K. Tempest Bradford

This post reminded me that I’ve been wanting to poll folks about writing software lately. I know everyone talks about the wonders of Scrivener and how it changed everything for them and such, but there are other programs out there as well. I’m wondering how well they work for people.

I know some still prefer homespun methods of keeping track of stuff like plot threads, character traits, settings details, etc. Sometimes having it all in one program does help those who need a little guidance in order to be organized. I’m still int he process of finding the best way for myself, so I’m definitely intrigued by what others are up to.

So, if you use writing software that provides a bit more functionality than a word processor, let me know what you use and why you like it. Also what you wish it could do but doesn’t, and wish it wouldn’t do but does. Or, if you’ve cobbled something together from several different programs, I’d love to hear about that, too.

What I’m not interested in hearing is variations on: “Real writers don’t need fancy writing programs, you should JUST WRITE.” Because, honestly, everyone is different. Some of us do better with extra tools. And I’m sure everyone agrees that no matter how good a writing program, it cannot write something for you. So if you feel the urge to whip that out, kindly talk about puppies and kittens, instead.

August 30th, 2010 | Tags: scrivener, writing software | Category: Writing, Writing Life | Comments (11)

Longer, more detailed and specific post later. But:

Dear publishers, producers, directors, studio heads, network presidents, and other people in charge of media,

Stop it with the fucking racism, already. It’s just not on, anymore. It’s stupid and ridiculous and disgusting and not right. Racism is never, ever okay. Even if not being racist cuts into your bottom line, or even if it angers racist consumers; even if being racist is comfortable, or even if racism is what you really enjoy perpetrating, it is not okay.

And in case you need some help understanding what racism is, I’ll give you some clues:

1. Whitewashing? Racism.
2. Portrayals of racial stereotypes? Racism.
3. Magical Negroes (or any variation involving any other racial or ethnic group)? Racism.

I could go on. But honestly, you all know what you’re about. I know you know because you all have ready-made excuses for it, or deflections, or any other number of cheap tricks. Quit it. Even if it might have been a tiny bit acceptable before, it’s just not now.

Racism is not ever okay. If you don’t believe that, then get the fuck off of this planet. We don’t need you.

No love,
Tempest

August 22nd, 2010 | Tags: 30 Days, mutherfuckers who need their asses kicked, racism, racists, the media | Category: Blog Against Racism | Comments (6)

1. Go to SmallCon. I probably can’t, though, since I’m going to World Fantasy at the end of that month.
2. Go to JemCon. Do not judge me. Again, I probably can’t go since I need to reserve the vacation days for World Fantasy. Still, it’s very tempting to try and go just for the weekend. I would need someone to go with me as I’ll know no one there. And transport. Sigh. SIGH, I said.
3. Go to World Fantasy. I’m covering this for the day job, yet I sill have to use vacation days. I am making this face –> :/
4. Go to DragonCon. Can’t go, have to go to Germany, instead. I know, life is hard.

What do you want to do?

August 21st, 2010 | Tags: 30 Days, what a girl wants | Category: General | Comments (4)

I’m sitting in a new tea cafe that just opened up in the Village with my friend Nivair, just soaking up the cafe ambiance and drinking expensive tea. I love finding new cafes and other places to write in the city, especially since my ‘old’ haunts often go sour long before I’m done with them. This has been a constant source of annoyance for me since I moved back to the city four years ago. And I am on a constant hunt for good places to chill and write.

People often ask me why I can’t write at home, and I have no good answer for them. I can rarely get in the mood at home, can rarely even work up the energy. It could be that I don’t have an office space per se — my desk and such is in the living room — but it could just be that I am odd.

I like writing in cafes and other public spaces. I like the din of other people’s voices around me, which are often mixed with music. I guess I also dig the energy. I’m not one of those people who needs to be seen writing to feel like a real writer, I just need to be out of the house.

This is not always the best idea for my wallet. Sitting in a cafe or coffee house for hours means you have to pay to justify the space you’re taking up. Unless it’s a Starbucks. I never feel guilty for taking up space in a Starbucks. With an indie cafe I want to help them stay in business so I can keep coming there to write, so I buy stuff. A whole day can cost $20 if you’re not careful.

So in addition to cafes I also seek out good hotel lobbies, and I’m pretty talented at finding them. My current favorite hotel is the Ace on 29th street. They’ve got their lobby set up for laptop jockeys like me, with a long communal table with outlets in it, which is very convenient. And since it’s a lobby, they don’t mind if you don’t eat and they’re open all night and all day. It’s pretty perfect. Except on Friday and Saturday nights.

Anyway, my obsession for finding good places to write long ago led me to create this list on Yelp, which is an adjunct to this massive list of places with free wi-fi in the city. Every time I add something new to that list and it hits the front page of Yelp I get a new compliment as more people discover it. There are a ton of people like me who need the comfort of a public place to get their work done. Or to waste time on the Internet.

How many of you are like me and need to be out of the house to write? How many of you need to be in your house to write? And how many of you are lucky enough that it doesn’t matter?

August 10th, 2010 | Tags: 30 Days, cafes, where I write | Category: Writing, Writing Life | Comments (14)

A couple of years ago I brought up this topic as I was searching for a solution for myself. I decided on Sonar, and so far it’s serving me well. However, I’m researching submission trackers for another project, so I figured I’d open up the discussion again.

How do all you writer-types keep track of your submissions? I know some are still using the old Excel spreadsheet solution, but what else is out there?

And if you were going to build the perfect tracker, what features would it include?

August 9th, 2010 | Tags: submission tracker | Category: Writing, Writing Life | Comments (12)

It starts with Elizabeth Bear^[1] using the word (or tag) ‘deathmarch’ to describe difficulties in moving forward on wordcount with a novel. Apparently the word in the original post here has been removed due to concerns raised in this comment here:

The word I want to point out is “deathmarching”. I’m well aware that some people may use this to refer to a hard, exhausting, sometimes perilous struggle, but there’s history attached to that word, and thus it’s not one that ought to be used lightly.

Read the whole comment, as it makes some good points. And then be prepared to stab yourself in the eyes after reading Bear’s response:

I have very mixed emotions about political correctness in language: I believe that it’s our responsibility to be aware of the language we use, but I also have a sense that mythologizing language only gives it power.

I’m going to just say two things about this and the subsequent conversation in Bear’s journal and elsewhere.

1. Every time I see someone (usually a white person) using the term ‘political correctness’ in this way it makes me want to get on a rocketship and leave this planet behind forever. It’s not all that shocking for me to see Bear waving around PC in a manner that would make Glen Beck proud given the racial politics she’d displayed lo these many years. But still, lady, what the hell? You’re a goddamn writer yet you wave off the very real consequences of using loaded words casually by complaining about political correctness? How much fail can possibly be contained in one person?
2. I really don’t think that it should be up to people in positions of privilege to decide when it’s okay to make words mundane and erase their history of blood. I think it should be up to the people with the history and the people the word affects. Hint: that ain’t you, eBear.

And to be honest, it’s not me, either. It’s folks like this:

You see, in this story, by subsuming such outdated usages of “death march” into the mantle of the banal and the mundane — why, “imeldific” was such a success — we have embarked on the positive process of washing the blood out of our history. We have smoothed the jagged edges of our own psyches by repeatedly enduring the battering of the hardness and pain inherent in the stereotyping and prejudice we encounter. Saying and saying and saying, again and again: war, war, indio, savage, ladrones, blood, our little brown brethren, war, master, master, yes — until we accept the reality of it, and the repetition renders the reality common, banal, mundane, free of pain.

Why, look at us. We can even assume respectability now. Tayong hindi lumilingon sa pinanggalingan.

– ephemere (Trigger warning for descriptions of violence.)

And while we’re at it:

The background behind “deathmarch” is real. There is nothing mythic about respecting the experiences of those who have been systematically dehumanized and slaughtered or the people who belong to one or more cultures scarred by those experiences.

– manifesta

And then, AND THEN someone unearthed this blog post from 2006 which is actually, seriously called The Bataan Death-March of Merchandising. Because, you know, dealing with the Comicon dealer’s room is totally like unto a deathmarch.

Which all leads me to agree heartily with megwrites: fuck you, Elizabeth Bear, fuck you so, so, so, MUCH.

But, here’s the thing. As this post at Fiction Theory points out, this problem is not limited to Bear, it is vast. And the way to combat it, other than calling her and any other writer out on this stuff, is to do our best as writers or just as people not to contribute to it. You should go read.

Footnotes

1. Yeah, I know, pretty much any sentence that begins this way can’t end well[↩]

August 7th, 2010 | Tags: 30 Days, blog threads of fail, Elizabeth Bear, FAIL | Category: Rants, Writing | Comments (30)

A few months ago I gave one of my bosses a small jar of my favorite honey from the farmer’s market because she was out of hers and looking for new honey to try. We often bond over just how good the honey is because local honey by skilled beekeepers is the bombdiggity! In fact, one of the sellers for this particular vendor gave me an appreciation for honey I never had before.

He taught me how honey has different flavors and why the stuff you buy in the store is often just flat and sweet instead of complicated and deep. Now I treat honey like fine wine and good chocolate. I need many jars of different flavors to match the different teas or foods I put the honey in or on.

I once told one of my co-workers that I spent a weekend pairing up my favorite teas with my favorite honeys looking for the perfect combination. Her response was priceless: “Girl, you need a boyfriend!” When I related this tale on Twitter, Amal El-Mohtar tweeted back that it seemed like an excellent way to spend a weekend to her, as tea and honey are sacred.

That they are.

Which is why I need to get my hands on her excellent book, The Honey Month. I have had peeks at it at various conventions but it always sells out before I get around to buying. Sadness! However, I am going to enter this fabulous contest and win a free copy so that I can enjoy the honey and tea prose and poetry goodness. You can, of course, also enter the contest. I won’t hold it against you if you win. Promise.

August 6th, 2010 | Tags: Amal El-Mohtar, honey, poetry, tea, The Honey Month | Category: People I Know, Writing Awesome Stuff | Comments (7)

About a month or so ago Cat Valente challenged herself to write a blog post every day for 30 days to combat the creeping Twitterficcation of the blogging world^[1]. While I do enjoy Twitter way more than I thought I would^[2] and think Facebook is an excellent social aggregation tool even if they’re shit on privacy, I do agree that I wouldn’t want to see long-form blogging fall by the wayside. Blogging has been really important to me both personally and professionally. But I’ve fallen off doing it for the past couple of years. Not because of Facebook or Twitter, but because I have allowed my job (which includes blogging) to eat me up somewhat.

In the past few weeks I have made a point of carving out time for writing and socializing with my writer friends to combat this. And now that I’ve had some short-term success in that area, I think I’m ready to try getting back into regular blogging again. Plus, Cat told me to.

I’m going to put a bit of a twist on the challenge since I have a million blogs I’m supposed to be contributing to or maintaining. My blog post a day for 30 days will stretch across more than one blog: Tempest blog, ABW, Chicktech, Geek Feminism, FeministSF, Tor.com, and probably whoever I’m supposedly guest posting for these days (Sorry, Jeff!). At the end of the week I will be sure to point to all the various posts so you can keep up.

As per Cat’s own rules, the posts for this will be substantive. I don’t know that I’ll have time for huge essays every day, but it won’t just be “Look at this damn shit over here, OMG.”

I’m sure I’ll find plenty to write about, but if I run out of ideas I’ll ask you all for help. Maybe you just want to see me go on and on about puppies and kittens for a month.

Footnotes

1. Mostly she’s not happy that everyone wants to leave LJ, which I can understand in a way. I still think Dreamwidth is better and wish I could just transplant everyone there and move on.[↩]
2. Yes, Mary, you may laugh at me now.[↩]

August 6th, 2010 | Tags: 30 Days | Category: General | Comments (5)

I, like Cat Valente, am confused by notion that a science fiction story can be too autobiographical to be fiction. Um, no. I can’t even really add to what Cat says here because there’s nothing extra to say. This notion is silliness.

I would never have written Elan Vital if I was under the impression that there was a hard separation between my life and my fiction. Black Feather as well.

Like I said. Silliness.

August 5th, 2010 | Tags: WTF | Category: Writing | Comments (1)

I wish that M. Night would read this moving essay by a young Chinese American adoptee about how the whitewashing of The Last Airbender made her feel as both a fan of the show and as an Asian person. I wish he would read it and have to respond to her in person.

Avatar is important to me because it shows that Asians can be leaders and heroes as well as white people. I was born in China, and I like to watch something about Asian and Inuit culture because usually at school we don’t get to read about these cultures. It feels really good to see something about my birth culture along with other Asian and Inuit cultures so I can learn about them too. It feels important to me that there’s a series that doesn’t have stereotypes about Asian people.

I felt sad when I heard that the main characters in the movie were going to be played by white actors. I was crestfallen about that because I thought it showed a message that only white people could be heroes while the TV series says the exact opposite. I thought the movie wouldn’t look at all like the original Airbender series because white people would play the main roles and it wouldn’t be believable for me. I felt sad, insulted and furious all at the same time!

…

…it’s horrible to treat us like dirty laundry that needs to get bleached. We are human beings just like everybody else.

Sing it, sister.

Hat Tip: Racebending

August 4th, 2010 | Tags: racism, The Last Airbender, whitewashing | Category: Blog Against Racism | Leave a comment

For those of you who don’t read my LJ, I’m soliciting opinions on how to make eReader reviews more interesting/relevant.

August 4th, 2010 | Tags: eReaders | Category: Technology, eReaders | Leave a comment

Earlier tonight I was taking the subway home after an evening hanging out with Nora. Since it was after midnight when I got on, there were several seats on the train, so I sat in an area where just two seats were available and put my bag in the other one. A few stops later a man got on the train who was very, very loud. I noticed him more because he seemed to be helping a physically disabled person maneuver onto the train and was actually about to offer my seat when I saw that the guy had a walker with a built-in seat and wanted to settle in that. I went back to playing my smart phone game.

And then I noticed that the loud guy — who was apparently the brother of the dude with the walker — was sort of haranguing some people near us. He was insisting that this young woman sit down in the empty seat next to him even though she said she was fine, was getting off in a few stops, etc. But this dude was so fucking insistent and belligerent about it, going on about how his wife also never wanted to sit down on the train (?), that I think the woman acquiesced and sat down essentially to get him to hush up about it, because he was That Kind Of Person. Not asking her to sit to be polite, but essentially bothering people because he could.

This is all standard NYC subway fare, honestly, and I wouldn’t have paid much more attention, except after the woman sat down the loud guy said to her still-standing boyfriend that if we were in a different place and time, he’d make “that fat bitch move her bag” so he could sit.

People, I have never made a more intense WTF face in my life. More »

July 31st, 2010 | Tags: living in nyc, NYC, punch you in the balls, subway | Category: General | Comments (11)

I just now noticed that JournalPress now allows users to choose which LJ icon they want to use. Yay! So now you won’t always see my fan icon (though mostly you still will) and posts from the tech blog will have a different icon so they’re easier to identify/skip if you want.

Now if only someone would update/rewrite the plugin that allows comment syncing between LJ and WordPress, we’d be in business.

July 18th, 2010 | Tags: wordpress, WordPress admin | Category: Geekitude | Leave a comment

I know that pointing out RoF Fail is a little like kicking a puppy, but you know how it is when Nick Mamatas sends you a link clearly meant to induce blog-worthy rage — you just have to accommodate him.

So, LJ user torrain was reading the latest issue of Realms of Fantasy and didn’t get far before the facepalm reached epic proportions. Inside the magazine’s movie review of The Last Airbender ze found this awesomeness:

However, The Last Airbender has already caught flak for “whitewashing,” meaning, the casting of white actors (or actors who appear to be white) to play non-white characters, especially when those characters are heroic. It’s a hot-button issue that dredges up memories of images like Al Jolsen wearing black-face makeup. Of course, there are two sides to this coin. On one hand, whitewashing can feel insulting, disrespectful, and disappointing to movie-goers. Many may label it as politically incorrect. On the other hand, anyone who has run a casting call will tell you that when you find the right person for the role, something magical happens. Time seems to stop, and you feel as if the character comes to life right in front of your eyes. The character is no longer ink on paper; the character begins to live and breathe. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the individual human being reading for the part. Adding to the mix is the fact that some roles written for white people have been won by actors of color, and some roles written for men have been played by women. In other words, whitewashing isn’t a one-way street. It’s a difficult situation that places filmmakers between the goal of finding magic and not offending audiences. At the end of the day, most directors simply want to tell a good story.

There’s a lot of obvious fail going on here, and it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with this notion that “something magical happens” when the right person comes along for the role, even if that person is white and the character is not. Even if this was ever true somewhere in the world, it’s not true in this movie. Let’s quote Roger Ebert talking about the casting, specifically:

Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they’re all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It’s a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad. I don’t say they’re untalented, I say they’ve been poorly served by  Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing.

Entertainment Weekly:

The trouble with The Last Airbender is that Aang, as a character, is a saintly abstraction (Noah Ringer plays him with a sensitive pout that grows cloying), and he’s surrounded by generic young actors who are like place holders for real stars.

Variety:

Shyamalan has worked wonders with child actors before, but Ringer is no Haley Joel Osment, delivering some fancy footwork but zero charisma in the pic’s key role. Most dialogue scenes are framed in tight Sergio Leone-style closeup, emphasizing the actors’ wooden nature. At that proximity, we notice that Rathbone never blinks; nor can he be counted on to deliver any of the comic relief of his animated counterpart.

I could go on. The issue here is not that M. Night just happened to find these amazing kids to play these roles who just happened to be white. This is what he or the producers or the studio set out to do from the beginning because, even though millions of people love the cartoon and its clearly Asian characters, they felt that audiences just can’t handle brown and yellow people as the heroes. As the evil villains, sure. But protagonists must be white, right?

Whitewashing, no matter how much you pretty it up with the magical casting feeling of amazingness, is still just damn wrong.

The second half of that paragraph, which you probably didn’t even read because the first part was so rage-inducing with its faily wrongness, I shall paste again, because it also needs addressing:

Adding to the mix is the fact that some roles written for white people have been won by actors of color, and some roles written for men have been played by women. In other words, whitewashing isn’t a one-way street. It’s a difficult situation that places filmmakers between the goal of finding magic and not offending audiences. At the end of the day, most directors simply want to tell a good story.

Jesus. Okay, deep breath. First of all, the conceit of having women play roles written for men is usually about deconstruction more than it’s about some magical audition process or someone being “right” for a role. And I can’t come up with any examples of people of color playing roles “written for white people” unless you’re talking about classical theater or something. Maybe they mean Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? But again, when POC play, uh “white” roles, that actually has a different weight and purpose behind it than whitewashing. The power differentials there are NOT equal. Are POC overrepresented in Hollywood movies and American television? No. Are white people? Yes. So when whitewashing occurs, do you know who it hurts and disrespects and diminishes? POC.

The fact that this Realms columnist doesn’t understand any of this is already major fail. The fact that his or her editor doesn’t understand any of this is even bigger fail. And it’s leading many people to question why they would even bother to save such a magazine from its impending cancellation when all they have to look forward to is a bunch of racefail in the non-fiction section.

I’m just going to bottom line it for you: Whitewashing is never okay no matter what. If you don’t agree, then you’re really too far gone to exist in polite and cultured society and perhaps you should do us all a favor and go back to the cave you most certainly crawled out of.

Is that too harsh?

July 15th, 2010 | Tags: RaceFail, RaceFail Never Dies, Realms of Fantasy, The Last Airbender, whitewashing | Category: Blog Against Racism, Rants | Comments (47)