Apparently I also got an Honorable Mention for Pointing at the Moon. Wow. Now I feel extra-happy. 🙂

This story is a Launch Pad influenced story. And I’ve always loved the artwork.

Hi! Just a reminder. I’m reading one of my stories at Borderlands Books on Thursday evening, along with some other excellent writers:

Clarion West reading with Amelia Beamer, Vylar Kaftan, Pat Murphy, Tim Pratt, and Rachel Swirsky, Thursday, July 23rd at 7:00 pm. Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia Street in San Francisco (in the Mission, close to 16th & Mission BART).

I’ll be reading “What President Polk Said,” which is a warm snuggly story about Gold Rush miners and it’s got lots of bunnies and sunshine. You know how I am.

All of these writers are great–some have won Hugos, and others are up-and-coming folks you’ll be hearing more from in the next few decades.

A quiet house with wood floors, somewhere in a forest. It has a basement for Shannon and an attic for me. He codes and builds things. I write and dance. We both work from home, so we’re able to keep our schedules as we like them. The house has great temperature control, so we can keep our workspaces at our preferred temperatures. We meet for lunch and dinner, of course, and on the ground floor we have a spacious kitchen and a large TV for playing our favorite videogames.

Outside, there’s long forested trails for me to walk along and think. Nearby, we’ve got lots of our friends as our neighbors. I can drop in and see what’s happening, or find people to play board games. They’re welcome at our place too. Some of them are writers or artists or programmers, and we create our work together in the same place. Maybe we even collaborate.

We’re committed to local, sustainable farming–so we share food communally with our neighbors and frequently have common meals. Some of our neighbors have kids, and I consider them all family.

Nearby, there’s a town for supplies, but it’s far enough away that we’re free from traffic and city noise. We connect to the world through the Internet, and participate in lots of online gatherings and conversations.

And of course there are cats, which I am no longer allergic to.

What’s in your daydreams?

Disarm received an Honorable Mention from Gardner Dozois in the Year’s Best Science Fiction. Yay!

So the swine flu is spreading so quickly that WHO can’t keep track of it all anymore.

I’m fascinated by pandemics in a morbid way. I know my epidemiology pretty well, but there’s something I’m not sure of.

Swine flu hasn’t been as bad as many people feared (thank Hypnotoad), but it could mutate into something more deadly. Given the current strain attacking the world, many people have already had it.

If the virus mutates, will those people who already had swine flu:
a) have better resistance to the new strain
b) face the same risk as the rest of us
c) unknown; we can’t tell unless we know exactly how it mutates

In other words, will the current bout of swine flu offer the world any protection against a more dangerous one? Anyone know? Akaba, I’m looking at you. 🙂 But if anyone else knows, tell me. I believe the answer is c, but I’m not positive.

Break the Vessel is now available at Pseudopod for your listening pleasure.

I got the best fan mail about this one. He had lots of nice things to say about the story, including that it made him cry at his desk. Reading that letter nearly made me cry at my desk.

All my recent travels inspired this post. You can tell what I look for in an airport. (hint: food and power outlets).

Best airports, in no particular order:

SFO (San Francisco): Great food! It was voted best airport food in some award, and it deserves it. Plus, there’s plenty of power outlets and companion-accessible bathrooms. The bathrooms all have these awesome hand dryers, too. They look sort of like a square-nosed Jaws the shark. You stick your hands in, and voom! Dry in 12 seconds or less. And you can get there by BART. Lucky for me, I get to spend a lot of time at this airport.

DEN (Denver): Spacious, easy to navigate, decent food options, moving walkways, generally few delays.

BOS (Boston): Just discovered this one. Wins points for actually having protein sources I can eat.

DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth): I was only there once, but it was clean and organized. I liked the train that connected all the terminals.

PHX (Phoenix): My old home. Modern, straightforward, rarely delayed. Not much character, just like its home city, but it works for what I need. Also there’s lots of cheap parking.

ABQ (Albuquerque): Stylish and southwestern looking. But most notably, it has a branch of Garduno’s, one of my very favorite New Mexican style restaurants. (New Mexican is different from standard Mexican, authentic Mexican, or Tex-Mex. It can even be subdivided into regular New Mexican and Santa Fe style New Mexican. But I digress.)

AMS (Amsterdam): Swank! Big cushy recliners for napping, multilingual signs, free lounging areas that weren’t part of clubs. Very nice place.

Edited-to-add KOA (Kona-Kailua): I can’t believe I forgot this one! There’s no roof. The whole airport is outside, including baggage screening and everything. (There’s a small roof-like part over some of the more critical areas. But the waiting areas and terminals are open to the sky. You can see waving palm trees and feel the gentle Hawaiian trade winds. It was a treat. (Except for poor Shannon melting without air conditioning.)

Worst airports:

LAX (Los Angeles): Just went through there for the first time. Ugh. Dingy, badly lit, no outlets, weird seating formations (to prevent people from lying down, I think). At least I wasn’t stuck there.

ORD (Chicago): It wouldn’t be so bad except… a) I have to go through here a lot on transfers, which means I need dinner, and b) they do NOT SERVE food I can eat. Everything, including the pre-made sandwiches, is full of red meat and cheese. I’m usually stuck with a bagel and a salad (a nasty iceberg one, usually). I’ve tried packing my own food, but it usually makes a mess in my bag and it’s one more thing to carry. But anyway.

MAD (Madrid): Dark and outdated. Admittedly, some of my dislike for the airport stems from having to stay there overnight before a 6 AM flight because of public transit issues. Stone benches are not comfortable for any part of human anatomy.

MOW (Moscow): There’s actually three airports and they each have their own code, but I can’t remember which one I was in. It wasn’t the one with the car nailed to the ceiling. Anyway, it was creepy and weird. This was 1996 when I was there. Creepy, dim, and all done with a very institutional feel. If I ran an insane asylum, I might use this as my model.

Airports which I feel mostly neutral about: Portland OR, Seattle-Tacoma, Minneapolis-St Paul, Chicago Midway, Chattanooga, Atlanta, New York JFK, Washington-Dulles, Las Vegas, Hartford, Orlando, Frankfurt, Zurich, Berlin, and a whole bunch of local/regional small airports.

And for people who look at different factors than I do, here’s the best airports for sleeping.

I almost forgot.  Hawaii pics.

If you don’t want to dig through them all, here’s my favorite. Though the picture of Shannon “after coffee” is pretty awesome too.

At the Fish Hopper

>>>>>   Readercon 20 Participant Schedule: Vylar Kaftan

Thursday 9:00 PM, Salon B: PanelYou Don’t Know Dictionary! Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Vylar Kaftan (L),
Sarah Micklem, Sonya Taaffe
** Leader (Participant / Moderator) **

There’s no need to make up new words when there’s so many great unknown
old ones.  Tolkien introduced many readers to the likes of “wain” and
“fell” (in the sense of fierce and cruel), while later writers such as
Greer Gilman and Gene Wolfe have gone much further in plumbing the depths
of unabridged dictionaries.  Our panelists share their adventures with
prodigious vocabularies and blank pages.  And for the reader, what are the
pros and cons of relying on context versus consulting the Book?

Friday 1:00 PM, Suite 830: Workshop (120 min.)

How Acting Techniques Can Enhance your Writing.  Inanna Arthen with
participation by Nick Antosca, Kathryn Cramer, Laurel Anne Hill, Vylar
Kaftan, Caitlin R. Kiernan
** Tentatively Scheduled — If you wish to not be listed in the Program
Guide (and hence not be expected / committed to show), please let us know
ASAP! **

Recent neurological studies have shown that readers’ brains react to
fiction as though they were experiencing the events. The line between
written and performed art is blurring more and more as young readers grow
up in the age of instant video, YouTube, and podcast fiction. Acting
training and awareness can thus be hugely helpful for successful fiction
writing in the 21st century. We’ll cover “four-dimensional writing” using
physicalization, pacing, dialogue flow, description, and setting the
scene. Wear comfortable clothes and expect to participate actively! (2
hrs)

Friday 6:00 PM, RI: Workshop (60 min.)

Speculative Poetry Workshop.  Mike Allen with participation by Leah Bobet,
Michael A. Burstein, Vylar Kaftan, Ernest Lilley
** Tentatively Scheduled — If you wish to not be listed in the Program
Guide (and hence not be expected / committed to show), please let us know
ASAP! **

What is speculative poetry? How do you write it, why would you want to,
and which editors will buy it? Come prepared to write on the fly.

Friday 8:00 PM, ME/ CT: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)

Annual Interstitial Arts (IAF) Town Meeting.  Ellen Kushner with
discussion by Liz Gorinsky, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Shira
Lipkin, Delia Sherman, John Shirley, Sarah Smith, Catherynne M. Valente
** Optional Extra Item — If you wish to commit to showing up and be
listed in the Program Guide as a discussant or participant, please let us
know ASAP! (Check the online Grid to see if it works!**

Interstitial Art falls in the interstices of recognized genres.  The
Interstitial Arts Foundation is a group of “Artists Without Borders”
fighting the Balkanization of art. They celebrate work that crosses or
straddles the borders between media, the borders between genres, the
borders between “high art” and popular culture. They are not opposed to
mainstream fiction or genre fiction, nor are they seeking to create a new
category. They are just particularly excited by border-crossing fiction
(and music and art), and want to support the creation of such works and to
establish better ways of engaging with them. The IAF has had a presence at
Readercon from its beginning. In 2007, in cooperation with Small Beer
Press, the IAF published Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial
Writing edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, and in fall 2009 they
will present Interfictions 2, edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher
Barzak. They are also doing a lot with visual arts.  Interstitial Arts is
an idea, a conversation, not a hard-and-fast definition-and it’s a
conversation you are invited to join.

Saturday 10:30 AM, VT: Reading (30 min.)

“Break the Vessel.”  [Actually, I think I’ll have to read something else; Break the Vessel is too long.]

Saturday 2:00 PM, RI: Workshop (120 min.)

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? Improv for Writers.  Ellen Klages with
participation by Nick Antosca, Inanna Arthen, Jeffrey A. Carver, Craig
Shaw Gardner, Victoria Janssen, Vylar Kaftan, Shira Lipkin, Jennifer
Pelland, Chuck Rothman
** Tentatively Scheduled — If you wish to not be listed in the Program
Guide (and hence not be expected / committed to show), please let us know
ASAP! **

Remember when writing was fun? If you’re stuck, out of ideas, or if your
Editor/Critic keeps shutting down your muse-get out of your head and into
this class. We’re going to improvise, play with our imaginations, and
rediscover our creativity. We’ll explore characters, settings, plot
twists, and dialogue, all using simple theater games.  What bubbles up
will be the basis for a few short writing exercises. Wear comfortable
clothing, and come prepared to laugh. (2 hrs)

Sunday 12:00 Noon, Vineyard: Kaffeeklatsch [Journeyman Writers Meeting. A meeting for any writer with one or more SFWA-qualifying sales.  We’ll talk business, craft, marketing, or whatever else people want.  If you’re not sure if you’re eligible, talk to me.]

Readercon programming gave me (and everyone?) less than 24 hours to respond to this schedule, so I couldn’t get them timely feedback.  I’ll try to attend everything that they asked me to, including the optionals.  For the reading…  hmm.  Maybe Scar Stories and What President Polk Said?  I might have time for a flash fiction story too.

Also, I’ll be reading at the blood drive from 1-2.  All flash fiction pieces, since I expect this to be Short Attention Span Theatre. Come give away precious bodily fluids while I stir your brainmeats into jelly!

See y’all there.

I have been swamped and not posting here much. So here’s a bunch of writing news updates, which will soon appear on my site as well.

• “Break the Vessel” will be podcast at Pseudopod. I’ll let you know when it’s up. This is the “poop story.”
• Sybil’s Garage 6 is out now, and includes “Fulgurite.” This is the “unicorn cockroach sex story.”
• The Cinema Spec anthology is out, and includes “Starshow,” the “goddamn the universe is a lonely place” story.
• Phantom, a dark fiction anthology like Bandersnatch, will be out at Readercon. It contains “What President Polk Said,” aka the “insane Gold Rush miner” story. [Does anyone else have shorthand names for their stories like this?]
• Speaking of Readercon, I’ll be there. I’ll put my schedule in a separate post. I’ll also be at World Fantasy later this year (but not WorldCon, sorry).

Aaaand, two public readings of my fiction:

• Borderlands Books (San Francisco) on Thursday, July 23rd at 7:00 PM. I’ll be part of the Clarion Themed Reading with Amelia Beamer, Rachel Swirsky, and Tim Pratt. I’m not sure what I’m reading yet, but possibly either “Scar Stories” or “What President Polk Said.”
• Kilgore Books (Denver) on Friday, Aug 14 at 6:30 PM. I’ll be part of the Sybil’s Garage 6 reading with Jason Heller and Sean Markey. I’m reading “Fulgurite” and possibly also another story. I’ll have copies of Bandersnatch and Phantom available for sale.

I like frogs. Frogs are cute. Ribbit.

Also, the Write-a-thon continues! I’m grateful to everyone who’s sponsoring me; it really keeps me motivated. I feel like I have a firm commitment and I’ve got to make my time work for me. If anyone else wants to pledge, the link has all the information, including my project. I’m making a worldbuilding wiki for the novel I’m writing this fall. One sponsor will get to see the actual wiki.

Thank you for your generosity and support! And thanks for reading my news items.