The Clarion Blog-A-Thon New Prize: Ellen Kushner!

Ellen Kushner is one of those women who, quite frankly, astounds.  If it was just her vibrant personality, running amuck at cons, that would be enough – as she moderated one of the finest panels I’ve ever been on, and is no slouch at contributing herself.  If it was just her radio work for NPR, which has been called the best program on public radio, well, you’d be impressed.
But no.  The woman’s also a helluva writer.  Her books Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword have been some of my friends’ dearest books, to the point where I had a buddy who, when moving, placed Ellen’s books in a special box so she would be sure not to lose them.  They’re so beloved that no less a light than Neil Gaiman wanted to, you know, read them out loud.
And she’s also taught the Clarion Writers’ Workshop with her lovely wife Delia Sherman.  And as such, when I asked her for a prize to help my Clarion Write-A-Thon (which, due to personal circumstances, I’m still boldly forging ahead two weeks after its official end), she said this:

“My contribution?  A unique handwritten postcard from me to your raffle winner.”

That’s right – if you’re an Ellen Kushner fan (and you should be), then donating $5 to my Blog-A-Thon will get you a chance at something far, far better than an autograph: a personal note. And she’s not the sort to scribble something generic, no; I’m sure it’ll be as interesting as she is.
That $5 donation will not just help you with a shot at the prize – it’ll be helping a writers’ workshop that’s jump-started the careers of many talented writers, not the least of which is Yours Truly.  (Seriously.  I wrote for twenty years and had three sales, all to small markets.  Post-Clarion, in three years I had twenty sales, many to the toughest markets in the biz.)  What you learn there is amazing, and you can help train the next generation of great science fiction and fantasy writers.
That $5 donation will also get you a shot at all the other prizes in the blog-a-thon, which thus far are:

• An autographed copy of “The Chaos,” from Nalo Hopkinson.
• A handwritten letter from the lead character of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Glamour and Glass” series.
• A signed copy of the script for “What Every Girl Must Know” from my Clarion classmate and upcoming playwright Monica Byrne.
• The challenge coin from Myke Cole’s Shadow Point series (plus a copy of the book, if you haven’t read it!)
• An ARC of Catherynne Valente’s “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.”
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks.” 

I'm Sure You've Always Wanted To Kick Me: A Kickstarter With Ferretts In It

My old friend Alex Shvartsman has made me proud.
See, I used to know him as Alex Shvartsman, Magic Master.  He’d fly around the world to various Grand Prixs in exotic countries, racking up wins, playing Magic: the Gathering with finesse and good humor.  He was always one of the pros I looked forward to hanging out with.
Then he started writing fiction.  And he was getting published a lot, but in little fiddly markets – the kind where you get paid $5, or two contributor’s copies, or even just a publication credit.  And I said to him, “Alex, man, you gotta level up.  You’re selling yourself short.  You’re playing in Friday Night Magic when you should be acing the Pro Tour!  Try for the top markets, and let them reject you first!”
Well, since then he’s been published in prestigious markets like Daily Science Fiction, and discovered what most Magic writers do when they cross over into fiction: we get paid a pittance for stories.  In Magic, if you’re a pro you can get paid good money for writing a 2,000 word article, and most major sites publish sixty articles a week.  In short stories, if you’re a pro, well…. some big short story markets don’t publish as many stories in a year as StarCityGames puts up in a week.
So because Alex likes to give back to the community, said, “This is ridiculous.  I bet I could make a market for short stories that paid well.”  And zing!  He put together Unidentified Funny Objects, a humor science fiction anthology, which he Kickstarted.  It’s within $900 of its goal, with four days left, and it needs a boost to get it right over the top! So the man needs your help.
As an added bonus, if you help kickstart it, Unidentified Funny Objects will contain a story by me.  The story’s called “One-Hand Tantra,” and it starts like this:

“The path of most wizards is solitary,” Loefwyn’s father had told him when his power had first manifested itself. “Your path, my dearest and only child, is more solitary still.”
To this day, Loefwyn wished he had never become a masturbatician.
As his father had promised, Loefwyn’s singular sex magic had given him a decent living. He’d just scraped up enough cash to build the obligatory wizard’s tower, a ribbed rock column jutting up to advertise his unique talents. Masturbaticians were rare, effective ones even more so . . . and both Loefwyn and his spells were potent indeed. Intrigued merchants dropped by to witness the town’s newest oddity–even as they hesitated to shake his hand.
Now, royalty–minor, vicious royalty, but royalty still–had hired him. Enspell Griselda the One-Eyed, and Loefwyn’s success was all but guaranteed…

Trust me, this is one of the oddest, sweetest stories you’ll ever see – and you can get a copy of it for a mere $10.  I’ve seen some of the other stories in there, and I have every faith you’ll find something to chuckle at.  So get in there!

Look, Walter, We Have To Talk

I really liked Breaking Bad, once upon a time.  These days, it’s become a bit of a slog.
It’s not that Breaking Bad is, well, bad – but at one point, after suffering through another tense episode of Battlestar Galactica, I asked Gini: “Are we enjoying this, or are we appreciating it?”  And everything about the new BSG was top-notch – the effects, the acting, the plotting, the music – except that we were having zero fun watching this grim Shoah-in-space.  So we stopped.
We’re more invested in Breaking Bad, and we have only nine episodes to go, but… I’m not sure how thrilled I’m going to be about it.  I mean, yes, the pitch on Breaking Bad has always been, “Mr. Chips to Scarface,” which is to say that you take a beloved science teacher and turn him into a crime lord.  Well, no real spoilers here, but nine-tenths of the way through the show, Walter is far more crime lord than science teacher, and my sympathy for him has completely evaporated. His ego is in full flight now, his morals eaten up, and every time he does something to pull his fat out of the fire I’m now like, “Come on, man, just put a bullet in that guy’s head.”
So who’s left to root for?  Nobody, really.  In the ascendancy of Walt, it’s like all the other characters have shut down, withdrawing or retreating or dying.  The cast of characters is smaller than when it began.  And as such, Breaking Bad has this problem for me: it’s more disproportionately Walt at a time when I want to see less of Walt.
I’ll stick it out to the end.  We’ve come this far.  But in the beginning, Breaking Bad was this gloriously black comedy, with the mishaps of Walt and Jesse and their klutzy criminal enterprise.  The good news is that Walt’s worked out most of the bugs.  The bad news is that as it turns out, watching vicious efficiency in the drug trade isn’t nearly as entertaining as I’d hoped.

The Clarion Blog-A-Thon: The Final Stretch

This summer has been what we call “Sweeps Week” at La Casa McJuddMetz, since everything that’s happening feels like a bad plot twist from a soap opera. Daughters moving in!  Cancer scares!  Heartache among friends and family!  Oh, the drama is flowing fast and fierce, and so my commitment to the Clarion Blog-A-Thon wavered.
In addition, I am writing the hardest thing I have ever written.  This novel is, I kid you not, shredding my writerly self-esteem.  Why?  Because instead of just charging in and writing the thing chapter by chapter, which would at least give me the satisfaction of seeing my fine prose and going, “Well, I got somewhere,” this time I’m trying to plot the whole thing in advance.  And I am not a plotter.  All my stories flow from instinct, me starting at a weird opening line and struggling my way, sentence by sentence, to the end. I know some people can write random scenes and then stitch them all together at the end like some sort of literary Frankstein(‘s monster), but for me I need to know why and how we got here.
Planning this novel scene by scene makes me feel as clumsy as a foal taking its first steps.  I don’t even have the satisfaction of having written stuff at the end of it.  I just have this morass of ideas, written up clumsily on the Clarion Echo, and every day I’m going, “God, I’m shit.  I’m total shit, aren’t I?  I’m horrid.”
Such is the joy of the writer’s life.
So in the middle of all of this chaos, my eye slipped off my end goal for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  But Clarion?  Is why I am not total shit.  The Clarion Writers’ Workshop is why I’ve had stories published in two dozen different magazines; they levelled me up, taught me how to critique and redraft my own stuff, and I owe them.
As such, I’d like to raise an additional $250 for Clarion before the week is out.  For that, I’ll ask your help.
Every day, between now and Friday, I will be posting about the additional prizes I’ve got for the Blog-a-Thon, some very cool.  I’ve gotten the prizes to encourage you to donate, but at this point the Blog-A-Thon is officially over and I am struggling on my own to complete it for my alma mater.  So I will ask your help; please donate, whatever you can, to help me in a quest that’s been particularly difficult this summer.
To start this Week Of Prizes, I’ll start off with a secret that I don’t think I’ve revealed before. For Neil Gaiman was one of my teachers at Clarion, and he’s the one who gets the most press – mainly because he’s the one who actively told me, “Go ahead and blog about me.  I’m all out there, anyway.”  Other teachers were more reluctant to be shared on the Interwebz, and so I haven’t blogged about them as much, simply to respect their wishes.
This gives the impression that Neil taught me the most, though.  Which is a lie.  I learned a metric ton from each teacher.
But if I had to choose the one who I point to as being responsible for my whole career, it’d be Nalo Hopkinson.
Nalo caught me at the moment when I was most down, literally eight hours after I’d been looking at plane flights out of Clarion – I was on the verge of quitting.  And kindly, calmly, she inspired me to get back on the horse after the terrible story I’d written – all without making any promises of success.  (You never make promises of success to a writer.  Fate is cruel, and you will be crueller.)  And then she gave me some of the bones of advice that have shaped the foundations of my writing, discussions of how to write characters and writing from the body and character voice.
She inspired me.  And so I’m glad to have one of her books in the prize pool today.
The Chaos is a YA novel about a world gone literally berserk – and as is Nalo’s hallmark, the protagonist is a feisty, fascinating girl with strong opinions on life, wandering through the craziness of a Toronto beset by magical weirdness.  As usual, the voice is worth reading alone, because there’s something about the way that Nalo writes that feels like you’re being lectured to by some incredibly fascinating character as they have wild adventures- which, in fact, you are.  I kept reading it, thinking, “This can’t get stranger,” and no, it kept getting even odder.  It is a fun and vibrant read, and you can win an autographed copy for a mere $5 donation.
The current prizes are:

• An autographed copy of “The Chaos,” from Nalo Hopkinson.
• A handwritten letter from the lead character of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Glamour and Glass” series.
• A signed copy of the script for “What Every Girl Must Know” from my Clarion classmate and upcoming playwright Monica Byrne.
• The challenge coin from Myke Cole’s Shadow Point series (plus a copy of the book, if you haven’t read it!)
• An ARC of Catherynne Valente’s “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.”
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks.” 

An Interesting Change

Hey! See that burn there? That’s a bullet wound.
Okay, technically it’s a jacket wound, acquired at the shooting range.  Because when you fire guns, the casings are ejected out of the gun, flying at high enough velocities to do damage to your eye, red-hot from having just thrust a bullet out of the muzzle.  And if you’re unlucky, then that burning brass jacket will arc up, hit the edge of your safety glasses just right, and tumble underneath to be lodged next to your sizzling skin.
Did I mention you’re holding a loaded gun when this happens?
Fortunately, I was calm enough not to wave the gun around while it was burning a small row of blisters against my eyebrow; for all of my neuroses, I’m good in actual crises.  I laid the gun down, barrel pointing down-range, and extracted the jacket, which had cooled enough to only hurt my fingers a little.
Still, it’s a little weird to carry a wound from gun shooting around.
I do like shooting, and am sad I won’t get to do it for a few weeks – last week, I learned that I shoot better if I don’t just hold my breath, but exhale and shoot with empty lungs.  Grouped quite nicely that time around.  And of course, I’ve always wanted to own a gun, but as a depressive this is probably a Very Bad Idea.
Yet all of this shooting gave me an interesting switch earlier today.  I wrote a Tweet that said, “I’m sure someone thinks the spree of shootings is a conspiracy by Obama to ban guns, but I don’t want to look.”  (As it turns out, that “someone” is the lead singer of Megadeth, proving that everyone involved with Metallica is now batshit crazy.)
But the original Tweet? “I’m sure someone thinks the spree of shootings is a conspiracy by Obama to ban our guns.”
Hrm. Little mental shift there.