Storyboard: How I Come Up With Children's Stories

I am an image-based writer when it comes to stories for young people (middle-grade).  For "The Girl Who Flew on a Whale," I was inspired by a photoshopped image of a girl touching a floating whale.  That story isn't finished yet, but it will be one day.  

A lot of my stories arise from seeing something that sparks my creative juices.  But sometimes my ideas arise from scenes in novels, which compels me to steal the real-world image, manipulate it, cut it up, throw in some weirdness and fantasy, and then put it all back together again.  Such is the life of "Mr. Pine's Woobly House (And the Mysterious Things Melinda Stone Found There)."  While reading Jean Toomer's Cane, I was inspired by the following lines:

The railroad boss said not to say he said it, but she could live, if she wanted to, on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road...Six trains each day rumbled past and shook the ground under her cabin. Fords, and horse- and mule-drawn buggies went back and forth along the road.  No one ever saw her.  Trainmen, and passengers who'd heard about her, threw out papers and food.  Threw out little crumpled slips of paper scribbled with prayers, as they passed her eye-shaped piece of sandy ground.  (Pg. 8-9)

I took that scene and came up with this:

Misunderstanding the LGBT (QUILTBAG) "Agenda" -- Or Why It's Not "Bigoted"

(I originally posted this on Google+, but since most of you probably don't follow me there, I figured you'd like to read this.  No, I don't cross post everything.  That would be annoying...)

To this day, I still find statements (or logic) such as the following ironically amusing: "I love you, but homosexuality is a sin." It's similar to "I don't support discrimination against LGBT (QUILTBAG) people, but I don't support same-sex marriage."

Such statements point to a failure to understand the other side. To LGBT (QUILTBAG) people, the various issues they are campaigning for, which extend from the right to marry to the various protections afforded to almost everyone else (job protection, protection against abuse, discrimination, violence, etc. etc. etc.), are all Civil Rights. In other words, regardless of what one might think about these people and their "agenda," they believe to the core of their being that this is a Civil Rights movement.

Within that context, can you really blame them for seeing bigots everywhere? From the mindset ofCivil Rights, any contradictory statement like one of the two I listed above would present a bigoted position: that is that saying "I don't support same-sex marriage because I believe it is a sin" is an dogmatic position, the adherence to which links one to bigotry within the context of a Civil Rightsdiscussion.

The fact that LGBT (QUILTBAG) people are right -- it is a Civil Rights movement -- is secondary to understanding why they are so adamant about their beliefs. Some like to say that these folks are just as intolerant as the people they claim to be against, which is little more than linguistic trickery to support a victim mentality. The reality is that almost all (notice the qualification) LGBT (QUILTBAG) people do not believe they have a right to control what you do and do not believe, just that you don't have a right to impose those beliefs on them by denying them the rights and privileges heterosexuals take for granted on a daily basis. At the end of the day, LGBT (QUILTBAG) people aren't trying to take something away from their opponents. Their opponents, however, are -- that's where bigotry finds a home.

Discussion Dept. Vol. 2: Reviewing Yourself and GRRM is Not a Punk

(I should probably change the name for this feature...)

Only two things are "bothering" me this week -- at least, only two things I can talk publicly about.  Let's get right to it:

Complaint #1:  I Give Myself Four Out of Five
It recently came to my attention that a number of authors, small and large, leave reviews on websites like Goodreads of their work.  These aren't self-published hacks (not that all SPers are hacks, just that a lot of the jackasses who do these kinds of activities happen to be SPers), but traditionally published authors.

Even if the "reviews" involve little more than giving oneself a 4-star rating on Goodreads, it is still unethical and borderline immoral.  Rating your own work, even if you claim that you are "being honest," skews the numbers and misrepresents your work to potential readers.  Not only is it not

RIP: Sara Douglass (a.k.a. Sara Warneke)

Sad news from Locus:

Australian author Sara Warneke, 54, who wrote bestselling fantasy novels as Sara Douglass, died September 26, 2011 of cancer.

She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer last year and lost her battle earlier today.

While I have not read much of her work, I know that the SF/F community will miss her terribly, not just as a person, but also as a writer.  It is a sad day when we lose one of our own and I wish the best for those she left behind.  My condolences to her friends and family.  May she live forever through her work.

SandF Episode 5.5 (Torture Cinema Meets 2012) is Live!

The new episode is here!  This week, Jen and I take the awful apocalypse movie 2012.  And it's really bad.  Really.  Trust us...we've been watching crappy movies for a while.

Wait?  It's not as bad as we thought it would be, but still pretty bad?  Oh...

Anyway.  If you'd like to hear what we have to say about this darned flick, go download the mp3 or follow us on iTunes!

Literary Space Opera: Does it or can it exist?

I've been mulling over the idea of writing a space opera, tentatively titled The Reorientation War.  One of the things that strikes me about space operas is the epic scope; much like epic fantasies, space opera offers an immense field in which to play.  For me, that means a lot of people, a lot of places, a lot of social, political, and physical conflict, and a lot of action.  And with The Reorientation War, I'm hoping to sidestep the hero paradigm and opt instead for a more brutal, realistic vision of how an interstellar human empire might function.

But through the course of considering space opera as a genre, I've started to wonder about form.  Is there such a thing as literary space opera?  Or do writers of space opera adopt the adventurous landscape established by early SO writers, and, thus, take on its contemporary "popular prose" style?

The reason I ask these question is because I consider literary fiction to be more formally oriented than other genres.  That is that literary fiction, for me, places an extraordinary amount of attention on the language and the interrelationship of parts, which may or may not leave room for a linear plot.  Since much of space opera seems oriented towards plot-oriented conflict, it seems to me that much of the SO genre is potentially antithetical to the "literary."

A great deal of what we associated with SO borrows liberally from the same sources as Star Wars

Discussion Dept Vol. 1: Heinlein, Vietnam Drinking Games, Sony, and Stupid Arguments About SF

Every once in a while I feel like complaining about a few things instead of engaging the issues in a more sustained manner.  Usually I don't blog about such complaints (which sometimes aren't complaints so much as confusions or general "mehness").

And that's why I've created the Complaint Department Discussion Department feature:  to give me a little space to complain or babble about a few things without sustained thought (or to point out stupid things people say and do in the SF/F community).

Here goes: