New Orleans Genre Writers Conference

This weekend I went to the New Orleans Genre Writers Conference.  This was the first, inaugural one. Man, I’m tired.  I don’t know why, but these sort of conferences really take it out of me.

One of my fellow attendees suggests its because you are concentrating so hard, listening to the speakers, taking notes.  This makes sense to me.  Your brain is only five percent of your body weight, but consumers twenty percent of your body’s resources. A very energy-intensive organ.

Well, as the first conference, it was a bit ragged. A lot of the programming went over time, and some of the presenters really rambled, saying little of value.  But any conference is like that, I’ve found, whether a professional conclave or a science fiction convention – some panels are great, some are terrible, most are mediocre.

I also wish it was, as advertised, a little more genre-specific. Like, how to create voice in science fiction, instead of just voice in general.  Or a panel on what, if anything, joining the genre professional associations like RWA or SFWA can do for you.

I also expected somewhat bigger names for the price, than just the local crowd.  Its good to get to know your local writers, but I can meet them at more reasonable venues. Well, it is just the first year.  I imagine a busy New York editor doesn’t want to commit to a newbie local con.

It would be good to have some programming about “independent publishing,” as they call it these days.  Its a viable alternative for people now.

But since it was the first year of local people bootstrapping a conference from nothing, I think it was a good effort.  The venue at the Courtyard Marriott in the Warehouse District was quite convenient for me.  I hope to be back next year. Maybe I’ll even be on the other side of the table.

0

My Blog Tour Entry

My guest post for the Dirty Magick blog tour is up at the ParaYourNormal blog.  Check it out:

The Magic of New Orleans

I was asked to write about “the magic of New Orleans.”  There are also exceprpts from several stories in the book, including mine.  I hope you’ll take a look.

0

Dirty Magick Blog Tour Begins

So, this is cool.  Charlie Brown, my editor for the Dirty Magick: New Orleans anthology that I recently placed a story in, has organized a blog tour to celebrate the publication of the book.

The first stop is at book review blog Mythical Books,  with a guest post by editor Charlie, and excerpts from several of the stories in the anthology, including my story, “The Sacred Marriage of Etienne McCray.”

There is also a giveaway of five paperback copies (US only) and five Kindle copies of Dirty Magick: New Orleans.  You can follow me on Twitter @kmcorby in the Rafflecopter there for an extra chance to win!

I’ll follow along with the blog tour as it progresses.  I’m writing a guest post in the tour later on in the month, and I’ll link to that blog when it goes live.

This is my first blog tour ever. I’m psyched!

0

God, D&D, don’t rape Sansa!

SPOILERS for the SONG OF ICE AND FIRE BOOKS by George RR Martin.  And possibly for the show.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

 

 

I’m concerned about a possible upcoming plot twist on the TV show GAME OF THRONES.  I guess it is my favorite TV show — the only one I watch live, and I usually rewatch it a couple times during the course of the week.  (It’s a very, very complicated show; sometimes it absolutely demands a second viewing.)  I’m afraid the show is teeing up for a serious misstep that could permanently damage the show’s reputation and enjoyment among the fans, including myself.

It’s the immediate fate of Sansa Stark, the only surviving Stark (as far as most of Westeros knows) and therefore the Heir to Winterfell.

As you probably know, Sansa has lately been under the creepy pedo-uncle “protection” and tutelage of Littlefinger, and his plan for her is alarming to say the least.  He has taken her home to Winterfell and betrothed her to the Bastard of Bolton, Reese Bolton’s psychopathic son and recently legitimized heir, Ramsay Bolton.  The marraige will, the Boltons think, legitimize their claim on Wintefell and the post of Warden of the North.

But Littlefinger knows Stannis Baratheon is marching from the Wall to attack the Boltons at Winterfell.  He feels confident that Stannis will prevail, take Winterfell, and slaughter the Boltons, thus leaving Sansa in possession of Winterfell and the natural choice to be Wardeness of the North.  (Under Littlefinger’s control.)  While he waits for Stannis to arrive, Littlefinger bugs out south to conduct more scheming with the Lannisters in King’s Landing.

Well, this is a hell of a gamble.  If Stannis fails, that leaves poor ladylike Sansa alone in the grip of that stone psycho, Ramsay Snow/Bolton.  Ramsay, impressed with Sansa’s beauty and nobility, promises Littlefinger he will never hurt her.  But as we all know quite well, Ramsay is incapable of not hurting someone.  Cause he’s a psycho killer.

If you’ve read the books, you know this is taking a very disturbing turn.  Sansa’s story so far this season is not identical to, but parallels a storyline in the books.  In the books, Ramsay Snow/Bolton is married to Sansa’s childhood friend, Jeyne Poole, who is put forward by some faction (I can’t remember who) as a fake Arya Stark, a fake heir to the North.  And Ramsay, being the monster that he is, rapes, beats, and brutalizes Arya/Jeyne, and utterly breaks her as a person.  It’s said in the books that her nightly sobbing in her tower rooms at Winterfell is demoralizing the entire North.

Is that to be Sansa’s fate?  Raped and broken by Ramsay’s torture?  You’d think not — Sansa is one of the major characters, a Stark, one of the putative “good guys” in this morally gray universe.  And she has already undergone unimaginable torment at the hands of another psycho, the unlamented Joffrey Baratheon, for years in King’s Landing.

But it could be, it could be.  Sophie Turner, the actress who plays Sansa, has spoken in several interviews about filming an especially traumatic scene about midway through the season.

This, I think, would be a major mistake.  Now, Sansa is one of my least favorite characters in GOT, both the show and the books.  She is passive, whiny, spoiled, clings to her ridiculous illusions of chivalry while constantly having her nose rubbed in the brutality of Westeros.  And, in the books, by the end of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, she still hasn’t figured out that it’s better to be a player in the Game of Thrones than a pawn. Although she finally seems to be figuring it out, with Littlefinger’s example, in Season 5 of the show.

But as little as I like her, I can’t stand the thought of her being raped.  She’s just a girl!  What is she, about seventeen now in the timeline of the show?  (Even younger in the books.)  A gently raised girl, who would have no chance defending herself against that brute Ramsay — who would barely even understand what was happening to her.  Many of the characters in the show are monstrous, and they earn in large part a lot of what is coming to them.  Like the Hound.  Even Ned Stark earned his beheading in a way, by being so rigid and honorbound in the moral abyss of King’s Landing, by being so blind to the evil going on everywhere around him.  (Not that he deserved it, of course, but it was a forseeable outcome of his naive and inept course of action.)

But if there’s any character that’s blameless in GAME OF THRONES, it’s Sansa.  She’s blameless in large part because she’s so damn passive, but as far as I can recall, she has not hurt, killed or betrayed anyone.  She has lost her entire family and is alone in the world except for skeevy Baelish.  Violating such a soft and weak character would be like shooting a puppy.  Sansa has suffered enough.

You’d think, no, there’s no way they’d do that, it would be monstrous.  But the show had made similar boneheaded choices before.  Especially, I’m afraid, when it comes to rape.

You know it’s true.  Witness the way they stripped Danaerys’s consent from her marriage-consummation scene with Khal Drogo, turning what was an empowering scene for Dany in the books (and a humanizing scene for Drogo) into the frank taking of a teenage girl by a grown man.  Remember her tears as he deflowered her.

Witness the absolutely horrific scene last season when Jamie Lannister raped his sister and lover Cersei, right next to the bier holding the body of their dead son, Joffrey.  Cersei sobs, “No, no, stop, it’s wrong,” while Jamie throws her down and burrows under her skirts.  God!  And remember the way the producers consistently disavowed it, too, after that episode aired, claiming repeatedly that it was consensual and it was not a rape, despite the very obvious filmic evidence to the contrary.  Even GRRM publicly distanced himself from that scene.

So yes, you’d think the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, would have sense enough not to do that.  But there’s every evidence to suggest that no, they don’t.

But this time I really think this would be going a bridge too far.  We know Sansa much better than we knew Dany at the wedding in Season 1.  And Sansa is a far more vulnerable character than Cersei.  I don’t think this violation of Sansa would be something the viewers could forgive.  I don’t even like Sansa, but when I think about it I just feel sick.  I don’t see that it would serve any purpose in the plot, either.  Sansa has suffered for years and years.  It’s time for her to start fighting back, and winning.  This sort of debasing violence would be a backwards turn in her arc, not forwards.

More than that, it would compound with the other scenes to make me think that the constant prurience and objectification of women’s bodies in GAME OF THRONES  is a feature of the show, not a bug — something these guys enjoy for it’s own right, not some gross fanservice they keep throwing in to attract the dudebro demographic. And this would give me a real problem with the show.

I guess this post makes me sound pretty sex-negative, and I’m not really.  I have no real problem with all the tits and ass and fucking in the show, except that there’s so much of it, it gets tiresome through repetition.  A lot of it is just straight-up gratuitous, and the sexposition is more often than not, ludicrous.  It’s not that I think it’s wrong or bad, it’s just boring.  But rape?  That’s different.

Well, the episode is already in the can, and it airs tomorrow.  So all my plaints here are surely for naught.  But I can still hope that after the Jamie/Cersei debacle last season, D&D learned their lesson when it comes to sexually humiliating main female characters.  One can only hope.  But not trust. Clearly not that.

0

… and why I started again.

Hurricane Katrina drove my whole life off the rails.  We lost our house and everything we owned.  I lost my job, as most City employees were laid off after the disaster.  We spent months crashing at the homes of family and friends.

When we started to claw our life back together, I went to graduate school.  I had been planning to go anyway, and I was in Baton Rouge anyway, where Louisiana State University is.  If you don’t know what to do with your life, go to graduate school.  So I was very busy with library school for a couple years, and then moving back to New Orleans, reestablishing my career, buying a new house.  Writing, which I had abandoned anyway, was not on my radar for many years.

I started writing again because of dreams.  Not “I wish” dreams, but actual dreams, while I slept.

I have always had a very active, detailed dream life.  I was trained to it, it’s a family tradition.  At the breakfast table my mother would ask us kids what we dreamed the night before.  She would relate her dreams, and we would analyze them.  Her parents and sisters had done it , too.  So I learned to remember and record my dreams at a young age.

A couple years ago, I started having dreams where I was writing.  Just that — I would sit at a table, with a notebook, and I would write a short story or an essay.  That was it, that was the dream.  Sometimes when I woke I remembered the story and could scribble some notes down; more often I forgot it.

Or, I would compose a screenplay.  I would see it, on a page in screenplay format, materializing before me as I narrated it, with stage directions and everything.  But the page in a way would be transparent, too, and behind it I would see the actual film, as filmed, the final cut, with edits and scoring, running behind the page as I told it. (In the dreamspace, you can write, and think, much faster than you can in meatspace.)

Now, I’m not claiming any of this stuff was a masterpiece.  In the usual way of dreams, I’ll bet a lot of it wouldn’t have made much sense to my waking mind.  But that’s not the point.  The point is, I was writing stories again in my dreams.  Not just telling stories, or experiencing them, but writing them, with words, on paper.

After a few months I finally twigged to what was going on.  Oh, I thought.  I should start writing again.  My subconscious wants to write.

So I joined a writer’s workshop I heard about at the public library.  I dusted off some of my old short stories and a novel, and workshopped them.  I did Nanowrimo 2013 and “won” it, although that novel is going to be much longer than 50,000 words and is a long way from being finished.

And I started writing short stories again, too.  One of which I just published in the urban fantasy anthology Dirty Magick: New Orleans.  Here’s the link to the e-book version; the paperback edition is forthcoming.  (Ha-ha, self promotion!)

I don’t have any particular plan for this new phase of my writing career (if you can even call it that.)  I contemplate it with non-attachment as best I can.  I don’t want to become a full-time writer.  I don’t hope to support myself.

I just have this gift.  I was given this free gift by the universe, the ability to string words together in a pleasing and meaningful way, and it would be a sin not to use it.  Such a waste.  The universe doesn’t give many gifts; don’t waste them.  Life is hard enough without throwing away what you’ve been given to make it better.

That’s why I started writing again.

0

Why I quit writing…

In the early 2000s, after about ten years of work, a few sales, three Nanowrimos, and two unpublished novels, I stopped writing for a long time.  I was totally burned out and discouraged, and a series of events transpired that made me feel like the entire business was hopeless.

First, I managed to finish Nanowrimo that year, “winning” by writing 50,000 words of a work I had come to totally despise.  But it was a Pyrrhic victory.  Once I uploaded the file to the Nano website to verify my win late one night in late November, I closed the file and never, ever looked at it again, not to this day.  Writing that NaNovel had become a kind of death march that left me feeling totally exhausted and discouraged.

Next, a story that I had poured my whole heart into, a near-future science fiction story for which I had done massive amounts of research, and which I had lovingly targeted toward a particular market, a science fiction magazine — came back from that magazine with a boilerplate rejection.  You know, a form letter — sometimes it’s really just a flyer —  that says, thanks but no thanks.  This was a stinging rebuke for two reasons.  One, although I hadn’t sold many short stories, the ones that were rejected didn’t get boilerplate rejections. I usually got a personal note from the editor scribbled on the manuscript, like “It’s good, but not for us,” or “keep trying.”  Sometimes, an actual letter advising how the ms. could be improved, or suggesting another market to try.  That a story I would sure would sell came back with a boilerplate reject was heartbreaking.  Second, many of the readers in the workshop I currently belonged to specifically suggested that magazine, independent of my ever mentioning it.  “This would be great for Magazine X!” That everyone could see this except that magazine’s editor was crushingly discouraging.

So I was feeling pretty rocky when the third thing happened.  I met a local author at a con when he gave a reading.  He had just published his first novel to good acclaim.  Upon researching him after the con, I discovered he was a member of George Alec Effinger’s writer’s workshop.  That workshop arose out of an adult extension class on writing science fiction that George taught at the University of New Orleans.  Many people — my parents, my husband — had encouraged me to take that class, but I proudly refused.  “I don’t need a class on how to write.  I know how to write!”  I was young and full of myself enough, I guess, not to realize that one can always improve one’s craft — an artist is always learning.  Nor did I ever imagine that a class could evolve into a workshop, an ongoing community, and at that time I didn’t realize, to my detriment, that artists need community, need support to keep going in the mercantile American culture that is brutally dismissive of art and creativity.

I guess that was my first inkling of that, when I realized I could have joined a sustaining writer’s workshop, led by a Hugo and Nebula winner no less, that might have nurtured me and guided me toward completion of a novel.  But I was too full of myself to do it.

(I’ve come to realize over the last few years that I have many fixed, rigid ideas about things, all sorts of things, that limit me in ways I never realized.  Not a good trait for a speculative fiction writer.  I am trying now to be more flexible and open-minded.)

And then, George Alec Effinger died.  So I guess this was in April 2002.  (Poor bastard, he had cancer.  He was only 55.) No more classes.  No more chances to join that workshop.  Opportunity lost.

At that time, having seen some startling reversals in the lives of older friends and relatives, I had become rather possessed of the idea that one could make a fatal mistake in life, one that would send you down the wrong track for good and all, and you would never recover.  You wouldn’t know that moment when it came, but it would be obvious later, as you gnawed on the dry bones of your discontent.  (Yeah, I was not in a good headspace those days.)

But this was it!  I could see it, my fatal mistake.  Not joining that class, not becoming part of that workshop.  Flailing alone in the wilderness, while other writers, no more talented that me, learned and advanced, helping each other.  I should have joined that sci-fi writing class in 1996 or whenever.  Not joining was my fatal mistake.

Reading that writer’s blog, realizing the implications for myself, I just put my head down on my desk.  I remember that moment very clearly.  It was the final straw.

My writing career seemed like a failure and a wasted opportunity at that point.  Pointless.  A black hole sucking the joy out of my life.

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I told my mother.

“So take a break,”  she said.  “It’s not on a timeline.  You can always come back to it later.”

So I did.  I stopped writing, for about three years.

I was just thinking of taking it up again, when Hurricane Katrina happened.

1

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑