1. That the USDA thinks 40% beef is sufficient for taco filling.
2. That Taco Bell can't even manage that 40% (and Alabama actually noticed).
3. That what goes into taco filling includes things like silicon dioxide. That's sand. In your food. On purpose.
4. That people still willingly eat Taco Bell.
28 January, 2011
25 January, 2011
nine hours, nine dragons
The nine dragons come from Sundby slab, Spånga, Sweden, 11th century, Urnes style.
 | The little wolf at the top is 9th century Irish-Viking, Jelling style. He was lonely up there on my shoulder (my first tattoo! sniff), and I needed the rest of the arm's real estate, so World's Most Awesome Artist Adam Kilss from Zulu Tattoo found a way to incorporate the two, and to adapt the original design so that we could, like see the dragons' heads. My arm generally does not look quite so sausagey or so red. Three hours of color work will do that. Last session was six, and boy howdy was I a mess after (for about a week, actually). |
18 January, 2011
and the geek shall inherit the earth
I got turned onto the Change series by SM Stirling recently. No really, by SM Stirling, not just he's the author. He came in and commented on this post at A Heathen's Day, and I was impressed --A, that an author would bother to come respond to a critique personally and B, that the defense was as eloquent as it was. And C, yes, it didn't hurt Stirling and I see wyrd and fate the same way, probably because we've read and interpreted the same sources the, yes, same way.
Anyhow. The series. Post-apocalypse, one day the tech just stops, nothing electrical, no combustibles, apparently laws of physics have changed...ready set go! Post-apocalypse is in vogue these days--some critics and scholars posit that it's because of 9/11 and Katrina and all the other immediate, devastating, world-ending disasters we see in the media--but unlike so many, this one involves neither zombie nor comet. Just people, which is scary enough.
What I find so damn endearing about the Stirling novels (and I can see the hardcore SF fans cringing...endearing? Is she serious?) is that I know the survivors. I know them. The Rennies. The re-enactors. The Wiccans. The DIYers. The too-much-Tolkien focus on pre-industrial skills. Hell. On some level I still am them. (Oh, English, I bend you to my will). I remember the hysteria around 2000, when everyone thought all our electronics would die, and I remember playing the 'what will we do if' game with my friends. It wasn't much of a stretch for us. We were, and are, RPGers, and for us that had also translated into amateur historians and SCAdians and whatever else. Archers. Swordsmen and women. Martial artists. Seamstresses and breadmakers and disaster-preparedness personnel, too. We think about things like clean water and farmland and stock fodder and antibiotics and minimal caloric requirements and what knife is more practical and useful. It's nice to imagine that, even if I died in some post-Change world, my socially suspect hobbies might prove useful.
The other thing I appreciate is the depth and solidity of the world-building. We got geography. We got history and engineering. We got (perhaps an excess) of detail about fringe religions and subcultures and medieval weapons and modern adaptations that would make sense and why and all this stuff. It's like one of those medieval tapestries, or a really elaborate illumination, where you spend half your time poking around the edges looking for ornaments and weird little critters on the margins. And we have a so-far fascinating look at how myths and legends happen around real people, and why they happen, and who creates them.
And this is where we segue into something much on my mind, lately--namely, the major draw of SFF&H for me, as opposed to the literary and real-world fiction. It really is about the world-building. Not for sheer originality, because I think originality is over-valued, but for the way in which the economies and cultures and whatnot fit together. The logic of the underlying structure. The skill of the adaptation of, say, feudalism or Roman-style republic or tribalism or whatever to specific geographic or technological circumstances. It's the hardest, most labor-intensive part of the genre for me as a writer; and the one that you just can't skimp on, if you want to be anything except cliché. But I also don't like this stuff handed to me, in block exposition; I want to see it in action, reflected in character attitudes and action, all the way down to the slang. I want to discover the world, and explore it, and not know everything about it maybe ever.
I am a crappy short-story writer of SFF in part because I get all caught up in the world-building. This bores some audiences. Oh, wasted dialog, some say. Oh, worthless banter! --which is really indication of speech pattern and character interaction and whatnot that you can't just assume matches your own. I don't know. I like that stuff. I thrive on it. It baffles me on some level that there are SFF fans who don't give a rat's ass about those things, and who don't want to know why and how things work. They just want Action! and Story Arc! and everything laid out (setting, point, etc) right up front. That takes all the fun out of the discovery. And then I wonder why the hell they're even reading SFF if they don't want to discover things, and then I just get bitter and depressed because I'm afraid that's more of the market than I want to believe.
Maybe we've got zombies in SFF after all.
Anyhow. The series. Post-apocalypse, one day the tech just stops, nothing electrical, no combustibles, apparently laws of physics have changed...ready set go! Post-apocalypse is in vogue these days--some critics and scholars posit that it's because of 9/11 and Katrina and all the other immediate, devastating, world-ending disasters we see in the media--but unlike so many, this one involves neither zombie nor comet. Just people, which is scary enough.
What I find so damn endearing about the Stirling novels (and I can see the hardcore SF fans cringing...endearing? Is she serious?) is that I know the survivors. I know them. The Rennies. The re-enactors. The Wiccans. The DIYers. The too-much-Tolkien focus on pre-industrial skills. Hell. On some level I still am them. (Oh, English, I bend you to my will). I remember the hysteria around 2000, when everyone thought all our electronics would die, and I remember playing the 'what will we do if' game with my friends. It wasn't much of a stretch for us. We were, and are, RPGers, and for us that had also translated into amateur historians and SCAdians and whatever else. Archers. Swordsmen and women. Martial artists. Seamstresses and breadmakers and disaster-preparedness personnel, too. We think about things like clean water and farmland and stock fodder and antibiotics and minimal caloric requirements and what knife is more practical and useful. It's nice to imagine that, even if I died in some post-Change world, my socially suspect hobbies might prove useful.
The other thing I appreciate is the depth and solidity of the world-building. We got geography. We got history and engineering. We got (perhaps an excess) of detail about fringe religions and subcultures and medieval weapons and modern adaptations that would make sense and why and all this stuff. It's like one of those medieval tapestries, or a really elaborate illumination, where you spend half your time poking around the edges looking for ornaments and weird little critters on the margins. And we have a so-far fascinating look at how myths and legends happen around real people, and why they happen, and who creates them.
And this is where we segue into something much on my mind, lately--namely, the major draw of SFF&H for me, as opposed to the literary and real-world fiction. It really is about the world-building. Not for sheer originality, because I think originality is over-valued, but for the way in which the economies and cultures and whatnot fit together. The logic of the underlying structure. The skill of the adaptation of, say, feudalism or Roman-style republic or tribalism or whatever to specific geographic or technological circumstances. It's the hardest, most labor-intensive part of the genre for me as a writer; and the one that you just can't skimp on, if you want to be anything except cliché. But I also don't like this stuff handed to me, in block exposition; I want to see it in action, reflected in character attitudes and action, all the way down to the slang. I want to discover the world, and explore it, and not know everything about it maybe ever.
I am a crappy short-story writer of SFF in part because I get all caught up in the world-building. This bores some audiences. Oh, wasted dialog, some say. Oh, worthless banter! --which is really indication of speech pattern and character interaction and whatnot that you can't just assume matches your own. I don't know. I like that stuff. I thrive on it. It baffles me on some level that there are SFF fans who don't give a rat's ass about those things, and who don't want to know why and how things work. They just want Action! and Story Arc! and everything laid out (setting, point, etc) right up front. That takes all the fun out of the discovery. And then I wonder why the hell they're even reading SFF if they don't want to discover things, and then I just get bitter and depressed because I'm afraid that's more of the market than I want to believe.
Maybe we've got zombies in SFF after all.
13 January, 2011
of two minds
I was all ready to become a Gemini, but now someone named StarJack on WaPo says I don't get to switch, after all. Words cannot express the disappointment.
12 January, 2011
remedies
The Man is job-hunting. This is eerily reminiscent of the whole grad school application process, in that the process seems to be a) gather up a lot of papers and documents (electronically or otherwise) and b) throw them into the ether and hope someone responds. Oh yes. And there's spending scads of money to get some of those papers and documents sent (electronically) from point A to point B. It's a little obscene. It's a lot disempowering. It's a little (lot) scary, too. No idea where we'll be in a year. Six months. Gah. And we might not know until May or even June, and the lease here runs out in June (unless we wrangle an extension). We found out we were coming out here something like, oh, two months before we did. Before that, it looked like we were going to Madison. Anyway, what it means for me is losing another career-sorta job and carting off a couple thousand miles across the country and probably starting over on that whole career thing. Unless, you know, a novel sells this year or something for more money than first novels in SFF tend to sell.* Oh yes. And I'd like a pony to go with that.
But seriously. One of his recommenders has had 'problems' uploading her letter to the website on which letters live. She's had these problems twice. Part of that is no doubt because she is in Afghanistan embedded with an Army unit in the combat zone. But that doesn't stop me from quietly hating on her because, well, our future could rely on her internet connection. The job market's ugly enough without missing letters and administrative hiccups that will turn a committee off just because they don't have to look at anyone whose application isn't perfect.
Luckily there is good wine, good beer, yoga, and Xbox.
*Which won't happen if I don't edit the draft, which I am not doing while I am blogging.
But seriously. One of his recommenders has had 'problems' uploading her letter to the website on which letters live. She's had these problems twice. Part of that is no doubt because she is in Afghanistan embedded with an Army unit in the combat zone. But that doesn't stop me from quietly hating on her because, well, our future could rely on her internet connection. The job market's ugly enough without missing letters and administrative hiccups that will turn a committee off just because they don't have to look at anyone whose application isn't perfect.
Luckily there is good wine, good beer, yoga, and Xbox.
*Which won't happen if I don't edit the draft, which I am not doing while I am blogging.
09 January, 2011
in which i am branded a hater of men
I am tired of boy stories. I am tired of sons who must fulfill their fathers' destinies. I am tired of the Savior of Everyone being a boy. I am tired of that being the norm, and stories in which there are girls or women or, gasp, mothers as the influential figure being unusual. Okay, these are actually two different complaints. There's the Influential Parent Is The Father thing, and the Speshul Hero Is A Boy thing. Where are the mothers? John Connor has Sarah, and she's the one who makes him a badass, but how rare is that? Are there women who are made badass by their mothers?
But really, I am tired of boy stories. Why does the child in TRON have to be a son named Sam? Why not a daughter named Sam? Have we not seen a bazillion iterations of Boy Following Daddy's Footsteps? Even my favorite author ever is all about boy stories. The last women stories she wrote were back in the late 80s. Maaaaybe the early 90s. She wrote a sequel to a woman story recently, but that's a sequel. And now her new shared-world online story begins with... a boy story (grant it was one of her co-authors, but still). Knowing the other authors, a girl may appear at some point. But I am sad that the whole thing begins with... a boy. Again. And a dead mother. Again. And a daddy issue. AGAIN. And this is a shared world with three women writing it.
Nothing wrong with daddy issues or mommy issues or stories about boys or girls. But it's the same tired crap, over and over, too many times. I know there are exceptions. The point here is not oh, but there's a Sarah Connor or a Ripley or a Leelu or a True Grit out there. It's that you can name them pretty easily as exceptions.
I suppose part of it's audience. Okay, probably a lot of it. I know men who won't read novels by women who write male protagonist POVs. They have no such qualms with male writers and female POVs. Shocking. And like it or not, and I do not like it, SFF is male-oriented. The shelves are flooded lately with paranormal romances*, and we all know who those are for, but I don't take that as indication the genre is shifting toward women as audience or authorship.
I found Marion Zimmer Bradley and Darkover when I first seriously got into SFF. I was working my way across the library shelves, and the MZB was the first cover I thought looked cool, so I took it. And it was about women! Whoa. Then I found this novel by someone named Cherryh, and it was about a woman, too. Whoa again. I didn't realize at the time what a big deal that was to a 10 year old, but in retrospect, it had a huge impact on the kinds of stories I expected, and respected.
*I don't like, or read, paranormal romances as a general rule (confess a weakness for Stackhouse stuff, but that's because of Eric, because really, I have a weakness for Vikings and THAT is a whole 'nother can of wtf because it doesn't get much more boy story than that, unless you also go east and north and into the Finnish material, or you think Skadhi's the coolest thing ever, or c, both of the above). But I don't think the presence of a vampire, werewolf, ghost, spaceship, etc. makes something SFF, either.
But really, I am tired of boy stories. Why does the child in TRON have to be a son named Sam? Why not a daughter named Sam? Have we not seen a bazillion iterations of Boy Following Daddy's Footsteps? Even my favorite author ever is all about boy stories. The last women stories she wrote were back in the late 80s. Maaaaybe the early 90s. She wrote a sequel to a woman story recently, but that's a sequel. And now her new shared-world online story begins with... a boy story (grant it was one of her co-authors, but still). Knowing the other authors, a girl may appear at some point. But I am sad that the whole thing begins with... a boy. Again. And a dead mother. Again. And a daddy issue. AGAIN. And this is a shared world with three women writing it.
Nothing wrong with daddy issues or mommy issues or stories about boys or girls. But it's the same tired crap, over and over, too many times. I know there are exceptions. The point here is not oh, but there's a Sarah Connor or a Ripley or a Leelu or a True Grit out there. It's that you can name them pretty easily as exceptions.
I suppose part of it's audience. Okay, probably a lot of it. I know men who won't read novels by women who write male protagonist POVs. They have no such qualms with male writers and female POVs. Shocking. And like it or not, and I do not like it, SFF is male-oriented. The shelves are flooded lately with paranormal romances*, and we all know who those are for, but I don't take that as indication the genre is shifting toward women as audience or authorship.
I found Marion Zimmer Bradley and Darkover when I first seriously got into SFF. I was working my way across the library shelves, and the MZB was the first cover I thought looked cool, so I took it. And it was about women! Whoa. Then I found this novel by someone named Cherryh, and it was about a woman, too. Whoa again. I didn't realize at the time what a big deal that was to a 10 year old, but in retrospect, it had a huge impact on the kinds of stories I expected, and respected.
*I don't like, or read, paranormal romances as a general rule (confess a weakness for Stackhouse stuff, but that's because of Eric, because really, I have a weakness for Vikings and THAT is a whole 'nother can of wtf because it doesn't get much more boy story than that, unless you also go east and north and into the Finnish material, or you think Skadhi's the coolest thing ever, or c, both of the above). But I don't think the presence of a vampire, werewolf, ghost, spaceship, etc. makes something SFF, either.
03 January, 2011
my new year's resolution...
...is headstand by June.
So very excited for yoga tonight. It's been 3 weeks between classes! That's the downside to the holiday break. The upside is of course that I did not have to grade or show up in a classroom in that interim, either, although I did read and respond to work email. I am in complete grumpy denial that classes restarted today. I'm teaching zombies again--the theme of the course, not the students. I'm almost, almost getting sick of them (zombies! not students!). I am also not going to make up a new syllabus for the spring classes. We will finish this year with zombies.
Anyway. Yoga. We were talking about classes I take, not classes I teach. Stupid-excited to get back to the Monday class, even though I know partway in I will be cursing the instructor and wishing I'd been more diligent in my home practice during December and probably regretting the coffee I drank before class that I need to go brew now since the water's finally boiling there brewed now where was I?
Commas are for those who need to take breaths.
I don't know what it is about yoga I love. It's not the spiritual aspect, because a) my classes don't emphasize that and b) I would be annoyed if they did. Chanting is cool and all, but it's not my thing. I think I go to breathe, stupid as that sounds. Well. Breathe and stretch and focus, for 75 minutes, on something so totally that everything else goes away. The job, the stress about the spousal unit's job, the fretting about the next convolution of plot, the deep conviction that I will never really sell the novel even if I finish it, the slow progress of the knitting, whatever. It's all gone when I am on the mat. Which is not to say I'm in some zen place. I'm not. I'm still pushing myself to stay balanced or get that leg straight or whatever (which is not very yoga, I know). But I am entirely focused on what I am doing, right then.
That's remarkably restful.
Aha. And I just figured out I have to double-carriage-return to get my two line breaks in this update window, unlike the benighted monstrosity I use for my class websites. Score one for learning a new thing without reading the directions first!
So yeah. I am reliably informed that my blog is "very plain." Said informer implied she might fix that for me. I will probably let her, because her Photoshop-fu outstrips mine by several orders of magnitude. I am undecided... do we go with the whole scifi look, or the mythic look...I mean, are we going with DA or ME here? I don't know. My blog design, like my fictional choices, is often conflicted. Maybe I can get her to do cyborg vikings or dragons or ravens, or knotwork in chrome. (Rat. If you're reading this... whaddya think?)
LJ tells me my paid account has expired just this very moment. Quelle horreur. The community that made me move over there 7 years ago is largely migrated off to FB or Twitter, the former of which I am on (reluctantly) and the latter of which I shun like plague. Both are free. For the price of an LJ, well... I can do other things. Like buy ebooks! or real books. Or yarn. Or whatever. Priorities, they have changed.
Although I evidently think I have something interesting enough to say that people will read it. Ha. Maybe I'm writing to myself. Maybe that's okay.
So very excited for yoga tonight. It's been 3 weeks between classes! That's the downside to the holiday break. The upside is of course that I did not have to grade or show up in a classroom in that interim, either, although I did read and respond to work email. I am in complete grumpy denial that classes restarted today. I'm teaching zombies again--the theme of the course, not the students. I'm almost, almost getting sick of them (zombies! not students!). I am also not going to make up a new syllabus for the spring classes. We will finish this year with zombies.
Anyway. Yoga. We were talking about classes I take, not classes I teach. Stupid-excited to get back to the Monday class, even though I know partway in I will be cursing the instructor and wishing I'd been more diligent in my home practice during December and probably regretting the coffee I drank before class that I need to go brew now since the water's finally boiling there brewed now where was I?
Commas are for those who need to take breaths.
I don't know what it is about yoga I love. It's not the spiritual aspect, because a) my classes don't emphasize that and b) I would be annoyed if they did. Chanting is cool and all, but it's not my thing. I think I go to breathe, stupid as that sounds. Well. Breathe and stretch and focus, for 75 minutes, on something so totally that everything else goes away. The job, the stress about the spousal unit's job, the fretting about the next convolution of plot, the deep conviction that I will never really sell the novel even if I finish it, the slow progress of the knitting, whatever. It's all gone when I am on the mat. Which is not to say I'm in some zen place. I'm not. I'm still pushing myself to stay balanced or get that leg straight or whatever (which is not very yoga, I know). But I am entirely focused on what I am doing, right then.
That's remarkably restful.
Aha. And I just figured out I have to double-carriage-return to get my two line breaks in this update window, unlike the benighted monstrosity I use for my class websites. Score one for learning a new thing without reading the directions first!
So yeah. I am reliably informed that my blog is "very plain." Said informer implied she might fix that for me. I will probably let her, because her Photoshop-fu outstrips mine by several orders of magnitude. I am undecided... do we go with the whole scifi look, or the mythic look...I mean, are we going with DA or ME here? I don't know. My blog design, like my fictional choices, is often conflicted. Maybe I can get her to do cyborg vikings or dragons or ravens, or knotwork in chrome. (Rat. If you're reading this... whaddya think?)
LJ tells me my paid account has expired just this very moment. Quelle horreur. The community that made me move over there 7 years ago is largely migrated off to FB or Twitter, the former of which I am on (reluctantly) and the latter of which I shun like plague. Both are free. For the price of an LJ, well... I can do other things. Like buy ebooks! or real books. Or yarn. Or whatever. Priorities, they have changed.
Although I evidently think I have something interesting enough to say that people will read it. Ha. Maybe I'm writing to myself. Maybe that's okay.
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