Summer Write-A-Thon!

The Clarion Foundation holds a Write-A-Thon every summer in which writers solicit sponsors to raise money for Clarion, which lets them put on their excellent programs. I’m participating this year, and next week they will start taking donations. The money goes to a great cause and I promise I will be writing some awesome stuff this summer.

So if you’ve got twenty bucks or so to spare, keep it handy for next week and I’ll post more as we get closer to the start! It runs concurrently with the Clarion workshop, so from the last week of June to the first week of August.

Across a City In Under an Hour

For the fourth time, Mark and I accompanied some friends to the Bay to Breakers run. Last year I accomplished my goal of running the 12K race in under an hour (59:37, I think), so people kept asking what my goal for this year would be. “To do better,” I said. I don’t know. I’m not a runner, and so I’m not going to get much more off my time. The best finishing times are around 35 minutes; the best times in my age group are around 40. So while I could maybe–maybe–get down to 50 minutes with a lot of training and work, I am pretty happy just to keep generally fit and be able to run a 7.7 mile race with very little specific preparation.

For the first time, we didn’t stay in the city before the race. Caltrain ran special trains, and we took the first one up, which got us about a mile and a half from the start in just enough time for us to walk there and join the press of people surging toward the start. The train itself was amusing, very much a party train inasmuch as any train can be at 5:45 in the morning. We couldn’t sit together, and David ended up sitting with people who were shaking glitter over everyone and drinking. There were costumes: a seahorse, a cow, a couple in mock-wedding clothes with “Just Married” taped to the back, and all kinds of crazy, colorful garb. We’d thought we might nap on the way up, but that proved pretty impossible.

The weather this year was about the best since the first time we ran it: sunny and warm, and I know that’s not ideal running weather, but at 7 am it is. (For better or worse, I think the weather was responsible for the much greater incidence of naked runners this year.) We crossed the starting line around 7:08 in a mob of people and I immediately tried to build up speed, which involves a lot of running back and forth to get around people who are conserving their energy. This year, I used the Nike+ app on my phone to give me mile-by-mile updates, which was helpful: over the first two miles, it told me my average pace was 7:20/mile, which was great considering I just need to average 8 minutes per mile to finish in an hour.

Then we hit the hill. That’s always a killer, and this year, like last, I tried to run up it. Made it last year, didn’t quite make it this year. The last block wore me out. But then we got to run down the other side. There’s a long flat run to the park, and in the park the first mile or so slopes uphill, which I hadn’t really noticed before, but it did hurt my time; my average at mile 5 was 7:54/mile. Still on pace, but up from 7:53/mile the previous mile, and I thought I’d been doing pretty well. The track sloped downhill from there, and with the determination of improving my time, I made full use of the assistance of gravity.

Once again, it was a huge lift to see the ocean come into view. I love the ocean anyway, and seeing it at the end of the race is pretty sweet. Gives me a good lift for that last stretch, with the finish line right there. So I pushed, and crossed the line (the clocks read 1:12 on one side and 1:13 on the other, having been started at some oddly arbitrary point before 7 am), and when I pulled up the Nike+ app to stop it (after fumbling to get the phone out of the hip pouch and so on), it showed my time at 59:51. So I was pretty sure I’d beaten my old time, and sure enough, when Mark found me and scanned the QR code on the back of the bib, my official time was posted at 58:58.

So that was my race. We had a couple first timers with us this time who both did really well, and three repeat runners who did pretty well except for poor David hurting his ankle partway through. And the weather held all the way through–San Francisco is really a beautiful city, and it was being shown off perfectly (it has its charm in the rain and the fog, too, but that’s a different kind of beauty, and one that’s harder to appreciate when you’re wearing short sleeves and runner’s shorts in an ocean breeze). On the bus to the Caltrain, we talked to a guy who’d run in the 75th race (that would be 26 years ago) and was now walking the races, posting a 13-minute mile walking, which is great. He talked about how the race used to be, in the days before they capped the tickets, and although there are still a lot of people there, he seemed to think it was an improvement.

And when we got home on the train, it was twenty to one and the farmers market was still going on. We felt a little odd that so much of the day remained, considering what we’d already done. Grilled burgers for lunch, and then people scattered to finish off their Sundays. And yes, we got to see the partial eclipse later that night.

And today I’m sore, but happy. Bay to Breakers is always lots of fun, and something you should put on your bucket list. :)

Starting Something New

…not in the way I usually write about here. I had the very great honor of officiating at the wedding of two friends yesterday, and I just wanted to report that it all went very well. They are an adorable couple, the families are wonderful, and I unexpectedly saw a bunch of people I knew but hadn’t seen in a while–extended friend circles.

It’s my second wedding performed and I think I did a little better this time. For as emotional as I got practicing the ceremony, it went very smoothly. The couple was so happy, and remembered their lines, and I gave them the right vows and the right rings and we had a lovely little time.

And I got to relive memories of my wedding (though I was not as good an officiant as we had!), which is always occasion to be happy.

So yeah. Good weekend.

Obama Does The Right Thing

A little late on this, but big kudos to the President’s public support of gay marriage. I sat and read the article and thought about how unlikely this would have been just a year ago. Every time I see another politician step up and say that supporting gay marriage is the right thing to do, I get a little emotional, which is maybe silly; why should it be affecting to me when people recognize my right to live as a human being? Other people respond with contemptuous “it’s about time” anger, and maybe that feels right to them. Maybe I’m so used to the entrenched bigotry that I have some weird version of Stockholm Syndrome where I sympathize with how hard it is for someone in the public eye to actually take that position.

But I think it’s more the emotion associated with watching the tide turn in a battle, of Wellington keeping a wary eye on the horizon as the battle goes on and Napoleon’s reinforcements don’t arrive, of the knowledge that the unlikely is happening before our eyes. History is being made here. I may not long recall the exact date, but I will remember sitting in front of my computer looking at those words on the screen, the same way I remember the giddiness of Prop 20 being overturned in California and the optimism with which we confronted the Prop 8 vote. I have been heartened by the number of columnists who’ve said that this is just another step in the march forward, who predict that in 2016 the official platform of the Democratic party will include federal recognition of same-sex marriage. I think this is an amazing time to be living in.

I have seen opinions from some people complaining that Obama didn’t do enough, didn’t go far enough, have heard his statement called “cowardly” and “opportunistic” (which are about the furthest words from my mind when a sitting president makes a declaration like this going into an election cycle), as though making this statement the day after a crucial swing state resoundingly passed a constitutional amendment outlawing any recognized partnerships save for a formal marriage of one man and one woman held no danger for him politically. To those people, I would say: go see “The Avengers” again, because clearly what you want in your life is comic book superheroes and not real people addressing real problems in a realistic way.

The sitting President of the United States supports same-sex marriage. That’s a big deal. Let’s be happy about it just for a day or two, huh?

The New Yorker Celebrates Obama’s Statement (from The Gothamist)

Sending Out Stories

Two stories went out today. One submission to Shimmer, and one final edit to FurPlanet’s ROAR anthology on “Chasing the Spotlight.”

“Chasing the Spotlight” was written about six? seven? years ago, and though the editor liked it, he said (rightly) that the way it handles news reporting was very dated. He suggested a number of places in which it might be updated, and I started trying to fix it, but that proved to be too annoying. So I just rewrote it.

I like it a lot better now, and the word length stayed approximately the same, so I think it all worked out. We will see what Buck thinks of my edits. :)

It feels good to be getting back to short stories. I now have two stories out, where I think we were told we should always keep three in the market. Looking up at my post-it board, I have ten stories in various stages of pre-production. One is sold and two are out, so that means I need to do something with the other seven.

 

So you’re going to Clarion…

Okay, take two of this, since WordPress’s “Hey, try our quick post!” apparently means, “Hey! Type out a post and we’ll make it disappear!”

 

 I attended the Clarion workshop in 2011, and I remember going into it that everyone said kind of encouraging but also infuriatingly vague things like “it was great, but it’s hard to put into words what was so great about it.” Post-Clarion, all of us struggled to capture that feeling as well, and for a bunch of writers, it’s amusing to see how difficult it was to state plainly. But I think the reason is that we are not only aware of what we got out of it, but what everyone else got. For me to say, “I learned to critique better, I learned some things to improve in my writing, I met some amazing people in the writing community and gained confidence about my writing” sounds very dry and doesn’t convey the power of the six weeks we spent there. But to say, “I gained a writing family,” while it does convey that, sounds rather overblown and overdramatic.

The point is, I guess, not to stress about what you’re going to get out of Clarion. If you go in as a writer open to the idea that you need to improve and that you and your classmates are all there to help each other do just that, you will get your money’s worth and then some. I know that I was a little stressed about what to expect, about whether I’d fit in (and you will no doubt be told many times that YES YOU DO FIT IN and it will not be enough times but you will end up believing it in the end, I hope), but at the same time I don’t want to tell people what to expect, mostly because everyone’s experience is going to be different.

I do have a few words of advice and I will just toss them out here as bullet points:

* Double-check your logistical arrangements to be gone from the real world for six weeks. You can’t stop reality from interrupting Clarion, but to the extent that you can minimize it, really do so.

* Take advantage of the blog to introduce yourself and meet your classmates. It doesn’t completely eliminate the “getting to know each other” period, but it does shorten it. It was great for us to show up and be able to put faces to names: “Hi, Jim! Hi, Jasmine!”

* Set yourself at least one goal before you go, something to improve in your writing or your process. But also keep yourself open to new goals. You’re going to meet seventeen awesome classmates and six awesome instructors, and the ideas and suggestions are going to come at you like tennis balls from one of those serving machines gone wild in a comedy sketch. Try something new. Don’t be afraid to fail at it.

* Share with your classmates. You guys are all there to help each other. You are a team, and you can’t add any new people to that team. If you see divisions or cliques forming, blow that up. We were a pretty lucky class in that we all got along and stayed pretty tight–not that there weren’t conflicts, but we didn’t let them fracture the class. Your support for each other will be one of the best things you come out of Clarion with.

* Learn the path to Rock Bottom and Trader Joe’s. Really. It will save your life when you can’t stand one more cafeteria meal.

And I hope all you guys have as amazing a summer as I did last year!

 

Furry Awards: My Hobbyhorse and Solution

* Wow, did this never post? Sheesh. Talk about using things properly. :/ I wrote this a month and a half ago. Sorry about that, guys.

 

I don’t want to come off as one of those cranky people who just pick holes in everything without offering a solution. And the best way to avoid that is to offer a solution. So here you go.

It seems to me that at this stage of the fandom’s life, the goal of an award should be to highlight any quality book that comes from the fandom. We are trying to show the outside world with these awards that there is really something to this fandom, that we are not just a lot of people writing “I WISH I WAS A CAT” stories.  And the main gripe with the Ursas has not, by and large, been the awards process, but the winners. You will also note that the complications in the previous part are all generally tied directly to selecting a “winner.”

Yes, that is the purpose of an award. But if we are trying to show quality in the fandom, then why do we have to restrict that list to one book in a year? I can look back at the Ursas in many years and find two novels that were worthy of recognition, or three or more short stories. So why don’t we have an award that recognizes, not a single work, but any work that passes a bar of quality? Make the award inclusion on a list, so that it carries the same weight as being a Hugo or Nebula nominee.

At a stroke, you eliminate many of the barriers to a juried award. Authors whose works are in contention need only excuse themselves from considering their own book; with no competition, they could fairly judge other works, knowing that praising one book or story doesn’t hurt the chances of their work to be listed. Jury members need not have read all books in contention as long as enough people have read each entry to provide a balanced judgment of it.  I can envision a system whereby a work would need a minimum of, say, fifteen votes to qualify for the list, and would need to have a 2/3 positive score (10 yea to 5 nea) to be on the list.

The main problem I see with this award is the main problem I see with any furry fandom award, and that is my problem from the last post: this is a young fandom without a lot of experienced, professional writers. So even if this proposal is put into effect, I can see that the release of the list of winners each year will be accompanied by the same kind of complaints about some work that should’ve been on but wasn’t, or some work that made it but shouldn’t have…

But it’s in people’s nature to complain, and at least this way there would be an approximate record of what the fandom considered its best works. And as the quality of writing improves, and the discrimination in the readership improves, the overall quality of the list will improve as well.

I think that aiming for a list rather than a single award will feel like a more manageable goal to beginning writers, and having several books or stories included on a list makes it more likely that someone will find something they like, whereas a single winner may not be to everyone’s taste. And perhaps that will motivate people to do what we are all hoping these awards will do, which is: write better fiction. This fandom is still in its youth (in many senses of the word), is still growing fast, and there is no shame in recognizing that the fiction may have a little ways to go to catch up to big brother/parent Science Fiction. While I don’t believe the sometimes-repeated contention that the popularity-rewarding Ursas discourage writers from even trying because they will never be as popular as already-established writers (*), I do see that it would be nice to have a larger body of work for them to look up to.

*This argument seems to me close kin to the argument that raising taxes on rich people will hurt the economy because it removes the incentive for people to be successful. Anyone with the means to accumulate a fortune does not choose whether or not to do it based on what the tax rate is, and any writer who gives up just because he/she doesn’t think they will ever be popular should not be writing to begin with, and is therefore probably correct. Real writers, the ones willing to put in the hours per day and days per week and weeks per month and months per year into their craft, those people are aiming for a larger goal than popularity, and they would not be deterred if the Ursas did not exist at all.

Of course, I help run a publishing company that prides itself on selecting the best available work in the fandom, and one might argue that having a work selected by a business that depends on quality to make profit is pretty similar to being chosen as a high-quality work by a small group of people with trustworthy judgment. There aren’t that many works published in the fandom each year in print, after all, and if you really want to be analogous to the Nebulas, then publication as a barrier to entry isn’t that bad an idea. However, it does weed out those potentially brilliant stories that just don’t have an audience or a venue—the market for short stories in the fandom is pathetic, much as it is out in SF at large. So I’m not opposed to the idea of an independent group that can scan all the writing in the fandom.

There you go: my thoughts on writing awards in the fandom. I’ve written these out as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s; next time someone tries to set up something like this, I can just point them to this series of posts.

Using Things Properly

Hey, it turns out people have been commenting on these posts once in a while! Now that I have told WordPress to e-mail me when that happens, I think I will have a better chance of noticing and responding…

Thanks people who’ve commented and please don’t stop. :)

Smart Things About Clarion

One of my 2011 classmates writes about what to do to prepare, if you are lucky enough to get to go. Great advice. I will write my own thoughts on Clarion next week, perhaps…

Furry Awards: The Considerable Obstacles to an Alternative

NOTE: As usual, the following constitutes my opinion and should not be taken as anything but that.

All of the preceding two posts should not be taken to mean that I am a staunch Ursa defender (though I have moved that way in recent years), nor that I have no interest in an alternative award. I have in fact been involved in four separate attempts to create an alternative to the Ursas, and so when I heard about the most recent one, my distance from it (not that anyone noticed) was more of a “I don’t want to go through this again” than “this is a pointless exercise.” I admire the spirit behind it.

So let me summarize what I think the goal of an alternative award usually is/should be, because one of the pitfalls people fall into early on in this process is attempting to describe the award by what it is not (i.e. the Ursas) without specifying what it is. What I think people want in a general way is something that recognizes literary quality rather than popularity (not that a work can’t excel in both, but that’s another rant) (*).

*Now, I will freely admit that what follows is mostly based on this goal that I made up, but that goal is based on what I have heard in previous and current incarnations of the “we should have another award” discussions, and it seems like the most likely goal for a new award, given that most of the awards we have out there in the general mainstream (Oscars vs. People’s Choice, Hugo vs. Nebula) are divided along the “popular”/”quality” lines (though you will also note that the claim of the Oscars or Nebulas to be really about quality is shaky at best; really they are “most popular among people who live in the world of that art,” which is about all one can ask for). There really are only two kinds of awards: popular vote and juried, and since the popular vote award already exists and is successful, I chose to discuss the juried award vote (and their hybrid child, the “popular vote among people chosen by some criteria related to the award”).

This post was written before the announcement of the “Coyotl” awards, which are basically an award voted on by members of the Furry Writers Guild, though I admit I had heard rumblings that such ideas were circulating. I don’t really follow the arguments there and so I want to say in advance that none of the things that follow are aimed at any specific people or intended to rebut specific statements by specific people. They are a distillation of arguments I have heard repeatedly from many sources over the last few years.

Setting that aside, if you were to set up an award like that, the goal should be to recognize the best literary efforts created by the furry fandom. Sounds simple, right? Well. Let’s look at how you would do that.

1. “Recognize…”Okay. Stop there. Who gets to recognize? There are a whole host of problems with this.The people most qualified to recognize good literary fiction are, in general, the people writing it. This means that every year, some or most of your ideal judges would have to recuse themselves from the judging process. As I mentioned back in the Ursa discussion, I excused myself from any involvement in the awards early on; as a writer and publisher, I wanted to be creating furry stuff, not judging it.
   
   The qualifications of any subgroup of the fandom to judge fiction better than any other subgroup of the fandom are questionable.Science fiction has a pretty clear line between Authors and Fans. If you look at the rolls of the SFWA, you will find M.A.s and MFAs, people who have spent twenty and thirty and fifty years studying literature and writing, people who on a regular basis attend casual or professional workshops, or even teach them. Our fandom is a really young fandom, and we just do not have that population of experienced professional writers in it. I’m not trying to mock or denigrate the fandom here; I think the creativity and passion in the writing community is terrific. I just don’t see the line in our fandom that I do see from my time in the SF community. This makes a juried award—an award decided by a small select jury, usually of professionals—impractical at this stage in the fandom’s life.Yes, but! you cry, The Ursas are open to ALL, and this would be (hypothetically) restricted to certain people who have demonstrated some writing ability. I would counter that mostly the people who vote in the fiction categories of the Ursas are people who love to read. They’re just self-selected instead of having to qualify for some Furry Readers Jury or something. I know several very smart, very discerning people in the fandom who don’t write fiction (for instance, Fred Patten, who has reviewed more furry books than most people have read, and yet would not qualify for membership in the FWG). While I admire the intent behind a jury selection based on writing or some other qualification, I would contest any assertion that fandom-published writers, or “people chosen by a specific subgroup of the fandom,” are somehow more qualified to judge fiction than anyone who loves books enough to make it through the Ursas’ registration, nomination, and voting process and simply doesn’t have the drive or talent to write.
2.  “…the best literary efforts…” Another sticking point. How do you quantify a literary effort? With a “Dead Poets Society”-type graph of quality vs. subject matter? These things are always contentious no matter where you attempt to apply them, and if you think that everyone else shares your opinion that Book ABC was really the best book published in 2010 and if only these awards were in place, it would definitely win, then, well, I’m sorry, but you are in for a crashing disappointment. However, this is something that’s an issue with any award, the age-old struggle between popularity and literary merit. Ask Stephen King about it sometime.
   Related Sub-issue. In order to judge which of the literary efforts in the fandom IS the best, however that is done, you need to have a group of people (see “juried award, above”) who are willing to read ALL the entries in a given year. If you have five novels nominated (however that happens), you will have to trust all the members of the voting body to read all five of the novels in the voting period. It’s hard enough to find anyone who’s read more than two novels a year, let alone five in a short span.
3. “…in the furry fandom.” Another great divider. Who’s “in the furry fandom”? The Ursas kind of judge work based on furry content (though they do fall down in some cases: http://publishyourstory.blogspot.com/2007/06/earth-rise.html), but again, they rely on popular vote, so if a “big publisher” book caught the interest of the fandom (“Tales from Watership Down”), it would be nominated. This is kind of a hidden issue with the Ursas: they do not specifically celebrate works created by the furry fandom. They celebrate works that are popular with the furry fandom.
   It seems to me (though this is probably the point most open to debate) that if you are creating awards to celebrate the furry fandom, you will need to set up some criteria to eliminate entries that are not from the fandom. In most cases, creators either self-identify as furries or don’t.  But there will inevitably be corner cases, and some thought needs to be given to how those will be addressed.

I hate to be one of those people who offers criticism and no solution. So I have an alternative to propose! Next post.