I’m looking a lot like this grumpy minion. Today, I was supposed to upload a review of another Angela Slatter story, but I haven’t gotten around to sitting down and properly dedicating the time. It’s been a trialling month and while I now see it wasn’t all that bad, I do what I always have done and that is fall in a place where my nerves and anxieties get the best of me. Expect severe improvements in the next couple of weeks, but right now, this is the situation.
Monthly Archives: February 2014
I Talk About the LGBT Side of the SFWA Kerfuffle
Technically, the SFWA kerfuffle is over (seriously my writing this is not really related with the scandal portion), but me being gay has a lot to do with how personally I took the bursts of sexism exploding around the Internet. I am forever tied with the fighting for women and their right to be respected, because a lot of what they go through, LGBT people go through. It’s discrimination based on something ludicrous (as all discrimination is) and I’m going to speak about why the LGBT folks are going to have it tough in the community, if we’re still having to deal with finally giving women the equality they deserve.
Author and friend, Sean Munger, wanted me to get into it on his blog and that’s what I did. Mind you, this is mostly a personal journey. NO gross exaggerations about the genre, but I’m willing to best my own story is not all that unique.
If the situation for one of the two sexes (incidentally the one in charge of birth) is as fucked as the recent shit storms indicate, how bad do you think the situation is for any other community within the genre is? Us, LGBTQ writers, have it as bad, but our problem is we are invisible.
The very concept of us is to many uncomfortable. I encounter this in my day-to-day life. Even friends who I consider close and open prove time and time again that the idea of a man attracted to another man (sorry to any lesbians reading this, but heterosexuals love fetishizing you) is bizarre, weird and unwelcome. Imagining it is akin to witnessing body horror. And the worst part is that any attention I have given to any straight man has been either misinterpreted as flirting or exploited for incessant ego boosting.
The world told me being gay is a no-no, so when I got serious about writing every lead with a significant character arc was a woman, because women are allowed to have men as romantic interests.
Kama Libris: The Reading Worm
The Reading Worm by Diana Naneva
Pose: Simple and intuitive, the Reading Worm manifests itself in early childhood when eager readers consider discovering a book from a different vantage point. It’s an instinctual position that requires the Book Keeper to lie face down in front of the book, but the reader’s face must never hover directly above the text. The one requirement is for a Book Keeper to rest his chin on the ground in front of the text, creating a slanted reading angle.
Purpose: In the history of the Infinite Shelves, many reading poses have come and gone, but few have originated from a place of convenience and evolved on to become as instrumental in Book Keeper culture as the Reading Worm. The Infinite Shelves boast books that have books written inside their text – the so-called Veiled Tomes.
The Veiled Tomes are illuminated manuscripts where every letter is an illuminated initial or a sentence or word are woven together into an illustration. Reading a Veiled Tome is difficult at best, but when in the Reading Worm, the book reveals secret text hidden within the margins, illustrations and ornamentations on the page. Some tomes have been crafted so well, they can hide two additional, independent manuscripts within a single physical book.
Point of origin: As aforementioned, the Reading Worm has been present within Book Keeper culture since the first wave to arrive in the Infinite Shelves. However, none consider the pose essential, therefore it took three centuries before the Reading Worm revealed its true potential. The discovery was made by a Book Keeper by the name of O-Ouaya, a member of the Ooyu – a serpentine race with soft skeletons whose lives are spent hanging upside down from the tree clusters in their home planet.
It’s because the Ooyu can read either hanging upside down or while lying on the ground that the Veiled Tomes were discovered in the first place. Since then, the Reading Worm has been integrated as a fundamental Sacred Reading Pose, while the technique of inscribing text upon text has been adopted by Book Keepers to compress information in fewer books of their own.
Pose in action: Continue reading
NO GOOD ADVICE: Jonathan Wood on Writing
Writers are notorious for giving advice on writing. Doesn’t take long on the Internet to find a million or so articles on how write better, faster and stronger prose. Because it’s inescapable, writers often are assaulted by opinions and ironclad rules on writing, which often contradict each other. In the end, you’re a bit confused and have no idea who to listen. I’ve talked about my disenchantment with writing advice as well.
What I’ve learned about the craft (writing is magic!) is that writing is one personal experience and no two writers are the same. Unless they’re clones. In which case I demand access to their cloning facility.
This is why I’ve taken to the streets to talk to writers about advice. What worked and what did not and why. The idea is not so much about to hash out new writing advice, but to foster more of a dialogue about a writer’s relationship with advice. This Monday I’ve invited author and dear friend Jonathan Wood to talk about writing (because that’s all writer ever talk about). Continue reading
[Friday Story Dissection] “The Hummingbird Heart” by Angela Slatter
Title: “The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales”
Author: Angela Slatter
Genre: Fantasy / Fairy Tale / Lore
Pages: 210
Type: Collection
Stories: 16
—
What’s Friday Story Dissection?
It’s a weekly feature on the blog where I cast a more in-depth look into short stories, either in a collection or in an anthology. The idea is for these short stories to exist within the context of a loose narrative, determined by a theme, intent and story order intended by author or editor.
Anthologies have adopted detailed prompts to narrow down the wiggle space of submissions, thus creating a more focused narrative. I believe short story collections tell a larger story with individual stories feeding off and layering a top each other.
It’s my intent to break down stories to their elements – a detailed, spoiler-full review with the mandatory quotes as a base to speak about the short story collection/anthology at length. This is a practice Bulgarian literature teachers would implement, loosely translated as “analytical literary essay”, but on a much smaller scale. Plus, I intend to weave in personal digressions, so there’s that, too.
—
Stories Dissected:
[1] “Bluebeard”
[2] “The Living Book”
[3] “The Jacaranda Wife”
[4] “Red Skein”
[5] “The Chrysanthemum Bride”
[6] “Frozen”, “Words” and “The Dead Ones Don’t Hurt You”
—
“The Hummingbird Heart” by Angela Slatter (7/16)
This Friday I break away from the ensemble reviews to the known one story per review model and this week I’m covering “The Hummingbird Heart” – a lovely, well-crafted fairy tale with its roots in Greek mythology. The central theme here is motherhood. The protagonist, Ismene, is a mother trying to bring back her daughter, Antiope, to life by enlisting the help of a mage, Philotas. It’s a very barren description, which steals a lot of the magic from the story, but had to be said so that we can move forward. Continue reading
Kama Libris: Introducing Chimamandanata
Apologies for missing a Wednesday, so as a peace offering, we’re happy to reveal a new character who will join the cast in the Infinite Shelves. Welcome Chimamandanata or Chima as all friends call her. She is among the veteran Book Keepers and owns a bar, which as we all know readers and writers are instantly attracted to. As the narrative forms, Chima’s role will grow more important, because really.
Bars! Secrets! Books! Bribes!
She makes a lovely living feeding information where it’s needed. One more image after the jump!
Why It’s a Good Thing the SFWA Meltdown Is as Ugly
The SFWA has experienced a vile, public meltdown.
Not a newsflash, but I feel as though I’m admitting this happened now as I write about it. I’ve been following the SFWA developments for a few weeks and since the infamous petition, the situation has only escalated.
It’s hard for me to speak about this, because I’m not a SFWA member. I’m not anywhere near the US and honestly, it just hurts me to see this happen in the first place. It plays with all my buttons and I’ve been restricting myself from offering my thoughts, because they would be far from civil on the matter.
I thought, however, that maybe things aren’t as bad, then a mainstream news source picked up on the scandal and that was that – we were not self-contained anymore. This is how the genre and the field would be known to the general public and it was something I initially lamented on Facebook when Zachary Jernigan first shared it.
Because the literature we write people do not take seriously. I distinctly remember an incident in university four years ago, when a colleague of mine expressed her disappointment when I’d told her I don’t like reading crime fiction and non-fiction, but rather spend time with works as far removed from reality as possible. Her words, “How can someone so smart say that.”
Speculative fiction is still a joke, still silly and still something small kids and teenagers read. That’s not going to change when what we make headlines with is sexism, racism and forms of cultural oppression. I’ve always thought we’re a forward thinking group, which has banded as a means to do what we love – something that the mainstream mostly doesn’t get or respect.
I’ve Been Thinking About Writing Advice (AGAIN!)
“Thinker, Not a Talker” - artist unknown
As a writer I have spent reading more about writing advice than I’ve been actually writing as I have plenty of blogs I’ve followed through the years and not all that much completed work to my name. Writing advice is a curious thing. Everyone and their grandmother dishes it out and rather than explain their advice is tied to personal experience, some people push it out as the gospel truth.
Depending on what you’re looking for, you’re bound to find contradictory advice by people who have found some form of success and use said success as evidence of the ‘one true way’.
I’ve learned the hard way ‘one true way’ doesn’t exist. For years I’ve tailored my writing after advice I have read on the Internet, which had disastrous effects on me as a novice back when I took writing seriously. It’s why I mull over writing in silence and rarely put out advice.
[Friday Story Dissection] “Frozen”, “Words” and “The Dead Ones Don’t Hurt You” by Angela Slatter
Title: “The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales”
Author: Angela Slatter
Genre: Fantasy / Fairy Tale / Lore
Pages: 210
Type: Collection
Stories: 16
—
What’s Friday Story Dissection?
It’s a weekly feature on the blog where I cast a more in-depth look into short stories, either in a collection or in an anthology. The idea is for these short stories to exist within the context of a loose narrative, determined by a theme, intent and story order intended by author or editor.
Anthologies have adopted detailed prompts to narrow down the wiggle space of submissions, thus creating a more focused narrative. I believe short story collections tell a larger story with individual stories feeding off and layering a top each other.
It’s my intent to break down stories to their elements – a detailed, spoiler-full review with the mandatory quotes as a base to speak about the short story collection/anthology at length. This is a practice Bulgarian literature teachers would implement, loosely translated as “analytical literary essay”, but on a much smaller scale. Plus, I intend to weave in personal digressions, so there’s that, too.
—
Stories Dissected:
[1] “Bluebeard”
[2] “The Living Book”
[3] “The Jacaranda Wife”
[4] “Red Skein”
[5] “The Chrysanthemum Bride”
—
“Frozen”, “Words” and “The Dead Ones Don’t Hurt You” by Angela Slatter (6/16)
I’m deviating from the one-story-per-review format as I come upon stories, which departure from the fairy tale mold as they are all set in the modern world. However, unlike “The Living Book”, these three stories – “Frozen”, “Words” and “The Dead Ones Don’t Hurt You” – don’t find their beginning in ancient times. In this sense, they form a self-contained narrative bubble that touches upon the magic and wonder of the fairy tale world, but only projected through the lens of modern society. Continue reading
Kama Libris: The Elbow Bookmark
“The Elbow Bookmark” by Diana Naneva
Pose: The Infinite Shelves, although a home for books, have little space for solitude. With the great mountain ostriches, paper serpents and countless Book Keepers, one can seldom find the necessary silence to concentrate. The Elbow Bookmark developed out of this necessity.
It’s a simple pose. The Book Keeper assumes a sitting position with legs crossed and since the position is casual, individuals are allowed to cross their legs in a fashion most comfortable for them. Once the Book Keeper has fulfilled this step, he/she holds the desired book in one hand (similar to the Reading Monk) and grabs their neck so as to extend an elbow above their head.
Purpose: The Elbow Bookmark communicates when a Book Keeper has engaged with a good book and needs focus. This pose is a powerful non-verbal cue that alerts nearby Keepers to leave the individual in question undisturbed and maintain complete silence.
The position allows modifications which signal how important the reading actually is. A fully extended elbow aligned more or less along the Keeper’s spine serves as a strict warning against any communication (emergencies being an exception). A more relaxed elbow, which forms a 90 degree angle with the Keeper’s torso, means the Keeper is open to discuss pressing matters.
An elbow which points towards the ground signals that the Keeper is either cranky or near the end of their reading. Manners dictate to honor the individual’s request for silence, but asking a question pertaining to a personal matter is not considered a severe transgression.
Point of origin: Unlike other poses, the Elbow Bookmark can be traced with great historical accuracy to Ml’mar Nurená Ai – a legendary Book Keeper who was also among the first to reach and colonize the Infinite Shelves.
A member of the Paludem race (named so by the first Roman Book Keepers), Ml’mar was a humanoid with exceptional hearing. His home world consists of swamps where most life forms developed soft filtered tissue instead of mouths to feed on the microscopic organisms living in the planet’s water basins.
The saying goes this particular evolutionary development and superior hearing caused Ml’mar distress as he struggled to ask fellow Book Keepers to be quiet in his native soft whisper-like language. His experience led to introducing the Elbow Bookmark, which relied on the body to overcome language barriers and improve communication – a problematic, at the time, task.
Pose in action:
