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Sunday, August 28, 2005
Got a thrill today while hunting for the original cover art for Throne Price. (I met the author at a con and he told me I could feature it on Reality-Skimming, but I lost the needful reference to find the website again, so now and then I troll for it.) Didn't find the original cover, that featured Erien with UnderGelion for a backdrop, but did come across a review of Throne Price that I had not seen before, which made me happy. A lot of reviews of ORU books start with descriptions of how far the series is set in the future and other aspects of the background, often not even getting to the nitty gritty of the issues central to the particular book in hand. I am not knocking that approach. Well behaved authors are grateful for all attention, and particulary favorable attention, which many of the reviews that feature the external details of the technology and history of the ORU have certainly given us. It is all good! But I am always particularly delighted when someone's review convinces me a reader "got" the big stuff, from my own (admittedly biased) point of view. The summary of how things wound up the way they are will be the same for every ORU book, but the critical issues will be different in every one. So thanks for making my day, Laurie Thayer! Paragraph from the review is repeated, below, with link to the site of origin:
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Clear Dreamers and Future Dreams
Clear dreamers in the Okal Rel Universe have visions of the past. This contradicts most people's assumptions that only the future can be worth mystical attention; however, it is perfectly consistent with the Okal Rel worldview which makes a sacred duty of restraint in conflict and societal stability — albeit at the cost of what egalitarian Reetions view as a nasty, hierarchical result.
Okal Rel Looks Back to Stay the Same
Clear Dreaming vs. Dreams of the Future To get back to clear dreaming, juxtapose for a moment the "naive techno-optimism" (Heylighen, F., 1998) of the so-called Golden Age of science Fiction, so often lamented by those who enjoyed the fruits of its mass popularity and exemplified, in caricature, by the Hanna and Barbera strip, "The Jetsons". After reveling for much of my youth in my own version of naive techno-optimism which took it as an article of faith that good science would benefit mankind, as a whole, and not solely the captains of industry and stars of academia, I believe I am simply disillusioned. Any hope I feel is gravitating towards looking back, instead, if we want to survive as a species?let alone progress in the egalitarian, Reetion sense of the word.
If we cannot learn not to fight, we need to learn new rules for doing it, and I fear I have ceased to imagine we can refrain from waging war on each other, given the looking back at history that I have done over the last couple of years. We need a way; however, to wage safe war, every bit as much as we need to practice safe sex. In other words, we must achieve some real life, satisfying, form of Okal Rel. References: Visions of the Future (in Sci Fi or Cultural Studies)
Static World Views in History
Friday, August 26, 2005
Heh. This is cool. An editor of an unnamed publisher/publication is offering to critique short pieces of work online. He mentions the amount of CRAP he reads as submissions at work. I've heard the same complaints from other sources as well. You think if there's so much crap out there, all the good writers I know (you know who you are) have a decent chance of getting published. Just finish the damn story already!! (click title for the link.) Sunday, August 21, 2005
Finally completed notes from Westercon
I have finally finished the post I started on July 3rd to report the second day of Westercon, took it off draft and published it. Can't figure out how the URL for the direct link should work; the posting's on the archives page for July 2005. Thursday, August 18, 2005
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
False Hopes and Bad Typos
This post is about two problems with skimming reality, in the real world: reacting instantly to first impressions, and horrid typos. Yesterday I surfed to PublishAmerica while doing my morning mail, and after spending a grand total of ten minutes looking over the site, and the news items on success stories in particular, I gleefully dispatched an e-mail to two mailing lists where I share a sense of community with fellow writers, recommending PublishAmerica as something worthy of their attention. I was swiftly chastened for my naivety by a flurry of replies, catching me up with the complaints clogging writers' forums and law courts, from authors accusing PublishAmerica of misleading them. This morning I spent a bit more time investigating and was left feeling saddened and frustrated. I continue to believe in a world where more deserving artists get published, and the art of writing thrives accordingly, but I now feel I was wrong to be heartened by PublishAmerica, in particular. If PublishAmerica is as sincere and honourable as it claims to be, they should allow captive authors to dissolve their contract with them, at the very least, and be more forthright with new prospects about what they are getting into in the first place. I suspect many authors would still want to publish with PublishAmerica, even if they were told frankly, up front, what their prospects were for making money. And it would be reassuring to know what percentage--if any--of submissions are turned down by PublishAmerica. I do believe more books deserve readers. I do not believe every book does. (The article I found most useful, in my researches, was Publish Anything: The Saga of a PublishAmerica Author by Lisa Maliga.) I still find the situation in the traditional world of publishing too painful for aspiring authors, in particular, to be healthy for reading and writing, in general. Of course, I am terribly happy to have publishers! This observation is in no way a criticism of them or any other publisher in business, today. The only ones I have ever met are good, book-loving people, doing their best to help their authors succeed. But if we want writing and reading to thrive, we need to find ways to make it more respectable to start small and grow bigger, naturally. My fear is this. It is readers and writers, themselves, who are to blame for the difficulty of making small-circulation publications work better. It is we who would rather read this week's best seller, than take the time to look for something worthwhile closer to home, risk investing in an unproven commodity, or give a less-than-perfect work with promise the encouragement it deserves. The struggle to create a good place for writers to thrive in, is therefore beset by threats from all sides. It is still a good fight, despite that, and I would hate to see bad experiences, such as the kind reported by some PublishAmerica authors, detract from the importance of making space in the world for more authors to get published. My blessing on all small press publishers, and all honest markets for the diversity of talent in the world that may never be best-seller material! May those of us who love to read, and love to write, have the good sense to support them, as well as the latest best seller. My second discomfort of the day is -- typos. As one of those creative types who read and wrote for content, as the saying goes, I have always been prone to spelling mess ups and keypad fumbles. Ever since I was in elementary school, my report cards would say things like "Janey (I didn't start going by Lynda until first year university) is a delight to have in the classroom, but her handwriting is messy and she has trouble with spelling." Now, thanks in part to a copyediting course at SFU, I find I am haunted by my past transgressions. I read my own copy, online, and I cringe at the typographical blemishes. I look at a beloved book and think about the well-known-oops in it, before I remember to love it for its content. I have lost my innocence. :-( Sadly, I know I shall never stop being prone to typos. But I can swear a mighty oath to proof read everything TWICE and to spell check even e-mail before I dispatch it. As a final gesture of reform, I entreat any readers who spots a typo on the Okal Rel Universe website, or any of my blogs, to report the evil thing to me at lynda@okalrel.org in the hope that you will, therefore, be the last innocent bystander exposed to its malignant influence. Saturday, August 13, 2005
Discovered the World Naked Bike Ride today, in the July / August 2005 issue of George Street Letters, a magazine put together by Dr. Robert Budde of UNBC here in Prince George. I got the magazine last night and read it from cover to cover, which is odd because I only glance at other magazines and newspapers and get my world news from CBC 1, most days, because the TV coverage is so long-winded and feels untrustworthy somehow. I use the web a lot, but not for news, as a rule, unless it is to check out something I've heard about for more information, like the supposedly banned MTV ad that came past me last week via e-mail. (Interesting ad, but I'm leaning in the direction of hoax, given the dearth of main stream media coverage of such a ban and lack of details available about it on the internet, such as exactly what branch of "the US Government" was responsible for banning the ad and under the jurisdiction of what law, as my brother-in-law pointed out. But I digress.) This entry is about the World Naked Bike Ride and why I learned about an international phenomenon of interest to me via a local arts and culture newsletter instead of from somewhere else. The World Naked Bike Ride gave me courage. So much of the news of the world can be summed up with: "Those who have the most want more. Those who 'have not' are either getting so nasty about it that it makes you sick, or else they are dieing quietly in ways that make you numb with grief for humanity." Not so much fun to go and dunk yourself in, voluntarily, at the end of a day's work. People who do things like the World Naked Bike Ride, to protest the values of unthinking consumption, have managed to side step the Great Big Fat Rule that goes something like this: "Take nothing seriously unless it makes you rich, famous or powerful." Naked bikers are advocating a better quality of life through the simple expedient of saying "no" to the barons of industry who keep insisting we cannot be happy without a newer, bigger and better whatever it is we currently have the older, smaller and less snazzy version of at the moment. They are even doing it politely, albeit stark naked. No one has to get brutally murdered. And the pictures make you smile to look at because the naked folks in them look so very human and completely unashamed of it. Why I encountered my ration of morale lifter via the George Street Letters magazine is also interesting. Viewing myself strictly as a field subject in my own brand of personal, mico-anthropological field work, I think it reflects a preference for reading something written by people I know, that might mention things I have personally experienced, and have something to say that makes me feel like part of a community, instead of staring slack jawed at some far distant citadel of media mega-wallop that offers me the unappetizing choices of either worship from afar, despite increasing doubts about its motives and integrity, or being suckered into the fantasy that glitzy offers to add my bit of input actually constitute meaningful dialogue. Speaking to smaller audiences may be the inevitable cost of idiosyncratic publishing, whether the medium is a blog like Reality Skimming or a community newsletter like George Street Letters. But damn it all, there's something "real" about it. And it can still connect you up with the global picture, when necessary, like one of a myriad creeks that flow into a thousand different rivers. Sunday, August 07, 2005
Feisty Rebels and Their Impact on the Status Quo
Everyone wants to overthrow Sevildom. This is a good thing. After all, I do not advocate the fictional oligarchy of the Gelack side of the Okal Rel Universe as desirable. I would be a huge failure in my own estimation if the net result of the Okal Rel Universe was to foster an elitist obsession with bloodlines and birth ranks in the real world. The problem I have with readers and writers who want to tear down the status quo of Sevildom has nothing to do with idealogy. It is about oversimplifying the problem. I recently came across a story that illustrates this very well. It is a story about an amazing woman. I am taking it as a given, here, that the story is true. It is based on journal entries made by Northwest explorer David Thompson, on two separate occasions, and on one journal entry made by Sir John Franklin. The Manlike Woman overcame the cultural limitations imposed on her as a female to carve out a life better suited to her unique personality. She did it despite the humiliation of being deemed a "loose" woman by natives and Thompson's European fur traders alike. She did it without any obvious role model to inspire her. She blazed her own trail. She had a huge impact on her immediate followers and defined her own life, on her own terms. How much impact did she have on the world at large? Almost none. In fact, she barely qualifies as a footnote in history. I discovered her in a two page article entitled "Columbia River / Indian Prophetess" in Mysterious Canada: Strange Sights, Extraordinary Events, and Peculiar Places by John Robert Colombo (Doubleday Canada, 1988). Few articles in this charming and entertaining book, endorsed by none other than SciFi's own Spider Robinson, are as authoritatively documented as Manlike Woman's story. Two pages back, you are into ghosts and claims concerning visitations by UFOs although Colombo tackles the chronicling of such things more in the style of a folklorist than with the breathless, question-posing habits of an Erich von Daniken. The only mention I could find on the web to Manlike Woman, was a post on a forum, (See http://roxen.xmission.com/~drudy/hist_text-arch4/msg03326.html), although whether that is due to the difficulty of referencing someone without a name, I cannot know. (In an effort to remedy Manlike woman's obscurity, I have submitted an article to Wikipedia called Manlike Woman the Indian prophetess of the Upper Columbia River.) My point in all this is not to belittle the heroic life of someone like Manlike Woman. It is to rebut any reader or writer of the ORU who says: "Yes, but surely some feisty rebel will have overthrown all this horrible, Sevolite-centric hierarchy by standing up for him or herself, hundreds of years ago!" My suggestion is that attitudes of this sort are innocent of any realistic grasp of history and the potence of the obstacles involved, in particular. The ORU does seek to chronicle improvements in social justice, through change. But those who want to write for it must accept the complexities and very real difficulties inherent in the process. In other words, any story that solves the problem of Sevolite dominance, in 6,000 words, with a feisty commoner who says "fooey" to the whole thing, is unlikely to find favor with me. On the other hand, such a story might be very interesting if the author took the time to research how similiar rebels were treated by history, first, and to understand the ORU well enough to produce a plausible interpretation or variation on the theme in a genuninely ORU setting. I would be excited to see such a story. In fact, if nobody else beats me to it, I might write one or two of them myself. Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Channel Width and Honesty as Policy
Reading the article "Total Recall" this morning, in the current Discover, gave me an idea. The article describes the photolog phenomenon as exemplified by Flickr. The idea relates to past and present "best policy" for dealing with the public. In the past, the successful ploy was to put up a false front. Now, to my considerable personal gratification, that is less and less possible, as was recently reinforced for me at the SFU "Future of Publishing" workshop I attended last week. Here's the idea. Spin doctoring works when the channel of communication is narrow and broadcast-based in nature. The message must be blunt and shouted. It has to be clean and simple. You don't want to provide any rough spots for any negativity to stick to. This is very little like a real relationship, with multiple means and opportunities to test how genuine our impressions of each other really are. Information in the blogsphere, however, does more closely approximate relationship status. There are many ways to test the truth of a projected persona or product, and the greatest risk is not being misunderstood during a long stretch of silence after shouting out your broadcast-mode message, but being distrusted or otherwise dismissed as disrespectful of the audience. That is much more akin to relationship rules than the old, lordly mode of communication in which whoever has the power to shout the loudest gets believed no matter what the message. Sounds like a healthy thing to me.
Brianna's Amel Picture
Monday, August 01, 2005
Thrills and Gifts
Thoroughly delighted a new impression of Amel, from friend and reader Brianna Thomas. David has put it up on the Flash version of the gallery, that can be navigated to via the SAGA button on the www.okalrel.org homepage. I will add it to the blog, as well, and put it in the HTML version of the gallery, accessible from the same SAGA link. Brianna is interested in doing an ORU set of tarot cards for us! Perhaps for sale by Windstorm Creative as part of the Fandom Press manifestation of the ORU. Also spent the morning, today, proof reading the galley for the Okal Rel Universe Anthology: I, edited by Virginia O'Dine. Virginia and I still have hopes we'll see the anthology on sale at Cascadia Con, but we decided last night that if the timing is too tight we will go for quality over speed. I've made the opposite decision on projects, in the past, and regretted it long after the target event had been and gone. |