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New Release – Legends of Urban Horror Anthology

Today is release day … sort of! My latest story, ‘The Bridesmaid,’ is featured in Siren’s Call’s newest anthology, Legends of Urban Horror: A Friend of a Friend Told Me. In addition to my entry, there are some great spooky tales in here, so I highly recommend checking it out. Here’s a short synopsis:

We’ve all come across them. The warnings told by a friend of a friend – don’t go in there, I wouldn’t if I were you, did you hear about…? Or perhaps your mind leaps to the cryptozoological realm – creatures barely glimpsed, and yet to be identified. Other spheres of existence – they can’t be real… certainly not until you’ve experienced one! Maybe the real horror lies in the minds and hearts of others just like you. People with a slightly bent perspective that feed on the fear in others. Twisted souls that would take advantage of the weak, or vulnerable. Those who believe they are doing good for a higher power, or to gain power simply for themselves. Petty vengeance that breathes a life of its own once unleashed. Whatever your poison, the ten stories in Legends of Urban Horror: A Friend of a Friend Told Me are sure to intrigue, and perhaps bring back fears long forgotten.

As an additional incentive, I’m posting a very short excerpt of the story for your enjoyment. Check it out, leave a review, let me know what you think!


Excerpt from The Bridesmaid

I don’t think about the place again — honest, I don’t — until a few nights after that. I wake up screaming, all sweaty and gross, and turn over to look at my clock. It’s three in the morning. Em’s snoring next to me, completely oblivious. I guess I wasn’t loud enough.

It wasn’t the scariest nightmare I’ve ever had, by any means. The bridal shop is there, I go inside, run down a seemingly never-ending hallway that finally opens up into the art studio, and I see him there. Mister Painter. Only this time, he isn’t smiling. His face is all twisted up with fear. He holds up a hand to me, and for a minute I’m scared he’s going to have a gun. Instead, he shows me his palm. In the middle of it is a pulsating green light, buried into his hand like someone just hammered it in. The skin around it is the classic grotesque shade of red and white that just screams infection. I ask him what he wants, but he doesn’t say anything. The dream ends. See? Like I said, hardly Freddy Krueger.

I decide not to wake Emily and instead get up from bed and pull on a pair of pajama pants. We don’t have any roommates, but I still feel weird going out to the living room in my skivvies. The fridge beckons me over, so I open it up to see if anything inside calls to me. Milk, juice and leftovers. Bleh. I just pour myself a cup of ice water and lean against the sink while I hydrate and cool off. Em’s school books are there on the table, along with pens and notebooks. I open the thickest textbook, some anatomy thing, and flip through the pages while sipping my water. That bores me pretty quickly, so I close it and look over at the closest notebook, open to a blank page. And I don’t know why, but I pick up one of the pens and start to doodle.

It seems like only a few seconds pass, but when I set the pen down and look up at the microwave, it’s almost four o’clock. My gaze falls down to the paper and I drop my glass. Thankfully, it falls harmlessly onto the table instead of the floor.

Em’s notebook is covered in the horrifying scrawls of Isabella’s Formalwear. Only they didn’t come from Mister Painter; they came from me. Veiny eyes on each corner, a massive black pyramid, incomprehensible equations, and of course, strange, hulking humanoids all around. Blob-men.

I rip the page out of the notebook, crumple it up and toss it in the trashcan. Then something touches my foot. I cry out and nearly upend the table before I realize it’s just the water I spilled. I calm myself down, then grab a paper towel and mop it up. Kneeling down beneath the table, I start to cry, just a little. I don’t know why. I don’t cry. I’m not a crier. I blot the tears and blow my nose into the paper towel, which I then throw away. The picture taunts me from its place atop the heap. I push it down and bury it under banana peels and old homework assignments, then wash my hands and go back to bed. It’s the nightmare, I tell myself. It must have bothered me more than I thought. I fall asleep angry at my own brain.

(Paperback from Amazon – Kindle – Smashwords)

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Why Nate Silver is Awesome, but not a Wizard

The 2012 election is now officially over. The dust has (mostly) cleared, the winners and losers have been (mostly) identified, and the accountability game has started up. Who made the best predictions? The worst? Did Tagg Romney take a swing at anyone on election night?

Some of these questions may never be answered. But it’s clear in the wake of the results that The New York Times’ (and former DailyKOS blogger) Nate Silver is being heralded as a modern-day oracle, possessing of superhuman knowledge and predictive skills. #NateSilverFacts has taken off on Twitter, generating a list of impressive feats about the Chicago Economics-bred statistician (my favorite? “Nate Silver can recite pi — backwards.”)

Does he deserve the credit? Absolutely! He’s been doing this since the 2008 primaries, and while he’s always been known in political blogging circles, it’s great to see him get some mainstream recognition. That said, equating him to a wizard is sort of problematic to me, not because Silver isn’t awesome (again, he is — his book, The Signal and the Noise, was one of my favorite reads this year), but because it highlights the fact that the rest of us should be doing a lot better.

This whole concept is especially interesting to me, as the novel I’m working on finishing up for NaNoWriMo (uh … right after this post, I swear) is about a guy who predicts the future with mathematics (sort of akin to Foundation, but more fantastic than science fictional). So … yeah.

With that in mind, I’d like to present a few reasons why Nate Silver is not a wizard — and most of these assertions actually come from Silver himself.

The Basic Idea is Simple

Nate Silver’s model is, by all accounts, a complicated beast. It aggregates polls in a sophisticated manner, weighting them according to previous pollster performance. It also uses economic data and accounts for certain ‘bumps’ (naming VP candidates, conventions, etc) to come to a conclusion. And as we saw Tuesday night, it’s pretty damned accurate. At the presidential level, Silver called 51 out of 51 races correctly.

That’s impressive. But how impressive, really? There’s something called the Pareto Principle (also referred to in Silver’s book as the Power Law Distribution, or 80-20 rule) that can be applied to a large number of endeavors — the most basic formulation is that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers, or in software, 80% of your bugs will come from 20% of your code.

In political predictions, I’d claim that you can become 80% as accurate as the big guys (Nate Silver, Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium, who also had a fantastic night) with 20% of the work. In fact, I’d claim that the truth is probably something like 90-5 — 90% as accurate, 5% of the effort.

Can I back that up? Sure. Let’s take a look at RealClearPolitics. RCP is a right-leaning poll aggregator started by Steve Forbes. It’s simple. Every single state poll* is averaged to get a final number. That’s about as easy as it gets, folks. Assuming we don’t count things like web design, all we’re doing is averaging numbers. I can write that program in less than five minutes. So how did RCP do? Pretty damn well. At least 80% as well as Nate Silver.

As far as I can tell, they called 50 out of 51 races correctly. The one they missed was Florida, which even Nate Silver called a coin flip, and even then, RCP didn’t miss it by all that much.

This is not to denigrate Mr. Silver, or claim that he’s wasting his time. Instead, it’s meant to admonish people who say “Well, sure, but he gets paid to blog and predict full-time. Come on, that’s not fair.” This stuff is not incredibly hard. It was easy to see that Obama would win if he won Ohio, and as Silver pointed out on Twitter, Obama had lead in something like 98% of Ohio polls in the week before the election.

Predicting Tomorrow is Easier than Predicting Next Year

Nate’s final prediction range for the electoral results — the president winning re-election with somewhere in the neighborhood of 313 electoral votes — was fairly accurate (at the time of this writing, it seems likely President Obama will win Florida, netting him a total of 339 EV). Not bad, right? But that’s the day before the election. Fivethirtyeight went up in June of 2012, and since then, it’s been something of a rollercoaster. While Obama always maintained a lead, the range went up and down dramatically, decreasing to a low of 285 EV after the first debate.**

Is that a problem? Perhaps not. We should always adjust our predictions to account for new data. But at the same time, that adjustment doesn’t mean we get to discount problematic predictions. I might predict a sunny morning on Tuesday, but if I see black clouds coming in late Monday night, I’m obviously going to change that prediction and take an umbrella. Doesn’t change my initial forecast, however.

We can make judgements about the usefulness of far-out forecasts, of course. To take the weather metaphor even further, predicting rain two weeks in advance is much more impressive than doing so a day in advance, but is it appreciably more useful? Maybe in some cases (taking a vacation?) but probably not most.

So give Nate Silver credit for his final forecast, but keep in mind that the model wasn’t a magical prediction machine that foresaw events like the lopsided conventions, Romney’s debate performance and Hurricane Sandy. That realization leads us to…

His Model Isn’t Perfect

Fivethirtyeight called every state correctly at the presidential level, but it wasn’t all perfection. Some margins were off fairly signficantly. Silver predicted Obama would win Ohio by 3.6 percentage points; he actually won by less than 2. He projected Florida to be a literal tie (though he did think it slightly likelier than not that Obama would take the state); Obama is expected to win by a full percentage point when the counting is finished.

On the Senate level, we see some misses. While most of the states were called correctly, Montana and North Dakota were predicted to be taken by the Republican candidates with a 67% and 93% likelihood, respectively. Democrats won both races.

In fairness, these are probabilistic predictions, not guarantees. If I roll a die and predict I’ll roll a number between 1 and 5 with a 83% probability, that doesn’t make my prediction incorrect if I roll a 6. And furthermore, Silver includes his uncertainty about his predictions, generally stated as a margin of error.*** But if someone gave Silver 9 to 1 odds on Heidi Heitkamp losing ND based on his model, he could have lost quite a bit of money.

I think Mr. Silver would be the first to admit his model is not perfect. He says as much in his book, predicting that once the media and campaigns start to catch on to his basic methodology, he will probably be outclassed. I’m sure his model will continue to improve in 2014 and 2016. But improvement is definitely possible.

The Bar is Low 

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is god. Or wizard, or something. Silver’s predictions are quite accurate, but at the same time, he doesn’t really have substantial competition. Pundits suck. Everyone knows it. Nate Silver himself knows this — in his book, he performs a study which concludes that predictions made by political pundits (in this case, on The McLaughlin Group) are no more accurate than a coin toss. And while he doesn’t make any strong claims as to why this is, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not just laziness — it’s that there’s no incentive for a pundit to be accurate, as the political parties pay them to toe the party line, and the media facilitates it in the name of being “fair and balanced” and “hearing both sides of the story.”

But imagine we lived in a world where campaigns readily accepted polling data (whilst recognizing that no individual poll or polling organization or going to be perfect). Imagine we lived in a world where pundits like Dick Morris, who is renowned for poor predictions and forecasted a Romney landslide, and Jennifer Rubin, who had been predicting a Romney win for ages, then after the election, straight up admitted to lying about it all, were fired and never listened to again.

In that world, Nate Silver would be a pretty average fish in a big pond, I would think. As it stands now, he’s a trout sitting at the top of a bucket of dead minnows.

In Conclusion: Nate Silver is awesome, but that’s no excuse for others not to be.

Really, the whole point of this post is not to take anything away from, or even bolster, Mr. Silver’s analysis. He has plenty of detractors, defenders, and judging from his sales post-election, money. What I do want to get across, however, is that the rest of us, and the media in particular, should be doing a lot better. Republicans who were utterly shocked by Romney’s loss may have bigger problems than who is president — they might living in a bubble impervious to rational thought. Those Democrats who had the same reaction in 2010, or who in 2012 thought that the House would gain a massive Democratic majority as the populace stood up and loudly rejected conservatism, are similarly in trouble. Even worse are certain segments of the  punditocracy, who in the name of ratings, decide to ignore anything that doesn’t fit with the narrative they’d like to tell.

Nate Silver does solid work with honest numbers. We should be demanding the same of all our talking heads.

Finally, some advice for the Republicans

You’ve been hearing this from pretty much everyone, but allow me to reiterate. Your constant dismissal of Nate Silver (and Sam Wang, and many others) is yet another data point in a worrying trend, namely the refusal of certain higher-ups in your party (and lower-downs in your base) to reject facts. Being an underdog doesn’t mean you’re going to lose; it means you need to work harder, and be prepared if you fall short. We can argue about the extent of global climate change and the optimal decision for an individual government to make. We can argue about whether gay and lesbian Americans should have the right to marry, as abhorrent as I find even pretending that there’s a moral counterargument to that.

But there is no arguing that Barack Obama was the huge favorite to win the 2012 election. There is no arguing that carbon emissions from fossil fuels have exacerbated a problematic greenhouse effect. There is no arguing that sexuality is not something that can be dismissed or changed by praying hard enough.

These are facts, and facts are immutable. Denying them and ignoring them will lead to failure. Always.

* RCP has a habit of excluding certain polls, sometimes with justification, sometimes not. I suspect it would be more accurate if it included everything — let the right-biased polls be counteracted by the left-biased ones.

** FiveThirtyEight also included a daily “NowCast,” a prediction of the results if the election were to have been held that day. If Silver’s model was 100% perfect, I’d expect the NowCast to change substantially each day, while the Election Day forcast would stay completely same. Obviously, no model is perfect.

***One of the funny things about margins of error is that, though uncertainty is a sign of an honest prediction, they can be abused. I don’t think this is the case with Nate Silver (though his +-70 EV margin might be viewed as a large range), but one can easily see how this could be the case in general. It’s not really fair for me to predict an earthquake next year centered in downtown Los Angeles with a 3000-mile margin of error, and then claim I called it correctly when something rumbles up in Canada.

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Friday Fun: Overclock Remix’s FFVI Kickstarter almost finished!

Happy Friday! It’s been kind of a weird week (or two) what with all the Reddit stuff, politics, and getting ready to move into my house (my first time dealing with lenders, builders, landscapers, etc). So I thought I’d throw up something light for Friday — look for this to continue on Fridays for the foreseeable future.

Today I want to talk about OverClock Remix. It’s a fantastic website for anyone into video game music, and I’d be surprised if there are any VGM aficionados out there who haven’t at least heard of it. It’s essentially a community dedicated to remixing songs from video games and providing those remixes completely free-of-charge. If you need to take a peek at their body of work, all their songs are available at their website, and if you want to listen to a big chunk, their newly redone torrents containing every song they’ve ever done are likely to be right up your alley.

There’s more, though. The past few years, OCRemix has gone from doing individual songs, to remixing entire game soundtracks. They’ve done soundtracks for Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy I,IV,V and VII, Wild Arms, Pokemon, Zelda and tons more. Now they’ve set their sights on one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy VI, with an album called Balance and Ruin. And not only are they releasing the music free, digitally, as they always have, but they’ve also created a Kickstarter for a physical release.

Check it out!

With a week left, they’ve wildly surpassed their goal (and even added physical releases of previous albums to the rewards!) but there are still slots left to get your hands on the album. To encourage you to kick a few bucks their way, I’ve posted some of my favorite tunes from the game. The first two are remixes from OCRemix, entitled “Cid in the Factory” and “Arab Painting.” If you’re new to the site, these two should give you an idea of the diversity of musical styles that OCRemix plays with.

And finally, I have to post the climax of the soundtrack: the ending theme. One of my favorite pieces from the entire series, it’s a shame this has never been properly remixed or orchestrated. Hopefully Balance and Ruin changes that.

Have a chill weekend, and I’ll see you next week!

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Better than Nothing

[Content Warning: This is a piece about an underage prostitute, and is not particularly cheery]
 
    She makes herself smile as she slathers another coat of blush on her face. She thinks it makes her look like a clown but the other girls say it’s just the way things are and new pussy shouldn’t ask questions. The other girls never talk to her much, but she doesn’t really mind because they’re old and they’re scarred and they’re not nice, not even to each other. But it makes her miss her friends. She used to have friends.

    She walks out into the hall and Daddy’s sitting on the couch with his brother, smoking his bud. He’s not her real Daddy, of course — she doesn’t know anything about her real Daddy other than he knocked Momma up in high school and left town right after. This Daddy doesn’t like when she interrupts his “me time,” but that’s pretty much all the time and she needs a ride to 36th and Prince because he said if she doesn’t make at least two hundred tonight he’d take it out on her ass.

    “Hey Daddy,” she says, but it comes out as more of a cough as the smoke dancing in the room hits her throat. Neither of the men notice her, so she says it again, and her voice sounds more like the 13-year-old girl she is than the 18-year-old girl she’s trying to look like.

    “Fuck you want?” Daddy says without looking up.

    “I need a ride.”

    “Ain’t my fuckin’ problem. You got your own two legs, don’t you?”

    “Yeah, I got legs,” she replies. Daddy doesn’t like it when you don’t answer his questions.

    “Then fuckin’ walk.”

    His words sting. She hates the way he talks to her now, but more than that, she hates herself for being so hurt by them. She sniffles, and Daddy holds out an arm. She backs away, afraid he’s gonna hit her, but he wiggles his fingers and she walks forward. He bends her down and places a soft kiss on her cheek.

    “Do good tonight, okay Baby? Do good and I’ll take you out.”

    “All right,” she says. “Night, Daddy.” She heads toward the door, holding a hand to her face. It reminds her of when she first met him, when he said he wanted to be with her forever.

    She picks her purse up off the ground. There’s nothing in it except a pack of condoms, some cheap lip gloss and a stick of gum. She found both of those on the sidewalk last night before the fat old man picked her up. She almost chewed the gum after he bust in her mouth, but now she’s glad she saved it cause her stomach is groaning and it’s not real food but at least it’s something.

    Outside it’s that strange sort of weather between snowing and not-quite. The grey sky makes it seem like a different world, and she wishes it was. It’s not cold outside and she almost thanks God, but then she knows she doesn’t have a whole lot thank God for ‘cause He could probably give her more than a warm night if He really wanted to. 

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How Women Play The Game: Part Two of Five

Welcome to Part Two of my ‘A Feast For Crows’ blog series exploring the vastly different ways the women in the novel play The Game of Thrones. This will contain SPOILERSOMG up through the end of A Feast For Crows. The previous entry covers Cersei Lannister playing by the rules. This week, we’re going to take a trip to the Iron Islands.

Ignoring the Rules ~ Asha Greyjoy

If there are rocks to starboard and a storm to port, a wise captain steers a third course. I shall [show you] … at my queensmoot.

Illustration courtesy S. McCrea 
Oh man. What can I say about Asha Greyjoy? I mounted a defense of Cersei in the last installment, but that’s wholly unnecessary here. I haven’t met anyone who thinks of Asha as anything but a badass, self-sufficient woman who’s able to carve out a fair amount of power for herself it an aggressively male-dominated society (though, being the daughter of the king helps).

In some ways, Asha is a lot like Brienne of Tarth (who we’ll get to in a future post). Both reject the path their societies have dictated for them, and both do so vehemently and without second-guessing themselves. In other ways, however, the two couldn’t be more disparate. Brienne doesn’t reject the concept of patriarchy and gender roles — she just considers herself placed in the wrong role. While Brienne hides her femininity whenever possible, Asha embraces it. She doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a woman. She doesn’t call herself ‘king’ when asserting her right to the throne; she is a queen through-and-through.

This, of course, presents some problems for her. While it’s hard to say for certain, I suspect that if she had cut her hair short, taped down her breasts and called herself by a male name, she might in fact have an easier time gathering support for her reign. The Ironborn are all about tradition; even overturning the strictly hereditary rule of the Greyjoys is only allowable because the tradition of kingsmoot supports it. Thus, a king would likely be far preferable to a queen, even if that “king” was only arguably male (and to be sure, it would take a lot of arguing on Asha’s part).

But Asha don’t play that. As referenced in the quote above, she ignores the rules of the game and chooses a third path. To be unabashedly female while claiming the rights and duties of the male son of King Balon. And it goes … okay.

Asha’s queensmoot is mostly a failure for her, and the crown is handed to Euron instead. Arguably, however, this is less because of her sex and more because of her commitment to a level of pacifism which doesn’t contrast well with Euron’s promise of a-rapin’ and a-pillagin’ (one could, I suppose, argue that Asha’s less violent stance is a function of her gender and upbringing, but I digress). Though many of the Ironborn initially seem to support Asha’s claim, Euron’s promise to conquer all of Westeros is too tempting to ignore.

There are two main takeaways from this. One is that Asha does much better than anyone, especially her uncles, actually expected. Could it be that the Ironborn aren’t as adherent to gender roles as we assumed? Well, yes and no. Mostly no. Women still have an awful time in the Iron Islands, which is saying something given how misogynistic the mainland of Westeros is. One look at the concept of salt wives, the slave concubines of Ironmen, is enough to prove that. But the kingsmoot proves that this lack of respect for women is not necessarily unrelenting for an individual woman. This is a common theme when dealing with feminist characters in a decidedly non-feminist world — disadvantages can be overcome if you’re strong enough, smart enough and persistent enough.

The other interesting aspect of the kingsmoot is that it’s not quite clear whether Asha’s gender actually damns her. One the one hand, it’s clearly Euron’s appeal to violence and use of the dragon horn that puts him over the top. The crowd doesn’t really care what he’s got dangling between his legs; they want plunder and dragons.

On the other hand, if Asha had the clear, unambiguous support of several of her uncles, especially Aeron and his vassals, she would have been in a much better position to take the throne. Even in the face of Euron’s appeal-to-dragons (which is by far the best rhetorical device since the Chewbacca Defense), a clear descendant with the backing of Ironborn leaders likely would have prevailed. It was Asha’s gender which prevented her from getting the support of her uncles, and it’s very possible that sans this little detail, Asha would have been propelled to victory.

This doesn’t detract from Asha’s power as a character, though. If anything, it adds to it. It’s good for characters to fail, and smashing the patriarchy is far from trivial. More often than not, the hammer will bounce off the glass and hit you in the face. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, and it doesn’t mean that adhering to society’s expectations is the only sensible course of action. I’m with Asha: play the game, but screw the rules.

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Reddit, Jezebel, Free Speech and Anonymity on the Internet

For those of you who don’t follow Internet drama, congratulations. You almost certainly have a more fulfilling day-to-day life than I do. But there were some pretty interesting events over the past week that I feel compelled to write about.

Reddit is an extraordinarily popular website. It’s basically an open slate — users can submit links (or simply text, like questions or statements), other users vote these links up or down and the most highly upvoted jump to the top. Reddit has something of a problem with misogyny and racism, as you’d expect with an unmoderated site. One community in particular, known as /r/CreepShots, is wholly devoted to taking pictures of unknowing, non-consenting women’s body parts in public (usually in tight pants or low-cut shirts) and posting them for users to masturbate to.

ShitRedditSays, a group formed to call out misogynist, racist bullshit on Reddit, started a media campaign to get CreepShots shut down. This was mostly a failure … until yesterday, when all hell broke loose. A (now defunct) tumblr popped up detailing names and personal information of several of the CreepShots creeps, and Jezebel posted an in-depth story covering the controversy. Needless to say, Reddit was outraged. Partially because they love creepy shit, partially because they are of the mindset that unfettered free speech is an unassailable ideal in every single case, and that to censor anything will mean the death of a free society, and partially because they have an aversion to the concept of “doxxing,” or posting the personal information of anonymous posters.

I’m not going to talk about Reddit loving creepy shit, because SRS does a fine job of that. Instead, I’ll talk about the free speech/doxxing issue.

1) On free speech: Reddit is not the government. I’m completely behind the concept of free speech when it pertains to laws and government intervention. I’m not at all behind it when it comes to private spaces moderating what speech is acceptable. You are free to post whatever horrible racist drivel you want on the Internet. You are not free to post it on my website. Reddit moderating objectively terrible content like CreepShots is not a violation of free speech in any way, regardless of the legality of creepy pictures.

2) On doxxing: there’s a hilarious double-standard for the Reddit hivemind here. Reddit defends CreepShots in the name of “free speech”, and yet, is completely unwilling to do so for doxxing. Newsflash — doxxing is legal and morally ambiguous in the same way CreepShots is. If you’re defending CreepShots in the name of “it’s legal speech,” you have no ground to object to doxxing. Absolutely none.

All of this leads to an interesting idea: what if there was no anonymity on the Internet?

A radical idea, I know, though I’m hardly the first one to think about it. One of my college professors (Computer Science, natch) advocated this approach, and at the time, I had a knee-jerk reaction against it. But if you think about it a bit further, there are some benefits. For one, no more doxxing. If everything you post on the Internet has your real name right there for everyone to see, the worry that someone’s going to out you, well … disappears. In addition, some (not nearly all, unfortunately) of the consequence-free marginalizing blather will dry up as well. John Q. Smith is going to be a lot less willing to post a creepy picture of a woman’s ass without her knowledge when an employer searching for “John Q. Smith” will bring up John’s creepiness.

Downsides? Of course. It fucking sucks that the Internet has the mindset of “default = straight white male,” and stepping outside of that opens you up to attacks. Many people choose not to fight against this, and refrain from identifying themselves as a woman, or gay, or transgender, to protect themselves. I totally understand. A non-anonymous Internet would take that strategy away from marginalized peoples, which I’m not totally comfortable doing. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that the default assumption might disappear once the diversity of people on the Internet is made more clear.

There’s also a host of smaller issues. It becomes a lot more difficult to do anything of questionable legality online, which is sort of … good and bad. While I’m not really an advocate of piracy, I don’t relish the idea of the RIAA having full access to torrent logs and the ability to match IP addresses to names. And I don’t like the idea of being outed for your interest in fully legal, fully consensual furry pony porn.

But there needs to be some sort of solution. The idea that the Internet should be a consequence-free zone for the worst sorts of behavior going into the future is not acceptable to me. And while I know that to Reddit and 4Chan, this unrestrained nature is the very key to the Internet, but I simply don’t see that as sustainable. When these doxxing and counter-doxxing and triple-reverse-revenge-doxxing start to happen everyday, I think we’ll see a lot of people naturally move from the “what happens on the Internet doesn’t count” model. The best course of action is likely for the Internet to remain anonymous, but for the vast majority of people to pretend like it isn’t.

What do y’all think? Do the benefits of an anonymous Internet outweigh the use of anonymity as a shield for deplorable actions?

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Review: Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

Perdido Street Station is not a light, afternoon read. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but it’s absolutely true. The book itself is not even all that long — I mean, it’s no My First Weird Fantasy, but neither is it Infinite Jest — but it really feels as though it is. It’s like a rare ribeye with béarnaise sauce compared to a $8.99 sirloin from Applebees — whether or not the ribeye is any good, it certainly takes more conscious effort to enjoy and digest.

It’s said that any story should only have one or two Big Ideas. These are the philosophical underpinnings of the story — in layman’s terms, they’re what the story is *about* outside of the characters. Terminator is about time travel and robots. Those are its Big Ideas. Harry Potter is about a school for magic. That’s its Big Idea.

One of the reasons Perdido Street Station feels so dense is that it purposely breaks that rule. This novel is about so many things. It’s about art. It’s about dreams. Artificial Intelligence, academia, justice, Theories of Everything, free/potential energy, gods, demons, technology. Miéville touches on all of them, and at such a pace that you’re never quite sure where he’s going with it. As soon as you’re sure that this plot point is going to be the central conflict, it falls by the wayside and becomes a subplot or less. This lack of focus is at once breathtaking and aggravating. There is no denying that the novel could have been substantially trimmed, kept the same narrative and touched on almost all of the same themes. Miéville made a conscious decision to jam-pack his novel with a plethora of topics, not all of which pan out to satisfaction, and while I think that’s a completely valid choice (as opposed to an objective mistake), it didn’t quite work for me.

So what is the actual, central conflict of the novel? Well, we don’t actually find out until about halfway through, and describing it ruins some of the surprise. The story revolves around New Crobuzon, a sprawling, dirty, amazing, problematic, multicultural city within the magical steampunk world of Bas-Lag. The initial circumstances that lead to the conflict concern Isaac, a researcher, and his secret girlfriend Lin, a khepri (that is, scarab-headed) artist. Isaac is attempting to use his research into “crisis energy” to help Yagharek, a garuda whose wings have been sheared off as punishment for an unknown crime, and who can no longer fly. Lin, meanwhile, has been commissioned to complete a massive sculpture by a twisted, deformed crime boss, and though she’s in over her head, the chance to work on something so monumental is too tempting to pass up.

You might have noticed the races I mentioned — khepri, garuda — and those are just a few of the imaginative peoples Miéville uses to populate his world. Those races, incidentally, are the best part of the novel. If you’ve read other Bas-Lag novels (which I haven’t), you might be familiar with some of them, but as a new reader I thoroughly enjoyed being introduced to races outside the traditional elf, human, dwarf fantasy triangle. We have the aforementioned khepri, people with scarab heads and human bodies, garuda, bird-people, cactacae, cactus-people (and as a fan of Final Fantasy, I couldn’t help being reminded of cactuar), vodyanoi, humanoid frogs with watercrafting abilities, and more. Even when the narrative sags, Perdido Street Station is worth the read for Miéville’s fully-realized use of novel, nonhuman societies.

And really, despite its sometimes heavy, meandering nature, I would recommend you read Perdido Street Station. It represents some true forward-thinking for the genre, and contains some absolutely amazing scenes and creations. I desperately want to give it a 4 out of 5, but to me, that attributes a certain level of “couldn’t put it down!”-ness to the novel which it simply didn’t possess for me. Indeed, I had to actively force myself to continue more than once.

To continue the metaphor, Perdido Street Station totally represents that expensive gourmet steak with a crazy French sauce and some vegetable you’ve never heard of. It’s absolutely worth a taste, just to experience what an artist can do when all conventions are thrown out the window. But in the end, it’s just slightly undercooked for my taste.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville gets a 3.5 out of 5.

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I’ve been infected with a virus … and the only cure is blogging about my WIP!

Thanks to Jim Reader over at the Central Texas Home for the Terminally Twitchy infecting me with a viral bloghop, I’ve decided to share some information about my current work-in-progress (which is, of course, different from the book I’m currently shopping). I’ve also decided not to tag anyone else, as most of the writing friends who I know are working on novels have already been tagged. SO THERE!

What is the working title of your book?

Chanter: A Song of War

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I always forget the answer to this question as soon as I start writing. I remember the initial seed of the story came from the system of magic (which is based on music combined with the Japanese elements), partially because I love Bard-type classes in video games, and thought they’d never really been given the potential they deserved.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmm. For Magdalena, possibly Christina Hendricks (but, like, a young Christina Hendricks) or Deborah Ann Moll (she’s a bit too thin, but she seems to have the right sort of fiery temperament). For Professor Rylock, uh, maybe Clive Owen or Colin Firth? All are absurdly attractive, but then, lead actors sort of have to be attractive, right?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A songstress with an incredible power and a researcher delving into the mathematics guiding magic work together to fend off vicious insectoid invaders.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Good question, that. I’m going to do everything in my power to go the trade publishing route, but I won’t say no to self-publishing if years and years pass and there’s no progress.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I started last November for NaNoWriMo, and it’s about 3/4ths done.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I hate this question as well. I suppose the first “Mistborn” book might be a decent comparison, given that there’s a bit of focus on the magic system, and it’s also about a young woman caught up in events as opposed to a predestined hero of the world or anything like that.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

As I said above, the initial seed of the story was based around music and bards, and it sort of took off from there. I’ve used (limited) experience in high school band and my (more extensive, but also limited) experience in academics to tug at some of the threads.

What else about the your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Aside from the music-as-magic idea, which I happen to think is pretty cool, I think this story’s strength is the same as all my stories, if such strength exists: the characters, their relationships and the themes that come out of them. I try to create flawed, complicated but still admirable characters, and that goes for both protagonists and antagonists. Stephen King said something like “Fantasy needs a really strong, really evil villain to succeed” in reference to Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter, and while that might be the case, I’ve never really ascribed to that. My antagonists are rarely “evil” — “misguided” is about as far as it goes. If that idea appeals to you, you might enjoy Chanter.

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Something From My Wonderous Work-In-Progress

Just thought I’d post an excerpt of what popped out of my head these past few days. It’s a stupid project, one that will not amount to anything, but one that seems to refuse to stop bouncing around my thoughts until I write it all down. See if you guess what it is.

CONQUEST
Do you want to know how your sisters died, Amazon? They died screaming, crying for mercy, begging Ares to spare their honor. They died cowering. Not like warriors. Like women. I wish I could have seen it.

DIANA appears on top of a crumbled pillar, clenching her teeth.

DIANA
You want to hit a woman? Here I am. Go ahead and try me, coward. See what it feels like to be a big, strong man. But I promise whatever you give me, I can give it twice back in return.

CONQUEST stomps forward. DIANA lifts a massive piece of rubble from nearby and pelts him with it, halting his progress. She barrels forward into his chest, pushing him back. He swings wildly but misses, and as promised, DIANA hits him with two powerful blows to the midsection. CONQUEST swings again, hitting DIANA with little effect. She drives a heel into his knee, and as he bends forward, she directs a savage elbow into the side of his head. CONQUEST’S helmet falls into the dirt, revealing a bloody, battered head beneath it.

DIANA

Don’t bother begging for your honor. You never had any to begin with.

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ArmadilloCon 34

This weekend I attended ArmadilloCon, a writers’ convention in Austin, the heart of Texas and my current home. It was pretty laid back, but I still met a lot of interesting people and attended a lot of intriguing panels, so I thought I’d post a short writeup on the talks I listened to. Hope this is useful for the people who weren’t able to make it out!

Writing in Multiple Genres
Panelists: Frank Summers, Bill Crider, Urania Fung, Alexis Glynn Latner, Kenneth Mark Hoover, C.J. Mills

Some of my compatriots weren’t enamoured with this panel, especially as an opening to the convention, but I found it pretty enjoyable. It was less a pragmatic “should you/shouldn’t you” or “should you have a pseudonym” discussion, and more of a philosophical one. The consensus essentially came down to the idea that the story is paramount; genre, if it exists as an inherent part of storytelling, is secondary. Though Ms. Fung made a good point that genre exists for your readers to find something they might like, but they also exist for writers to find readers. Some assorted topics of discussion:

  • Crossing genres, even within the same story, is much more accepted now than it was even 5-10 years ago
  • Some other mediums, such as comic books, were trailblazers in helping readers become more comfortable with crossing genres.
  • Names thrown out of authors that do this particularly well: Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, Isaac Asmiov, and even Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 
  • Motivations included listening to the needs of a story, writing for a specific market you’re interested in, and simply wanting to be defiant toward the publishing industry. 

Trends in eBook Publishing
Panelists: Rhiannon Frater, Bill Crider, Liz Burton (Zumaya Publications), Gloria Oliver 

Anyone with a passing interest in writing or publishing knows that eBook publishing is the way of the future (way of the future…), so I had to hit this one. I was pleasantly surprised with the level of discussion on the panel. Excuse my French, but Ms. Burton of Zumaya Publications knows her shit. I can’t hope to do any of the comments justice, but here’s a quick rundown:

  • eBook publishing has obviously exploded lately, but it started back in 1996. Which is, like, woah.
  • One of the biggest misconceptions is that it doesn’t count any money to make an eBook, which is false (or at least, false for good eBooks). That still doesn’t mean $13 is a good price (it’s not). And it doesn’t mean that $1 is a good price either (leaves no room for sales, makes it very hard to raise price for future works). Consensus hovered somewhere around $4-$8.
  • Amazon and B&N provide the majority of sales. This isn’t really news.
  • NO DRM. All the panelists and the audience seemed in agreement about this. It provides no benefit to stopping piracy and just annoys reader. Ms. Frater also made a good point on this topic. She told a story of a friend who found her book on thepiratebay and was flat out ready to quit writing because of it. Frater did an experiment where she tracked downloads on the file, only to find that, even though it was available, it had somewhere around 5-10 downloads in nearly a year. So essentially meaningless.
  • Some worries about the new marketplace: ease of plagiarism (copying and publishing under a different name) and buying and reading a book, and then returning. Ms. Burton said there are continuing discussions with Amazon on this issue.
  • Mr. Crider pointed out that he made more money in on an eBook of an older title than he ever did when it was published in hardcopy. His electronic sales outpace his previous paper sales by a vast majority.
  • At least in Ms. Frater’s case, her agent and publisher (TOR) doesn’t mind her self-publishing work on the side, especially when it’s used to promote her traditionally published novels.
  • Big 6 is learning how to deal with all this, but it’s slow. They’re used to dealing with retailers, not direct customers.
  • E-ARC (Advanced Reader Copy), blog tours and cover reveals can be fairly useful to build buzz.

Writing a Strong Female Protagonist
Panelists: Rhiannon Frater, Chloe Neill, Patrice Sarath, Michael Bracken, Jaime Lee Moyer, Katharine Kimbriel 

As someone who writes a lot of female protagonists (that I hope are strong), this was one of the panels I was really interested in. Unfortunately, though the panelists were all eager and helpful, with a nice body of work, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Jim Reader pointed out that it should have just been a panel on strong female characters, and while I don’t necessarily agree (a panel focusing on female characters, and why there are so few of them compared to male characters, absolutely can and should be done), I do think that the panelists sort of went this way. There wasn’t a whole lot of advice about female characters specifically; instead, there were a lot of tips on strong characters in general. Again, great info. Just not what I was looking for.

  • The evolution of female characters in general has been from sidekicks/love interests -> belligerent, bitchy, lone wolf, “man in a skirt” types -> fully formed, well rounded female characters
  • To give you character likability, find their core strength
  • Avoid common tropes and caricatures
  • Motherhood is often thought of as weak; it’s interesting when this is inverted (I loved this, mostly because my novel has a strong motherhood component that I never try to play anything other than a strong and valid role)
  • Good leaders recognized people who can do things they can’t
  • One of the points I strongly disagreed with is the idea that sometimes weak female protagonists are fine because a woman juggling a job and a family, etc, might just want an escape. I, quite frankly, call bullshit. I think creating a weak, blank-slate character is a lazy way to attract readers. I mean, I’ll never bash a writer for writing what will sell (Shakespeare gots to get paid after all), but I believe you can write a strong, relatable character that people will like instead of a mindless puppet who exists to be rescued.

The World After Fossil Fuels
Panelists: Katy Stauber, Alan Porter, Jessica Reisman, Fred Stanton, Adrian Simmons

This one was more an interesting standalone discussion rather than one specifically about applying the ideas to fiction. But still, very enjoyable, with some very smart and experienced people on the panel.

  • Limits of Growth is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic
  • Our current energy use won’t change until we decide to make a change; even if there’s pressure (higher prices, etc) the infrastructure simply doesn’t support anything than fossil fuels.
  • High-speed transit would be nice in the US, but it’s more complicated than just building trains. Would require all new rails to support higher speeds.
  • Blimps, for all their danger, are actually highly efficient as a form of transportation, as hydrogen is one of the one forms of fuel more efficient than gasoline.
  • ITER fusion reactors, thorium fission and renewable diversification were all mentioned as places to research for those interested.

Alternate History
Panelists: Bob Mahoney, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Josh Rountree, Penny Griffin, Howard Waldrop

  • Are alternate histories considered scifi or fantasy? In the end, “speculative fiction” is probably a better category.
  • Classic dilemma that almost all alternate histories need to choose between: are certain historical events and technological advances “inevitable,” or do strong people and circumstances create events? That is, would the printing press have been invented around the same time even without Gutenberg? Both views are valid, but it’s hard to write a story that does both.
  • The main appeal lies in the fact that hindsight is always 20/20, and it’s fun to say “What if?”
  • Writing from the point of view of a character inside the alternate world is usually (but not always) better than an outsider. Throwing an outsider in an alternate history can give the reader someone to relate to, but also creates infordumps.
  • Research till it hurts, leave out 99% of it.
  • Reading list: Man in the High Castle, Joan Aiken, Fatherland, Plot Against America, Celestial Empire, Gate of Worlds, Kingsley Amis “The Reformation”, The Difference Engine, Harry Turtledove, Scott Westerfield, Nabakov “Ada or Ardor”, “The Ugly Chickens” by Howard Waldrop, “Lest Darkness Fall”

Politics and Social Issues of the Future
Panelists: Gabrielle Faust, Adrian Simmons, Chris N. Brown

I loved this one! Another great discussion with some very sharp people about what to expect in the near future.

  • Corporatization of food and war. Ms. Faust had a great point about food giant Monsanto teaming up with Blackwater, the mercenary corporation. Mr. Brown brought up the idea of renegade farmers with urban farms trying to grow in secret, and the police (or hell, mercs) trying to catch them for patent infringement.
  • Disappearance of nation states — Europe already starting to trash the idea of highly separate nations. Look for borders to become more and more porous.
  • Possible end of capitalism, which sounds like the idealistic talk that has always been thrown around, but the panelists made some good inferences regarding this. Essentially, capitalism is addiction to growth, and it’s quickly becoming obvious (especially in a nonscarce economy, more on that below) that this is unsustainable.
  • The end of “race” as a concept. Now, Mr. Brown brought this up specifically talking about the U.S. become more and more of a mixed race country. I agree with him in general, but not on the timeline (he said 25 years; I think 250 years would be optimistic). Brought up the concept that systemic racism exists more because of incentives than human natures. As the incentives (or privileges) fade, so will racism.
  • All of this will lead to amazing instability in the next few decades.
  • 3D printing will become a huge issue, possibly leading to the end of scarcity as a concept (more on this in the “Social Impact” panel below).
  • Distribution is currently strangling production; that is, we can produce a lot, especially since we don’t need a lot people (or jobs) to do it any longer. It’s costlier and less efficient to distribute this. 3D printing might solve this (either a printer in every house, or one for every community).
  • That lack of scarcity might lead to a lack of required jobs for humanity. Pessimistically, it’ll make us bored and violent. Optimistically, it’ll allow us to focus on long term problems like the environment, or even cosmic problems like finding new worlds to inhabit.
  • Look for the blending of rural and urban communities as available land shrinks and people telecommute more. Things like urban farming will be one of the most obvious effects of this.

Social Impacts of New Technology
Panelists: Robert Jackson Brown, Chris N. Brown, Madeleine Dimond, Elizabeth Moon

I consider this a “companion” to the previous panel; it touched on and expanded on some of the same topics.

  • Secrets may become mostly a thing of the past. The power that revolves around keeping and telling secrets will cease to exist. This might lead to more accountability and more forgiveness; when everyone has black marks, no one’s little mistakes really matter all that much.
  • More talk of 3D printing. The ability to print guns could be mighty useful in a revolution. This requires a huge amount of power currently, however, meaning it’s still under the control of the Powers That Be.
  • Speaking of which, all of our technology that supposedly frees us (Internet, mobile web, etc.) is still at the behest of giant corporations, which is worrying.
  • Technology disrupts power structures, which is why governments dislike it. Mentioned was an “Internet Satellite Disruption Kit,” basically a quick-connection kit dropped by the West into unstable countries to document state behavior. Also brought up photographing police. Brought up social media in the Arab Spring, use of twitter/etc. to avoid cartel blockades in Mexico. Also brought up Anonymous’s hacktivisim against cartels to free a blogger.
  • 3D printing has already been prototyped to make biological materials, i.e., organs. Could we make animals? If so, would this be used to make extinct animals, or new, exotic ones?
  • Networks are becoming much more diverse (slowly), which is fantastic. Used to be only the highly privileged could afford Internet access. Is becoming less the case now.
  • The Internet has led to a culture of outrage. While Internet activism has empowered many and will be a huge outlet for direct democracy in the future, we have to be careful that it doesn’t convince us that doing nothing or simply screaming into the void enacts change.

Attracting and Building an Audience
Panelists: Elizabeth Moon, Chloe Neill, Kenneth Mark Hoover, Pauline Baird Jones

How does one build an audience. Well, by doing this: IF YOU ARE READING THIS RIGHT NOW, SEND THIS LINK TO TEN FRIENDS. Seriously, though, there were some decent tips and things to follow up on here. Nothing revelatory, but still interesting.

  • The concept of a “brand” — who are you and what are you selling? Most authors agreed that you are your brand, and you shouldn’t be afraid to be you in most cases. Ms. Neill made a good point, though, that one should know one’s audience. Ms. Moon can get away with talking about controversial topics like politics since she writes for an adult audience about socially aware topics and her readers expect this to a degree. Neill, as a young adult urban fiction writer, has not much to gain and a lot to lose from this, so she holds some opinions back.
  • A series-specific brand/website/blog might be a good idea. If so, start early. Moon, on the relaunch of her PaxWorld series, said she started her blog a year before the rerelease of the first book, and she wished she would have started it at least six months earlier. Building an audience is sloooow.
  • Don’t be afraid to write want you want, but once you’re done, market to people who are likely to like what you’ve written. Don’t market your Fantasy novel to Hard SF fans, even if you also love Hard SF.
  • Keep a positive focus as much as possible — again, depending on audience.
  • Be a nice person, hold off on the snark. This was highlighted as one of the most important things an author can do. You don’t need to be bland, but be friendly and kind to the people you interact with. This makes a difference with readers, but also to editors/agents.
  • Chloe Neill said she dedicates about 50% of her “writing time” (i.e., non dayjob, non-personal) to marketing. Note that this shouldn’t all be shilling your work; things like networking, talking to fans, talking to other writers, etc. are included.
  • Tangible items were highlighted as possible effective. Things like buttons, cafepress merchandising, contests, giveaways, etc. provide readers with a connection and constant reminder of your book.

Shew! There’s a lot of information here to digest, but hopefully, like me, you’ve either found something helpful for the business of selling books, or a spark of an idea for your next story. It was a great experience all around (I got my copy of Dark Tales of Lost Civilzations signed by my co-author Joe Lansdale!) and I absolutely plan to return next year.