Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Happy New Year!

It’s a bright, shining new decade. In the past ten years we’ve had an economic collapse, Facebook, and the first lesbian kiss on TV. It’ll be interesting to see what the next ten bring forth.

I rang in the new year with what I’ve been told is a distinctly Victoria tradition: the levee at City Hall.. It was one of at least seven going on New Year’s Day, all of which were published in the paper several days ahead of time, some of which, like the one at Government House, are legendary. We got up what felt like ridiculously early after a night out before and wandered the two short blocks down to City Hall. Up the stairs in the Council Chambers, the city council was lined up in a reception line to shake everyone’s hand. As the hour wore on, it started looking more like they were awaiting firing squad than new arrivals, but none of them deserted their posts.
Upon arrival, there was a very proper, and long, queue for coffee looping around the majority of the room. As I was there for the food and didn’t want anything that would keep me awake once I got home and could nap, I got to sit and watch everyone else come in; the levee bus tour of city homeless that takes them around to each stop so they can stuff themselves (we were the first stop, which meant the arrival of food in addition to coffee lead to the immediate dissolution of any proper queue), the woman who lost the most recent City Council election, the Raging Grannies, each in their own eye-catching outfit (I spotted leather pants on one), but with the common thread of purple hats and signs pinned to their shirts demanding that the minimum wage be raised. One gentleman I think was unassociated with them came in and recruited them to sing a rousing rendition of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” Also among the attendees were Victoria’s Poet Laureate, Linda Rogers, and her theremin-playing husband, and a young man in a leather jacket who sat in the middle of the floor and booted up his netbook to take advantage of City Hall’s free public wifi until the photographer for the paper apparently made him uncomfortable with dozens of shots.
A short hour and a shrimp-and-lettuce wrap later, and the first levee of the year was over.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Solstice

Today is the first time in 456 years that the Winter Solstice and a lunar eclipse fall on the same day. From about one to two in the morning, all across North America, we can watch the moon fully eclipse.

As my friend Mike Cnudde says, this probably means there is a shadowy cabal somewhere planning global domination now that the planets are aligned, only to be foiled by some guy, his girlfriend, and their plucky dog.
Happy holidays, and here’s hoping you get to foil some nefarious plots!
Posted on by Eileen Young

Theory Train Issue One

After adventures with formatting and finding artists and the interesting process of getting on Duotrope, we are live with the first issue of Theory Train! It’s exciting, because it’s the first for-profit venture I’ve helped launch. We started in September, putting the whole thing together. Adam put together our website, Michelle got us listed on Duotrope, and I handled submissions. Meetings by Skype were our primary mode of communication, and it made for very odd one-sided conversations for anyone who happened to be in the same room as us.

And now it exists!
Posted on by Eileen Young

Social Network

I just watched The Social Network, the movie about the founding of Facebook. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the dotcom boom, where the dream was becoming a billionaire overnight by coming up with some clever new idea.

Then it all collapsed.
In the ruins of startup companies and emerging bodies of law, there as formed a singularity, a point beyond which culture is unrecognizable. The singularity was driven foremost by Facebook and the accompanying phenomenon of social news.
We control who and what we see; online friends, whose status updates we see, feeds from news and comics and Twitter. Reddit and Digg and how many others let us decide what news is noteworthy.
It’s like small-town gossip on a world-wide, interest-based scale. There are drawbacks, of course, but those, too, you can talk about with your network; everything has a link to Digg or repost somewhere else.

And the heroes of the new millennium are drunken twenty-somethings really handy with code and ideas. I really like this idea, of the transmutation of heroes from the Justice League to their animators and the people who maintain their fansite. Inventing something technological is the easiest way to change the world these days, as evidenced by Gates as much as Zuckerberg.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Launches!

Wednesday was the launch of issue 8.2 of Island Writer, and it went wonderfully. All of the editorial staff were able to be there and we had a packed room with all the contributors and people there to hear the readings.

Chelsea Rushton, our Editor in Chief for this issue, did a great job of emceeing the night, and we got to hear from more than half of the contributors.
Excitingly for me, I will be the next Editor in Chief. I get to work with the same wonderful editorial team I worked with for this issue, and now that everyone has experience we should be able to smooth it out and make the production more seamless for everyone.
I’m starting to really enjoy the chaos and hubbub of setting up an event like this – the frantic arranging of tables and fretting over acoustics and food, the joy in getting rid of a whole box of the magazine not for the sake of sales but for the sake of fewer things to store in our wonderful treasurer Laura’s garage.
In other news, the science fiction collaboration I’ve been working on for the last several months with friend Mason Kochanski is now finished! And published. I suppose this is a sort of launch for Intervention, which is available for download under a Creative Commons license to your computer or phone as a PDF, Kindle file, or EPUB. We’re using Feedbooks as opposed to my usual site, Smashwords, because Feedbooks explicitly allows for Creative Commons licensing, which is important to both of us. The site is also accessible through the smartphone app Aldiko, which is cool. Click over to download it!
Posted on by Eileen Young

Russia’s Doomsday Device

As an excellent follow-up to writing about a science fiction future, I read an article today about Russia’s Doomsday device, Perimeter. I was first shocked that they had one – the most familiarity I have with one is watching Dr. Strangelove in high school. But it exists, and it’s active, and it continues to be upgraded to this day.

Perimeter’s very existence is surreal and far from comforting.
The very idea of such a relic of the Cold War mentality is alien to me; the Berlin Wall came down about the time I learned to talk, so it belongs very firmly in the realm of The Past, that mystical country of questionable relevance. Perimeter drives home in the most graphic way possible that nuclear war is something that was seriously considered for a long stretch of time.
I’m quite glad we never tipped over that brink.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Science Fiction Future

It probably says a lot about my social group that “how should we end the world?” is not a question that even makes me blink anymore.

I do a lot of collaborative writing; I currently have three on the go, though one I’ve taken over most of the writing portion while my collaborator gives me ideas. They all tend to be post-apocalyptic science fiction, as is a fair amount of what we read and pass around to each other. But the focus isn’t on the end of the world, it’s on what happens after, in the days-weeks-months after everything changes. The way it ends isn’t usually important, either; the most recent collaboration the end of the world was decided based on an article I’d read in the paper that morning, with no real emotional investment in it or plan to explore how we got to that point in the story.
A concept bandied about in science circles nearly as much as science fiction is that of a singularity, an idea or instant or tipping point beyond which the future is unrecognizable and can’t be accurately predicted. With the rapid rate of change in technology, my friends and I tend to take for granted that we’ll live through at least one more singularity.
But, given the very nature of a singularity, it’s difficult to write past one. So we write not singularities, but the kind of disaster that comes from attempts gone wrong; anarchy, oppressive regimes, and accidental genocides. It’s half adventure and half thought experiment as to how radical a shift we the writers could survive.
And it’s a lot of fun to write.
All of it, if we ever finish, will be available free online under Creative Commons, because a communist approach to intellectual property is something else we four share. As one succinctly put it, it’s better to have it out there for free and have people read it than to charge and sell one copy. In an ideal world, of course, we’d be able to exist on our writing and other people would be able to read it whenever they liked, but we don’t have one yet.
Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Robert Wiersema

Last Wednesday Robert Wiersema came to talk to the Victoria Writers’ Society about writing in the real world and his new book Bedtime Stories. He will be touring the Island and the Gulf Islands for the next eight weeks. His wife will drive, to protect society. In the book, father and son bond over bedtime stories, since father is a big reader – a writer, actually – but the son is dyslexic. Despite the similarities to Wiersema’s own life, he reiterates often that his main character is not him. They may both get up at 4am to get in an hour and a half of writing before facing the day, and both write everything longhand in fountain pen before typing it up, and both have sons the same age. But the character is not him. “Chris is not me. I want to be very clear on these things,” Wiersema says with a smile.

The very funny Wiersema never plans what he’s going to say . . . ever. Which has gotten him in trouble on more than one occasion. He doesn’t specify the occasions, but talks of surreal moments in his career as a writer. “Some days are strange. Some days you stay after work getting your picture taken for the Globe and Mail lying on the floor with the book open on your chest like publishing it has killed you.” He nods at the VWS audience, “some days you give speeches you’re in no way prepared for.”

His topic for the night was “writing in the real world,” so he elaborated on how and why he got into writing. He started by as an English Literature student, commenting that “there are few things more arrogant than a second or third year English Literature student, especially one with creative writing pretensions.” Working in a bookstore was one of the two more important things in his career as a writer – the other being getting together with his wife. Working in a bookstore exposed him to what people actually read, not just what was considered part of the CanLit canon. “That was a great moment for me as a writer, realizing that there was value outside of what was considered normal.”

He then posed the question, “What part of your real life gives birth to the writing?” For him, it’s fear. What kick-started his first novel was he and his wife getting pregnant. He realized that he was going to be a father, and thirty. He was happy, then terrified, then wrote Before I Wake in three months in a white fear of “what’s the worst that can happen?”

As a last point, he said, “If you take nothing else away from this, take this. This is the double underscore point. Write what you know is bullshit. Write out of what you know. If you have a happy marriage, don’t write a happy marriage. Write about someone else’s happy marriage, or about someone’s bad marriage. . . . Give your characters their own tragedies.”

He finished with a reading, then entertained questions he promised to answer entertainingly; a promise he fulfilled. As a writer and reviewer and bookseller, Wiersema has a lot of insight into the local book world.

An interesting note from the question period is how he got his agent; he already had a reputation as an honest reviewer who didn’t pull his punches, and that got his name moderately well known, and known for integrity. That came up particularly glaringly in my notes as I’ve been writing this, as this is the first time I’ve let a speaker know I’ll be writing about them for my blog.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

Continuing Education and Augmented Reality

I spend a lot of my free time involved in the Victoria Writers’ Society, and a lot of that time involved in Island Writer, a literary magazine based around Vancouver Island. We only accept stories from the Island and the Gulf Islands. I do a variety of interesting things, none of which involve selection. It’s kind of fun how much of that there is. As the Editorial Assistant, I accept and blind all the submissions, convert them all to Google Documents, format them for the genre editors, and pass them on after the deadline has closed. I also verify that they’re from the Island, keep track of a multitude of spreadsheets, and answer questions. Today I sent out the rejection letters for the upcoming issue, which was slightly less fun, as I know it will disappoint some people. The acceptance letters will follow shortly, but they’re pe4rsonalized, and from the genre editors, so I don’t need to do anything more until we do the copyediting.

It’s been an education being involved with the magazine. When I started on the last issue, I’d only helped with selection for my high school literary magazine, and that was a dramatically different experience. This issue has been more of an education, as I’ve been involved since the beginning, including posting ads on Craigslist calling for submissions, and my duties have grown in other areas.

So I’m really looking forward to the launch of this issue, and working on the next one. I hope I’ll continue to be able to work with a great team and learn a great deal about the publishing industry.

This bout of sentimentality brought to you be a meeting earlier today; no, I most likely won’t be the next Editor in Chief, but we’re hoping that I’ll be able to do some definite training with the next Editor in Chief about production schedules and the other duties of the Editor in Chief.

As I’ve been typing this, I’ve had MuchMusic on in the background: music and 3-minute videos make good company later in the evening. One of the persistent commercials is one by Doritos about the band Down With Webster. One part of the ad focuses on the special edition bags of chips that have a spot on the back that you can hold in front of your webcam to get a free music download.

The MuchMusic website having that capability means that the spot is electronically coded, like barcodes, but in a different shape, which brings home far more that augmented reality, that 90s sci-fi darling, is very much a physical reality.

Video games that take place half in the real world and half electronically have popped up with regularity for the last while; my favorites of the genre are Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, which features a virtual scavenger hunt over physical San Francisco as a minor element, and Invitation to The Game by Monica Hughes, which approaches it from a different perspective; the involved subjects continue to think they are playing an electronic game even after the game becomes their reality. The blurred lines between the electronic and the physical makes this an interesting time to be experimenting with technology. And the blurred line is becoming increasingly more prominent; it’s more than just sales, like barcodes, and some electronic games for teenagers; the British postal system has come out with new stamps that, if you put your smartphone camera over them, will bring up a video presentation about the historical place or event depicted in the stamp. And if the British post is doing it, you know for certain that it’s no longer a fringe technology.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Know Your Audience

Having recently quit my office job, I am devoting most of my time to applying for jobs and my most recent copyediting client.

And obsessively checking my stats on here. Not many of them, but they’re there, and the statistics I get are fascinating: I wasn’t even aware that there was a browser called Flock. Nor do I have any idea how someone from Israel would have found my blog. Most of the statistics are as expected, but it’s the outliers that are fascinating. For instance, 3% of my pageviews are from China? That’s an interesting statistic.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the resume process; you have this collection of information, of stuff, and you put it out there and hope for hits. And, unless you get the job, or someone commenting, you will never have any idea as to why.

But the outliers, while the most fascinating, aren’t the primary audience. My primary audience is people local to the Victoria writing community and people from the online forums where I discuss writing. Predictably, the sites my target audience uses are the top referring links to come here. That means I’m doing a decent job of being visible. I’d be extremely worried if I was getting most of my referrals from my Facebook page, considering that Facebook is more social and familial and I hardly discuss writing or the writing community there. It would mean I was making some kind of mistake on the other places I post links to this blog.

So, thanks for clicking over, wherever you came from.