Well, I haven’t seen this year’s volume yet, but it seems that for the 2010 edition of Gardner Dozois Year’s Best (the one dealing with publications for 2009), two of my stories got Honorable Mentions: “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” and “Of Melei, of Ulthar.” Not bad, though I’m hoping I can get a story into the next volume again! That’s in addition to “Of Melei, of Ulthar” making the British Fantasy Association’s long-list for awards in 2010 and the Locus 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” receving an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the …
Category: WRITING
Strangely Like Oulipo
So, I’m taking a break from a paper that’s almost done. Something distressing happened the other day, and while it’s sort of looking resolved, I’m still having trouble focusing. It’s interesting, though: I’m sort of performing a narrative analysis of a couple of independent creative projects that my students did in some classes I taught back in 2008-2009. The narratives of their creative works can be read not just as a generalized social critique of TEFL and its impact on Korean society, but also as an encoded, implcit critique of particular gaps in mainstream classroom TEFL practice, as well as …
One Paper, Two Paper, Three Paper Accepted…
Well, no, wait, that sound better than it is. I just like the sound of that line, sung to the tune of a rather objectionable song but it always reminds me of the Agatha Christie novel title… So far I have three papers to present this fall. Two are within the space of a week and a couple of days, down in Melbourne at the beginning of September — one on ecology, politics, and dystopia in The Host at the annual Utopias conference hosted by Monash, and one on a couple of diverse uses of SF in the Korean classroom …
Clarion West Write-a-Thon, 2010: Sponsor Me!
Well, the Write-A-Thon has been going, and I’ve been writing like crazy — but it has been, and this is very appropriate, essentially “crits” for my students’ essays and Creative Writing portfolios. But I’ve also been wading through the last of my grading for final exams — final exams finished just a little under a week ago — and I’ve also been waiting for my Write-A-Thon profile to show up on the site, so that I could solilcit some sponsorships. Well, it’s up now, so if you feel like sponsoring me, here’s where to go! Basically, the deal is: I’m …
“Beauty, Sleeping” & Thoughts on This Semester’s Creative Writing Class
I write this on Friday evening, at 10:30pm, in a coffee shop I’m likely to be kicked out of in half an hour. The only other people who’ve been here as long as I have are a couple who seem to be locked into one of those fights that involve no actual fighting, just a pretty woman sitting silently with a frown on her face, and a handsome, baffled-looking young man who is sitting across the table from her with a frustrated look on his face, learning that sometimes, a pretty woman is also the hardest sort of girlfriend to …
A New Kind of Fiction?
Probably not, just as Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science doesn’t really seem to have launched a new kind of science into being. (From the condition of the copy I have on hand, I’m apparently the only person ever to have signed it out of my university’s library — though perhaps that’s because it’s available online for free?) In any case, I don’t know how well-explored this field is, but it seems to me the logical extension of the online treatment of SF — moving from short stories to flash fiction and then to twitterfiction — might lead …
Another Draft Down… EDIT: Two, Actually!
Well, I’m pleased… I cranked out another 2,500-odd words today, bringing the total wordcount for “Capped” to 10,600 words. It will need some trimming, of course, and I hope I can get it down to at least 9,000 words, maybe 8,000 or 7,500 even. But it’s another story drafted, and I am pleased. Next up is a very short piece I’ve been thinking about drafting for a few days now. I should be able to pump out a draft of that tonight, too, if I can keep focus. If not, well, I won’t feel badly. I got 2,500 words written …
Starship Sofa’s Latest…
You know, I haven’t actually read much of Jack Vance, but the interview in the latest Starship Sofa was pretty damned interesting… and I’ll listen to the story by Kim Stanley Robinson (in the same podcast) later, as I need to get some work done tonight. Though I did find it nice not to be the only one who’s never read Dune.
There You Go Again, Reality
In the story I’m now working on (working title Capped), some software glitches (actually, algorithms in weak-AI software used on the stock exchange) causes a massive, worldwide economic crash (and especially one specific part of the world economic system) in the space of a few minutes. Ooops, then it happened in real life. Well, not as catastrophic (thank goodness) and not worldwide, and not with AIs exactly, but something eerily similar. So now I have to find a way that these circuit breakers could crash, or be overridden. Or something. That is, if my story is going to work in …
One abstract out… one to go (later).
Well, that’s one of two paper abstracts sent out. The deadline was the end of the month. This one I particularly want to get accepted, as it’s the WorldCon in Melbourne this fall. We’ll see what happens! (It’s basically a presentation of how (sometimes) I use SF in my classes not only to teach about the role of SF in American culture, but also to teach about American or global Anglo culture more generally, and also to throw current events in Korea into a kind of comparative relief to get students to look at, and talk about, things from a …