Posting Fever!

I got that fever, that writing-blog-posts-from-school-when-I-should-be-calling-the-parents-of-my-horrible-children fever! Wooooh!

Anyway, I wanted to give you all a quick update, since I haven't posted in forever. We're going to resort to bullet points, because I really do need to get back to calling the parents of those naughty children.

In writing:

• I am, against all odds, still writing. I just finished a short story called The Dead of Tetra Manna, which can be summarized as (I love this part): "a transhuman communist psychic spy versus his capitalist vampire doppleganger." The story still needs a round of edits, but then I'm going to start sending it out. I think it's a keeper.
• I am not, however, keeping up very well in my project to earn 50 rejection letters in a year. I just don't think it's plausible, given my schedule. That doesn't mean that I'm going to give up on getting 50 rejection letters as fast as I can, however. Maybe I'll just throw myself a party at the end or something.
• On the other hand, speaking of beating the odds, I won NaNo! I'm sure I'll put the web badge up sooner or later. What Sacred Games Part One: Heaven and Earth ended up weighing in at about 54k. What's this "Part One" business, you ask? Well, no one was more surprised than me when it ended up taking about 50k to get through the first third of what I had planned. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing will have to wait for edits, which will happen as soon as I can look at the thing without feeling ill. Probably later this month. Part Two and Three will be called Shadow on the Sun and Trickster's God.

On the internet front:

• New podcasts I'm listening to include: The Guild of the Cowry Catchers and Metamor City, both of which are awesome, both of which deserve a longer review, and both of which will have to wait until I'm not writing a lightning-fast pseudo-post in-between phone-calls to-the parents-of naughty-children (help-I'm stuck-on dashes-and can't-stop!).
• New blogs I'm reading include: A Character for Every Game I Own, CSI Games, Destination Unknown, The Other Side, and The Subterranean Design Blog, some or all of which may eventually find their way to my blogroll. You can also expect to read more in-depth reviews of these presently.
• Podcasts and blogs I'm listening to and reading also no longer include several you may see at right, which may find themselves removed, with or without comment.

In books:

• The Abigail discovered and hooked me on Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series. Awesome. Review pending. 'Nuff said.
• Uh... I'm not reading a lot right now. Mostly I only have time for podcasts (see above), which can comfortably be combined with driving. Reading... not so much.

And in games:

• The Abigail and I continue our disgustingly adorable practice of running games of all kinds for each other, despite our absurd schedules. Life, while rough, is still good.
• With my good friend Jon here for the winter, I've gotten a little fresh imaginative blood in my veins and got to run a little Scion, the next chapter in Jon's, the Abigail's, and my braided Storytelling Mage: the Ascension chronicle Out of the Cradle (about which more might one day be written), and played the first sessions of what will hopefully be a neat alternate-setting Mage game.
• I just ordered Greg Stolze's Reign and Jason Blair's Little Fears: Nightmare Edition, both of which I await eagerly. Eagerly, I tell you! Feel free to link to free internet resources for either games - I may include them in any eventual posts I write on the subject.

That's about the shape of it. In my other lives I'm still teaching and planning a wedding and working out regularly. The sun still turns. Life goes on. See you soon.

Retractions and Incriminations

The good news, I can now update my blog from school. It wasn't working before, but it is now. This means that I'm now a lot more likely to blog, since banging out a quick Burning Zeppelin post is a great way to pass a lunch break or prep period when I'm feeling solitary.

The bad news... well, read on.

The writer of the Buffy: the Vampire Slayer critique I referenced in my last post commented to let me know of my (apparently several) inaccurate statements, including...

• The article in question wasn't actually written by the guy I thought it was. Rather, it's an edited compilation of comments from a message board he was a part of.
• My attempt at describing the dude was completely off, check out his website for more accurate information.
• People who dislike the Yellow Crayon Speech aren't evil, just misguided... actually, that was meant to be a joke. As I've said before, I am dedicated to the idea that everyone deserves to be heard without being demonized. In retrospect, I possibly came on a little strong there.

I'm sorry for sending you all off in the wrong direction. All I can do is own my mistakes and redirect you to more accurate information.

Hopefully we can all expect more from the Burning Zeppelin's update schedule in the immediate future. Bye 'till next time.

The Evil Dead... Lesbian Edition

In keeping with my theme of being as outdated as humanly possible on this blog, I finally read the Willow and Tara as Evil Dead Lesbians article by Stephen Booth (a man of mystery who is either a cricket player, a Berkley English professor, a crime writer, or some dude with a website and an opinion). The Abigail has been trying to get me to read this article for a while, but I've been too busy. Actually, I'm still too busy, but I finally read it anyway.

Booth's basic premise is that Tara's death in Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a prime example of the evil/dead lesbian cliche. Apparently there's a long, shameful history of this in hollywood. Gay characters are generally introduced as weak, insane, and victims (or some combination of the three). In older works, the message was that homosexuality is bad and will lead to your destruction, while in some newer films, it's more a matter of token gay characters being introduced and then killed off because their sexuality (in the eyes of the authors) stops them from becoming major characters with wide appeal. Culminating their affections with physical sex tends to lead to the death of one or both partners. Booth cites a huge list of films which feature (or even center on) this plot device. I won't reproduce it here - read it for yourself - and suffice it to say that I am basically convinced. Booth goes on to say that Whedon's decision to kill off Tara was hurtful and unnecessary, bad for the show and for people who idealized it, and reveals secret and/or unconscious bigotry or a tendency to fall prey to the allure of the ratings stunt.

Booth also condemns my favorite scene in Buffy - the Yellow Crayon Speech - as just a man saving the world from the "crazy lesbian." That I can't forgive. The Yellow Crayon Speech will live on in my heart as a perfect literary moment. I don't cry at television shows often, but the Yellow Crayon Speech made me seriously moist.

In every other way, however, Booth is pretty much right.

I don't think Joss Whedon is a bigot, but as I've said before (and will say again) I do think he's kind of lazy. A lot of his world building is pretty suspect, from Buffy's schizophrenic attitude about what it means to have a soul to the inconsistent motifs of Firefly and Serenity. Sometimes this laziness manifests in ways that are racially charged, like how the supposedly chinese-dominated future of Firefly lacked asian main characters for no good reason or how nonwhite Actives in Dollhouse are vanishingly rare and never more than secondary characters. Or, for that matter, how Buffy's Sunnydale, supposedly a Southern California town, contained few blacks and no latinos. And at least once, as in Buffy, this laziness manifested in a abrupt descent into a deplorable homophobic cliche.

The Abigail is strident about this, and over the years I've come to agree: when you write for adolescents, you have a responsibility to help them grow. I'm not going to talk about how to help them grow. Someone who writes Christian young adult novels about the evils of sex and spiritual experimentation has as much a responsibility as someone who writes sex-positive pagan propaganda; the difference is only one of content and point of view. The only sin that I'm willing to condemn here is laziness. Kids are all our responsibility, and cash cows, rating stunts, and unwitting anything has no place in fiction created for their consumption. Sell your ideas and let adolescents decide who to follow, but don't abuse your audience.

I won't go to far in decrying Whedon's laziness, however, because when push comes to shove I still like his work. After this post is done, after all, I'm going to take a nap - because I'm a teacher and therefore the first to be infected with whatever terrible disease is sweeping through Oakland this flu-and-cold season - and then watch the latest episode of Dollhouse. I sometimes just wish the man would pay a little more attention.

Anyway, read the Booth article. It's long, but you won't regret it.

* * *

• Bitch session: what laziness have you noted in Whedon's world-building, character-developing, and word-writing?
  
• Bitch at session: where have you seen Whedon be absolutely brilliant? Let me know (and be sure to tell me I'm a bad person for forgetting it)!
• The Yellow Crayon Speech really was perfect, wasn't it? How depraved do you have to be to criticize it in the slightest?
• Remember, I'm still taking suggestions about which of my two competing ideas to pursue this NaNoWriMo. Check my last post to read (highly imperfect) synopses and comment with your opinions.

Thoughts of NaNo

It's October 1st, and that means that like sane writers everywhere (yes, that's sarcasm you detect in my tone), my first thought is of National Novel Writing Month and what I'm going to create this year. I am going to do NaNo this year. I have a lot of good reasons for not - brand new and terrifying career, a wedding to plan (not to mention fights to have with the Abigail about said wedding planning), and a human body and it's pesky need for sleep, to name a few - but if I let good reasons stop me from doing great things, I'd never get anywhere.

If you'll recall from December's NaNoWriMo postmortem, I didn't win last year. I'm trying not to let this trepidate me. There are lots of reasons I didn't win: I developed this stupid idea that I wrote best by hand and wasted time writing and then transcribing, I wasn't sure I was going to do NaNo until the day before so I had only the barest idea of what I was doing right until I started doing it, and most of all I didn't write. None of those good reasons are going to get in my way this year. Especially that last one.

Anyway, as October unrolls before me, I find myself suspended between two possible NaNo ideas, and I'm curious which one you all think would be the most fun/the must likely to net me a coveted win.

* * *

The first idea is a new one, based (believe it or not) on a dream.

The premise is science fantasy (that is, a science-fiction flavored story that follows the rules of fantasy). I'm kidnapping the good old neofeudal futurism popularized by the Dune series and the Fading Suns RPG. In the grim dark future of humanity, we are nearly enslaved by cthulhu angels from beyond space and time attracting to this continuity by the development of pseudo-real psychic technology (including summonable space fighters... which is coincidentally what returns the "knight in shining" armor to the status of a viable combat tactic). After being saved by a heroic pair - a tactically brilliant soldier and a woman with an unmatched political genius - a humanity that has largely forgotten how to think for itself finds itself needing new leaders. An oppressive and puritanical church arises, and in order to prevent it from becoming the sole leading cultural force of the future, the pair announce that they will marry and take on the role of Emperor and Empress of the galaxy.

What makes this complicated is that the marriage is purely political. In fact, the emperor is gay. Although friends and partners, this isn't a love match. But, since they have to play a complicated media game with an anti-gay anti-sex anti-fun church for dominion over humanity, the crowned heads of the galaxy can't let anyone know what's really going on.

Fast forward several years. The emperor has found a boyfriend (his valet), but the empress is still frustrated, lonely, and bored. Enter the The Empress's Gendarme. One of the new generation of soldiers bonded to the pseudo-real summonable warships with which the Emperor and Empress freed humanity, he is everything the Empress wants. The Emperor makes the introduction, and they fall into bed pretty shortly thereafter. Everyone's happy, right?

If they can keep the church off their backs. If they can survive the inevitable political bullshit. If they can keep humanity free when the cthulhu angels return. In short, it's far future political drama with a romance at its heart. It's kind of sexy, in a neofeudal Sun King France sort of way. With summonable AI warships.

* * *

My second idea is something I wrote part of, once. But, it's been a long time and I'm planning on basically starting from scratch, so it isn't cheating, right? Anyway, the story lay fallow for a long time before being awakened by the brilliance that is Mur Lafferty's Heaven.

A long time ago, I had an idea for an epic. It's a postapocalyptic fantasy story dealing with what it means to be a god or a man, a mortal or an immortal. The world had lasted for millennia, before the Enemy came. In a war that took a thousand years, he slew the gods, broke the afterlife, and just as he was about to destroy the world... he vanished.

Now the world is a strange and broken place, filled with the surreal and dangerous remains of old enchantments and half-dead remnants of gods (in particular, I'm fond of a city once known for its diviners and now known for its glassworkers; it's in the middle of a field of broken glass that used to be a sandy desert... until a god fell out of the sky and smashed into it) (oh, and I also wrote an "afterlife" full of lost ghosts who can't find their way to whatever comes next because the psychic landscape is full of wreckage from heaven).

One of the more common of these bits of weirdness are the Alarkine, the remnant of the heavenly host that had once served the gods. At the command of the gods, the Alar - the angels - had mixed their blood with humans, to produce powerful warrior-children who didn't require obscure circumstances to come into being and centuries to mature, the way Alar did. After many generations, the Alar find themselves weird mixtures of human and divine, with no place in the world. Some of them are crazy, some are bitter. Some want to bring the gods back... and others would like to, but only to kick their asses.

The main characters are a priestess of an old god (because what does religion have to do with the existence of the gods, anyway?) and her bitter god-hating Alarkine bodyguard who swiftly become caught up in the return of the gods and the Enemy, and have to find within themselves the strength to rebuild the world before its destroyed altogether.

It's a surreal dark fantasy epic of self-discovery, with heavy metaphysical, philosophical, and ethical angles thrown in. And one of the main characters is a half-angel paladin who hates the gods. And also there's a line (which I will keep in a new version) that makes the Abigail's knees weak:

"Look at the stars, Kaleyin. You're not dead. The prophet said that you and I would stand on the edge of the world and watch the last star fall, so you're not dead." He kissed her cold lips, and as the world vanished in white fire, he whispered "I will love you until the last star falls, and after."

This is always an important consideration.

* * *

So which do you think I should pick? Science fantasy political romance or apocalyptic dark fantasy journey of discovery? Half angel paladins or cthulhu angel antagonists? Fire from the hands or lasers from the eyes? Wait a minute...

Beneath Ceaseless Podcasts

Thanks to some livejournal friends, I've discovered an excellent new podcast, online magazine, and fiction market, all in one neat package labeled Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The magazine specializes in "alternate world fantasy," stories that explicate some fantastic setting alongside character description and plot. So far, I've listened to a story about the mysterious origin of mysterious gems, a revenge-seeking pseudo-European fantasy man in pseudo-Africa, and a neat and scary story about shapeshifters and magic locks. I've liked some of them more than others - the shapeshifters and magic locks were the best and I didn't really like the Afrofantasy - but they have all been worth it. I've enjoyed the podcast and hope to enjoy the magazine when I have some time.

And hopefully so will you.

That's Three and Four

I have just heard via the livejournal of the inimitable Sherwood Smith that publishers and agents are apparently now prone to checking up on a writer's internet presence before choosing to hire, represent, or buy. Ms. Smith warns us that one of the things that annoy publishers and agents is bitching and moaning about rejection letters, so from now on, all quoted rejection letters will be accompanied by this disclaimer:

I am not out to be accepted at this point - I am out to be rejected. I am looking for rejection. I am hungry for it. Rejection proves that I am trying. I'll be happy to be accepted, sure, but I am not complaining. I have no problem with rejection or rejection letters. Failure is only another opportunity to learn.

Disclaimer aside, I have two more rejections to share with you, bringing me to a total of four.

Re: The Weight of His Words
(Please quote our reference #12398 in any correspondence.)

Thank you for submitting to Andromeda Spaceways.

Sadly, we find that we can't use your submission at this stage.

Thank you again, and we hope to hear from you in the future.

Notes from the readers:

[Cut as it's none of your business]

Hope that's of some help, and better luck next time!

Agradar the Doomed

The letter contains many good points about the story, and I'm probably going to use all of them. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is the second market to offer good advice alongside their rejection (Pseudopod was the first). Good advice makes me happy and responsive magazines make me happy; I'm definitely going to send more stories to ASIM.

I also got a more generic response from Weird Tales.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your manuscript. The volume of mail I receive keeps me from responding personally to each submission. And unfortunately I must often turn down good work due to space limitations and other considerations. I am very sorry that I will not be able to publish your piece at this time. I appreciate your interest in Weird Tales and hope that you will keep me in mind for future submissions.

Yours Weirdly,

Madrador the Strange

I believe that I will soon become an expert on rejection letters. They come in many flavors: some are form, some are personalized, and some are a little of both, some are gentle, some are utilitarian, but all of them are awesome, because all of them mean that I'm one step closer to being published.

Thursday Bonus... Oh Forget It

Don't look a overdue gift post in the mouth. Times are tough, and I'm lucky I'm writing this. I'm not giving up on posting once a day, not exactly. It's a goal I plan on meeting... it just might take a while. Teaching is one of those careers that gets a little easier every day. My kids get more used to me, I get more used to them, I build up a bigger store of good ideas, and I have more time for the other things that make my life go pop.

Let me say, though, that having a life where there's nothing that doesn't make me go pop is awesome. I teach, and when I'm not teaching, I write. When I'm not doing either, I'm with the Abigail.

And also, I have a huge backlog of dishes that need to be done and a staggering amount of paperwork piled up... so perhaps this new system has some kinks to work out.

For all that buildup, this is going to be a pretty lame post. I have in my brain a link to share with you, one I hope you will enjoy. John Wick (author of many, many games that I've referenced in many, many posts, and I'm too tired from wrangling hormonal teenagers to make new references) has taken a comission to create several NPCs for an upcoming RPG project. In his second-most-recent post, he talks about a fascinating potential consequence of magical healing and resurrection. Check it out.

A more substantive post about dreams and stories (and several other posts, too) coming (hopefully) soon.