Vylar Kaftan

[Also posted to the WisCon group.]

Hello, folks! I’d like to announce an additional programming event which will not be on the program. (Mostly because I didn’t think of it until it was too late.)

There will be a Journeyman Writers’ Meeting for newer writers. Much like the Mid-Career Writers’ Meeting, we’ll talk about whatever the attendees want: craft, business, market news, and so forth.

Anyone with one or more SFWA-qualifying sales is welcome to attend.

It will be on Saturday during the lunch hour in Room 607, which is the overflow programming room. The lunch hour runs from 11:15-1:00, so we’ll try to get started at 11:45 or so. That gives people time to run over to Michelangelo’s and get a sandwich to bring along.

Please help spread the word. I’ll also put up details in the overflow-programming board at the con. Thanks.

So there’s a new science fiction anthology series called Warrior Wisewoman, from the fine folks at Norilana who also bring us Sword & Sorceress books. The book is edited by Roby James, and it’ll be out in June. The book looks gorgeous and I’m really excited about seeing it.

Kimberly Lundstrom of The Fix enjoyed the anthology and gave it a positive review. About my novelette, “Christmas Wedding,” she said:

A post-apocalyptic setting won’t spoil Mel’s “Christmas Wedding” in this poignant story by Vylar Kaftan. Corie and Mel have long planned to marry, but Corie suffered a traumatic brain injury the day Yellowstone erupted and the world changed. They have traveled hundreds of miles, finding danger along the way, as well as love and support from an unexpected source. Despite all they have been through and their current struggles, the women are determined to marry.

This is the moving and well-told story of the survival of three women, banding together to build a new life amidst the ashes of the old.

Disarm is up at Abyss & Apex.

I’ve written two stories using this method, both of which have sold.

Pick a song you love, preferably not one that’s widely known. Perhaps something by one of your favorite bands.

Play the song over and over and over. And over. Until you know every word.

Now start writing a story from the mood the song inspires in you. Use fragmentary bits from the song as inspiration. BUT (here’s the catch) the RIAA will come sue your butt if you actually use any lyrics or any traceable imagery. So you have to mutate the phrases and reword them in such a way that no one can ever connect them to the song. Change details, change angles, change settings, whatever you’ve got to do to be sure you’re covered. When you’re done, the reader shouldn’t be able to tell what song you were using. But if you told someone what song to listen to, they’d see the secret connections.

It helps to put the song on repeat while you draft, once you’re to the point where you’re not really listening anymore.

And it’s got to be a song you totally love.

I need to do this again. I know exactly what song to use, too.

Writers workshop, Friday morning 10 AM - 12 noon.

Panels:

Title: Juvenelia: What We Wrote Before We Were Writers

” A panel of professional writers reads bits of what they wrote in junior high and high school. Guaranteed to be revealing, entertaining, and a hoot and a half. ”
Friday 4-5:15
Senate A

M: Betsy James, Vylar Kaftan Joyce Frohn

Title: LiveJournal and WisCon

“You’re on LiveJournal (LJ). Like a lot of the people at WisCon, you enjoy keeping in touch with your WisCon friends through this powerful tool for connections. You might even have come to WisCon for the first time because you heard about it from LJ friends who share your interest in feminism and sff. You relish the chance to engage in discussions year round about the topics that make you passionate–gender, race, power and privilege, writing, etc. But all of a sudden, you’ve made someone on LJ mad–*really* mad. More than that, lots of people you don’t know are mad, now that your comment has been linked. What do you do now? Jump in, cave in, bow out? How do you respond at all and keep a measure of your privacy, given that the people blogging may know your real name, your sexual orientation, the details of your marriage and your relationship with your parents, and are in a position to share a lot, online or offline, with the untold numbers who now think they know what an ig!
norant person you are?”
Friday, 8:45-10:00 P.M.
Assembly

M: Vylar Kaftan, Bill Humphries, Lilian Edwards, Candra Gill

Title: What Can’t We Forgive?

” SF/F fans can be forgiving sorts; we’ll let violations of physical laws go by without too much notice, permit battles with armies too large to be supported by their populations, and so on. What won’t we forgive and read on? Some people won’t forgive Orson Scott his personal politics, while some won’t forgive the moral worldview of his fiction. Some won’t forgive Anne McCaffrey her tent-peg hypothesis, while others won’t let Heinlein get away with any of a wide variety of sins. Some people can’t forgive China Mieville’s preaching, or Samuel R. Delany’s depictions of underage sex. Where do people draw the line, either with regards to an author’s work or their personal behavior, and what does it mean when we can’t forgive? ”
Saturday, 4:00-5:15 P.M.
Capitol A

M: Steven Schwartz, Susan Palwick, Judith Moffett, Ian Hagemann,Vylar Kaftan

Title: Time To Put Down The Laptop?

“Everyone and her sister/brother/dog seems to be blogging these days. Do you find blogging a waste of creative energy and a bane to more polished fiction? Does talking about your process keep you from engaging in it? Counting your words rather than crafting them? Or do you think this is a false economy of scarcity? Does blogging actually help you write more, better, faster, better-crafted? If so, how? ”
Sunday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Caucus

M: Alan Bostick, M.K. Hobson, Naamen Tilahun, Cecilia Tan, Vylar Kaftan

Title: Taboo

[A transgressive reading. In other words, we'll be reading dirty, nasty stuff. Good thing my parents aren't coming to WisCon this year...]

Sunday, 1:00-2:15 P.M.
Conference2

M.K. Hobson, Jennifer Pelland, Rachel Swirsky, Vylar Kaftan

Dear WisCon attendees (or whoever feels like answering),

I will be reading in the “Taboo” reading along with Jennifer Pelland, Rachel Swirsky, and M.K. Hobson. We’ll be reading some of our most edgy and dangerous work. Mine involves rather a lot of fecal matter.

As part of the reading, we’ll be holding a drawing for a few lucky winners. We’re each going to bring a book or magazine that we have a story in.

My question: Would you rather win a copy of Bandersnatch or Paper Cities?

“Disarm” will appear any day now in the next issue of Abyss & Apex. E-publishing sometimes works on a much faster schedule than traditional publishing, which is nice.

It’s my first time re-appearing in a market. I published Nine Thousand Four Hundred Ninety-Four Days there in 2006, which went on to be republished in Spanish at Axxon. Here’s hoping that the new story is as well received.

Anyone had to make major lifestyle changes for health reasons in a very short period of time? Have you had trouble sticking to a plan even though you know it’s not really optional?

I could use some help here. I know what I have to do, and some days I just can’t make myself do it. I think the biggest problem is that I’m trying to make health changes NOW that would normally take a person months or possibly years to achieve. And while normally there’s some room for slacking off, I get really sick when I screw up. So I don’t have the luxury of easing into this.

Anyone have an inspiring story for me? You can post, or drop me a note privately if you prefer at any of my email addresses. Or you can use w e b AT vylarkaftan DOT n e t to reach me.

P.S. Like I said before, I’ll be fine long-term. But I do have to change my diet and exercise habits to achieve that.

From stopword: What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

56 attempted, 45 completed.

[Hmm, I can't seem to get underlines right. I will bold & asterisk the ones I read for school. Or in some cases, italicize and asterisk...]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses [I'm scared of this one]
*Madame Bovary
*The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
*The Tale of Two Cities [It's _A_ Tale of Two Cities!]
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies [but I really want to read this]
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
*The Iliad
Emma [I did see the movie, but it's one of my less-favorite Austen stories so I never read it]
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
*Mrs. Dalloway [I read it for school AND I didn't finish it AND I wrote a paper on it anyway.]
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books [And I'm really glad I did.]
Memoirs of a Geisha [on my shelf, waiting to be read]
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
*The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
*Middlemarch [This is one of the most boring books I ever read.]
*Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
*The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) [I read part of it for school.]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility [I loved the movie and really ought to read the book.]
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
*To the Lighthouse [I took a college course on Virginia Woolf, only to discover that I hated Virginia Woolf's work. Maybe I wasn't ready for it yet...]
Tess of the D’Urbervilles [Always thought I should try this one.]
Oliver Twist
*Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables [Yes, the whole thing.]
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time [This was excellent.]
Dune
*The Prince
The Sound and the Fury [I really like Faulkner but I'm scared of Joyce. No idea why.]
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon [Not really excited about trying this.]
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces [Also on my shelf, never read it.]
A Short History of Nearly Everything [I thought this was awesome.]
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion [Yet another movie I loved where I really ought to read the book.]
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

4 out 5 stars, with comments on three stories, one of which was mine:

Another story that I liked was “Godivy” by Vylar Kaftan. Language is one of the strengths of this interstitial piece but Kaftan also sprinkles this tale with sensuality, comedy, and tragedy–all in the span of a thousand words or so.

The full review is here.

I am seriously impressed with the way Matt Kressel and Kathy Sedia have worked hard to get publicity for Paper Cities. It’s a fine anthology and I’m glad so many people are hearing about it.

Since the internet is full of gripes about publishers, I’ll take the time to say that Senses Five Press treats its writers well and I recommend them. I’ve been very happy with my experiences.

Neile tagged me with this meme.

Here are your rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences here.
5. Put the meme and answer in your journal, tag five people and the madness continues.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, edited by Jonathan Weiner.

But when I ask what, precisely, he is trying to do, he says that he won’t discuss it over the phone. In another late-night phone call, Lamo reveals that he recently went to a doctor, again announced that he was “an accused felon,” and said that he wanted his life to be less stressful. To Lamo’s annoyance, the doctor gave him prescription sleeping pills and a four-week supply of Paxil, which he refuses to take.

I’ll tag some LJ folks. the_atomic_punk, katybeth, ombriel, unferth, dawn_pillsbury.