Remember that snippet I posted earlier? I now have a 4000-word story to go with it–temporary title “The Two Sisters in Exile”. Put it up on OWW for crits, and waiting for the inevitable complaints about density. (to be fair, it’s very very dense, and I didn’t even get to cram enough food in it [1]).
*sigh*
I shall now go back to my novel and browbeat it into submission. So far, it hasn’t exactly been cooperative…

[1] All stories should have food. It improves the plot immeasurably. Also, it compensates for those times when I’m typing on my computer and can’t have more than a mug of tea and a raisin because it’s not dinnertime yet.

And now for a minor rant on politics… Yesterday we got the leaflets for the presidential campaign of all our candidates (a solid dozen or so). The H went through them, making sarcastic comments as he waded deeper into them (a lot of them were about financial regulations and what we should do about the banks, which is unfortunate for them because the H works in an investment bank). He handed the lot to me, and said something to the effect of “you should read them, but it’s seriously pathetic”.

And, I have to admit, he’s right. There are many many things that I find outright creepy in them–the insistence on overtaxing companies (er, can I point out that companies you overtax will just move to another country where taxes are lower?), on curbing immigration and promoting French values at the expense of Europe (yeah, sure, let’s step back a few decades).

But that’s not the pathetic thing. The thing is–all of those leaflets, save one [1], fail on a very simple basic criterion: they don’t make sense. They present a presidential program that does a combination of: incoherent measures, promising something we already have in place (like separating investment activities from credit activities. We already have that), and/or promising something intenable (you can’t actually hand out gift measures to everyone, and promise we’ll balance our budget by 2017). And I stare at them, and think, oh my God. That’s leaflets for voters. They think we’re going to swallow this hook, line and sinker. They think we know so little about our own country, that we have so little logical and critical sense that we’ll believe all of this.

It’s… scary. Probably not in the way that they intended, but it doesn’t make me very optimistic about the coming years.

[1] You’ll wonder about the one that made sense, aka the only leaflet the husband didn’t poke holes into as he was reading it. It’s the one from our incumbent, Sarkozy. I hate many of his measures, but I have to grant him this: he presents a coherent program, doesn’t make promises I don’t believe in for a second, and I actually trust him to do something during his presidency that doesn’t include major fuck-ups. It’s a shame, as said above, that I don’t agree with many of his measures, especially his stance on Europe and immigration.

A snippet from my files:

In spite of her name (an elegant, whimsical female name which meant Perfumed Winter, and a reference to a long-dead poet), Dong Huong was a warrior, first and foremost. She’d spent her entire life in skirmishes against the pale men, the feathered clans and the dream-skinners: her first ship, The Tiger Lashes With His Tail, had died at the battle of Bach Nhan, when the smoke-children had blown up Harmony Station and its satellites; her second had not lasted more than a year. The Tortoise in the Lake was her sixth ship, and they’d been together for five years, though neither of them expected to live that time again. Though men survived easier than ships–because they had armours, because the ships had been tasked to take care of them. Dong Huong remembered arguing with Lady Meng’s Brewer–begging the ship to spare itself instead of her–and running against a wall of obstinacy, a fundamental incomprehension that ships could be more important than humans.

Among the Northerners, however, everything was different.

(I have no idea what I’m going to do with this, and it looks like the kind of background worldbuilding I’ll throw away in a final draft, but I rather like it).

So… I can haz new phone. In this case, shiny Galaxy SII phone (was strongly tempted by a Note, but it was just getting too large for a phone that I wanted to use primarily as a communications device). And now comes the fun part where I import my contacts from Nokia into Android.
Guess what. It’s a horrendous experience.
I can sync the contacts from my phone to the Nokia Ovi Suite. Unfortunately, the %%% programmers at Nokia didn’t make any kind of CSV export, so you have to try and sync contacts with an external email program, such as Outlook, in order to actually export stuff. That wouldn’t be so bad–except that Outlook doesn’t come prepackaged with CSV export, and you have to install from the CD (which, of course, I’ve lost). I then attempted to go through Thunderbird sync–which turns out to be a buggy feature that makes the Ovi Suite crash, yay. (also, apparently Nokia stopped supporting Ovi Suite, oooh, about 4 months ago, making any kind of feature update hard. Not that it was ever anything more than a buggy program).
The process to export to CSV ended up looking something like this: sync contacts to Ovi Suite. Sync Ovi Suite to Outlook. Import contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird. Export to CSV.
Then it got more simple, albeit annoying: once I’d got the CSV up into gmail, I had to clean up the double entries, and merge everything for 300+ contacts. Gaaah.
Anyway, now I think I’m all set up. Shiny new phone, and normally my line transfers between providers tomorrow. Can’t wait.

And a roundup of links, while I’m off writing:
-The BSFA on BSFA Awards Ceremony: An Apology. Due to the fallout of the ceremony (and the fact that several committee members were angrily accosted late at night in the bar, which is not a very pleasant experience), they’ve had a spate of resignations. They’re short of people now, for various reasons. If you want to volunteer, now would be a good time.
ETA: fixed this, as fjm pointed out that I had been mistaken.
-Foz Meadows on Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men. I’m actually not convinced that “hurt” is the right word, insofar as it seems to put the privileged on the same level as those people who actively suffer from the misogyny/racism problem, but it’s a post that’s well worth reading.
-Tori Truslow on Dear Western SFF: stop it with “exotic” already: the use of the word “exotic” and the baggage it carries (this time, do check out the comments, there’s some very interesting discussion going on)
-Kate Elliott on The Narrative of Women in Fear and Pain. Also very important points on women as victims. It reminded me of last week, when I opened up a horror book: it had one of those characters who was clearly meant to be an unlikable protagonist, killing a young woman (not his first) in a particularly nasty and unpleasant way. I closed the book, and chucked it straight in the bin. It’s an easy and nasty shorthand for characterisation, and quite frankly makes me want to chuck the character through the window rather than follow him. It’s also voyeuristic as Hell, and I have no intention of being in any way a participant in that kind of narrative. Also, the day we get the trope of serial killers focusing their attention on helpless young men [1], I’ll cheer.

[1]There is one book I read which features a serial killer dispatching men instead of young women: Val McDermid’s The Mermaids, Singing. It has a boatload of problems (killer is a trans, and the only trans we see in the book, which is uber problematic), but at least it’s an interesting take. And I can confirm that neither the male-killing nor the female-killing kind of serial killers attract me in any way.

-Wisconsin repeals its Equal Pay Act, under the grounds that “men are more money-conscious than women”, and the main breadwinners of families (nah, single mothers never happened, and families with two working parents are just a fallacy). WTF. Cat Valente comments, mostly on how the heck we got here, and how we shouldn’t assume we’re safe away from the US (while I do agree with her, I believe in Europe people are more likely to get our rights denied for practising Islam and being vaguely Arab-looking. The US has gone women-phobic, in my neck of the woods it’s more like xenophobic).

-In the same vein, a rather terrifying post by Libby Anne on the erosion of pregnant women’s rights in the US. Do avoid the comments if you want to keep your blood pressure down, because they’re a morass of dumb people telling women that their noblest goal is to give their lives for their fetuses (seriously. Not even the Catholic Church is that regressive, and God knows I have issues with their handling of abortion and gender equality).

-On Eastercon: I love the con, I had a great time personally, but… you might want to take a look at this blogpost by Alex Dally McFarlane on some less awesome stuff that went on there. I don’t agree with everything, and I do think it’s important to point out that it’s been a con with many many degrees of awesomeness (not aware of everything, but the incident about gender equality on panels and how it was swiftly dealt with are a particular example of how stuff was efficiently and strongly dealt with). And again, I personally haven’t experienced anything I’d classify as offensive, but I had the privilege of being able to stick to my rather large comfort circle(s). I remain confident those are issues we’re working on as a genre, and that things can only get better (I’m quite sure cons used to be much less gender-equal than they are now, for instance–this is an area where we’ve definitely made progress). And the whole discussion has given me ideas for future panels at Bradford!

-Charles A. Tan on the fallacy of World SF, languages, cultural domination within the field

-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” is up at Apex–it’s a wonderful story of alienation and immigration, and what it means to be a foreigner in one’s own country

-Saladin Ahmed’s post on Game of Thrones. Read the comments at your own risks.

So… don’t really have much to say, other than that the con was awesome: Heathrow remains one of my favourite locations because despite the weirdness of the con hotel, it’s *very* easily accessible from where I live (I’m already looking at Bradford next year in mounting dread). I had con crud pretty much as I walked into the hotel–my BA flight having kindly cranked up the air conditioning and worsened a pre-existing cold–and I spent the entire con trying not to run out of voice (the con bar was particularly bad for this, as it had ambiant music that made me speak louder just to be heard).

Organisation was great; I met lots of people old and new, hung around until impossible hours, and mostly wish I’d had more time to actually see everyone whom I wanted to see.
The non-Anglophone panel was great, though, as Rochita points out, it would have been nice to have an extra half-hour in which to move beyond the false problem of translation (which is admittedly difficult, but no more from English to another language than from another language to English), and tackle the power differential and the effects of globalisation (especially as I roped Rochita in, and she could attest to personal experience of growing up in a country vastly overwhelmed by US culture). My panel on Youth and Youthfulness in SF was great (Tom Pollock being one of the best moderators I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing), and we tackled lots of interesting problems on that. Highlight of the weekend probably goes to a panel I wasn’t on, though: “The Nature of Heroism” featured Tricia Sullivan, David Anthony Durham, Genevieve Valentine, George RR Martin and Joe Abercrombie, and Tricia raised some very pointed and valid questions about the “men’s club” nature of heroism and our excessive preoccupation with violence in epic fantasy. You can watch the whole thing here, and it’s definitely worth a look.

They also announced the Hugo nominees while I was at Eastercon (but stuck in a signing): there are lots and lots of friend on that list, and many congrats go to them all (I’m especially impressed that a lot of people are on the ballot twice in different categories). To single out just two of them, though: it will come as no surprise that Ken Liu’s short fiction is nominated both for Best Short Story and Best Novella (and I will be very miffed if he doesn’t take at least one of those trophies); and many congrats also go to Nancy Fulda, whose short story “Movement” is a Villa Diodati success story (not often that stuff we critique ends up on the ballot for the Hugos and the Nebulas!).

(I do have a few other links about stuff that went on… less well, shall we say, but I’m keeping them for tomorrow’s link roundup. There were many awesome things about this year’s con, and this is the post for them).

So… bags packed. Chocolate taken with me. Eastercon app downloaded. Leftover food (xá xíu) handed over to the H for his bánh mì tomorrow.

My plane leaves at 8:00, which gets me up at 5:15am. Arg. I’ll be off for some sleep then…

A reminder that my schedule can be found here; and the author herself can be found in the bar or in the dealers’ room. I will be rooming with the awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and hope to see many of you there!

So, as you might know, I have a panel at Eastercon on TV shows we’d like to see but haven’t, and I notoriously lack imagination for that sort of thing (I mean, the only things that come to mind is something with a decent main female character who’s not a Strong Female Who Still Needs to Be Rescued by Men cliché; and a female POC Doctor Who…). But judging by all the interest when I bitch about Sherlock, I’m pretty reasonably sure that some of you have got strong ideas on this 🙂

Therefore, I’m throwing the question(s) out for collective brainstorming:

What don’t you like about current TV shows? What shows would we like to see made but probably won’t be?

Thanks in advance!

So, we’re up to “Let’s Kill Hitler” in Season 6, and there’s stuff I don’t overly like in there…

(spoilers after the cut)
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