mistborn

A few weeks ago I talked about the Hugo Voter Packet and how for a $60 supporting membership to Worldcon you could get copies of most of the Hugo Award-nominated works. Well, the packet was finally released today, so if you're already a member go download it now! If you're not a Worldcon member already, check out the cover art of the nominated works (it looks like pretty much everything except for the Dramatic Presentations are included in the packet) and consider joining so you can vote for the Hugo Awards by the July 31st deadline. My Hugo Award-nominated novella THE EMPEROR'S SOUL is in the packet alongside the other Best Novella nominees, and it's an honor to be in such a group.

This week's Writing Excuses podcast episode talks about short story writing with Mary Robinette Kowal. Mary has published more short stories than the rest of us combined, and she has a lot of good helpful things to say about the process.

I sent out a newsletter last week. Here it is. If you're interested in getting these three or four times per year, and getting an email reminder when I'm signing near your city, sign up here.

Tonight I'm signing in San Jose and tomorrow I'll be in Albuquerque. Details on my events page. I've also left quite a few signed books at my previous tour stops, so give the following stores a call!

theferrett

“Cammy is the perfect woman,” says Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch.  “Cammy has a value system that comes from the fifties.  We were on an airplane, and a pilot – a lady pilot – introduced herself to me.  When she went back into the cockpit, Cammy said, ‘I’d rather she be serving Cokes and peanuts, and let a man be the pilot.’

“She designed her life around, ‘How can I please a man?’ She went to massage school, cooking school – she bought a book on blowjobs. I wish more girls would do that. If more girls did what Cammy’s doing… my business would go down.”

And good Lord, I am filled to brimming with revulsion.

The thing is, I’m not revulsed by Cammy’s choice.  If Cammy is content living subserviently, and that makes her happy, then I say “Go, Cammy.”  (Even if I suspect Cammy is perpetuating an elaborate ruse to extract cash from gullible men’s pockets.  They say the best salesman never appears to be a salesman.  Cammy’s probably getting exactly what she wants, from men who probably deserve it.)

But I’d never want a woman whose whole job was dedicated to pleasing me.  That has nothing to do with feminism; it has everything to do with the fact that ultimately, I think humans turn into monsters when they have all of their needs met without cost.

Maybe that’s because I worked in retail – where if you’re smart, the attitude has to be, “The customer is always right.”  Because you don’t want the customer to feel dumb; nothing closes a customer’s wallet quicker than, “Gee, your concerns are stupid.”  And they’ll tell people how they were insulted, spreading bad tales about you wherever they go.

So when they cram your mouth full of shit, you swallow it and smile.

Working retail, eventually you come to realize that “reasonable” is determined by past history.  You think it’s reasonable that a cup of good coffee is $3.95 because you grew up in a Starbucks culture… but talk to a guy who grew up in the 1950s, when coffee was an inflation-adjusted dollar at best.  You think it’s reasonable that drivers will give you the finger and honk at you in traffic, because you grew up in Manhattan.  You think it’s reasonable that people smoke in restaurants, because you live in Europe.

The important point: that “reasonable” creeps up, depending on what people do.

As humans, we’re bounded by other people’s reactions.  And if everyone acts like you’re completely normal and wonderful, you internalize that.. even if you’re completely awful.  On some level, we all think, “Well, if we get out of hand, someone will tell me I’m too much trouble.”

Remove those blocks – and sure enough, you start becoming too much trouble.

Wanna know why celebrities implode?  Because they’re swaddled in a culture that caters to their every whim because they’re a non-replaceable entity, and when normal people see them it’s usually in a gawking fawningness of “Oh my God, it’s you!  I’m so pleased to meet you!”  So their waiters go to extra miles that no normal person would get, and when they casually ask for a Diet Coke at precisely 45 degrees with a titanium straw in it, everyone just brings it to them.  Nobody notes this is actually really a pain in the ass to do for them, or if they do, they agree that oh, you absolutely need a perfectly-chilled drink.

Eventually, you come to think that this is reality.  That the 45-degree Diet Coke with the titanium straw is not just you, but universal and easy to do, it’s happened a thousand times before.  And then a waiter forgets and you get the wrong drink – and for the celebrity, it’s like they got brought a cup of transparent coffee with broken glass at the bottom.  It’s such a stupidly-done thing that it feels like an insult.  How could they not know?

So: embarrassing shitfit in a public place.  And to some extent, it’s not the celebrity’s fault – it’s the fault of all these people around them, nodding and agreeing and convincing them that yes, this is the way the world is.  Sure, the celebrity went off the fucking rails, but all of their PR agents and fans and entourage quietly removed the rails months ago.  In some ways, it’s astounding that they kept on the right path for as long as they did.

And you see that in retail, where people think, “Oh, I’m always right!  So I’ll sit in the coffee shop and slop coffee all over this magazine I have no intention of paying for, then leave it sprawled on the counter in a pile of sugar and drool.”  They think, “I’m always right, so when I bring back a tattered book with no receipt and want cash for it, the clerk who’s refusing me needs a good, solid yelling.”  They think, “I’m always right, so why aren’t these clerks catering to my every whim?”

And yes: you get more money from these nitwits.  But you do so by catering to their dysfunction.  Which means you get richer off of exploiting people’s psychological weak points.  (A point I make, in a somewhat more hammer-handed way, in my story Dead Merchandise.)  You actually make them a little insane – and some of them a lot insane – to harvest their cash.

So for me, having someone eager to cater to my every need makes them, in a low-grade way, the enemy of my sanity.  I want people who question, who remind me of the work this took, who tell me when I’m inconveniencing them.  A woman like Cammy (or at least how Cammy presents herself) would undermine the integrity of the person I’m trying to be, give me an inflated sense of self-esteem I might not deserve, slowly push me towards the land o’crazy expectations.

She’s not the perfect woman, Denis.  She’s a perfect servant, perhaps.  But perfect servants come with hidden costs, and I for one would be very reticent to pay them.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

theferrett

Long-time readers will know: May is the time my Seasonal Affective Disorder usually creeps in.  For a few weeks out of the year I’ll become a sniffling pile of self-hatred, sometimes skidding as far as self-harm, weeping and curling into a ball.  This misery lasts for about three to six weeks, during which in lesser moments all of my suicide attempts have arrived, and when I emerge it’s a slow crawl.

This is where the sadness usually starts to tickle.  And… it hasn’t yet.  Which concerns me.

The thing is, if there’s any year when I might not have my usual SAD, this would be it.  I’ve had major surgery in January, which my body is still recuperating from in some minor ways.  I’ve changed my diet and exercise habits.  And I’m on new medications, specifically a heavy dosage of Vitamin D in order to get my cholesterol and body chemistry back to proper levels.

So is it going to arrive?  Maybe.  I felt very sad on Saturday but then I ate a sandwich and realized my blood sugar was low, and everything went better.  I’m feeling a little low now, but is that SAD or just a reluctance to charge ahead with a tedious work day?

No clue.  Until then, I’m sort of waiting for the axe to fall – maybe it’ll show up late.  (It used to arrive in June.)  I’m on alert, trying to be careful about how I react, so I don’t take anything too much to heart.

But once a year, I usually have to endure a time of knives and anguish.  That may or may not show up this year.  In some ways, waiting for it to hit is nearly as bad as the depression itself, being tensed for a blow that may never arrive.  On the other hand, I’m relatively content, and finishing up my novel.

A strange place to be.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

kate_nepveu

The Pip has been sleeping poorly, which means Farscape in the wee hours.

( S01E04, 'Throne for a Loss'Collapse )

( S01E05, 'Back And Back And Back To The Future'Collapse )

Spoil me and have your food ration eaten by a puppet.

*goes looking for Moya icon* comment(s) | add comment (how-to) | link

dewline

Okay, Marissa Mayer: I just got a look at the new Flickr setup.

Endless scrolling?  You messed up by inflicting that on me. I don't have access to THAT much bandwidth!

money.cnn.com/2013/05/20/technology/social/yahoo-flickr/index.html

jimhines

I’m still waiting for someone — anyone — to present an argument against same-sex marriage that doesn’t boil down to, “My religion doesn’t approve” or “I think it’s icky.” Using the former as an excuse for discrimination is about as unAmerican as you can get, and the latter is just asinine.

While politicians and bigots continue to argue that “those people” don’t need “special rights or protections” under the law, here’s some of what’s been going on recently…

In Texas, a judge enforced a clause in Carolyn Compton’s divorce papers which states that, “someone who has a ‘dating or intimate relationship’ with the person or is not related ‘by blood or marriage’ is not allowed after 9 p.m. when the children are present.” Since Carolyn’s partner of three years is a woman and Texas has laws against same-sex marriage, the judge has essentially made it illegal for them to live together.

In New York, Elliot Morales shot Marc Carson, a gay man, in the face at point blank range, killing him. Elliot had followed Carson and his companion, and was heard yelling anti-gay slurs and asking, “You want to die tonight?”

In Chatham, Canada, an openly gay 13-year-old boy was attacked by four older teenagers, who called him “faggot” and “queer,” told him he was going to hell, and beat him. One of the boys pulled a knife and threatened to kill him.

Rep. Mark Pocan became the first member of Congress to obtain a congressional ID card identifying his same-sex partner as his spouse. However, his husband is still legally excluded from receiving health, pension, and other benefits.

In Washington state, lawmakers have proposed a bill that would provide an exception to anti-discrimination law and allow businesses to refuse service based on sexual orientation.

David and Jason married in New York in 2012, but Jason is a UK citizen. As a result, Jason is unable to stay in the country. In order to see his husband, Jason has to get a Tourist Visa, which allows them to be together for 90 days. Jason is now being warned that he’s used too many Tourist Visas, and has been advised to stay out of the U.S. for at least six months.

In New York, two gay men were pursued by a group that shouted anti-gay slurs and then beat them. Both victims were hospitalized. One required eye surgery.

So go ahead. Explain to me why we’re still denying people equal rights and protection under the law. Explain to me why any of this is okay. Explain how you sleep at night, knowing that these things are the direct result of our refusal to recognize “those people” as equal. Or even to recognize them as people.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

theferrett

If you were to log into StarCityGames about two years back, you’d have logged in with your username.  And once you’d chosen your username, you could never ever change it.  If you had, in a fit of pique, chosen “SirPoopyhead” as your user name, that was what you’d have to use forever.

The reason you couldn’t change it was because of a silly choice that had been made back in the year 2000, when we’d first purchased our shopping cart software.  The people who had designed that shopping cart decided to use the login name as the unique way of determining who you were – and when we’d created our own customized shopping cart, we hadn’t changed that.  So for all intents and purposes, that arbitrary string of characters – “SirPoopyhead” – was the single factor that made you you.

Problem is, that’s actually terrible design.

See, on the back end of an application, we have literally hundreds of places where we store the answer to the question, “What customer did this?”  What customer placed this order? What customer tried to log in at 4:56:15 am?  What customer ordered a Premium subscription?  What customer has $14.15 in store credit?  And the answer to each of those questions, each answer stored in a separate location, was “SirPoopyhead.”

The problem is that if we changed that string of characters to, say, “SirGalahad,” then we’d have to manually change that string in every one of the hundreds of tables that referenced it.  If we forgot to update just one table (or something went wrong in the middle of all these updates), then somewhere lurking in our database there would be a bunch of records that referenced the now-no-longer existing “SirPoopyhead,” which means that we’d have lost data.  This could be very troubling if we were asking the question, “What customer had paid us money?” when we needed to give you a refund.

And with every new feature we added, this problem got worse.  We added gift certificates, so here’s yet another place we need to store “SirPoopyhead.”  We added wishlists, each of which was duly recorded under “SirPoopyhead.”  Hundreds, thousands, of locations each keyed to this arbitrary string of letters.

Worse, turns out logins are a terrible idea.  Customers forget their logins all the time, having made them up to check out.  If their login was associated with an old email address, they might not even be able to get access to their old login without manual intervention.  We literally had, in some cases, customers who’d created twelve separate accounts because they kept forgetting what their login was supposed to be.

No, what we needed was a nice clean email login like Facebook.  Everybody remembers their emails.  But people change their email addresses a lot – and as noted, having to constantly change “SirPoopyhead@hotmail.com” to something else had a nonzero risk of something going wrong.

What you need, as it turns out, is a unique ID to reference each customer that never changes!  You!  SirPoopyhead!   You’re now customer #123456, and every question we’ll ever ask about you now returns the answer, “Customer #123456.”   Then you can change your email, you can change your login, you can change anything you want – all we’ll be doing is looking up the information for Customer #123456.

But.

But.

Come this point in our shopping cart’s development, we had literally thousands of places in the code that used the login name instead of the customer ID to answer questions.  And it wasn’t as simple as a “search-and-replace”; some of these were complex queries that we’d completely have to rewrite from scratch.  And then, because we’re responsible website owners, we’d want to test all of these changes thoroughly to make sure nothing got broken.

Yet if we wanted to do this, we’d have to do it soon.  Because we were hiring more and more programmers, and adding new features daily, each of which referenced “SirPoopyhead.”  The longer we put this change off, the more places we’d have to change the code.

That’s what’s called technological debt.  Thanks to a bad decision made literally twelve years ago, we had a ton of code that caused us to have to jump through a lot of hoops for what seemed like it should be a simple thing.  And every month that went by without changing this sprawling, underlying code was another month’s worth of updates that would also, eventually, have to be changed.

What followed next was a tedious and gruellng five-week project where I looked through each of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that touched literally every page on StarCityGames.com, changing instances of “login name” to “customer ID.”  You cannot understand how magnificently boring this was.  There are fun things a programmer can do, usually learning new techniques or doing something flashy – this was basically me, being a smart search-and-replace, doing something a computer wasn’t quite equipped to do.

When it was done, we ran some conversion scripts, and then rolled it out.  Zingo!  To you, the customer, the only change was that there was now a notification saying, “Please log in using your email.”  But to the back end, there was literally a whole new day.

That’s why it’s sometimes hard to change software.  How difficult could it be to change your user name?  Well, as it turns out, thanks to factors that are hard to explain to your average customer, it can be incredibly hard – an unpleasant task requiring weeks to fix, one that adds almost no new features whatsoever, one that can introduce bugs into stable sections of code that haven’t had problems in years…. yet one that ultimately needs to get done in order to make way for bigger changes later on.

That’s why programming is weird.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

mindyklasky

I know I had a weekend around here, but it seems to have slipped away, while I was blinking…

We spent all day Saturday down at the Smithsonian, attending a seminar on “Neighborhood Walks Through London.”  We’re going to London later this year, so the presentation was particularly welcome.  The charming presenter did a great job of highlighting major and minor sites in her home town, relaying history, bits about art and architecture, and generally making me wish that my trip could last for about three months.

Yesterday, I continued the salute to Britain by indulging in afternoon tea with the incomparable Christi Barth.  We had a lovely time at the Park Hyatt (although both of us stuck with rather traditional teas, rather than the $150/cup “there are only three bricks of this tea left in the world” or the nearly as expensive “this tea is harvested only on the third night after the full moon”).  The Park Hyatt provides a buffet of savories and sweets, which allows customers to avoid their least favorites (egg salad, for me…) and to indulge in extras of their favorites (cheddar-scallion-bacon scones and goat-cheese-artichoke crostini for me).  The savories were actually somewhat better than the sweets, which is not my usual experience at tea.

I ended up taking the Metro downtown both weekend days — rare, given the system’s spotty weekend coverage.  Somewhat frustratingly, there was a scheduled break in the line between my station and downtown — they used shuttle buses to bridge the gap.  I walked the difference both directions on Saturday, but I availed myself of the shuttles on Sunday.  The buses are an annoyance, but they run *very* frequently, and the Metro staff are extremely friendly and helpful (and there are *thousands* of staff to guide people, or so it seems.)

Back home for the evening, we power-watched Masterpiece Theatre’s MR SELFRIDGE (although we still have the last double-episode to view) — a not-entirely-successful soapy biopic about that Chicago man who opened the Selfridge department store in London in the early 20th century.  I’m not at all enamored of Jeremy Pivens’ acting choices, and I’m suspicious of a lot of the social rules depicted, but I *am* intrigued by the transition of retail that the show presents.

In between all that, I almost finished reading Lea Nolan’s CONJURE (a fun high-middle-grade, low-YA book, with pirates, curses, and Gullah magic).

And that’s the weekend that was.  How about you?

Mirrored from Mindy Klasky, Author.

time_shark

Since the beginning of May I have:

Spent a weekend at the home of writer Nicole Kornher-Stace and her husband Dan at a gathering that was informally dubbed “CoalCon,” with the likes of Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney, Francesca Forrest, Julia Rios, Caitlyn Paxson, Dominik Parisien, Paula Friedlander, Shveta Thakrar, Katie Redding and various lovely spouses and partners. We shared embarrassing early-years writing, had an evil laugh contest, ate at a wonderful Indian restaurant, and consumed much rum. (Or at least I did.) A special thanks to Autumn Canter for schlepping me partway to CoalCon and back. She’s a gracious hostess.

Managed to finally finish the first draft of a new short story during a write-in held at CoalCon.

Claire, Nicole and Dominik at CoalCon.

Learned while at CoalCon that the entire shipment of trade paperbacks for the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter had arrived at our house in Roanoke.

Traveled to Philadelphia to give a talk to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society that turned out to be about Clockwork Phoenix 4 and Kickstarter with a dash of my new novel The Black Fire Concerto thrown in for good measure. I think I ended up spending more time answering questions than I did actually making the presentation. My thanks to Lee and Diane Weinstein for inviting me up and taxiing me around.

Waiting in the wings at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting.

Started sending out the remaining Clockwork Phoenix 4 rewards, both in ebook and trade paperback form, to everyone I owe them to. I’m not done yet, and really won’t be done for months yet, but the overwhelming bulk of the shipping and e-mailing will be finished by the end of this week.

 

The unveiling of the special singular signed edition of CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 4 in the special padded case Anita made for it to travel in.

Booked our room and rental car for ReaderCon in July. Started to fill out the giant programming sign-up, haven’t quite finished.

Got a couple invitations to a couple cool projects. Can’t say more.

Read through two months of submissions for Mythic Delirium. What’s left is what I’m holding for further consideration in putting together Mythic Delirium 29, the second-to-last print issue. If you haven’t heard from me at this point you’re more than welcome to query.

Contemplated whether I need to launch a Kickstarter to get the new version of Mythic Delirium where I want it to be. I think I will have to (ulp.) At least it won’t need to be as epic as the Clockwork Phoenix one was.

Originally published at DESCENT INTO LIGHT. You can comment here or there.