo!" (family member B); and "Holy crap!" (family member C).

I think we can conclude that I still have work to do to get the proportions exactly right.

Settling back in is a process; and, International Sendout Month.

One way I know the settling-back-in thing is happening is that our family whiteboard instantly filled back up with places we need to be and things we need to do. Another way is that I'm making bread these days (note to those who are interested in such things: add a generous double-handful of grated parmesan and an equally generous teaspoon of fresh-ground pepper to your next batch of bread — mm, mm). I haven't been back to karate class yet, but that will be in the next day or so, so I can start tormenting my lungs back into something like functionality. Houston has begun to go to cricket practice again, and he'll be playing on Saturday. Margaret played and sang in a school concert last night. The hecticity is back in action.

I'm also writing fairly consistently, which is one benefit of not travelling, and keeping track of progress on my dozen-or-so current submissions. Once NaNo is over, I will be unilaterally declaring December 2008 as International Sendout Month. Join me in the pledge:
I, ____________, do solemnly swear or affirm that by December 31, 2008, every single bloody piece I've written that is ready to send out will, in fact, be out.
Simple, eh? You do it, too! Poems, plays, stories large and small, novel synopses — whatever you got! Even if December is a slow month for editors, there is certain to be at least one market (or agency, in the case of the novels) for each piece you don't yet have out, and probably dozens. You could start researching them now! Try ralan.com or storypilot.com, or go to the library and use the Writers Market or similar. Get back to me on December 1 and let me know if you're playing at home! (And feel free to blog about it — the more, the merrier.)

In other news, there's a new writers' site called redroom.com. I've signed up, as it's free, but I'm interested to hear if anyone else has heard anything about it, good or not-so-good...?

11/17/2008

You need to know about these guys.


They're the Spooky Men's Chorale. They dream of mastodons. And practice mysterious handshakes. And they can grow beards (if they want to).

Americans and other non-Australians, do not despair: CDs and other merchandise are all available on their web site. Plenty of Spooky Love to go around.

I think I'll try and write a suitable poem, and maybe Houston can set it, and we can send it to the Spooky Men, and they'll perform it.

11/15/2008

Miscellaneous (and somewhat random) writing (and other) ragtags.

  1. I'm bang on schedule for NaNoWriMo wordcount: month half over, wordcount half achieved. Given that the first two weeks of the month were extraordinarily hectic and exhausting and involved many, many, many hours of travel (and concomitant jetlag), I'm very pleased with myself that I caught up and have maintained caught-up-ness for two days so far. Question: can I now edge ahead and finish the 50,000 before the end of the month? (Problem: last year's opus, while it seemed dreadful at the time, really wasn't all that bad. This year's opus is so extremely crapulous that there can be no mistake: it really does suck. That's demoralizing. Still, at the end of it, I'll have 50,000 words to keep, change, or throw away, which is better than a blank page and a heavy heart.)

  2. I gave one of my stories (as yet unpublished) to Margaret to read tonight. She laughed and laughed and laughed, which is good, because I meant the story to be funny. There's not much that's more fun than hearing someone whose opinion you really value laugh like a lunatic at something funny you've written.

  3. Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory is HUGE fun to read, and GORGEOUS to look at. I don't have the energy right now to grab the Amazon link for it; God knows you won't get too many hits if you search on that title, though, so I don't think you'll have much trouble finding it. Sample item description:
    Aether Distortion Receptor
    By golly, by hokey, and by all that is good in this world, they've done it. Yes, the invisible assassins of the future won't be murdering you in your sleep anymore. The Semmelweis Aether Distortion Receptor picks up wave anomalies within the aether field to allow perception of hidden ninjas and interplanetary invaders, the scourge of modern society. To boot, you'll look dapper and probably clever at dinner functions (where ninjas are most likely to attack.) As an added bonus, the Semmelweis will see five milliseconds into the future and hardly causes chafing or brain damage.

    The whole thing is like that, and the artwork is just stunning.

  4. If you want to make banana bread that's just a little bit above the ordinary, throw a cup of almond meal into the batter. Subtle. But delicious.

  5. Margaret and I went up to see the horses today. Miracle! My accident-prone beast is in good health, good shape, and good spirits!

  6. I'm rambling. Better get to bed.

11/14/2008

I'm very, very, very satisfied with this.

Australian Specfic in focus ("ASif") has posted a review of Canterbury 2100, the anthology within which my story "The Miner's Tale" appears. Lookit, lookit!

One thing that is unlikely to change in the future, whether using old world or new world technology, is reliance on fuel of one sort or another. Laura E. Goodin’s “The Miner’s Tale,” then, is apt. Industrial shenanigans are nothing new, and are unlikely to go away, as this story points out; neither, it is to be hoped, is the desire to help a fellow in need. It’s a simple tale, this one, but again adds to the reader’s experience of 2109 – as well as saying something to our current consumption of fossil fuel.

Eee hee hee — a positive review! My story works!

Note: you can order the book here, although you'll probably have to email the person managing the process to set up shipping to the States or other overseas location. (f you do order it, and read it, and like it, please blog about it!!!)

11/12/2008

Librarians have hidden depths.

I have been a lifelong library aficionada. My motto is, "Libraries will get you through a time of no money better than money will get you through a time of no libraries." (And I've been in a position to know.) My first jobs were library jobs. I have a bachelor's and a master's degree, both of which required generous amounts of time in libraries. I'm a writer now, which also requires time in libraries. But most of all, I'm a librarian's child, which means I get the inside scoop on the strange, complicated, whimsical, frustrating, fascinating world of libraries and librarians.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the remarkable concept of...the Book Cart Drill Team!



Note: there are tons more; just go to You Tube and search on "book cart drill team."

And, as a bonus exercise in juxtaposition, I offer this quote from David Mamet's book Three Uses of the Knife: "I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out."

An epic day.

Today I wrote five thousand words. This is my highest daily wordcount in the entire history of Laura writing. To some — and I know they're out there — who routinely produce many thousands of words per day, this may not seem like much. But I'm a relatively meticulous, polish-as-I-go writer. A two-thousand-word day is usually cause for great rejoicing.

But now at least I know I can do it. I can allow, even encourage, myself to write now, polish later. It's a mode I don't particularly feel comfortable with, but it's a writing skill, and realization, that may come in handy one day when I really need it. Sort of like knowing how to tarp a storm-damaged roof. I can tarp a roof, even though it's not the most comfortable thing in the world for me, and someday I may need to even when I'm not out on an SES crew, and boy won't I be glad then that I know how.

11/10/2008

Looking back on our last day in the States (this visit).

Margaret and I are back in Australia. It's a beautiful day, not quite summer but as good as. Margaret insisted on going to school today, our first full day back, so I'm here on my own. I've spent the morning catching up on things (like making sure the enormous pile of snailmail didn't contain any nasty surprises), running errands (like buying toilet paper, which really has to be done right away once the last roll runs out), unpacking, etc. etc. I did manage a brief stop at the beach, where a walk did somewhat to console me for missing my family and friends and native land.

Our last day in the States (for this visit, at any rate — I remain sanguine that other visits will occur in time) was spent in San Francisco with some very good friends. They took us to the Cable Car Museum, a glorious manifestation of the steampunk aesthetic that I'd been yearning to visit, and the California Academy of Sciences, which is not nearly as famous as it deserves to be, although I guess that's just as well, since it was packed, even on a weekday.

I close this travelogue portion of my blog (although not the blog itself, I'm very flattered that you were concerned, thank you) and leave you with some photos of its final day, as I return to work on this year's NaNo opus.

The San Francisco Cable Car Museum






The California Academy of Sciences





11/07/2008

NaNoWriMo: behind schedule but still having fun.

My NaNo opus this year is an adventure for me in lots of ways. It's YA (young adult, for those not familiar with the term), which I haven't attempted since I was a YA myself. It's a pirate story, which I've never tried before. It has its steampunk aspects, which I've never tried before. It's outlandish, which intimidates me, because despite the fact that I've been writing speculative fiction steadily for several years now, I have been careful not to be outlandish. I have set up rules for my alternative worlds and states of mind and I've stuck with them. This time, though, I'm chucking all sorts of stuff in the mix, things that ordinarily wouldn't go there at all (such as turtles —, oh, and mosquito ringtones) and seeing what happens. It's quite exhilarating.

Because we're on the road, I'm not getting as much written this week as I otherwise would. But next week I'm planning on hunkering. I'll get lots done next week! I will!

11/06/2008

Believe it or not, we are still traveling.

We're currently in the San Francisco Bay area, which is a really interesting place to be on election night, I must say. Me, I'd voted several weeks ago by absentee ballot, and Margaret, the only other American in our little family, is too young to vote (unfortunately, as she thinks a great deal more, and more intelligently, about politics than most adult Americans). So we were under no constraints to wait on line at polling places and so on. However, it was an edgy day, waiting for the night's results to start coming in, so we distracted ourselves with some tourism.

The last few times we've been in the Bay area (and we've been here many times, as we have good friends here and it's just cool), we've tried to get tickets to the Alcatraz tour. For one reason or another, we've been thwarted each time. This time, it wasn't a school vacation, it wasn't a weekend, and we didn't foolishly wait until the very last minute before trying to book the tickets. So off we went to Alcatraz at last.


I hadn't expected the tour to be a barrel of laughs, obviously. But I was surprised at just how disturbing I did find it. The reasons are hard to sort out. They involve the nastiness of the place itself (see photos below); the thought of just how depraved and damaged a man had to be for the prison authorities to condemn him to Alcatraz — this wasn't the place for men who had, through unfortunate circumstances or upbringing, just screwed up a little; the thought of being a guard there and having to deal with hundreds of these terrifying and cold-hearted men; the irony of one of the world's great (and hedonistic) cities just over a mile away — close enough for the inmates to hear the music and conversation from the yacht club if the wind was right — when the inmates were subject to such cold, tedium, regimentation, and austerity; and the true horror that was the solitary-confinement cells. The guards were supposed to leave the lights on for the men in those cells during the day, but they seldom did. Men could be confined there for a day, three days, even as long as fourteen days. In the dark and cold and silence. Alone, alone.

The audio tour included a recording of an inmate telling of how, when he was in solitary, he would close his eyes tightly until he saw a small dot of light. "You had to work hard at it, it took practice, but you could get to where you'd put stories in that dot of light, like a movie. And that's what I did."

Another inmate recounted how, when in solitary, he would rip a button off his overalls and toss it in the air. When it landed, he'd spend the next few minutes on his hands and knees, groping in the dark, until he found it. Then he'd do it again. And again. For hours and days.

I was surprised to learn that the guards' and administrators' families, including their young children, lived an idyllic small-town life on the island. There's something creepy about such utter obliviousness to the inmates' conditions and state of mind. It got me thinking, rather uncomfortably, about what suffering we are all oblivious to that goes on out of sight as we live our relatively idyllic lives.

What I found the most distressing, so much that I had to go outside, was the gift shop. Sure, there were some very earnest and worthy books about Alcatraz and the Indian occupation of Alcatraz in the late 60s (which I just barely remember) and memoirs of some of the inmates. But there were also t-shirts cheerily emblazoned, "Alcatraz" (it was a wonder they didn't include an exclamation mark, like the name of some horrible Springtime-for-Hitler-esque musical), and keyrings, and fridge magnets, and pens, and playing cards — playing cards! — all treating the suffering of thousands of people as a tremendous lark. The prisoners suffered. The guards suffered. The inmates' families suffered. The victims of the crimes that landed the inmates in Alcatraz suffered most of all. I see no need to (a) profit by or (b) be amused by that.





Needless to say, after all that we wanted something a bit more life-affirming. So we went to look at the sea lions. I even took a couple of movies for you; imagine my horror when I got error message after error message when trying to post them. Sorry. I did my best.



11/04/2008

I'm just saying, is all.

I've voted. Have you?

11/01/2008

Some things just seem...right.

Today I went into New York City for dark reasons of my own (having to do with meeting Houston and Margaret at Port Authority). I had a bit of spare time, so I went to the New York Public Library and sat in one of their reading rooms and wrote. It seemed such a very writerly thing to do.

Then I went and had lunch with my cousin, who works doing sound for Broadways shows. And that was such a very artsy, bohemian thing to do.

But both these things PALED in comparison with how I spent the remaining half hour until I was to meet my family. I went into the Algonquin Hotel, ordered a gin and tonic, and sat in an overstuffed leather chair in the lobby, sipping my (wildly expensive but gaspingly strong) G&T and working on my current novel. Bonus: I was using a fountain pen.

Observe the gin and tonic to the right of the photo.