Real World Settings and Research Fallout

Posted on December 11, 2010 by Cora

There are many reasons I prefer writing fantasy and SF – one of them is that you don’t have to deal with the constraints imposed by real world settings. But some stories, unfortunately, insist on being set in the real world.

What is more, on occasion the real world offers up amazing coincidences and parallels that fit the story perfectly. Take for example, this ruin with a creepy history, which is not only conveniently located within walking distance of my protagonist’s home (another real world place not just tailor-made for my purposes, but perfectly matching a vision that had only existed in my head so far), but also ties into a childhood trauma the character experienced. The grisly history of the ruin will most likely never come up in the novel itself, most likely there never will be more than my hero walking or driving past the ruin and shuddering. But it will still make the story so much richer.

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Snow!

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Cora

We got yet more snow today. It snowed through much of the night, then it stopped for a while and started up again around midday.

I had to brush the snow from my car three times today, in the morning, at midday just before I drove to school and again when my class had finished. I probably would have had to brush off the car a fourth time, if I hadn’t canceled the grocery store trip I’d scheduled after school. Because the snow fall was so thick this afternoon that I would have had to dig out the car again after fifteen minutes or so in the grocery store. And I really didn’t need the tangerines or the milk that desperately.

I actually made a detour on the way home from school, sticking to the larger roads. The narrow winding road, which is the shortest way from home to school, wasn’t safe enough under the circumstances.

Once I got home, I cleared the snow away from the driveway and front yard. An hour later, it was as thick as before, and I thought, “Screw this! I’m not shoveling snow again.” Though I’m theoretically required to do it. My car is snowed in again, too, and someone wrote my name into the snow on the car. Probably the neighbour kid. He has recently taken to leaving messages in the snow.

And now have some snow photos under the cut: Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

On this day…

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Cora

On this day, December 9th, in 1983, I first got to see more than just a few glimpses of Star Wars. That’s the reason why December 9th will always be an important date to me.

However, a lot of other things happened on December 8th/9th: Continue reading →

Posted in Film, Personal, TV | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Links, Linguistics and Writing

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Cora

We’ve had more snow today. It started snowing in the morning and by the time I had to go to school for my afternoon class, I had to shovel the car free. It’s started snowing again sometime in the evening and continued snowing all through the night. As winters go, this one arrived uncommonly early (if we get snow at all, we usually don’t get much of it until January). It’s also driving up the gas prices.

And now for a couple of links, mainly on writing and linguistics:

My write-up of the launch of newleaf 27 is up on the newleaf website. There’s also some photos of the launch at the Flickr set. Continue reading →

Posted in Links, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Stuff Kids Say

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Cora

At school today, my students talked about St. Nicholas Day and the treats and presents they got. I told them that Kinder Surprise eggs were banned in the US, which completely boggled their minds.

One boy: “You mean, guns are legal, but Kinder Surprise eggs are not?”

Another boy: “Hundreds of people are killed by guns, but Americans are scared of Kinder Surprise eggs?”

I explain about fears of choking hazards.

First boy: “But you can swallow a gun, too.”

Second boy: “Or swallow the bullets and choke.”

My students officially have more sense than US legislators and consumer advocates. Continue reading →

Posted in TV, Work | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Of Advent Calendars, St Nicholas and Other Seasonal Customs

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Cora

December 6th is St. Nicholas Day, which is still a pretty big deal in Northern Germany and even bigger than Christmas in the Netherlands.

I’m too old for Nicholas sweets and presents and have been for almost twenty years now – though a friend of mine still got presents for Easter and St. Nicholas Day from her family at the ripe age of 28 and would have been very annoyed if not. She may still demand presents for all I know – I lost contact with her years ago.

Talking of things I’m really too old for, this year I actually have a chocolate advent calendar for the first time in twenty years or so. And I don’t just have one advent calendar but two. However, they were both presents, from an accounting firm and a pizza service I’ve never even patronized respectively. The pizza service advent calendar is very much like those I remember from my childhood, with little chocolate figurines. The accounting firm calendar is from Hachez, which means that it’s classier (no chocolate figurines, just tiny wrapped bars of chocolate) and that the chocolate is really good.

One custom I have always liked about St Nicholas Day in Northern Germany is the so-called Nikolauslaufen (another explanation is here), which is basically trick or treating with a seasonal theme. Kids dress up as St. Nicholas, go from house to house, sing seasonal songs or recite poems and get a treat in return. The traditional treats are oranges, tangerines and nuts, nowadays it’s mostly chocolate and candy. My Mom told me that in the very poor postwar years, the kids were often given useful household items such as needles, thread, shoehorns, etc…

I always buy Kinder Surprise eggs to hand out to the neighbourhood kids, because everybody loves Kinder Surprise eggs. Well, everybody except for this nutty consumer safety blog, which thinks Kinder Surprise egg are some kind of terrible danger and urges people to report import shops selling the eggs in the US. The comments are priceless BTW, particularly the one about how guns are legal in the US, yet something as harmless and enjoyable as Kinder Surprise eggs is not. And for the record, I grew up with Kinder Surprise eggs and never choked on them nor know anyone who did.

This year I got eleven Nicholas Day kids at my door, ranging in age from barely able to walk to early teens. That’s a pretty normal year. In bad years, e.g. when the weather is terrible, I only get four or five, in very good years I get over twenty. The kids usually come in groups between two and five, but once I also got a whole sports team (girl’s basketball I think) of twelve kids. One year I ran out of sweets and had to hand out my own chocolate supply, at one point picking a chocolate bar containing alcohol from a kid’s bag with “Oops, that’s the wrong one.” Not that anyone would freak out over a chocolate bar containing minute amounts of alcohol being given to a kid in Germany, but it’s still inappropriate. In the US, a chocolate bar with alcohol finding its way into a kids’ bag would probably cause a massive moral panic. Hell, they’d probably panic about Kinder Surprise eggs being handed out to unsuspecting kids.

Talking of local customs that would cause screaming outrage in the US, in the Netherlands, St. Nicholas or Sinterklaas as he’s called there also takes along his black pal Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) on his present-giving rounds. I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands as a kid and teenager, so I’m pretty familiar with Zwarte Piet. I also liked him a lot better than Knecht Ruprecht who sometimes shows up in German folklore and who is basically a scary guy with a beard, though I always thought Knecht Ruprecht was an alternate name for St. Nicholas as a kid. But considering that the Zwarte Piet is usually a guy in blackface, I don’t want to imagine the outrage he would cause in the US. And already does, apparently.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Brief Housekeeping Post

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Cora

I’m still playing about with the look and features of the blog.

I added a new haiku to the haiku zone and a new header image. This one is a detail of the Victorian fayence oven in the so-called fireplace room of the Villa Ichon, a Victorian townhouse turned cultural community center in Bremen, Germany. Here is a photo showing the whole oven.

Meanwhile, Anti-CAPTCHA, the comment spam blocker plug-in I’m using, is working like a charm and catching spam comments. I no longer have to deal with them or approve them. All I have to do is empty the spam folder once a day or so.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Writing Wank

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Cora

Here are two writing links with a common theme, i.e. the importance of persistence in developing and sustaining a writing career:

Brad Torgersen interviews Jay Lake for the Writers of the Future site and Catherine Schaff-Stump discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and the importance of practice for artistic and professional success. (Both found via Jay Lake.

I must admit that I have some deficits in the persistence area. Not so much with practice, I make it a point to write every day and average around 1000 to 1200 words per day, though some of that is academic writing (I don’t count blog posts or translations, though). But I really have to send out more work. The current novel isn’t finished (and it’s so far from what I usually write that I’m not sure what to do with it anyway) and one short story is still out on submission. But of my short stories, Ignis Fatuus hasn’t exhausted all applicable markets yet and Whaler only needs a bit more polish until it’s ready for submission. Plus, Whaler is proper SF, so it can go places that the fantasy stories can’t. I also found a print-out of very short never published story recently, the existence of which I had completely forgotten. It will need a rewrite, but it was surprisingly readable and definitely salvageable. I never submitted that one anywhere. I’m not sure why, though I have a very faint memory that the university writing workshop I attended at the time didn’t like it and so I shelved it. But they never got fantasy anyway

Perhaps I should give Cartoony Justice another polish, too, and send it out again, too. I still like it, it has consistently garnered “good rejections” a la “This is really nice, but we don’t know what to do with it, sorry” and a few new markets have opened up since the last time I submitted it. I’d really love to find a home for this one, since it was one of the first stories I wrote that were actually good. The other really good stories from that period have long since sold.

I have two more stories that I still like and really would love to find a home for, because I still think they are good. But the market for those pieces is limited. One is a lesbian western (and that’s your market limitation right there) and the other is a Silencer story. I wrote a couple of 1930s set short stories about a retro-style pulp hero named The Silencer. Two Silencer stories sold and have been published (one was even reprinted), but one never found a home (and it even has zeppelins). I also think I have two unfinished Silencer stories still on my harddrive and may get back to them at some point. I wrote a lot of retro-style stories for a while, mostly with recurring characters. There’s The Silencer and I also had a pair of groovy 1960s spies/adventurers. One of the 1960s stories sold (a really good one, too), the second never did and would probably need a rewrite, before I send it out again. I still like the characters and the retro-stuff, but the problem is that the market for retro-style stories is extremely limited, especially if they’re not explicitly SFF and those aren’t, even though they occasionally touch on the very far outer limits of the genre.

I also should do more with my occasional forays into poetry. I don’t write a lot of poetry, but when I do, most of it goes straight to newleaf. If it’s speculative, I sometimes also send it to one of the speculative poetry markets. But mostly it just clutters up the harddrive, if newleaf doesn’t want it. I really ought to research legitimate poetry markets more, newleaf isn’t the only market out there or even the biggest one after all.

Posted in Links, Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Cars, trains and Christmas Presents

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Cora

We had even more snow today and I am – gasp – even starting to feel a little Christmassy.

Amazon Germany brought most of my Christmas presents today, so I’m pretty much settled for everyone from my Mom to my fourteen-year-old neighbour. The only presents I’m still missing are for my Dad and aunt and uncle.

My Dad is pretty much impossible to shop for, since he doesn’t do DVDs or CDs and only reads motorcycle mags, the occasional garden book and coffee table type books about ships and shipbuilding. And he’s got plenty of those. I’ve tried giving him novels I thought he might like, anything from Patrick O’Brien (because my parents have all of the Hornblower books and everyone agrees O’Brien is even better) to Herr der Hörner by Matthias Politycki, a supernatural crime novel set in Cuba (he’s been to Cuba, as has Politycki, so I thought he might like it), but he just doesn’t read them. I’ll probably give him some desk organizing stuff from Staples, unless I have a better idea.

My aunt and uncle are no readers either (my uncle occasionally reads really horrid political non-fiction and very rarely coffee table books) and they don’t do CDs or DVDs. Never mind that their taste is so far out of my range that I wouldn’t know what to get them anyway. I usually buy them fancy tea and cookies or soap, since they at least consume that. However, my aunt has had a series of back operations (a long and very depressing stories) and has spent most of the year either in hospital or in a care home, so tea and cookies and soap are out. I genuinely have no idea what to give them. Continue reading →

Posted in General, Personal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Random Post is Random

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Cora

We’re still having snow and frost and may actually be getting more snow overnight. It’s supposed to thaw on Sunday, though.

Grocery shopping today was truly an exercise in frustration. I had to drive to five different grocery stores (plus one drugstore) to get everything I needed. I’ve noticed stock problems in several grocery stores of late with even common items such as oat flakes, spring onions and canned tomatoes mysteriously out of stock. It’s probably due to the weather conditions delaying trucks and the like. And the lack of spring onions in pretty much every local supermarket chain may well be due to the frost having destroyed the harvest. But oat flakes and canned tomatoes are not affected by current harvesting problems.

At the Kaufland branch I frequent, I really lost my patience. I was very happy when Kaufland took over a defunct Wal-Mart branch (the German grocery market proved too tough for Wal-Mart, who picked up their toys and went home, when their tactics didn’t work here), because they were often cheaper than the competition and their selection was huge. In Germany, grocery stores usually come in two varieties, cheap but limited selection of mostly housebrands or a big selection but considerably more expensive. Hence, I was happy about Kaufland as a sort of compromise between the two, because it meant that I could pick up cheap staple goods and brandname or more uncommon products in one go. Plus, the queues at their cash registers are never long, which can be a problem in many other chains.

But my local Kaufland branch has been on the decline for a while. Less selection in their formerly excellent fish and vegetable departments as well as elsewhere, products past their sell-by date showing up on the shelves with increasing frequency and the like. Tonight then I first found some moldy tomatoes in the vegetable departments (as well as no spring onions – again – nor any sweet potatoes which they used to carry), then a package of sausage past its sell-by date, no canned tomatoes for the second week in a row (I can actually get canned tomatoes anywhere, but Kaufland is up to fifty cents cheaper than the competition) and I got angry. Normally, the check out clerk asks you whether you’ve been satisfied with your shopping experience, but this time she didn’t. So I walked up to the information desk and told the lady there, “I’m sorry, but your store has really been declining of late.”

I got some excuses, including the following response to my pointing out that sweet potatoes haven’t been available at their store for months now: “But sweet potatoes are a seasonal product.” Me: “Yes, and they are in season now.” The lady also gave me a bottle of Rotkäppchen champagne as a sort of consolation for an unsatisfying shopping experience.

I also made oatflake cranberry cookies (that’s what I needed the oat flakes for).

Finally, New York Magazine has a very good interview with Anne Rice (found via Vampire Wire). Anne Rice is of interest to my PhD, so this interview was a very helpful find. A bit too much focus on religion IMO (I no more care for Anne Rice’s religion than for Stephenie Meyer’s nor any other writer’s, unless it is somehow relevant to my research), but some good quotes as well. And I actually like her casting choices for her characters.

Posted in Books, General, Personal, Research | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment