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Sea-Tac Free Wi-Fi is a wonderful thing

I’m on the intermission of my journey to Chicago, IL for a two-week vacation, and very much appreciating the free wi-fi. I have with me Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio’s collection of short stories simply entitled Stories, which includes, among others, a story by Chuck Palahniuk. There’s a sort of meta-pleasure referential to his cult hit Fight Club in reading Palahniuk on an airplane.

Yesterday I finished a book cover for the wonderful Sheila Martindale’s forthcoming book, Here, There, and Somewhere Beyond. I’m immensely happy to have been involved in the project.

In other artistic news, the webcomic I started in college with a friend of mine (I write it, she does the art) is undergoing somewhat of a revival. Here’s hoping for more to come!

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Playboy Documentary

There’s a new documentary piece on Hugh Hefner coming out, about his role as a social activist. Seem weird? Yeah, to me, too. This article takes a look at some of the driving motivation behind the documentary. I have yet to see the documentary (it opened yesterday), but I am really looking forward to it.

The things he, Kinsey, Steinem, and Meads have done – their contributions to the Sexual Revolution, have changed society in a lot of ways. The internet has contributed. In discussing the documentary with my mom the other day, we discussed the fact that she first encountered BDSM culture in her 30s, while she was living in San Francisco. I encountered it in a fairly mainstream fantasy novel when I was 15 and so, curious, Googled it, and found a well-laid-out Wikipedia page.

And that was normal for me, for my generation. Yes, there is a lot of hypersexualization, but there’s also a lot of information available to work with that – information on STDs and where and how to get tested, information on how to be safe in myriad ways. In my social circle, at least, it’s something to discuss -openly – near the beginning of a relationship, just to determine compatibility. Kinsey and later, when we were old enough to sneakily read The Onion, Dan Savage taught us that nothing was weird, simply potentially incompatible. And that was okay.

Hefner, of course, isn’t solely responsible for the social movement towards openness. But he’s a contributing factor, and one in iconic silk pajamas, so I very much look forward to the documentary.

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Island Writer

On Tuesday we had the first meeting of the new editorial board of Island Writer. We gathered at Simeon’s house and had his own white wine and chips and salsa and chocolate in his sunny living room, with Christine and I plugged into our little machines. It’s exciting, to have the working period of the next issue looming. Not too many submissions so far, but they’re trickling in. And, if the last one is any indication, I can expect about 70 in the two days before the deadline.

But talking about our vision for the magazine and the ways we want to organize it was great – I jumped in very late in the game on the last issue, and so wasn’t part of that. It wasn’t necessary, of course, but I really like having a better idea of what we’re doing. And I like that I’m going to be more involved in the process.

The rest of the board; Chelsea Rushton, Simeon Goa, Sheila Martindale, Christine George, and Kim Nayyer, all seem wonderful. Kim wasn’t able to attend, but Chelsea took minutes. I’m looking forward to working with everyone on this issue.

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CanWrite 2010, part one

So, it’s been a week since the end of CanWrite, but I haven’t been able to put anything together because of the sheer volume of information I gathered there. It was a fascinating experience, and highly educational.

Jean Kay, the coordinator, was very nice, and extended a generous invitation to the awards banquet on Saturday. She was intensely busy all weekend, and I rarely saw her for more than a few consecutive minutes.

I spent the weekend mostly at the registration desk with Sheila Martindale and Brock Clayards, both Victoria residents. Sheila Martindale is the venerable English author of eight (soon to be nine) volumes of poetry, and is a member of the local branch of the Canadian Authors Association, and is the Poetry editor for Island Writer magazine.

Brock is a retired RCMP officer and now has a small vineyard and many dogs. He’s had a fascinating career in various branches of the RCMP.

Thursday all three of us manned the desk, as there were registrations all afternoon. Friday and Saturday we all switched off as we attended sessions with the various speakers.

Friday we were joined by Julie, a publisher and the creator of InspireABook, who helped manage the blue pencil sessions – the ten minute periods where conference attendees could make an appointment to talk to four authors who had volunteered. Behind the desks were kc dyer, Lois Peterson, Anthony Dalton, and Bernice Lever.

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CanWrite starts tomorrow!

I’m volunteering all weekend at the CanWrite! 2010 conference. I’ll be at registration, and then doing signup for the blue pencil sessions. I’ll probably be everywhere, but I can be tracked down there, if anyone is so inclined. I’m excited at the prospect of my first writing conference, and this one is focusing on something dear to my heart – applying technology to your writing.

It’s interesting how technology is changing the industry. People are experimenting with storytelling via Twitter the mind-bogglingly broad spectrum of webcomics. Two of my recent discoveries have been Metaphysical Neuroma by Attila and FreakAngels, written by the iconic Warren Ellis.

Comics are their own separate world from writing and publishing books, but they have strange and sometimes beautiful overlap, such as that personified in Neil Gaiman, who has written everything from the screenplay and then novel of the BBC’s Neverwhere to the children’s book Coraline to the fantastic graphic novel Sandman to the novel American Gods. He’s amazingly dynamic, and has had a definite impact on both my writing and the variety of vectors my interests follow.

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Open Source – not just for computer people

Open source is more than a way to get great software like web browsers Firefox and Chrome, word processor Open Office, art program GIMP and antivirus program ClamWin. It’s a movement towards freedom of intellectual property – towards intellectual communism.

Open source software isn’t new, though – the GNU Project, the precursor to Linux (a family of open source operating systems), was started in 1983. But in the past few years, open source has moved from a computer thing to a culture thing. Creative Commons took the idea of open source and applied it to intellectual property other than code.

Now some of the same principles – not being forced to pay for interesting things – are being brought back to the physical world through things like Decentralize Dance Paries. Which looks completely awesome.

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Character Creation

The Victoria Writers’ Society had its last meeting before the summer on Wednesday. Tricia Dower spoke about character creation and read from her book, Silent Girl. Despite being sick and having to leave the room a couple times, she gave a really great talk.

Character creation, and the role of the character in the story (should they drive the plot? should the plot dictate everything about them? is setting a character, and should it be?) is a topic that comes up on every writing forum I’m a member of. Every writer is different, and takes different approaches, even amongst different of their own works.

Tricia Dower had an interesting approach to interviewing one’s characters, getting to know them as individuals beyond the page so that they inhabit the page as whole beings.

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Pacific Northwest

I spent this last weekend trekking fabulously through the Victoria Steampunk Expo then down to Port Angeles and thence to Seattle and back to Vancouver and then home. In three days. I think. It was a great deal of fun. Working inside most of the day, I don’t tend to appreciate what a gorgeous corner of the continent I live on.

Met Christine Hart at the Steampunk Expo, though didn’t realize we were both in the Victoria Writer’s Society until Monday when I came back and she’d found me on DeviantArt. It’s a wonderfully small community out here.

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Reading Lists

So, I am in a discussion with someone of Wuthering Heights; I’ve been to the home of the Bronte sisters, and have read about them, and analysis of their work – I’ve even read her sister’s great work, Jane Eyre. But I’ve never read Wuthering Heights.

I’m realizing I am not all that well-read in general; I’ve read The Great Gatsby, and The Jungle, and The Yellow Wallpaper, and a few other classics, and I’ve seen the BBC versions of every Jane Austen novel as well as attempting to read Emma. But somehow I slipped by all that required reading, A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies and all those other books people of letters have read.

So I’m going to attempt to rectify the situation, with aid from Time, The Best 100 lists, and these blogs. Even with overlap, that is probably well over 100 books. I’m going to compile the total list and add another page to list all of them, so I can check them off as I read them. The goal will be to read all of them.

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Island Writer Magazine

The launch for the Summer 2010 edition of Island Writer was this last Wednesday. It was my first launch; I was on vacation during the last one, and it was also my first launch as a member of the editorial staff. I was and am the editorial assistant for the magazine, and it’s a tremendous learning experience for me, seeing exactly what goes into a publication. I was also lucky enough with this issue to have two illustrations included. At the launch I got the meet the author of one of the stories I illustrated, Judith Mackay, and that was wonderful, to actually meet the person whose work I worked with. I hadn’t even spoken to her before that, except in form letters sent in my capacity as editorial assistant.
This issue was also the last issue for the editor in chief I worked with, Stacey Curtis. She’s spent the last several issues as the editor, and is moving on to other projects. She was wonderful to work with; creative, open to input on the technical side (we used Google Docs for some stages, which was a great and easy way to get everyone the files), and patient of my inevitable mistakes.
I met several of the new editorial staff at the launch, as well, and am looking forward to working with them on the next issue, coming out in December.