Sheila's LiveJournal

There’s much to be said for both basic methods of workshopping: handing out work ahead of time and reading aloud at the workshop. I’ve used both, but last night when the Asilomar group got together, I was struck by the distinct difference in the two methods.

I use the “hard copy ahead of time” method when I’m teaching. This works well for new, inexperienced writers and critiquers both. When you’re just starting out, it’s difficult to see problems in your own work, often no matter how many times you review it, and reading it aloud doesn’t help much. It’s also hard for beginning critiquers to catch difficult parts “on the run” as it were and comment usefully on them. Too often, on-the-spot critiques descend to the level of “I like this and can’t see anything wrong with it.” And the real problem with that is the beginning writer is likely to believe it.

lt’s too hard for the writer to have to listen to comments at first – and take notes if necessary, which it usually is. Even when the critiquers will be giving back the piece under discussion with comments added, many writers are shy and have difficulty listening. I often tell my students that if they think they’re going to be too overcome with it all to be able to listen appropriately, then they should bring a tape recorder; that way they miss neither the oral comments or the written ones. (The first time I underwent the workshop process, my blood was pounding so hard that I couldn’t hear a thing that was said, good or bad.) The “hard copy” method has another advantage – you can get more done in the time allotted.

But for experienced writers, there’s a lot to recommend the “read aloud” method. Last night, when my critique group got together, I realized how amazing it is that experienced writers can catch so many glitches in a story that they’re listening to for the first time. Nobody needs to comment on everything of course, or even see the problem in the first place. But a good group will cover the bases pretty efficiently. The real benefit is for the writer reading his/her work aloud. Last night, for instance, I recognized an organizational problem as I read ( another essay on aspects of SF that I’m doing for the NebulaAward website) – ahead of the critiquers pointing it out. Clumsy phrasing, passages that drag, become crystal clear when you have to read them aloud. Yes, it takes time, and our sessions tend to take three or four highly intense hours to work with five or six writers’ work – and that’s with setting a word or page limit. Beginning writers would soon be exhausted.

My group has been together (at least the core of members) for more than thirty years. Jerry Hannah hand-picked the first group while we were at the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, and we met twice a year for three or four days in the conference center at Asilomar State Park – thus our name. I remember the heady, in-depth discussions of points of craft that occurred, almost like taking a Master Class. Since then, the group has grown, and now there’s a Northern California group (mostly Bay Area) and a Southern (mostly LA area), and we meet every other Friday night.

Sometimes people will say, “You’ve published a lot! Do you really still need a workshop?” The answer to that is, Yes! I don’t think I would’ve got this far without my colleagues urging me to improve. Or they’ll argue that workshops influence a writer’s style and choice of material to the work’s detriment. My answer to that is, if you find yourself in such a controlling environment, run don’t walk to the nearest exit. A good critique group doesn’t tell you how or what to write; they identify what is and what isn’t working in whatever you choose to write.

Jerry taught us well, and I value the help I get from my workshop group. Now I need to get back to the piece I read last night and work on that reorganization problem!

Musings on why descriptions of destruction and obliteration appeal to us:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/the_fascination_of_apocalypse/

Phoenix was hot! (Well, duh.) The Mission Palms Hotel in Tempe (site of a recent Nebula Conference) has a very lovely pool, and that helped even though the mercury was already soaring by 7 am. I didn't step off the hotel grounds between arrival Thursday morning and departure Sunday afternoon.

It was a small Westercon, maybe less then 450 people, probably due to the economy tanking. But those that were there had a good time. One of my former fiction writing students, Dana Davis, came in to see me and show me her newly-published novel -- Yay, Dana! That always makes me happy. I sold a number of books that almost amounted to the sum US Airways extracted from my wallet in order to transport them, and I did a very fine panel on alien linguistics with Stan Schmidt and Juliette Wade on Sunday morning.

I met many writers I already knew, and made the acquaintance of others. One in particular, T. Jackson King, exchanged his collection of short stories, JUDGMENT DAY, for my lingster collection after a shared Reading session in which we basically read to each other. I've just started to read it, and I like what I've read so far.

July 4th evening I spent in the LASFS suite on the 4th floor which had a great view of a very long fireworks display put on by the city of Phoenix. Another former student, Christian McGuire (Con Chair for World Con in Anaheim a couple of years ago, and on staff for this one) assured me I really needed to come to LosCon this year. With all those fireworks going off in the background, how could I refuse?

Now back to the recalcitrant novella (novel? perish the thought!), energized by the linguistics panel!

Back to the computer shop tomorrow. Grrr. The refurbished machine shows some of the signs of the old one, so I now have no idea where the problem lies. But I know one thing: I'm getting mighty tired of this.

I managed with great difficulty to do some revision work on a story for an anthology due soon (like having to hold down the F3 stop instead of being able to use "save". And it still required shutting off the power in order to exit the program. Sigh.

The guys at the shop who keep my computer running finally gave up. They switched the (new) hard drive -- which we'd loaded with all my programs and links before we knew the Old Grey Dell she ain't what she used to be -- to a refurbished IBM. They didn't charge me for it. I'm going to use it only for writing and keep the laptop for surfing the web. Except for emergencies on one or other of them, of course. Shouldn't be any on the desktop for a while now. Keeping my fingers crossed! I'm so far behind in my writing, I can't afford any more downtime.

I'll be signing THE GUILD OF XENOLINGUISTS on Sunday, June 14th, 3-5pm, at the Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles. If you're in the area, come on by and say hello, lend moral support!

The latest one, "Old Man River," is up:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/old_man_river/

I'm off tomorrow to the Nebula Conference and Awards Banquet in Los Angeles. Although the hotel is only about fifty miles away from where I live, I'll have to make close to a two hundred mile round trip because I have to take the greyhounds out to my daughter's house in San Jacinto in the Moreno Valley to stay. Actually, that's not too bad because it will give me a chance to take them out to dinner tomorrow night, before heading to LA Friday morning, and then spend Sunday evening with them on my return as well. I haven't seen this daughter and family since Christmas, so it will be a pleasant visit.

The Nebs are being held at the same time as the LA Times Festival of Books, and SFWAns will be signing at the Mysterious Galaxy Booth (#614) on the UCLA campus. My slot is Sunday at 10am for an hour, and I'll be signing THE GUILD OF XENOLINGUISTS. (I have a few copies of the newly reprinted backlist, so I may take them along too and see if anyone wants to buy them.)

Oh – Nicky the cat wants it noted that he will stay bravely at home by himself and keep an eye on the marauding sparrows and hummingbirds who infest our balcony. (Actually, a neighbor will look in on him once a day, so he won't be totally alone, but don't tell him I told you!)

I recently had a frustrating few days. I made phone calls that landed me on hold for ten minutes. I left messages that weren't returned. I couldn't log on to Facebook because I'd accidentally minimized the typeface beyond the ability of my eyes to read and didn't know how to fix it. Sff.net wouldn't let me log on at all. No new ideas for Guest Blogs on the Nebula Awards site presented themselves. Everything I tried to do went wrong, was delayed, or vanished. I guess the universe was trying to tell me something. As in: Write the story, damn it!

Any time I'm asked to contribute a story to an anthology, or anything and anywhere else for that matter, I always says yes. I have my heart attack later. (How on earth am I going to do THAT?) This time, I'd put myself in the hock for two stories to two different anthologies within the space of one week. Sure, they both have fairly distant deadlines, but time has a way of creeping up. I started stewing over the fix I'd landed myself in. No ideas presented themselves – or at least, no workable ones. I had that dreaded disease, writers block.

Then one day last week I dreamed a first line for one of the stories. Great! No second or third lines were forthcoming. Back to depressionville. But last night was different. I dreamed the whole plot – in living color, as they say, dialogue and all. I was excited to walk the dogs and get to the computer to start work. Of course, by the time I came to actually write the story, most of the dream had slipped away. But you know, it was actually comforting to know my subconscious had worked the whole thing out. So even when I stumbled to a halt, I could trust my brain to come up with a way to solve the problem. And it did. Three thousand words in one sitting today. A whole first draft. Not perfect, but a good start – and I *love* to re-write!

I have another blog up at the Nebula site:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/clowns_dead_dogs_and_the_universe/

I’m doing something I rarely do unless pressured -- reading a volume of critical essays about SF, written by UC Santa Barbara professor Frank McConnell. These are papers he presented at the Eaton Conference on SF over the years. Th Eaton is a scholarly meeting, held at UC Riverside, home of an enormous collection of all things skiffy, a conference that annually attracts critics and scholars from the Ivy League as well as from Europe. I’m not fond of this kind of meeting, and only go because it’s in my backyard, so to speak (and I should disclose that the Eaton Collection now houses my own papers, though it didn’t during the years Frank attended)

When Frank died (too early) a few years ago, I – and others who had known him – was asked to contribute a few memories to be used in the afterword of this volume, and I was glad to, You see Frank wasn’t like your regular dry scholar. He was first and foremost a court jester. His papers skewered the pompous academics and their overblown theories about SF, and at times he had the normally sedate conference rolling on the floor with laughter. But he knew the field better than most, and there was always insight in his papers, underneath the humor. I’ll give you one example. Under the guise of examining the influence of SF on society, he brought a bunch of tabloid papers into the room and proceeded to analyze stories from the likes of the National Enquirer (“Aliens Holding Elvis to Ransom on Moon Base!” “Two-headed Baby Born Talking!” kind of thing.) as seriously as if they were the productions of the Ivy League crowd about legitimate SF stories. I remember laughing so hard that I was choking.

The thing is, there was a strong kernel of truth and wisdom in all the humor. He had powerful things to say even as he was goring all the sacred oxen of the field. He was a kind man, too, befriending a very new and shy writer when the Ivy League attendees didn’t deign to notice she was there. Since the early days, I’ve read a paper or two of my own, and been keynote speaker, but in the beginning I was just a newbie who got lost in the crowd.

The conference isn’t the same without him.

I have another guest blog up on the Nebula Awards site, an expanded version of something I first posted here -- with more connections to SF and to one of my own stories:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/islands_of_the_imagination/

"Stranger Than Imagination Can," a lingster story, which first appeared in my collection THE GUILD OF XENOLINGUISTS, made it to the short list for the Nebulas. If you'd like to read a copy, email me and I'll be glad to send one: sf.lingster@gmail.com

I made the decision not to go to Denver.

Although I managed quite well in Oregon, there would be considerably more walking about at Worldcon, and my leg gets very tired at the end of the day dragging this heavy boot around. It's starting to rub a welt at the top of my calf just under the knee that's quite sore too. Two more weeks minimum, four maximum; I don't want to jeopardize it.

Plus we've started some heavy-duty repair work at the condo building – termite-infested wood being removed all over (including from my balcony), then tenting, then painting. Not a good time to be away. Apparently, I just wasn't meant to go to Denver this year.

The blog entry, “Of Myth and Memory,” should be up now on the new SFWA Nebula Awards site. It's about double the length I first posted here.
(www.nebulaawards.com. ) The site looks spiffy – all you ever wanted to know about the Nebulas but were afraid to ask.

I seem to be writing more non-fiction than fiction lately, and it's appearing online.

Broadsheet, the online newsletter of Broad Universe, has just posted a short article I wrote for them on avoiding cliches when writing science fiction:

http://broaduniverse.org/broadsheet/0807sf.html

And coming up in the near future, an expanded version of my blog entry "Of Myth and Memory" is going to appear as a guest  blog in the new SFWA Nebula site. I'll list the particulars when I know them. I guess you could say I have finally entered the 21st century?

At the Eaton Conference recently, I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. The conference had taken as its theme science fiction about the moon, and Bradbury was an honored guest. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work.   

I wasn't disappointed. Bradbury's prose sings – it really is best when read aloud. Being introduced to Bradbury's work by a twelve-year-old boy long ago, I had fallen in love with the voice of these stories, saturating myself in his music. I realized, as I re-read of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me. Most of the stories have tiny plots that would sound ho-hum when summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably never existed even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point.

The magic of these stories lies in their poetry. I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:

    It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:

    And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....”

A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when all the apples fall from the trees” for the second – and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I re-read the book, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless tunes of simple words.

And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet whose prose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas. I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. The date I'd inscribed on the inside front cover was the year I went to college, the year after Thomas died. I'd hated “modern poetry” while I was in high school – until I encountered Thomas and the poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept off my feet by the sheer emotional torrent of words, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. Like Bradbury, Thomas loved small towns, though his are in his native Wales:

    ...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold  money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.”

I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. The thing is, these aren't the places Bradbury and Thomas lived either; they're myths about those places, more real than bricks and stones. That to my mind is good writing; that's Art.

Ah, Miss Warner, dragon of high school English classes, you told us that sentences ought not to run away with the images they contain but cower timidly behind their periods and semicolons, and that words ought not to be strung together with “and” like beads on a chain. How lucky you didn't teach Ray Bradbury or Dylan Thomas!

If you see an ad on Craigslist or FLiXer for a fiction writing competition where SFWA is supposedly offering thousands of dollars in prizes -- do not send in your "registration" money. Run like hell the other way.

It's a scam. SFWA DOES NOT run writing contests.

Check out Writer Beware@sfwa.org for more details on this scam.

Three words for it: Hot. Crowded. Overwhelming.

Hats, water bottles and sun screen were necessities of life as the mercury went way over 90. Vendors selling water, lemonade and ice-cream – they were everywhere – probably made tidy sums. I don't know what the official count is, but it seemed as if all of Los Angeles came to the grounds of UCLA on Saturday, the day I was there. Were they buying books or just gawking at sweating writers touting them? I don't know. People seemed to be toting book bags stuffed with something or other. I hope it was books! You needed tickets to get into some of the panel discussions and special presentations; I didn't try this year.

There were lots of parents pushing kids in strollers or carrying them in backpacks (In this hot weather? Ouch!)  And lots of face-painted kids and panting dogs. That seems like a happy omen to me. Future readers! Pet lovers! Memo to self: Put more dogs and kids into the stories I write.

The three-sided canvas booths for vendors seemed hotter than outside, especially if you stood under the trees. UCLA has a lovely, well-landscaped campus, and I enjoyed strolling around before my stint and after – until the sun became too much and a headache drove me home. I spent a quarter at UCLA years ago on a post-graduate fellowship, and it feels like my west coast alma mater. But it's huge, and even if you manage to park near the booth you're signing in at the beginning of the day, you can guarantee it will be the furthest away from you after you've finished browsing around at the end of the day.

The people who hosted me, the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society, were nice enough to improve on the lame PR poster I'd provided ahead of time, and they kept me supplied with cold water. I sold half a dozen books in an hour and a half. And I got to talk to a lot of neat people, including a couple of my former students, one whom I hadn't seen in years. But it seemed like there were four people who wanted to talk about their own writing ambitions for every one who was interested in buying a book.

So was it worth it? I guess so. Since it's the biggest book festival on the west coast, it's easy for a midlist genre writer to get lost. The energy of the festival was uplifting – and if I hadn't been there I'd have probably been at home grousing about the heat and getting very little done anyway.

Whar's your experience of events like this?

1. I've spent the last two years volunteering at a local hospice, getting to know people both young and old who've arrived at the final point in their lives, AIDs and cancer victims, and some who have actually managed to live out their “three score and ten – plus.” I've taken them shopping, to Barnes & Noble to buy a special book, to church, around town to see the Christmas lights, to lunch when they can't stand the hospice food any more (it's really not bad, but anything gets boring after a while). I've sung along with the karaoke with them, helped with crafts, run Tai Chi sessions, taken AIDS patients for appointments with their doctors, sat with them when they couldn't get out of bed any more.

This has caused a profound change in the way I view my life. I've learned that none of us know how long we've been given on this Earth, nor can we predict the manner of our going out (other than avoiding risky sexual behavior and needle sharing). But far from making me feel morbid or depressed it has been very freeing. I realized that the only thing that counts is to pay attention to each day – as Ram Dass said, “Be here now.” That has to be my Number One New Year resolution. Live in the Now and stop fretting about the future.

2. I live in Southern California, surrounded by Spanish speakers.  What excuse do I have for not learning Spanish? Oh, I know a few phrases, and I can understand quite a bit (especially written Spanish). I'm not good at teaching myself a language – I prefer immersion, the way I became proficient in French and German. But next year I'm going to take a class and learn more than “Feliz an~o nuevo!” (Maybe another resolution might be to learn how to make the little accent marks appear in the right places -- like *over* the letter instead of after it?)

3. Now that my greyhound, Jack, is well again, I need to get back to the regime we used to have of long walks. I'd like to prepare to walk a 5K in the spring. The dogs will be happy, so I'd better start soon.

4. (This one has nothing to do with New Year resolutions!) I received a brochure advertising a week-long writers' conference from UC Riverside, home of the Eaton Library of Science Fiction – the biggest, most prestigious collection west of the Mississippi – and maybe in the entire country – and host to the Eaton Conference, an annual powerhouse drawing SF scholars from all over, including the Ivy League. And what do you know? No science fiction writers were invited to give talks or run workshops. Sigh. But what they didn't realize is that their keynote speaker, a great literary figure, has also written – gasp! – science fiction: Joyce Carol Oates.

Happy New Year to everyone. May you and the the world have peace.

I'm intending to do something different (for me) on my web site (www.sff.net/people/sheila-finch).  I'm getting ready to put up at least two thirds of the novel Birds for free download. The original short story, "Hitchhiker," was published long ago in Amazing Stories. Then the complete novel was serialized by A.J. Budrys in Tomorrow SF, and  finally it was  published by Wildside. I've always been partial to this story! It takes place in the near future in the aerospace industry in Southern California, and concerns an energy being who happens to blunder into our space. putting our satellites at risk,  and the attempts of a young woman to go into space to clear her astronaut sister's name. I you like it, there'll be a link to the paperback version at Wildside Press.  I've never done this before so we'll see what happens.

I had a lot of fun doing the research for this book, visiting the High Bay at Hughes, taking flying lessons, watching a shuttle landing at Edwards Air Force Base, visiting Los Alamos and the Thames Barrier Project., spending time in Alaska in winter. And I have the original of the gorgeous cover painting Bob Eggleton did for the short story version. (A nice coincidence: That was one of Bob's early magazine appearances, as it was mine too. Now, Bob's doing the cover for my collection of lingster stories coming out from Golden Gryphon this summer.)

But as they say, there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, and that project has been delayed because of other stuff -- Not the least of which has been my greyhound Annie's recent accident at the dog park, resulting in stitches. (She did it to herself, only two other dogs were around and one of them my other grey, Jack; he's usually the clumsy one.)

Happy Mother's Day to mothers everywhere and all children of mothers too!