Month: March 2013

Launch Pad Workshop Opens for Applications

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I was swamped back in February, so I forgot to post about the application deadline for Clarion West, which was a couple of weeks ago, but for those who are working in a creative capacity–not just as a writer, mind you–the Launch Pad workshop is open for applications. Basically, it’s a crash course in astronomy designed for people who could use some training in the area to better handle related subjects in their creative work. In my class, we had mostly fiction authors (and not all of them exclusively writers of SF), but also a science comedy team. Screenwriters, film …

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Looking Back: “Erosion” (1999)

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In 2005, I hadn’t published much of anything, in any sense approaching a professional one. I mean, I’d gotten poems and short pieces into chapbooks, had published a couple of poems and a a small think piece in the university magazine were I did grad school, and a few short student articles in my undergrad campus newspaper; I’d even had a short piece of fiction included in a refugee awareness training program, though that was because my sister asked me to write something for the handbook she was compiling. But I had submitted a story to precisely one market in …

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사이코메트리 [Psychometry] — The Gifted Hands (2013)

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This entry is part 58 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There is now a stereotype for psychics in Korean cinema. (Assuming there wasn’t already one, that is.) Psychics are tall and pale as Snow White. They are skinny and their eyes do weird, sparkly blue things. Even if they’re from a poor background or living in poverty, they are obviously plastic-surgeried, and they look as if they belong in the back line of the photographs of a Korean boy band. Also, when they do something psychic, they look kind of crazy, and their eyes get really big too. To be fair, it’s probably as much the investors pressuring the director …

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On Academic Ecologies, Career Planning, and Worldbuilding,

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At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.) I commented that I think now is a pretty good time to distance oneself from TEFL altogether, and certainly a good time to get out of depending on jobs where one is directly teaching English.  (Unless one is …

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The Suwon Revelation

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After spending seven of the past eleven years in the Yeokgok district of Bucheon City, not living there has been full of surprises. Even though I tried to resist it, I developed a habit of mind wherein I conflated Yeokgok with Korea generally, just as I conflate Seoul Subway Line 1 with the whole system. Well, like riding Line 6 for a while, staying in Suwon for a week has been a revelation. For one thing, people don’t look us up and down, or scowl nastily at us the way the used to in Yeokgok, or on Line 1. They …

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