Cat Rambo's Blog
Posted by Cat Rambo
The pdf is free - certainly an unbeatable price. I'm glad to see this piece reprinted. For one thing it was my first pro sale, since it took second place in the Chiaroscuro short story contest and was bought by them as a result. For another, I simply like it - it draws on an issue that has been coming up in my family over the past few years, whether or not my grandmother should move into a nursing home or not. It's a move that she's resisting bitterly, and I think part of her motivation in that is a fear she'll meet the same fate as the grandmother in the story.
Is it fantasy or literary? I think it shares elements of both, and is a decent example of how a story can straddle that particular line. To my mind, it could appear in a magazine featuring either kind of writing -- as could a lot of the excellent spec-fic I've seen, despite a certain weird anti-snobbery thing that I see on occasion, where editors declare that knowing someone has an MA in writing is something that makes them less likely to read their stories. I'm not sure where that attitude is coming from, but given the hostility academics sometimes show towards genre fiction, I suppose it's understandable.
Posted by Cat Rambo
News from a mailing list this morning - Lloyd Alexander passed away today. He died in hospice care at home. He survived his wife of 62 years, Janine Denni, by two weeks. The two met in Paris while Alexander was attending the University of Paris.
His last book, THE GOLDEN DREAM OF CARLO CHUCHIO, will appear this August from Holt. Alexander said of the book, "I have finished my life work."
In the course of his career, Alexander prroduced over 40 books, primarily fantasy aimed at young adults, the most notable being THE PRYDAIN CHRONICLES, which consisted of the five books, THE BOOK OF THREE, THE BLACK CASTLE, THE CASTLE OF LLYR, TARAN WANDERER, and THE HIGH KING, which won the 1970 NEwberry award. THE BLACK CAULDRON was the inspiration for the Disney movie by the same name released in 1985. Other series by Alexander included THE WESTMARK TRILOGY and the VESPER HOLLY series.
Alexander was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1924 and decided he wanted to be a writer at the age of 15, an declaration that horrified his parents. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army in intellgience and counter-intelligence. Many of his books are set in Wales, England, where he did much of his Army training and Welsh mythology and the Welsh work THE MABINOGION heavily influence his stories.
Posted by Cat Rambo
The New York Times covered NBC's new fall line-up today and mentioned the shift towards fantasy and science fiction, occasioned by the success of such shows as "Heroes" and "Lost". I've got to say that of the new shoes that they mention, none of them seem particularly appealing, but who knows? - the new Bionic Woman may end up vastly more interesting than her predecessor. They also seem to stray a lot harder in the direction of science fiction than fantasy - a time traveler, a computer scientist, and a cyborg are the different protagonists.
I'd love to see more good F&SF on television, certainly. The Dresden Files is a series that made me happy to see on television. Although the show doesn't do the books justice, it has its moments, and the actor that plays Harry seems like great casting to me. And the idea of George R.R. Martin's GAME OF THRONES appearing as a mini-series makes me salivate like Pavlov's dog.
There's plenty of other series I'd love to see done well on television, but I have my doubts that the writing would do any of them justice, to tell the truth. Nonetheless, here's a few that I think would be particularly good.
Martin's WILD CARDS series was a shared world superhero setting that would make a killer show and blow "Heroes" out of the water, I think. The special effects might be expensive, but holy cow, would it be nifty.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books are great space adventure, have a charming and challenged hero, and would make spectacular TV.
Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser similarly feature great, engaging heroes and would make a wonderfully atmospheric fantasy series - not as campy as Hercules, but with some of the same sense of humor and willingness to poke fun at the genre on occasion. For that matter, you could do a sci-fi series based on his Change War concept that could have the same episodic nature of StarGate - but with a significantly more interesting premise.
There's a couple of my votes - what would you pick?
Posted by Cat Rambo
I'll be doing the Clarion West Write-a-thon again this year. It's like a Walk-a-thon, but instead of pledging per miles or kilometers, participants set their own goals, which may be a certain number of words per day or a story a week, or some variation thereof. I asked people to pledge per story and ended up writing seven over the course of the Write-a-thon.
Why did I sign up for the Write-a-thon - besides wanting to do something for Clarion West? Because it forced me to write. Would I have written without that impetus? Well, sure, but I don't think I would have written quite so much. John Gardner said any motivation for writing is valid, and I'll take it wherever I can find it.
When I was attending Clarion West, one of the things we were told was that a few people stopped writing afterwards. I was terrified that would happen, so after I took a week to catch up on sleep, I kept on producing a story a week for the next six weeks. I imposed that expectation on myself, and managed to live up to it. One of those stories will appear soon in Best New Fantasy 2 soon - "Magnificent Pigs".
Some people do NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in November each year, in which the challenge is to write 50,000 words in the course of a month. I've done that a couple of times, once successfully, and once very close - 46,000 words before a Thanksgiving trip derailed the effort. Neither writing turned into an actual novel, but one ended up as a solid chunk of writing that will turn into a novel somewhere down the line.
It's hard to write, and I don't know why. When I'm in the groove, the words flow freely, and time disappears. But getting myself into the seat, starting my fingers typing, and avoiding the temptations of internet quizzes and kitten pictures. Anything that helps me focus, gets me into that wonderful, enjoyable, miraculous groove is totally worth while. So on with the Write-a-thon! I'm getting ready even now.
Posted by Cat Rambo
I have always appreciated the existence of the Tiptree award, whose presence (in my opinion) acknowledges the vast power of speculative fiction to examine not just the implications of hard science, full of quarks and protons and string theory, but what are traditionally known as the "softer" sciences, such as anthropolgy.
The Tiptree award is named for James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, a writer who presented themself as male to correspondants and in the SF world for years before being "outed". One of the Nebula nominees this year is Julie Phillips' excellent biography, and recognizes science fiction and fantasy works that expand or explore our ideas about gender.
The reading featured writers whose work appears in one or more of the award anthologies (the one being released right now is the third), and it was a fine line-up. Ruff led off with an excerpt from his upcoming novel BAD MONKEYS and DuChamp followed with an excerpt from TSUNAMI, the third book in her series, the Marq'ssan cycle (which I highly recommend and will talk about in another post). Gunn broke the pace a bit by reading a piece of Star Trek slash fiction in which Kirk and Spock are having a child, followed by Dalkey reading from her Tiptree piece, "Lady of the Ice Garden", which appeared in the first anthology, and McIntyre reading an excerpt from the wonderful "Little Faces", also up for a Nebula award this year.
Afterwards there was a lively discussion about gender and science fiction, which ranged from 13th century French literature to contemporary transexuality. I would have gone to see any of these readers solo -- having all of them reading together was awesome.
