Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

So a friend of Todd's is selling off his printshop, so we're going in together to buy some type and other stuff. So this is part of the conversation we had this morning:

[comparing lists of typefaces]

Me: You're sure about this one instead of this one?

Todd: I recognize that as the proprietor of Enterprise Press you might have some resistance to a typeface called Romulus, but really.

[I think about IDIC.]

Me: Fair enough. Let's add that one then.

A quick post of more sneak peeks of my work for the studio show tomorrow--I was working until 10:45 there tonight trying to get things done!!!!





Funny story: I'd been texting Todd pictures of things as they came along and whatnot, and mentioned this to one of my instructors; I didn't think anything of it since I had written a nonfiction piece about working in BHW with him, Chris, etc. The instructor blinked and said, "You talked to the character from your story?" "....who is a real person," I explained. Basically, I am way entertained having a bestie who people apparently think is fictional.

...I am entirely too slaphappy. I should probably try to go to bed eventually.

The official press release.

Amazing Stories, the world’s first science fiction magazine, opens for Beta Testing of Phase 1 on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013.

Fifty+ Writers Sign On to provide genre-related content!

AMAZING STORIES are just one click away!TM

The Experimenter Publishing Company is pleased to announce the reintroduction of the world’s most recognizable science fiction magazine – AMAZING STORIES!

Set to relaunch with a Beta Test of its new Social Magazine Platform, Amazing Stories will feature content from 50+ bloggers, covering an enormous array of subjects of interest to genre fans.

“We’ve got authors and agents, bloggers and editors, pod casters and broadcasters; we’ve got gamers and game designers; artists and art collectors; pulpsters and indie authors; we’ve got Hugo winners, John W. Campbell Memorial Award winners, John W. Campbell Best New Writer winners, Nebula and Hugo Award winners and nominees and winners and nominees of many other awards; people who review films, people who make films; we’ve got fanboys and fangirls; we’ve got former editors of Amazing Stories, writers who’ve become synonymous with the field and writers who are just getting started; comic artists, book reviewers; traditionally published authors, self-pubbed authors and authors who’ve done it all. The response to my request for participation was phenomenal – it couldn’t be more perfect if I had set out with a list of must-haves!” said Steve Davidson, publisher.

Amazing Stories’ Social Magazine platform is designed to create an interactive environment that will be familiar to fans with blog content designed to encourage discussion and take things beyond the usual user-generated content model for social networks.

The Amazing Stories Blog Team will cover (for now – more coming!) fourteen popular topics – Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, (lit), Film, Television, Gaming, Comics and Graphic Works, the Visual Arts, the Pulps, Audio Works, Anime, the Business of Publishing, Science and Fandom itself.

At this year’s Worldcon (Chicon 7 the 70th Worldcon, Chicago), Toastmaster John Scalzi talked about what it was to be a fan and concluded by saying

“We are diverse – and we are all in this together.”

We are diverse – and we are all in this together, a sentiment that captures the very heart and soul of what it means to be a fan. Amazing Stories aims to be a vehicle through which the diversity of fandom can come together.

Amazing Stories’ relaunch will take place in two phases. Those interested in participating in the Beta Test of Phase 1 should contact the publisher at steve.davidson33@comcast.net. Participants will receive full access to the site with Member status and will receive on-site benefits as the project moves forward.

Phase 2 will introduce additional interactivity and user-customization to the site. Following the completion and testing of Phase 2, the magazine, featuring both new and reprint fiction, essays, photo galleries, reviews and more will begin publication. Readers who are interested in what the magazine will look like can read two Relaunch Prelaunch issues on line, or download them from the Amazing Stories store. (Additional Amazing Stories themed product is also available here.)

Experimenter Publishing is pleased to introduce the Amazing Stories Blog Team:

Cenobyte, Mike Brotherton, Ricky L. Brown, Michael A Burstein, Catherine Coker, Johne Cook, Paul Cook, Gary Dalkin, Jane Frank,

Jim Freund, Adam Gaffen, Chris Garcia, Chris Gerwel, Tommy Hancock, Liz Henderson, Samantha Henry, M. D. Jackson, Monique Jacob,

Geoffrey James, J. J. Jones, Peggy Kolm, Justin Landon, Andrew Liptak, Melissa Lowery, Barry Malzberg, C. E. Martin, Farrell J. McGovern,

Steve Miller, Matt Mitrovich, Aidan Moher, Kevin Murray, Ken Neth, Astrid Nielsch, D. Nicklin-Dunbar, John Purcell, James Rogers,

Diane Severson, Douglas Smith, Lesley Smith, Bill Spangler, Duane Spurlock, Michael J. Sullivan, G. W. Thomas, Erin Underwood,

Stephan Van Velzen, Cynthia Ward, Michael Webb, Keith West, John M. Whalen, Ann Wilkes, Karlo Yeager, Leah Zeldez

BACKGROUND:

Originally published in 1926 by the father of science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories helped to launch both the science fiction genre and its most enduring feature, science fiction fandom. The magazine is well known for its Frank R. Paul covers and for publishing the first stories by many iconic authors such as Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson and Ursula Le Guin. Published continuously from 1926 until 1995, followed by two brief resurrections from 1998 till 2000 and again from 2004 thru 2005. In 2008 Hasbro, the then current owner, allowed the trademarks to lapse and publisher Steve Davidson applied for and eventually received them in 2011.

Additional history and background on Amazing Stories can be found at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and Wikipedia. A complete gallery of all 609 previous issues with publication history is also available.

The Experimenter Publishing Company was created in 2012 for the purpose of returning Amazing Stories magazine to regular publication. The company shares the name of the original magazine’s publisher as homage. The trademarks for Amazing Stories were acquired by Steve Davidson in 2011, the previous owners having allowed the marks to lapse in 2008, at which time application was made for a new incarnation of the same title.

CONTACT:

For more information regarding Amazing Stories, the Blog Team and the Beta Test of the new site, please contact Steve Davidson via email at steve.davidson33@comcast.net.

To contact one of the Blog Team:

Cenobyte http://www.cenobyte.ca

Mike Brotherton http://www.mikebrotherton.com

Ricky L Brown http://doctorfantastiques.com/author/rickbrown

Michael A Burstein – http://www.mabfan.com , http://www.bursteinbooks.com

Cait Coker http://www.aggiescifi.wordpress.com

Johne Cook https://twitter.com/theskypirate

Paul Cook http://www.paulcook-sci-fi.com

Gary Dalkin http://www.tothelastword.com

Jane Frank http://www.wow-art.com

Jim Freund http://www.hourwolf.com

Adam Gaffen http://www.thekildaran.blogspot.com

Chris Garcia http://efanzines.com/DrinkTank

Chris Gerwel http://elflands2ndcousin.com

Tommy Hancock http://www.allpulp.blogspot.com , http://www.prosepulp.com

Liz Henderson http://www.true-blood.net , http://www.onceuponafansite.com , http://www.nicegirlstv.com

Samantha Henry http://www.scifidramaqueen.com

M. D. Jackson http://www.michaeldeanjackson.blogspot.com

Monique Jacob http://www.moniquejacob.com

Geoffrey James http://www.geoffreyjames.com , http://www.sorcerer.net

J. Jay Jones

Peggy Kolm http://blog.sciencefictionbiology.com

Justin Landon http://www.staffersbookreview.com

Andrew Liptak http://www.andrewliptak.wordpress.com

Meilissa Lowery http://www.true-blood.net , http://www.sidcity.net , http://www.chucktv.net

Barry Malzberg

C. E. Martin http://www.troglodad.blogspot.com , http://www.mythicaltheseries.blogspot.com

Farrell J. McGovern http://www.can-con.org

Steve Miller http://stevemillerreviews.blogspot.com , http://nuelow.blogspot.com/

Matt Mitrovich http://alternatehistoryweeklyupdate.blogspot.com

Aidan Moher http://aidanmoher.com/blog

Kevin Murray www.kevinmurray.ca , http://www.falloutfiles.com

Ken Neth http://nethspace.blogspot.com

Astrid Nielsch http://webdesign.asni.net/ , http://www.asni.net , http://www.asni.net/newsletter.php , http://music.asni.net/ , http://conceptart.asni.net/

D. Nicklin-Dunbar http://mouldysquid.wordpress.com/book-reviews

John Purcell http://efanzines.com/Prior/index.htm

James Rogers http://scienceismagic.com/

Diane Severson www.divadianes.blogspot.com , http://www.starshipsofa.com/category/podcast/fact-articles/poetry-planet/ , http://www.sfpoetry.com

Douglas Smith http://www.smithwriter.com

Lesley Smith

Bill Spangler

Duane Spurlock http://pulprack.blogspot.com , http://spurandlock.blogspot.com , http://duanespurlock.blogspot.com

Michael J. Sullivan http://www.riyria.com

G. W. Thomas http://www.gwthomas.org

Erin Underwood http://www.underwords.com

Stephan Van Velzen http://www.rantingdragon.com

Cynthia Ward – http://www.cynthiaward.com , http://www.writingtheother.com

Michael Webb http://www.martianexpatriate.com/

Keith West http://www.adventuresfantastic.blogspot.com , http://futurespastandpresent.blogspot.com

John M Whalen http://johnmwhalen.wordpress.com

Ann Wilkes http://sciencefictionmusings.blogspot.com

Karlo Yeager

Leah Zeldes http://www.zeldes.com , http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com , http://www.diningchicago.com/blog

-Ends-

~

ME: I might have a ...problem. Saying yes to things. Doing things.... >_>
HAL: Yeah, I know what your problem is. You're INSANE.
ME: <_<

Melissa: Cait, on TOS, who sang “Take Me Home, Kathleen” over the intercom system?
Me: …
Melissa: Cait! You should KNOW this!
Me: I’m thinking! It sounds like a trick question, because the character that always sang was Lt. Uhura, but this is an Irish song so it’s gotta be from an ep where people go crazy, so…Kevin Riley?
Melissa: YES! I KNEW YOU’D KNOW!
Oh yeah, that’s why they pay me the big—well, it’s why they pay me, anyhow.

So my boss wandered innocently into my office a while ago. (Please keep in mind that my boss, while completely BAMF, is also the most perfect and proper British man and English professor you have ever SEEN.)



Boss: Ah, you've been quiet all day. What are you up to?

Me (blinking owlishly over book fort): Well I'm trying to figure out how to rewrite my paper for an article...

Boss: Oh! Excellent! And what's it on, then?

Me: Well, uh, it's the Star Trek paper I presented at PCA a couple months ago. The tropes in fanfiction...

Boss: Oh really? [He picks up nearby book on Boys' Love Manga, just picked up from the library yesterday.] Hemm.

Me: Yeah, I'm looking at the differences in Original Series versus Reboot fiction. I was rereading Joanna Russ's essay on slash--she published an informal version in Nome #8 and then an academic version in one of her volumes of essays.[Warming to my subject, I pull out another book from a stack and have it with the open zine on my desk.] You can definitely see how tropes have changed over time, but I've been wondering lately how much if any it's influenced by the translation and import of Japananese yaoi manga.

Boss: Which, are, uh?

Me: Gay romances.

Boss: ...What does that have to do with Star Trek?

Me (more enthusiastic than ever): Oh Star Trek has a HUGE history of fan-written gay romances going back to the 1970s! [Pulls some more zines.] It's really interesting because they are all--well, almost all written by women. And there's a huge following of this sort of material in Japan as well, almost concurrently, but it doesn't start getting imported into the US until later, so I'm not sure what's going on, but you definitely see a number of tropes crossing from yaoi into slash in the last decade or so. Like there's wing!fic and--

[Lyndsey stops outside my door and peers in.]

Lyndsey: Wing!fic?!

Me: Yeah, I was just telling Boss about my research. [Brief recap.]

Lyndsey: Oh yeah, good times. You should check out ... [Rattles citations.]

Me: Oooh!

Boss: ... [He looks back and forth between us.] I see I'm quite in over my head here!

Lyndsey looks at me suspiciously.

Me: [To Lyndsey] I kept it tame. [To Boss] It gets much, much weirder, I promise.

Lyndsey: It does. You don't want to know.

Boss: ... And on that note, I believe I shall take my leave. [He does.]

Lyndsey: No tentacles?

Me: Not yet, I'm still looking at the pon farr stuff.

Etc etc.

Yeah. *looks sheepish* Then I had to double-check a couple of citations for novels and decided to write to one of the official authors, and apparently Simon & Schuster only does snail mail, so I had to write to someone on paper. On the plus side, that meant it looked a bit more professional than "I liked your book, now was this one line a joke or actually subtext, and also, can I quote you in my next article?!" but STILL!

So. Uh. What are you guys up to?

An email exchange from this morning with my friend Laura:

Ok, so I was dreaming last night, and I dreamed I was friends with Chris Pine, and he came to visit for dinner, then all the sudden the city we were in was under attack by a Giant Intergalactic Space Gorilla (seriously) and so Chris Pine and I were trying to get away from the GISG, and while we were running for our lives, I thought, “Oh man, Cait is going to be so jealous that I am here with Chris Pine.”

I immediately replied:

That is awesome. Can I post this on my livejournal? ;)

Subquestion, why was I not invited to the dinner with Chris?? :o


Because I have my priorities STRAIGHT, people!!!!!

So Laura wrote back:

I think we were in another country….otherwise I would so invite you along.

My final response: Clearly they were in Canada. With Tom Hardy, too I bet.

So I got an unexpected get out of jail free card and have been enjoying it.


Varamathras looks like I feel.

Scott called this morning from the Barnes and Nobles in Atlanta. We've been working our way through io9's 14 Best Speculative Fiction Books of 2010. He finished The Wind-Up Girl which I'm still stuck on--I like the chapters with Emiko but I loathe everyone else. Grr.

Anyway he was calling cos B&N had like none of the other books and he was about to give up and go to Amazon. He did pause to ask if I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with him.

Me (reading from web review): "If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power." Llama, this sounds horrible!!!
Scott: Yeaaaaaaah... that was a bad choice wasn't it?
Me (laughing): YES! This is a HORRIBLE choice!
Scott (sheepish): Yeaaaaaah. Okay I'll get this for me and then see if they have How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe.
Me: Yes please!!!

~

Saw this NYT article about some coffeehouses banning ereaders and found it deeply amusing. I know I'm really in the minority but I do LIKE ereaders: I like that I can carry a bunch of books with me very easily. I don't like that I can't mark them up, deface or improve the text, or a dozen or more years from now look on one fondly because it holds special memories (like the copy of A Moveable Feast I took to Paris, or the copy of Inglorious I read in Japan while contemplating marriage to Scott), but that's why it's possible to have BOTH things.

(And I've said this before and will say it again: I would totally have my iPad's babies if I could. So there.)

~

I crossed the 10k line in my novel. I know it's a drop in the bucket/average size of a Trek story, but it's still something all my own and I feel proud. I've created a file that's a sort of appendices as I work out additional things. Most recently I've been trying to figure out the religion of the people on the planet of Uir. (See, it has a name now. Well that's what the inhabitants call it, not sure what the Terrans call it yet...) Since I'm talking about a half dozen countries on the main continent, I'm thinking there's got to be at least three biggies. Now how do they all interact???

Working, working...

So today on the SFRA listserv a request was posted for a 1500+ review of the new Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, for those "with the chops." Shortly thereafter there was this conversation:

Me: I did something stupid this afternoon...
Lyndsey: Cait?
Me: ...you know that SFRA announcement for the reviewer?
Lyndsey: Cait!
Me: I have a PROBLEM okay?
Lyndsey: CAIT!!!!!!
Me: It's a pathological thing...
Lyndsey: WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO YOURSELF??
Me: ...I don't know. (pause) Did I mention I have a problem?

So let's review my life:

Exhibit opening: This Friday.
Conference paper: Sometime next week (the chair hasn't told me when it is...not a good sign. Also not a good sign? It's only half done thus far).
Article revisions: End of month.
Diversity presentation: December 2.
Book review: December 7.
Book chapter: December 15.

... Yeah. So on the plus side I sent out my grad school packet over the weekend, so, y'know, that's something.

~

Gratuitous cross-posting: Images of some new stuff from GRRM over at Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me.

So today at work we had a special event commemorating the Muniz Gift--an endowment to the library to purchase historic material relating to the history of south Texas. What we bought and subsequently put together a mini-exhibit for is a set of post-Civil War letters written by a member/surgeon of a black US Army troop that was sent to the area in the 1860s to help the Mexican Army fight the French.

...I kind of want to read them and write a story about them now.

Anyhow, Lionel Garcia, a professor, novelist, and PEN award winner, did a reading of his poem "My Horse." To celebrate we bought letterpress chapbooks published by Arion Press in San Francisco. (For my ST peeps, this is the sort of stuff that Printer!Jim and crew would work with.)

Afterwards I asked him to sign my copy, which he very kindly did (and he even spelled my name right!!!!!!!!). And then because I am me I held it tightly throughout with my writing notebook for good luck.



Me: Sympathetic magic works, right?
Todd: Sure. But it would be nice if you wrote something that wasn't fanfic.
Me: DUDE. This has my original fic project in it.
Todd: Really? Awesome!
Mary: She writes in it all the time. She had it at the meeting this morning.
Cassie: Well will you do a reading now?
Tina: Do it! Do it! Do it!
Me: Um, okay. (flips through book looking for something readable)
Cassie: Is that poetry?
Mary: It's definitely columns.
Me: Well I went through an Anglo Saxon dictionary and wrote down all the words I liked the sounds of.
Mary: ...
Cassie: ...
Tina: ...
Me: ... THIS IS HOW I WORK, OKAY??

So I read them a couple paragraphs from my WIP. And felt foolish. But they seemed entertained.

~

In other news, Starbucks has brought back their salted caramel hot chocolate which I LOOOOOOVE.

And IT still has my laptop, even though they said they'd bring it back in half an hour. SIGH.

I should have my grad school packet out in the mail next week. Then I can stop obsessing about it. I hope. Steve and David were asking about it and seemed positive, so fingers crossed!

Me: I'm glad I'm taking the GRE next week. If I waited longer I think I'd end up freaking out over it.
Candy: Just pretend it's a really expensive computer game.
Me: ... I can do that!