Nailed It In One Post

“It’s like I’m going through puberty again.  My whole body is changing.  I don’t know what to do.”
“Ferrett,” Bec said seriously, “You’re only growing out your nails.”
Yet after thirty-plus years of chewing my nails down to soft, ineffective nubbins, finding these things at the end of my fingertips constantly freaks me out.  I go to itch my face, and suddenly Wolverine is raking adamantium claws through my beard.  I adjust my shirt, and scratches appear, like stigma.
It’s only now that I enter the ranks of the bepowered that I understand that being nailless is the absolute lowest grade of the handicapped.  You can’t scratch yourself.  Envelopes daunt you.  You have to rely on outside equipment to open DVDs, your pudgy digits pawing ineffectively at the outside of the case.  But suddenly I have nails, and now it’s like a crazy superpower I don’t want.
Oh, the nails will come in handy.  Some of my lovers like to be scratched, and it seems only fair to try to leave furrows instead of pale white marks that fade.  Yet here I am, with these bonelike extensions, clumsy as a foal.  I try to iPhone-text, and it’s like a dog tapdancing on an ice pond, all clatters and no contact.
Who am I?  What am I becoming?  Will my errant nails go berserk and eventually need to be assaulted by a roving manicurist to rein them in?  Only time will tell.

Discuss: Jo Walton's Among Others

For a quite sedate story about a girl in a boarding school, Jo Walton’s Among Others is perhaps the most ambitious fantasy story I’ve seen written.  I finished it yesterday, and I’m still not sure what I think of it.
The official story is this: “Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle for the fate of Earth that left her crippled – and her twin sister dead.”
The trick?  Note that all that description is past tense.
The actual front-story is Morwenna, in a boarding school, writing her diary as she learns to adjust, nerds out about 1970s science fiction, and dates boys.
It’s as though Lord of the Rings was written from Frodo’s perspective post-Sauron in a journal where he discusses the local hobbit-gossip, frets about building the addition to his new hobbit-hole, and only occasionally reflects upon the fact that oh yeah, he saved the world.
The thing is, on one level the book is tedious.  Morwenna is obsessed with science fiction books as only a nerd can be, and I’d say fully 7% of the book is devoted to witterings about OMG ZELAZNY and I just discovered Silverberg wrote this other series and my friend just gave me a book by an author called LeGuin, she’s brill.  I grew up reading science fiction in the 1970s, and this book made me feel tragically underread.
(And as my friend Keffy notes, the danger of mentioning all these books is that you feel vaguely like you should be reading them instead of this one.)
But that tediousness makes the book feels very real – because in addition to her discussions of faeries and magic, there’s a lot of loose ends that never amount to anything at all.  She comes from a big family stuffed with gossip, and there are a lot of things at the boarding school that just come and go.  So it feels like a very real diary of a witch-girl who only occasionally discusses magic and almost never with the frenzy or enthusiasm that she does Tolkien.  There’s a wealth to this world that’s just astounding.
I know others had problems getting through it, mainly because there’s a lack of an overarching PLOT – there is no basilisk attacking her school while she scrambles to open the chamber of secrets, just a girl slowly coming to insights.  There’s progression, certainly, but no firm forward driving motion.
But I burned through it, because I found her voice compelling and I’m big on day-to-day revelations.  Morwenna is not a popular girl but she is a smart one, so she’s unpopular in that rare sense you almost never see in books – not the shamed, spit-upon outcast, but a vaguely creepy girl with one or two close friends who gets picked on a fair amount but not enough to leave permanent scars.
The big problem with Among Others, for me, is the ending.  I won’t spoil it (though I’m encouraging you to discuss it in the comments), but I will say that the ending really didn’t work for me.  I was literally eight pages from the end of the book and going, “…is this series a trilogy?” when everything got wrapped and zapped.
And I felt ripped off.  The book had been so personal, and moment-to-moment, that I felt it deserved kind of a quiet denouement, and instead it goes out of its way to wrap up that big, movie-star backstory it’s presented.  It felt rushed and grafted on to me….
…or maybe it didn’t.  I’m still sort of digesting that ending, and trying to come to terms with Among Others, because it is so strangely ambitious in an odd way.  The only thing that’s coming to mind right now is the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation society, that late 1960s Rock Opera about the good old days of England and aren’t the hippies tearing down the good things with the bad and why can’t we just have a nice cup of tea?  It’s ambitious in a way we don’t normally define ambitious, and so it’s hard for me to process.
And so I ask: if you read it, what did you think?  What do you think of my reactions?  I said on Twitter the other day that I wished I had a portable book discussion group, and people told me to post in my blog, they’d discuss it here.
So please.  Do.

Two Links On Occupy Wall Street You Should All Read

Brad Hicks’ discussion on how St. Louis utterly demolished the Occupy movement in their town is worth reading. Really a chilling example of how you handle liberal protest effectively.  And it’s not what you think.
Bart Calendar compares Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party, and finds one critical difference.  An extremely good point about the enforceability of free speech.

Clarionniversary, Late November Edition

One of the things I haven’t done since I moved my “main” blog to WordPress is to keep up my Clarionniversary posts – the ones where I tell you what I’ve worked on this month writingwise, how many rejections I’ve gotten, and what I’ve had published.
These never get many comments, but I think they’re important.  Because talent is something that’s nice to have, but some kind of work ethic is critical if you’re going to make it as a writer.
Look.  I used to be terrible about writing, and even worse about submitting.  I wanted to write, but I only wrote when the mood struck, or I’d had a good day, or I wasn’t too tired.  And that hurt me.  It’s taken me years of falling off the horse to turn these sporadic writing sessions into something I do with the same frequency that I brush my teeth or shower – which is to say, a daily activity regardless of what else I have planned.
As it turns out, when I look back at what I’ve written, it’s not notably better when I’m inspired or in a good mood.  So that’s the plan.  And I think it’s the plan for those 99% who aren’t just naturally good enough to churn out salable stories.
So I’m going back to posting these, showing where my effort’s been, and all the rejections go.  At this point I’m nowhere near a name writer, but I’ve got a pretty good publishing history for a guy with just over three years under his belt.  And I think anyone who’s curious should see what it takes for a man of my raw talent to turn into – well, not gold, but something resembling palatable currency.
Stories Sold This Month:
I sold the audio rights to “A Window, Clear As A Mirror” to PodCastle.  I love PodCastle, and I love this story – it’s the one with the money-back guarantee – so yay!
Stories Worked On This Month:

• “{$NAMELESS_NOVEL}” I finished the fourth draft of my novel, and sent it out to beta-readers.  Those who read it in my summer Clarion_echo blog-a-thon will note that the opening chapters have been considerably flensed of info-dumps to concentrate on character motivation.  Early feedback says it’s good.  After this, there’s one more draft and then it’s agent time.
• “The Afternoon War” (second draft).  I went to see a Civil War reenactment, then wondered what reenactments of future wars would look like – especially reenactments in big hulking mecha-suits.  A small, strange tale arose, which I finished and sent out to work.
• “In The Unlikely Event” (first, second draft).  This flashfic humor piece was inspired by the flight attendant reading off dire warnings; I wanted to know what the warnings for space travel would look like.  Funny, disturbing, probably unsalable like all of my humorous flashfic, but it’s out in submission now.
• “The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Sea” (partial first draft).  Still working on this one, which is a rather tragic tale of a girl who takes the ocean for her lover.  Probably a post on this one later in the week.

October Rejections: Four.  Two from Asimov’s, both very encouraging, but Sheila Williams determined that the tales in question were too horror-flavored for Asimov’s.  One rejection from Stupefying Stories, saying “an interesting and challenging – and for me, personally, rather uncomfortable – piece.”  One generic each from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Travelling Medicine Show and Daily Science Fiction.
In addition, “Shoebox Heaven,” which had been purchased, is now back in circulation after the anthology that purchased it went under.  This is why I never announce sales before the contract is signed.
Currently In Circulation: “Riding Atlas,” “Unreal Estate,” “Rooms Formed of Neurons and Sex,” “Devour,” “Season to Taste,” “All Things Head Towards The Sea,” “Shadow Transit,” “The Afternoon War,” “In The Unlikely Event,” “Shoebox Heaven.”
Overall:
A good month.  I’m stretching muscles.  The Novel of Doom is approaching completeness. Now I just have to get back to doing these summaries.

More Jumbled Thoughts On Occupy Wall Street

You know what doesn’t seem suspicious at all?  Showing up at one in the morning after you’ve barred the press, and clearing out a group of protestors because you need to, uh, clean the park.
Occupy Wall Street had turned into a semi-permanent encampment that was threatening to “shut down Wall Street” on Thursday, so you know, that shit had to go.
Regardless of your take on the Occupy Wall Street thing, I would like to note that this is just sketchy behavior.  If they’d said, “Okay, guys, on Tuesday at noon we’re going to let the sanitation crews in to clear it of fire hazards, and anyone who tries to stop us is going to get thrown in jail,” then fine.  That’d be a tactic clearly designed to break up the protest, but defensible.
However, a surprise sweep at ass o’clock in the morning?  That is “We’re going to break this thing in half.”  And you know, maybe you don’t like Occupy Wall Street, but remember that in politics, any gun you use eventually gets into the hands of your enemies.  I wouldn’t be thrilled if a long-standing, peaceful Tea Party protest was broken up the same way.
As Gini says, “When this happens in China, we decry it, but when it happens here, we say it’s necessary.”
But here’s the thing about Occupy Wall Street: this isn’t the end.  And that’s a change.
The last time I discussed Occupy Wall Street, I noted in the comments that I was pretty tired of having to look back to Martin Luther King, because it had been forty-plus years since the last effective liberal protests.  In the entirety of my lifetime, liberal protests have looked like this:
Liberals: What do we want? Change!  When do we want it? Now!
Police: GTFO.
Liberals: …okay.
I’ve pretty much gotten used to being part of the paper tiger army, where we yell a lot and feel good and then someone makes it hard and we slink away.  That hasn’t happened. So a part of me’s been wondering how long this Occupy shit can last.
Right now?  Two months.  And I’m pretty sure from the reactions on Twitter from the Occupy Wall Street folks in New York that they’re going to go back twice as hard now, because this was shitty and yes, a lot of people got arrested, but this is something people feel strongly enough about that a little tear gas ain’t going to clear them off.
And, you know, what else do they have to do?  It’s not like they have jobs.  Oh, wait – most of them actually are employed, they just feel pretty damn strongly about how Wall Street needs a leash to be an effective economic leader.
It’s not just hippies this time, though that’s the media spin.  It’s a lot of working stiffs and old hippies and young kids coming together and going, “Hey, America?  This is fucked up.  And I approve.”
In the meantime, what has Old Man Ferrett done?  Thrown a few bucks to donation requests, but between work trips and World Fantasy and pressing projects and, yes, romance, he has yet to actually make it down to Occupy Cleveland.  In other words, dick-all.  But that’s going to change, soon, as one of my pre-New Year’s resolutions.  Because this is something that is history-making, at least for me, and I don’t want to say, “Yeah, I remember watching the Twitter when the Occupy protests hit.”
Regardless.  The government’s reacting the way it’s supposed to when people get angry and refuse to move: police actions, tear gas, motions on technicalities followed by flagrant disregard for the laws they’re supposed to enforce.  But the protestors aren’t reacting according to their script, which is that they go home and feel like they did something, then go back to playing Nintendo.
Good job, guys.  Good fucking job.