serakit

Reading a lot of good stories is essential to being a writer. It helps develop language, broaden your horizons, and give depth to your ideas, It also tells you what people are already doing and what's been done before, which in turn permits you to respond to the zeitgeist a bit better.

But even when the story I'm presently working on was very, very shaped by a story in the anthology I've just finished reading, even when I'm excited about the concepts I'm exploring in this story and being surprised by some of the places it's taking me...

There's also a pervasive sense that I will never be able to write like that. Clearly my existing publications are a fluke and Neil Gaiman's man with a clipboard is going to come and tell me no one wants to read my writing and this isn't going to be my life.

Which is, I know, hardly atypical of writers. But still.

My Switch Lite has shown up! I now own my very first video game console. And Animal Crossing.

Surprising absolutely no one, I spent something like five hours playing Animal Crossing today.

Which is fine, it's the start of a long weekend, but tomorrow I do in fact have actual things to do. (I also have a protracted ride on public transit due to my car place being in Watertown, so I'm going to try to confine "yay Animal Crossing" to "being on the T.")

This was my reward to myself for my first pro sale-- while in general the writing money is not meant to be exclusively for toys, prior to the pandemic I was playing with Mathfriend's Switch enough to have decided I really wanted my own.

Ever so slowly, my metamorphosis into a gamer edges towards completion.

(Though I am getting a lot of my game choices from "Gaming for a Non-Gamer"-- a while back, a YouTuber who goes by Razbuten did an experiment and made his non-gamer wife play some video games without giving her any assistance or instructions as a way of testing how the language of video games is passed on. He's kept up the series, and I am to some degree basing my game choices on "Which ones did Razbuten's wife like." Which is how I wound up with Animal Crossing.)

Does anyone here know anything about Internal Family Systems therapy? The thumbnail description I was given makes it sound like it has some things in common with the way DID was viewed back when it was still called Multiple Personality Disorder where all the personalities conform to a standard set of Purposes, so you have The Innocent One and The Organized One and The Aggressive One, except that instead of full-on headmates you have the internal parts of your personality and I have... issues... with that framing.

On the other hand, it was a fairly quick thumbnail description, so it's entirely possible there were some words crossed here.

Anyone know enough about it to explain what I'm seeing?

So the popular narrative seems to be "the libertarians caused the bears." And certainly something seems to be going on in New Hampshire because Vermont has half the number of bear complaints and just as many bears. I certainly never saw bears when I lived in Vermont over the middle of the timeframe covered by the book despite a certain amount of wandering the woods barefoot. (Sidenote: don't do this.) But the book only partially makes a connection between the two--the woman feeding bears on her lawn certainly contributed, as did the "You can't mandate bear-proof garbage cans!" crowd.

But there were bear attacks in places that weren't Grafton, and every time the state Fish and Game department was called in they were emphatically unhelpful to the point where they come off as the real villains of the piece. There are two incidents of bears attacking women in their houses, one in Grafton and one not, and in both cases the game wardens show up and promptly engage in victim-blaming while doing nothing else, to the point where it often reads in much the same way police react to rape victims. Taking a cold pot roast out of the fridge in your kitchen isn't an activity that one should have to be concerned about, and neither is just existing in your house. They go to great lengths to make it the fault of the people who get attacked. "She had open cans of cat food inside her house and an empty bag of birdseed by her door!" The game warden doesn't even take a report on the first one, just checks off a "bear encounter" tick mark, which is a number that covers everything from seeing one in town to going through garbage cans to attacking your house, and all of these are reported exactly the same. (The second one has Fish and Game saying that it's not really fair to call it a bear attack despite the bear coming into her living room and charging her-- bear attacks are rare, doncha know.) All this while repeatedly upping the limits on acceptable numbers of bears in the state and doing nothing except saying "You are not allowed to shoot bears no matter how they behave."

The most fascinating intersection of the bears and the libertarians, to my mind, is the difference between the bears in Hanover and the bears in Grafton-- Hanover, being a wealthy town full of wealthy people and lovely infrastructure, gets immediate and expensive ways of dealing with their bear from the state, as the state relocates it and goes to a lot of trouble to dissuade it without harming it. Grafton, being filled with the kind of libertarian who doesn't have much money, gets ignored and dismissed by the state. As does neighboring Groton, which is a town similar to Grafton but with actual infrastructure. The Hanover bear isn't actually behaving any differently from the Grafton bears-- if anything it's less aggressive-- and they initially just wanted to euthanize it. When the town residents, who've named it, put up a fuss about this, they spend a lot of money to relocate it twice, and it finds its way back each time.

Meanwhile Grafton can't even get the state to admit the bear attacks were in fact bear attacks.

The book is about half ridiculous hijinks of libertarians as the town slowly spirals into a giant mess, and half bears. Occasionally you get things like the bear posse that goes around to every known den and kills them all one winter, but that was explicitly not the libertarians. (And the reporter repeatedly talks to people who refuse to talk to him and also make it known that they own guns and places where a body will never be found when he inquires about it.) But it really does seem more like the libertarians and the bears just kind of... happened simultaneously. The town definitely did break when the libertarians showed up, though; the population has now dropped dramatically from what it was pre-incursion, as the lowering and lowering of taxes and disappearance of a tax base made it impossible to even maintain cleared roads.

I remain incredibly amused by the description of a guard llama just completely owning a bear that tries to come after its herd.

In all the chaos of the continuing drama about the Best Related Work Hugo ballot (what can there possibly be to continue to argue about? Surely we have established at this point that no one's convincing each other of anything!), the community has missed another story that I think would be rather bigger under other circumstances: Jason Sanford has an article up which includes the tidbit that to submit to the open submissions for Last Dangerous Visions, writers have to sign a constrictive agreement that resembles nothing standard in short story publishing and which you really, really shouldn't sign. It requires you to stipulate that Straczynski can write things materially similar to your story without having to compensate you.

Now, being a bit more aware of Straczynski's history than I think Sanford is, specifically the kerfuffle during Babylon 5 surrounding how the episode Passing Through Gesthemane almost didn't happen--and happened much later in the series than they'd originally meant to put it, to account for getting releases signed--because someone proposed on the show's forums a vague concept that was similar to the already-planned plot for Gesthemane, I get why he might want to put these things in the releases.

But that's Hollywood; it's not how short story publishing works. It's a violation of about a hundred norms and anyone else doing this would land themselves on Writer Beware with a big flashing "THESE PEOPLE ARE PROBABLY A SCAM" sign. You're not supposed to have to agree to anything beyond that the rights you'd be selling are in fact yours to sell and that it's not a simultaneous submission just to submit. Or occasionally that you've removed all identifying information from the manuscript itself, if they do initial reads anonymously. But that's the most you should be requiring just to submit.

Lest anyone say "Yeah, but editors don't have to worry about writing a similar thing," I will point out that a lot of editors are also writers, especially at the story magazines.

As I said elsewhere, Last Dangerous Visions continues to be cursed.

(Incidentally, the submission criteria itself is also a little odd. They're using completely unpublished rather than pro sales, which is out of step with most things like this and shuts out even people who've had one thing in one of the little anthologies or magazines that only pay a token amount-- and also puts you in weird spots at the margins, with things like handmade zines or self-publishing. I wouldn't qualify for a thing targeting unpublished under any criteria, but the thing that disqualifies me should be the Derelict sale or a total amount of money made from fiction writing, not that one story in the small-press anthology from 2015 after which I didn't submit anything for five years.)

Excerpt from my evening:

Me: *spots title on spreadsheet* "Wait, which one was that story?" *opens .rtf file* "Oh, right, that one... which is not the one I submitted to that one anthology, that was the other one. Wait, where did I submit this one?" *scrolls to where I have it listed* "Oh, RIGHT, that other anthology!"

Seriously, up-and-coming writers, listen when they tell you to make a spreadsheet. (The only thing not on my spreadsheet is "Hunting for Ice Demons" and that's because it was sold long before I was doing this regularly or seriously.)

There is a Hugo controversy.

I know, this surprises anyone at all, right? There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the annual Hugo controversy.

In contrast to the last several, though, this one is very much a tempest in a teapot. Which is why I've written lots of words about it.

( *Lots* of words. So many words. All the words. )

Printers are actually demonic creatures.

Which is to say, the Windows work laptop is throwing "can't connect to this network" as an error, which has... some fixes but none of them are great and none of them are permanent, and I don't really want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the laptop just so I have it functional enough to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the printer when I don't even think it will work. (This shouldn't be necessary, but HP has decided to make printers that can't function just by plugging them into the laptop like a normal machine; you *have* to have wireless connectivity. Which I specifically didn't want because all of my machines have intermittent problems with wireless connectivity.)

Besides which, the only reason I need the Windows laptop is that HP has decreed that you can initially set up the printer only on a Windows or Mac-- which, person maintaining the list of Linux-friendly printers, is not what I would consider a Linux-friendly printer; you are a liar-- and I think I may have gotten that part done enough during the last time I was doing this since I got far enough to be stymied by the disappearance of my printer paper. Now that I've got more printer paper, though, I can't install the HP file on my Linux laptop because it insists it is unable to locate this package. Which I downloaded. And is sitting in the same directory I'm in when running the apt install command.

And all of this means that I've now been actively trying to install the new printer for several days and have not yet actually printed anything.

Have I mentioned that I hate printers?

(Update: I have now succeeded in printing from a hardwired connection between the Windows laptop and the printer. This does not help with either the Windows laptop's wireless issues or getting the printer to work with the Linux laptop, but it does mean I've printed both the things I want to print right now. This is not, however, a long-term solution.)

I was reading this article about the super-rich building bunkers. And even when you start from the premise that the world is not going to fall apart overnight--there will probably be time to see this coming and *get* to your luxury bunker--I'm lost in one question: what happens next? The world ending due to climate disaster is not going to be a fast process and it's not going to end quickly. Even assuming you can store or grow several years' worth of supplies in your luxury bunker, what happens next? You've spent several years there... and then what? You're out of supplies, you have no skills for the world outside, you have no place in whatever society forms out of the wreckage. If it was bad enough for you to end up in the bunker whatever's outside probably isn't even using the same currency!

Or say you do manage to get it self-sustaining enough to stay there indefinitely. Then what? Your children are eventually going to want to see other humans besides you, have relationships, get married, have children of their own, none of which they can do in a bunker. The ultra-rich can also avoid a lot of the worst consequences of climate change for themselves simply by throwing money around, which lets them stay in enough of a society that they can still see their friends and socialize and interact with the world, which means they're not going to be going into the bunkers except in the face of true failed-state societal breakdown.

So what exactly is the point of it? If society ever gets bad enough that it's necessary to go into it, then long-term it's not going to save you.

All the contracts are signed and the first things are online for preorder, so I can now announce it: I've made my first professional sale! ("Professional" in this context meaning "pays at a rate to count towards SFWA membership.")

I will be appearing in the Zombies Need Brains anthology Derelict, about lost and broken ships. I will be sharing a table of contents with some awesome people!

Our Official Marketing Copy:

A ship lost with all hands on icy Titan. A dying woman’s soul linked with the fate of an interstellar vessel. A wrecked oil tanker possessed by the ruin-demon who grounded her. A haunted space cruiser of legend again terrorizing those who travel among the stars. A pirate-ravaged frigate concealing magical secrets that can doom the wicked, or redeem the worthy. An inexplicably empty cruiser arriving at a space station amid the panic of a system-wide pandemic.
 
There is an allure to the ghost ship, the once-proud voyaging craft now abandoned to the void of space or the depths of the sea. In Derelict, speculative fiction authors Jacey Bedford, Alex Bledsoe, Gerald Brandt, Chaz Brenchley, Jack Campbell, Julie Czernada, Anita Ensal, Kit Harding, R. Z. Held, D.B. Jackson, Mark D. Jacobsen, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Jana Paniccia, Andrija Popovic, Kristine Smith, and Griffin Ayaz Tyree offer their tales of the lost vessel. So climb aboard if you dare, and prepare for a reading adventure that will unnerve and inspire and transport you beyond distant horizons.


My contribution is "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams" and it is simultaneously the quiet story of restoring a long-crashed airship and the much larger story of what political violence can and can't achieve. (I wrote this before the attack on the Capitol. It is now way more topical than it was when I wrote it.)

You can currently preorder the kickstarter edition (of which there are limited quantities because it was mostly for kickstarter backers) and the ebook, or if you want to wait there will be a trade paperback edition available later. Preorder here at the Zombies Need Brains website.