My full rant about how terrible the last episode of Battlestar Galactica was (including the stupid implications of Hera being mitochondrial Eve) will have to wait, as I am out working on my short story for the Genomics Forum competition (and again posting from my phone). In the meantime, I agree with pretty much all of the points raised by the Battlestar Round Table at tor.com.
Category: Blog
It was an accident at first, and then a week and a half of having this website had gone by and I noticed I had not missed a day yet. So I started doing it on purpose. And I even came up with a reason why blogging something every day was a good thing: just putting something out into the world helps me lower my perfectionism bar. Perfectionism is just procrastination wearing a fancy coat, after all, so forcing myself to put something up here every day could have the knock-on effect of helping me relax my internal editor. Help me work on my other writing projects in a more focused manner.
But today all of my ideas for things to put up here would actually take me too long to develop, and I want to use that time to…gasp…work on my short story. So please enjoy this meta-post while I am off working on fiction.
A personal journal entry from several months ago begins with a quotation by Primo Levi, which I encountered in an essay by Ursula LeGuin. “It is the duty of the righteous man to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”
I wrote several paragraphs of not-very-focused rumination about this idea when I first encountered it, and I have thought back to it many times since. And now I find myself thinking of it once again as I read the thoughts of one of my Clarion teachers, Mary Anne Mohanraj, talking about issues of race and its treatment in SF/F on John Scalzi’s blog. (“Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up To Speed” Part 1, Part 2) A fair amount of this discussion concerns genre fiction and the genre fiction community, but there is much here that is a reflection of our culture as a whole. Specifically, it was through the early rounds of this discussion (which has kind of unfortunately come to be known as RaceFail ’09) that I encountered Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which helped focus for me some of the fuzzy edges of the concept of undeserved privilege and made me realize that while my thinking about privilege in terms of class was fairly developed, it was still very rudimentary on issues of race.
I’m still getting my thoughts in order on the subject of subverting undeserved privilege, and how doing so interfaces or fails to interface with rational self-interest. It’s a sort of idealism vs. pragmatism in the face of preexisting conditions argument, and I am struggling to find my own clarity of thought about it. But the RaceFail ’09 discussion has helped me learn to recognize kinds of privilege that were previously invisible to me, and even bereft of conclusions the improved perception is valuable.
I am in my hotel in Houston, where tonight I will see Jonathan Coulton in concert at the House of Blues. Surprisingly, my hotel does not seem to have wireless internet. But this affords me a good opportunity to test the iPhone WordPress client. If this works like it is supposed to, I should momentarily have a new blog post with a phonecam picture of my ticket to the show appended to it.
EDIT: Huzzah!
It’s been a whole two weeks since I started this blog, and surprisingly many people have already found it and improved it with their comments. I’m sure no one else is paying as close attention to the people contributing to the larger discussion here as I am, so I want take a moment and drag them into the spotlight of acknowledgment and thanks.
First: Michael Fischer is my father. Alanna, Andrew, Ferrett, Jeff, Lauren, Megan, Nicole, Oisin, and Sarah are all personal friends, and to the extent they have online presences are on my Links page. Check them out, they rock!
New faces:
Julie Andrews is another aspiring SF/F writer and Clarion grad, who attended the workshop the year before I did.
Jordan Lapp is going to be an attendee of Clarion West ’09, and a winner of the Writers of the Future contest.
Scott Baker is an an applicant for Clarion ’09 and Clarion West ’09.
Tracie W. is another.
Jeanne, NJM, and JC are also hoping to go to Clarion, though they didn’t leave any links for me to point you at. (Good luck to all the applicants.)
Patrick Tomasso runs Enjoy The Show, a spiffy-looking movie news and reviews site.
Thank you all for your comments! I hope you’ll stick around.
You may notice that the links to my Clarion classmates’ and teachers’ blogs are no longer in the sidebar. They have been moved to my freshly-updated links page, accessible from any page on this site by clicking the “Links” tab in the header. The page is a growing collection of pure, concentrated awesome, and I encourage you to spend significant percentages of your life visiting and revisiting its contents.
I have a LiveJournal account which, prior to my setting up this website, has seen intermittent activity. I’ve decided that I want to experiment with synchronizing these two blogging services. If all goes well, what I post here should show up there. Let’s see if it works.
EDIT: Huzzah!
SECOND EDIT: But if I save a post as a draft on the blog, it publishes the draft to LiveJournal. Boo!
THIRD EDIT: It looks like I can specifically tell it not to synch when I save a draft, but I have to do so by hand for each entry I am saving to post later. Irritating, but not completely unworkable. Meh!
The hook is the bit that grabs your attention at the start, intrigues you enough to keep reading. This entry isn’t much of a hook, but that’s okay–this blog isn’t much of a blog. Yet. We will see how it develops.
Regardless, I’m glad you are here. Chances are, if you stick around, you will see a lot of changes going on here in the near future. Do not allow yourself to be alarmed by this. You are perfectly safe. And while there isn’t much in the way of diverting content here yet, the upside of that is you can easily appreciate what is here in it’s entirety! There’s an “About” page that has some links in it, and I’ve already filled the sidebar with some seriously awesome people. And more is coming, I assure you.