Tag: travel

A Friendly Reminder

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Applications for this year’s Viable Paradise sf/fantasy writer’s workshop close on June 15th.

VP is a one-week residential workshop, held annually in the autumn on Martha’s Vineyard – eight instructors and twenty-four students, all in it together for the whole week.  (Why one week?  Because not everybody who wants and needs the workshop experience is at a point in their lives where they can spare six weeks or a month away from whatever it is that they normally do with their time.  But just about anybody can manage to hack free a week if they absolutely have to.)

We’re also the workshop that features lighthouses and (the weather permitting) luminescent jellyfish.

Nostalgia Lane, in Need of Repaving

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The Fairlee Drive-In movie theatre in Fairlee, Vermont,  is holding a Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to upgrade from 35mm to digital – a vital move if they hope to continue in business, given that the movie industry is rapidly going all-digital.  (Paramount has already made the switch.)

This is a drive-in movie theatre that’s been in almost continuous operation since it opened in 1950, and is one of only two drive-ins left in the USA with its own attached motel.  Furthermore, their snack stand features hamburgers made from Black Angus cattle raised on the family farm of the theatre owners, as well as other locally-sourced items.

They’ve got some really great rewards for their backers, too: a $200 donation gets a room for two on a Friday night at the drive-in’s motel, plus 2 movie admissions and free burgers and fries and popcorn from the concession stand.  For the “go big or stay home” crowd, a $5K donation lets you own the drive in for a night, along with as many of your guests as can fit on their 400-car field, and a $10K or more donation gets the drive-in’s original carbon-arc projector and related equipment, as purchased in 1950 and used at the theatre until 2003.

I have fond memories of going with my parents to the drive-in when I was a kid in Florida, back when vast herds of them covered the plains like the buffalo, and I’d hate to see another one vanish.

Road Books

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I’ve blogged before about the kind of audiobook that makes good road-trip listening: as I put it at the time, “a book that isn’t so complex you’ll lose track of everything else you’re doing, but with enough stuff going on that you’ll stay alert and not succumb to highway hypnosis.”

Our most recent road book discovery has been the Victorian mystery novels of Wilkie Collins.  Not only are they full of interesting characters and incidents, they’re also long and full of enough plotty goodness to beguile a couple of eight or ten hour round trip journeys each.  We started out with The Moonstone, which involves (among other things) a mysterious gem stone stolen from the eye of an idol, and have moved on to The Woman in White (which after only about a dozen chapters – out of sixty-two – is already promising us a Bad Baronet.)  The former is available for free from Librivox, and in several for-pay versions; the latter is available for free from Lit2Go.

An unexpected (by me, anyhow) bonus:  For a Victorian male novelist, Collins does some excellent female characters.  He’s definitely better at them than Dickens, whose female characters usually make me want to slap them silly.

Goings-On in the North Country

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We drove over to Bradford, Vermont, today, to special-order a couple of books from Star Cat Books –also, to take a look at the flood damage along the local roads, because we’ve had some lately.  When the first warm weather of spring is followed up by major rainfall, things up here can get . . . interesting.  (Hint:  a place called Roaring Brook Road has that name for a reason, and every few years you’re going to find out why.)

On the heels of the heavy rainfall and flooding came a return of the winter cold, covering the flooded roads with sheets of ice.  The floodwaters had receded from most of the main roads by this morning (for a few hours on Tuesday night, our town was all but cut off from the world), but the reeds and bushes along the sides of the road were topped with little umbrellas of thin ice marking the level the water had reached.

My Boskone Schedule

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What (and How) to Read to Kids
Saturday 10:00 – 10:50

Reading aloud can be a memorable bonding experience — and big fun — for both adult and child. What genre stories work well when told to pre-readers? To 6-year olds? To 8-year-olds? We’ll discuss book selection and vocal presentation tips for both novice and experienced read-out-louders.

Bruce Coville (M), Bill Roper, Stacey Friedberg, Debra Doyle

Finish It! Completing Your Work
Saturday 11:00 – 11:50

Here you are with two half-completed novels, a handful of unfinished short stories, and a pile of great ideas gathering dust. Then there’s work, life, family, and cons. How do you maintain momentum with so many distractions? Panelists share their experiences as well as strategies to help keep you on track toward finishing the projects that only end when the manuscript is sent out!

Jeanne Cavelos (M), Jeffrey A. Carver, Felicitas Ivey, Fran Wilde , Debra Doyle

The Evolution of a Hero
Saturday 14:00 – 14:50

Heroes aren’t born. They’re made through a combination of choices and circumstances that mold them both internally as well as externally into someone powerful enough to represent a challenge to the story’s antagonist. Has the once well-defined transition from zero to hero changed with the introduction of modern social structures? What about modern female characters who chafe against preconceived notions of who a hero is, what it means to be a hero, and how a hero is made? Are there differences between the growth of a hero for men and women? And what does this all mean for the antagonist?

Jeffrey A. Carver (M), Jennifer Pelland, Craig Shaw Gardner, Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman

What Is Storytelling For?
Saturday 15:00 – 15:50

Why tell stories? What is the purpose of narrative fiction in culture? Are the world and characters a massive counterfactual conditional and the narrative an extended consequence … i.e., if things were thus, then this might happen? Or are we just telling lies?

Debra Doyle (M), Jo Walton, Ada Palmer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Michael Swanwick

Autographing
Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald & Darrell Schweitzer
Sunday 11:00 – 11:50

Reading
Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald
Sunday 13:30 – 13:55

From Browncoats to Red Shirts
Sunday 14:00 – 14:50

“Millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” SF can be cavalier about the death of away-team expendables or the faceless multitudes of Alderaan. But lately, storytellers are starting to finish off our favorites. Cheap, hateful trick — or welcome return to reality? What are the benefits (and dangers) of a story where no one, not even your best-loved character, is ever truly safe?

Steven Popkes (M), Walter H. Hunt, Melinda Snodgrass, Debra Doyle

Arisia Upcoming

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This coming weekend is the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston.  Arisia is one of the two big winter conventions we attend, the other being Boskone.  Arisia is large and lively and skews more toward non-print sf/fantasy than does Boskone, which is smaller and more book-oriented (though it was quite the lively con itself, in its younger days); we enjoy both of them for different reasons, not entirely having to do with the chance to get out of town for a few days in cabin fever season.

(When I start humming Stan Rogers’s Canol Road – probably the ultimate cabin fever song – under my breath, I know that the walls are starting to close in.)

Anyhow, my schedule this year:

Military SF: When Diplomacy Fails     Faneuil   Fri 10:00 PM     Duration: 01:15
      Military SF has been around quite a while, starting with the works of authors such as Piper and Heinlein and continuing to this day with works by authors like Weber, Drake, and Ringo. What is the current state of military SF? How is it defined these days? What about anti-war stories that use the trappings of military SF like Haldeman’s The Forever War? Is there a unifying political viewpoint among the different authors?

Autograph – Doyle, Hunt, & Kelner     Galleria – Autograph Space Sat 10:00 AM     Duration: 01:15
      Autograph session with Debra Doyle, Walter Hunt, and Toni L.P. Kelner.

In Search of Conflict     Bullfinch  Sat 11:30 AM     Duration: 01:15
      As writers, how do you create conflict? Not just between a protagonist and antagonist but between friends, family, nations, and even within the main character themselves? Is overt conflict, such as a physical confrontation or threat, better than an internal character struggle for some stories? There are myriad ways of showing conflict other than someone throwing a punch, what are they?

Reading: Doyle, Macdonald, and Nelson     Hale     Writing           Sun 10:00 AM     Duration: 01:15
      Authors Debra Doyle, James Macdonald, and Resa Nelson read selections from their works.

And once again, Jim Macdonald and I have the 10AM Sunday reading slot.  If you’re at Arisia and awake at that hour, do consider stopping by.  We’re going to be reading a new short story from the adventures of Peter Crossman, hard-boiled Knight Templar.

Road Trip Rerun

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Having made it through the Peterborough book signing, we’re now holed up for the night in our favorite inexpensive motel in Manchester NH, and I am pondering the question that always gets asked on occasions like this, which is:  Do readings and book signings actually do a working writer any good?

And the answer comes back, as it so often does in this business:  Who the hell knows?

My own theory, for whatever it’s worth, is that readings and similar activities may not do much to sell the particular book you’re pushing at the time, but they probably do contribute to increasing your “hey, I saw this person once and he was a nice guy, so  why not buy his new book” factor, at least a little bit.

(Don’t be a jerk to the booksellers, though.  Like the folks in Production, they have the means in their hand to exact a  subtle but devastating revenge.)

Back from Martha’s Vineyard…

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…and we’re already contemplating another road trip.  This one, thankfully, is briefer:  a jaunt down to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough NH for an Impossible Futures booksigning, this Saturday the 26th.

More regular posting about life, literature, and the things that peeve or fascinate me will resume shortly.

Where I Have Been

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gay head wirelessI’ve been — still am, and probably won’t be at home with my main machine and good connectivity until sometime Monday — on Martha’s Vineyard with the Viable Paradise workshop, which is an intense and often transformative experience, even for the instructors.  Spending a solid week talking about almost nothing except writing, because even the conversations about everything else tend to circle back to writing in the end, is energizing in the very best way.

Things learned this year include:  sliced potatoes baked with sea salt, olive oil, and rosemary are the food of the gods; moments of sudden insight strike people in all sorts of ways; Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor may well be the filthiest play ever written, and also one of the most hilarious.

Applications for next year’s VP open on 1 January 2014.

Sultry Weather

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Hot and humid, with thunderstorms happening in random places that aren’t here.

Not good weather for thinking, or for writing.  Summer in general isn’t.  Spring and fall are the best times, and the shoulders of winter.  Deep winter is almost as bad as summer, because (as I’ve said here at least once) the answer to “How warm can you keep a nine-room house with a full basement in deep snow country” is “Never quite warm enough.”

It could be worse–a couple of years ago at about this time, we were dodging the remnants of Hurricane Irene on its way up the Connecticut River Valley, on our way down to Massachusetts to return one of our two remaining offspring to college.  He attracts weird weather like that; when we moved him in for the first time as a mid-year transfer student, we ended up fighting our way through a massive snow storm that blanketed the east coast from Washington up through Maine.

Oh, well.  Back to work, heat or no heat.