Tag: travel

Still Too Hot.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

There’s a reason why I don’t read romance novels set in exotic tropical climes:  I hate hot weather, and the tropics have almost nothing else.

I spent three years in the Republic of Panamá, back when my husband/co-author was in the Navy, and every year we spent there, I moved my ideal location for permanent settlement another tier farther north.  One more year down there, and right now I’d probably be living in the Yukon.

Some good did come of it, though.  Get hot enough and bored enough, and you’ll start writing fiction to keep yourself occupied, and the next step after that is selling some of it, and after that, you’re doomed hooked.

I really will post about Pacific Rim real soon now, I promise.  Just not tonight.

Too Hot to Think.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Readercon was a nice convention this year† (and air-conditioned!), but now we are back home and it was hot enough today  that I count myself accomplished because I managed to get around to paying the electric bill.

That was about it for accomplishment, though.

We saw Pacific Rim while we were down in Massachusetts, and I’ve got some thoughts about it that relate to writing as well as to film . . . but I’ll blog about them tomorrow, maybe.

Tonight it is too hot.

†I’d like to thank all the people who came to my 10:30 AM Sunday reading, and to Jim Macdonald’s 2:30 PM last-of-the-con reading. A good audience is always heartening.

O My Prophetic Soul!

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

I do in fact have the 10:30 AM Sunday reading slot at Readercon next weekend.

My full schedule, for those who may be interested:

Friday July 12
8:00 PM   Kaffeeklatsch. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

9:00 PM    Autographs. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

Saturday July 13
10:00 AM       Intellectually Rigorous Fictional Data: Making Up Facts That Are True. Debra Doyle, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Margaret Ronald, Ken Schneyer, Harold Vedeler, Henry Wessells (leader). How do you make up convincing fictional primary sources? No, not for purposes of seeking political office, but because you need to know the facts and how they underpin the world of your fiction and the lives of your characters. Imaginary books and letters are just the beginning, even if they never appear in the narrative. Which fictional data sources matter? How much is enough to make a narrative feel resilient and whole?

Sunday July 14
10:30 AM        Reading: Debra Doyle reads from a forthcoming work.

And my co-author’s schedule:

Friday July 12
8:00 PM        Kaffeeklatsch. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

9:00 PM        Autographs. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

Saturday July 13
8:00 PM        The Xanatos Gambit. Jim Freund (moderator), Yoon Ha Lee, Scott Lynch, James D. Macdonald. The tangled webs of schemers both good and bad have always had a presence in imaginative fiction. There are the wily king-killers, the intrigue-fomenting spinsters and widows, the bard who hides the knife beside the harp, the indispensable keeper of secrets, and more. What are the challenges in writing an especially clever character? How has the role of the schemer evolved, and what versions do we no longer see?

Sunday July 14
2:30 PM        Reading: James D. Macdonald reads from a forthcoming work.

A Friendly Reminder

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

As of this week, we’re roughly halfway through the application season for the Viable Paradise workshop.

If you’re planning to apply, now is a good time to do it; there’s always a big rush of applications at the very end.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m one of the eight instructors at Viable Paradise; this year’s full set also includes James D. Macdonald, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Elizabeth Bear, Sherwood Smith, Steve Gould, and Steven Brust.)

 

Return from the Road

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

I’m back in the frozen north after a week in Boston and points south; regular blogging will probably resume tomorrow.

In the meantime, have a recipe:

Fresh Salsa

  • 1 onion, quartered
  • about 1/4 of a bunch of fresh cilantro (depending upon taste and how big your grocery’s bunches are)
  • 5 or 6 nacho jalapeño rings
  • red pepper flakes to taste
  • 4 or 5 cloves of garlic, peeled
  • 1 can of diced tomatoes with green peppers, drained (you could use fresh tomatoes, if you live where fresh tomatoes are plentiful and cheap and good.  I live in northern New England, where the local cookery tradition has a lot of recipes for what to do with green tomatoes that haven’t ripened by the time the first frost comes around.)
  • cumin, to taste (start with about a quarter-teaspoon and work up)
  • pinch of salt

Put the onion, garlic, cilantro, jalapeño rings, cumin, and red pepper flakes in the food processor.  Run it on pulse until the onions and other stuff are at the state of chunkiness you prefer for your salsa.  I like mine chopped fine but still recognizable as separate substances, not a unified puree.

Add the can of drained diced tomatoes.  Pulse once or twice more, carefully — you don’t want the tomatoes turning into a mush.

Remove the salsa to a container with a lid.  Add the pinch of salt.  Stir gently, put the lid on the container, and refrigerate it.

This will keep for several days in the refrigerator, probably longer — I’ve never had it stay around long enough to go bad, anyhow.

Done

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

The novel, that is.  At 4:45 on Friday morning.

Now it’s Saturday, and I’m at Boskone, enjoying the rewards of virtue, which include sleeping last night for eleven hours straight.

I won’t be sending in the novel until around Wednesday, because I have to clean up the formatting first.  By the time I finished it in the wee hours of Friday morning, an entire chapter could have been replaced by the Declaration of Independence and typeset in WingDings, and I wouldn’t have been able to spot it.

What I’m Doing This Weekend

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to be at the Boskone science fiction convention at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, is what I’m going to be doing.

My schedule:

Friday 20:00 – 20:50, Mythology in Science Fiction, Burroughs ( Westin)
How have myths and fables from our past affected SF writers’ development of fictitious off-world or future-world mythology? Are most of their myth systems just the old stuff dressed up with different names, or is anybody coming up with anything truly new? Does a mere hint of myth make an SF story a fantasy?

Saturday 12:00 – 13:00, Kaffeeklatsche, Galleria-Kaffeeklatsch 1 ( Westin)
Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald

Saturday 16:00 – 16:50, The Two Sides of Gollum, Harbor I ( Westin)
Gollum is unique: there’s nobody quite like him in fantasy (or is there?) And in many ways, he is the true tragic here of the Lord of the Rings, evoking at times anger, contempt, and pity from the readers. The panel looks at the character of Gollum (whether Stinker or Slinker) and how he fits into Tolkien’s world and Tolkien’s story.

Saturday 17:30 – 17:55, Reading, Lewis ( Westin)
Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald

Sunday 11:00 – 12:00, Autographing, Galleria-Autographing ( Westin)
Debra Doyle, S. C. Butler, James D. Macdonald

Sunday 12:00 – 12:50, Futurespeak: the Evolution of English and More, Griffin ( Westin)
Will English still be the world’s most widely used language 50, 100, or 500 years from now? How might it sound or be written differently then? Which writers are ut klude to tomorotalk?

So if I’m not posting here for the next few days, that’s why.

Blizzard Warning

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

To everybody in the path of the storm:

Stay inside; stay warm; stay safe.   Friday and Saturday look like good days for cuddling up next to your computer and working on your novel.  Whatever you were thinking of driving to will still be there on Monday.

(And if circumstances force you out onto the road anyway, make sure you’ve got a warm blanket or a sleeping bag in the car with you, just in case.  Some bottled water and a couple of energy bars probably wouldn’t hurt, either.  Making Light has a bunch of useful links. )

Where I Was; Where I Am

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

I was at the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston, land — at the moment — of a myriad hand sanitizer dispensers.  It remains to be seen whether or not I’ve escaped catching the flu, or some lesser variety of con crud.  (Bring people from all over the country, and sometimes the world, into one hotel for a long weekend, and a lot of people are going to go back home with new and exotic colds and other viruses.)

Now I’m back in far northern New England, watching the thermometer drop and still chasing my Zeno’ s tortoise of a novel denouement.

Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll have some cranky and intemperate things to say about dialogue attribution tags and their deployment.  But not tonight.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Last night it got down to twenty below.  Fahrenheit, that is; -29 Celsius.  Trivia fact:  The point where the two scales match is forty below zero, which is also the temperature at which soap bubbles freeze in mid-air and shatter when they hit the ground.

Weather like that is one reason why I go to science fiction conventions in Boston in January and February:  It’s warmer down there.

Cabin fever is another reason.  Up here, when the snow gets deep and the roads get bad, we don’t get out of town very much.  After a while, the walls can start to close in.  (I have a perverse fondness for “Canol Road”  by the late Stan Rogers for this very reason.)

One reason that isn’t the reason I go to sf/fantasy conventions is “to promote my books.”  I go to cons because I like going to cons, and if book promotion happens along the way, that’s a nice thing but it’s gravy.  I was a con-goer long before I was a writer.

Should you, as a newly-published or aspiring sf/fantasy writer, go to conventions?†  Only if you think going to conventions is fun.  And if you’ve never been to a convention and are planning to go to one, go to it for the new experience (which you may or may not like), not for the publicity or the networking or anything like that.  If you do like the experience, you’ve got a new hobby and a new group of friends to help get you through the essential loneliness of the writing life.  If you don’t like it, don’t worry; con-going fans are a small subset of the greater sf and fantasy reading public, and you don’t have to court them in order to succeed.

(If you do decide to give the convention scene a try, it helps to go to your first con in the company of a knowledgeable regular.  And whatever you do, don’t make your first sf convention a worldcon —  that’s like starting your swimming lessons by jumping off the high board into the deep end of the pool.)

†Of conventions in other genres, such as romance and mystery, I lack the experience to speak.