The next International Sendout Festival

Because I realized with horror that I no longer have all that many pieces out, I have unilaterally declared another International Sendout Festival.

IT'S ON FOR FOURTH-OF-JULY WEEKEND, PEOPLE! By midnight July 5 (Sunday), you will have met at least one of the following goals:

1. all stories/pieces that are ready to go out are out.
   
   
2. at least 10 stories/pieces are out.
   
   
3. one story/piece that has never been out is out, and one market you've never submitted to before now has one of your stories/pieces. (Note: this constitutes one goal, not two.)

Who's with me?

Know any uni students who would like some tips in research and writing?

I've posted several articles of my own devising on my editing web site, www.lauragoodin.com/editing (the link to the articles is near the bottom of the page). They are designed to give relative beginners at scholarly research and writing a few starter tips. I've run them past a university professor of my acquaintance who has suffered for years at the hands of good-hearted but woefully unprepared undergrads, and he reckons they (the articles, that is) can be useful for someone wanting to raise the level of their writing.

I'll be adding more articles over the next few months, so if you have any ideas for topics that might help you or your students, please feel free to suggest them! Also, I'd appreciate your sharing the link to the articles to anyone you know who might benefit from them.

The all-female Shrew we saw last night

Margaret and I went to the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre last night to see a production of The Taming of the Shrew that had the twist of being entirely cast with women. This is not quite as bizarre as it might seem at initial glance: after all, the original production was cast entirely with men (clarification: men and boys).

The director, the Bell Shakespeare Company's Marion Potts, said in an interview:

If anything, a female cast allows us to be more honest about the power relationships in question. We don’t need to shy away or apologise for the behavior that is scripted, because in a sense we are in control and endorsing this exploration...We can afford then to really hold the themes of the play up for scrutiny. We can also work out what isn’t about gender: another interesting facet of the casting is that we can suddenly see aspects of a relationship that aren’t just about gender – that are more symptomatic of other character traits – such as greed, or pragmatism or intellectual rivalry etc.

Margaret and I were both interested to see whether we actually did feel a different dynamic. After the show, we agreed that except for a moment here and there where we admired this or that actor's ability to use mannerisms, vocal control, and movement to project "maleness," we were largely oblivious to the gender of the actor. Instead, we did what people watching a good play always do: we let the actors become the characters. We found that that process happened just fine even with what should have been a somewhat confronting casting choice.

Either we're way too willing to suspend disbelief, or a really good actor (and Bell hires the best) can transcend the assumptions and agendas of even the most politicized of audiences (and directors?).

(Hm — an interesting aside: the publicity on Bell Shakespeare's site for the show mentions lion-tamers' whips, bearded ladies, smoke and mirrors. I remember a scene in which a smoke machine may have played a bit part, but none of that other stuff. Clearly some decisions were made about the scale of the production after that got posted!)

An additional, and quite stunning, post for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Day

I will be grateful to my friend Cathy for the rest of my life for many, many things — not least among them being that she sent me the link to this speech.

Appreciate your favorite specfic authors today!

Yes, everyone, today's the day — Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Day! (Also, Facebook page here.) Show your appreciation for a science-fiction and/or fantasy writer today!

I'm excited!

The Lifted Brow is a magazine of literary fiction, speculative fiction, creative non-fiction, experimental music, poetry, drama, multimedia, etc., etc. It comes out twice a year, and has already gotten quite a bit of positive attention in Australia and elsewhere (you can google it to find out more). I bring this up not just because it's a cool mag, but because I have a story appearing in Issue 5, which is now available for preorder from the Lifted Brow web site. I am thrilled to be Table of Contents buddies with some people whose work I really respect (and whom I really like), such as Rob Shearman and Angela Slatter — I wasn't expecting anything so cool anywhere near so early on in my writerly journey.

Anyway, as I said, it's available for pre-order. It looks to be absolutely bursting (à la Mr. Creosote) with many wonderful things. I'm excited!

World Juggling Day update

Margaret and I went to Thirroul Beach today at 10 a.m. to juggle. We were the only faithful there — I can't believe the beach wasn't thronged on a cold, wet, windy day with dozens, if not hundreds, of fervid jugglers. But no.

Nevertheless, we celebrated, as we had sworn to do. After insisting she couldn't juggle, Margaret ended up learning the very basics faster than I had. (Although it must be said that I was self-taught, which may have slowed me down even more than my chronic awkwardness would have anyway.)

Juggling is good for the writer (me). It's good for the actor (Margaret). It's good for the mom, and for the daughter. It's good for the middle-aged, and the young. And I'm planning on finding out whether it's good for the elderly.

Juggle, everybody, juggle!*


*Strictly speaking, metaphorical juggling (as in, aspects of one's life) isn't exactly what I'm referring to. I'm talking literally throwing things up in the air with a joyous, yet precise, "Whee!"

In case you've forgotten

June 20, 2009 is World Juggling Day! It's a day for celebrating the doing of utterly profitless and yet (or therefore) beautiful things. So go to a place that isn't too precarious or filled with too many precious objects, pick up a few things that aren't too fragile, and toss them around a bit!

Catachresis

Not catechesis. Catachresis. Definitions vary in an orbital cloud around the concept of "the deliberate misuse of a word." Wikipedia goes into detail:

Common forms of catachresis are:

• Using a word in a sense radically different from its normal sense. ("Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon's purse" — Shakespeare, Timon of Athens)
  
  
• Using a word to denote something for which, without the catachresis, there is no actual name. ("a table's leg")
  
  
• Using a word out of context. [Note from Laura: Wikipedia's example for this was too dopey to reproduce, but I can't think of a better one yet.]
  
  
• Using paradoxes or contradictions. ("Black sun")
  
  
• Creating an illogical mixed metaphor. ("To take arms against a sea of troubles..." – Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Catachresis is often used to convey extreme emotion or alienation. It is prominent in baroque literature and, more recently, in dadaist and surrealist literature.

Other definitions include "The inappropriate use of one word for another, or an extreme, strained, or mixed metaphor, often used deliberately"; "Figure of association in which a highly unusual or outlandish comparison is made between two things. This figure moves beyond a metaphor by degrees -- the language used for comparative purposes is strikingly at odds with conventional usage"; and "A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as anthimeria, hyperbole, synaesthesia, and metonymy".

I bring this word to your attention because it recently caught mine as I was reading a collection from Samuel R. Delany of short pieces on writing. He was talking about the need to second-guess — to doubt — everything you do as a writer. And then to doubt the doubt. "After all," he writes, "that extra adjective may not be clutter but an interesting catachresis that allows us to see something unusual about the object." The trick is, he says, not to give anything the benefit of the doubt. (You can read nearly all the book here; thanks to Rod for the link!)

One of the reasons I do NaNoWriMo every year is to practice flow rather than doubt. The doubting I have down pat. I doubt myself into immobility more often than not. (Which is where the NaNo thing comes in.) One of my writer-buddies, Jason, uses "Sean Williamses", or SWs, as a unit of writing measurement. Sean Williams is a breathtakingly prolific Australian speculative-fiction author whose personal goal is, I'm told, 3,000 words on the page per day. Per day. Jason measures his own daily productivity thus: .5SW, or .25SW, or whatever the day's output has been. Doubt is the enemy of the SW. The SW is the enemy of doubt. In the center of this antagonism, stretched like a gummi worm, sits the poor writer.

I'm trying to figure out if I included any catachreses in that paragraph. I don't think so. But I'm not sure.

47 is not the new 30. But I'm okay with that.

Yesterday five of us piled into one of the Unit* vehicles and headed south. After a lovely drive, including a few miles/kms bouncing over a corrugated dirt road, we arrived at the campground and set up the tent. Four of us elected to sleep in the tent; one set up his super-duper swag.**

As dusk fell, the night grew confrontationally chilly, but as this was not a low-impact camping area by any means and there was a dedicated fire ring, and plenty of firewood available from the campsite office, we indulged ourselves in a campfire. (As much as I love them, I seldom feel I am in a position to have one — either I am in genuine wilderness or the only firewood available is that which I would scavenge from the surrounding woodlands, neither of which are circumstances that make a campfire At All The Right Thing To Do.) There was also beer involved. And someone brought marshmallows. (This is Australia, so, alas! no graham crackers or Hershey bars.)

Sleep was problematic. Despite wearing six (YES, six) shirts, two pairs of pants, socks, gloves, a scarf, and my ludicrously over-the-top furry hat, and having a silk bag liner, a fleece bag liner, a pretty good sleeping bag, and a Thermarest, I was bloody cold all night. And I know I snore, and I was terrified of keeping the others awake, so every time I felt myself snore, I awoke in horror. (The others said they didn't even notice.)

Still, the next morning, off we went. My hiking partner and I had agreed in advance to take it gently. This hike was a rogaine, or orienteering event (I'm still not sure what the difference between the two is; is there one?): we were looking for markers in the bush, navigating to them with map and compass. And I have to say, we did a pretty good job. We found every one we set out to find, including the one we had to wade into a really cold river to get to. I would have been happy to find six; I think we got to about 10 by the end of the six hours. The weather was great, not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny — perfect. And we saw literally a dozen or more wombats, along with wallabies, kookaburras, crimson rosellas (parrots), lyrebirds (well, we heard those), etc. etc. And it turns out my hiking partner was a whiz-kid at Australian birds and botany, and he showed and told me tons of interesting things in between crawling around in the scrub or dragging ourselves up to the ridgeline.

I feel very smug about the bush navigation. The other events like this I've been on, I've largely tagged behind people who knew what they were doing. Sure, I've had some training in bush navigation, but I hadn't really taken too active a role before. But my hiking partner and I worked very collaboratively, and we were not that dissimilar in bush-navigation expertise. (It helped that he's a serious sailor and I have a pilot's license — map-reading is somewhat idiosyncratic for different modes of travel but there's a lot of overlap. Although we were both abashed that we had to take so much time to work out how the grid-north-to-mag-north conversion actually worked out in terms of what bearing we decided to take. We're both a little out of practice, I more than my hiking partner, who, luckily for us both, was able to convince me of his point of view.) As a result, we actually used our realio, trulio bush-navigation skills and got the results we wanted.

Now, lots of things hurt. I've been relatively out of shape recently, and not particularly resilient in a lot of ways, but today that didn't matter. We did what we wanted to do, and accomplished what we wanted to accomplish, and it doesn't really matter that my joints are no longer as brash and elastic as they once were. That's the tradeoff that they told me about when I started martial arts: the body does, unfortunately, get stiffer and more cautious, but the heart gets wiser.


*"Unit" refers to my SES Unit.
**The swag pictured in the link has the unfortunate brand name of "Burke and Wills." If I were making camping equipment in which I wanted people to have consummate faith, this would be one of my top brand names not to pick. Here's why.

Luddite, sort of

My very favorite pen is a beautiful, retro-styled fountain pen. Which I bought online. I can't stand microwave ovens, and I announced this to the world on Twitter the other day (for those who cared). I am exulting in not having a functioning TV, but I have no qualms about getting my news-and-entertainment hit via the Internet (although, as the weeks go by, I find I'm spending more and more of my day in utter quiet). I love making food the old-fashioned way, but I forge my definition of what that means by looking stuff up on the Internet. I'm about to go hiking this weekend ("go bush," as the Aussies say), but I'll be setting up the final logistics by phone and email.

My point?

Hard-line Luddism is just as silly now as it was two hundred years ago. And hard-line technophilia is just as silly now as it was in my childhood, when we were told techology was in the process of solving everything. I'm not going to fatuously and santimoniously intone that "technology is entirely value-neutral; it's the uses people put it to that matter." We can all look around us and see that that's only partly true, that there are plenty of technologies that are, by their very nature, offensive and/or dangerous and/or just plain creepy. But I will say that clinging to retro things like fountain pens is something that should be done because one likes fountain pens, not because one hates PDAs, or because retro makes one feel smug and noble. It's not its retro-ness that makes my fountain pen so beloved. It's the feel of it, how it looks, how it writes, how much fun it is to use. Sure, part of that fun is the connection to the past. But that's not what makes it better, it's just what makes it fun.

Dates to put in your calendar

World Juggling Day, on June 20. I will be down on Thirroul Beach (in the COLD, rain, hail, or shine) at 10 a.m., juggling. If it is raining, I will juggle for 30 seconds. If it is not raining, I will juggle for as long as I can still feel my hands.



Second, something I just found out about: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Day on June 23. The background is on this blog: it's "[a] day of celebration and wonder! A day for all of us readers of science fiction and fantasy to reach out and say thank you to our favorite writers. A day, perhaps, to blog about our favorite sf/f writers. A day to reflect upon how written science fiction and fantasy has changed your life." There is also, moreover and inevitably, a Facebook page. Not that I'm fishing for a bottle of Amaretto or anything, but I'm not above letting you know about the day and hoping it catches on.... (No, really. No need for gifts. I know you were worried, but it's all right. No, I must insist.)



Celebrations all around!

Three Feet from Doom

The Leeds performance of my one-minute play "Three Feet from Doom" is now available for watching. Go to the Gi60 site to find a link that will give you the entire night's performance. I'm at timestamp 1:01 (one hour, one minute), but it's interesting to watch all the plays! (Some are fun or touching or thoughtful, some are...not, but each one only lasts about a minute so if you don't like a particular play, take a few deep breaths until another one comes along.)

I've also posted the text of the play at Dry As the Remainder Biscuit, my miscellaneous-writings blog. I hope you enjoy it!

P.S. It's a really strange feeling the first time one of one's plays is performed without one. I think it's a good thing....

I can haz?

At $165, I no can haz. But if you want to haz, it's at Etsy. (Found via boing boing.)

No no no no no no no no!

Is NOTHING sacred?



And yet...I know I'll watch it, first chance I get.

Good author karma*

One thing you hear a lot from authors (and it's good that you hear it) is how grateful they are to all the people who helped them along. Any writer who's being at all honest will acknowledge those hardass English teachers, that visiting author who gave a workshop during ninth grade, the best friend who squealed about how awesome that story was or gruffly asked you for another one (depending on their temperament), the D&D buddies on whom you tried out this or that character or plot device, that professor who told you your stuff was crap but then put so much effort into helping you fix it (confusing you forever about whether you really were good or not).... Anyway, we've all got those people in our lives.

Richard Harland (in case the name is not familiar to you, he's the one whose latest novel, Worldshaker, is just out; more info on his site) doesn't just talk about the gratitude thing. He's actually giving something back: 145 quick-read-sized pages of hard-won, dearly bought writing expertise, free for the taking. Just go to www.writingtips.com.au and start reading — he's been compassionate enough to set it up so you can start at Tip #1 and read straight through without having to go back to the main menu all the time.



*This means author karma that is good; but if you want to mentally insert the hyphen and think of it as karma that a good author has ("good-author karma"), that's okay, too.