BayCon 2016 Schedule

I'll be at Baycon 2016, Friday May 27- Monday May 30, 2016, at the San Mateo Marriott. Please stop by and say hello.

Evil to the Core: Villains in Sci fi and Fantasy (Saturday 11:30 - 13:00, Synergy 5)
Sure, the hero gets the gal (or guy) and all the glory, but it's the villain that does all the hard work. Where would Batman be without the Joker? Nowhere! A good villain can drive a story, but it's exhausting and thankless work. Come pay homage to your favorite villains and join in as authors discuss treasured villains in their own work and others to reveal what makes those villains engage or repulse us¦or what fails to. Find out if your antagonist is as villainous as he or she should be.

Autograph Session (Sunday 11:00 - 12:00, Convene Lobby) (I will have copies of Collaborators, Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and other books to sell).

Wonder Woman After 50 (Sunday 14:30 - 16:00, Connect 4)
Ageism in fandom, or, Mom aren't you too old to dress up in silly costumes?

The Adult In Young Adult (Monday 11:30 - 13:00, Synergy 5)
YA: no swearing, sex, violence, or drugs. So your hero is a young boy who's just been thrown in among a bunch of space marines; can you really write a plausible story without swearing and violence? Our panelists discuss finding the appropriate without sacrificing the authentic.

Jane M. H. Bigelow on "Snow Dancing" in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Jane M. H. Bigelow had her first professional publication in Free Amazons of Darkover. Since then, she has published a fantasy novel, Talisman, as well as short stories and short nonfiction on such topics as gardening in Ancient Egypt. Jane is a retired reference librarian, a job which encouraged her to go on being curious about everything and exposed her to a rich variety of people. She lives in Denver, CO with her husband and two spoiled cats.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?

Jane M. H. Bigelow: My first stories were mostly crayon pictures with a few words. I remember one with a young witch flying over the houses and having a wonderful time. As a story it lacked conflict, but the witch and I had a great time.

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?

JMHB: Darkover's wonderfully detailed world  intrigued me, especially the strong basis for the Darkovan's psi abilities. I only found the series after it had been going on for awhile; another thing I liked was that I didn't need to read the books in a set order to enjoy them.

DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover? Is there another story you would particularly like to write?

JMHB: Another story? Oh, yes, several. As far as the future goes, I hope we'll see more of the ways that Terrans and Darkovans work out a coexistence. It seems to me that at least some of the Terran Empire might change, too. I enjoy stories set during the Hundred Kingdoms period also, though I can't seem to write them.

DJR: What inspired your story in Realms of Darkover?

JMHB: I'd always wondered why nobody on Darkover used cross-country skis to get around in all that snow. Since Darkovans didn't in fact have them, how could I introduce them?  What would happen if I did?

Monday Wisdom From Alice Walker

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.


I have the best friends in the world!

The Adventure of the Walkabout Cat

One of the challenges of owning indoor-only cats is that they don’t always get with the program. They dart out of open doors, find ways to squirm through gates and partly-opened windows, and so forth. We humans have yet to find the means to explain to them why they must stay on one side of the door when there are so many intoxicating smells and things to chase on the other side.

In our neighborhood, there are all the usual reasons for keeping cats indoors, plus a few local ones. Predators (mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, plus critters who can take on a cat and come out on top, like raccoons), diseases, ticks, fleas, cars. Things that cats are predators for: songbirds and helpful garden reptiles, to mention a few.

In our household, the situation is complicated by having a retired seeing eye dog who has been trained to open doors. She can’t managed round knobs, but latches are no problem, nor are sliding screens.

Here are our two cats, Shakir and Gayatri. Despite having one eye, Gayatri is a fearsome hunter. If we acceded to her wishes, she would present us with a snake or lizard every single day. Since this would mean disaster for our garden ecology, we keep her in jail. She gets out occasionally, which is why we use flea/tick/heartworm prevention on her, and she always comes back a few hours later, irate that we have not let her in right now.

Shakir, on the other hand, would sniff at a screen door and then slink away to a cozy basket. We always believed that of the two cats, he was the stay-at-home. Until one day, we discovered that Tajji, our afore-mentioned door artiste, had managed to open the sliding screen door. We did not realize this until some hours after the fact.

“Where’s Gayatri? Oh, thank goodness, she’s here, napping.”

And we did not think to look for Shakir until the next morning, when he failed to demand his breakfast.

Michael Spence on “The Snowflake Fallacy” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Michael Spence describes himself as an expatriate Virginian living less than five hundred kilometers from the Canadian border, along the northern event horizon of the St. Paul-Minneapolis paradox. He is the narrator of several Darkover novel audio books, including of Marion's The Heirs of Hammerfell. Recent publications include "Dark Speech" (with Elisabeth Waters, in Sword and Sorceress 30), "The Music of the Spheres" (Music of Darkover), "Requiem for the Harlequin: Two Perspectives on Time, and a Celebration of Kairos, in Three Stories by Harlan Ellison" (Sci Phi Journal), and "Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Tale from the Archives of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences" (Imagine That! Studios), a Finalist for the 2014 Parsec Award.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?

Michael Spence: When? Not sure; I only know that I was doing story fragments and rudimentary stories by sixth grade. Some were submitted as school assignments. One collection of fragments appeared on a stack of monogrammed memo slips discarded by an aunt. A novel got outlined in eighth grade and then abandoned. Junior high saw an attempt at audio drama and some Man from U.N.C.L.E. fanfic. High school Star Trek parodies placed fellow high-school students on an all-female starship (all but one, that is: me. Wish fulfillment, you ask? Naah. Well, okay, the starship part was).

Why? Hm. Some will tell you they read an atrocious story and knew they could do better. I saw a couple of stories like that, even a novel published as part of a media tie-in series (no doubt filling a last-minute hole in the schedule, albeit with silly putty). But also there's the fact, at least in my experience, that writers simply are cool -- you would agree, wouldn't you? -- and I wanted to be one. As Diane Duane's enticing title says, So You Want to Be a Wizard ... well, being a writer comes pretty durn close.

I might have quit for good in college, though, after a creative writing course with a then-prominent "literary fiction" author who had no time for SF. That I resumed it later ... "and who deserves the credit, and who deserves the blame? Ay!" Elisabeth Waters, that's who. We'd been friends during high-school years, and after college I lost contact with her ... but one day in a bookstore near the University of Virginia I picked up The Keeper's Price and saw Lisa's story "The Alton Gift," and some years later her impressive "The Blade of Unmaking" appeared in Sword and Sorceress 14. A mutual friend put us back in touch, and once when she and Marion were going through some stressful times I wrote a lighthearted Darkover novelette for them, noteworthy only in that it's the first piece of that length that I actually finished. I look on that as the moment I finally became something resembling a writer.

Sometime afterward, we were discussing story thoughts, and I mentioned an idea I was struggling with. Shortly thereafter she emailed me to say she had a possible solution, and would I like to collaborate? The result was "Salt and Sorcery" in Sword and Sorceress 16, the second of the Treasures of Albion stories, and we've been working in that world since then.

At about the same time, I took a short break from dissertation work one afternoon to do a short piece called "One Drink Before You Go." I submitted it to S & S, but Marion bought it for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Worlds. That was my first fiction sale.

Monday Wisdom From Simone Signoret

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.


Really, would you want to be with someone you had to chain yourself to?

Leslie Fish on “Old Purity” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Leslie Fish says she learned to sing and to read at a very young age, playing guitar at sixteen, and writing the first of hundreds of songs shortly thereafter, including settings of Rudyard Kipling's poetry and the “all-time most notorious” Star Trek filksong ever written: “Banned From Argo”. She’s recorded a number of albums and composed songs, both alone and collaborative, on albums from every major filk label. She was elected to the Filk Hall Of Fame as one of the first inductees. In college, she majored in English and minoring in psychology, protest and politics, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and did psychology counseling for veterans. Her other jobs included railroad yard clerk, go-go dancer, and social worker. She currently lives in Arizona with her husband Rasty and a variable number of cats, which she breeds for intelligence.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?

Leslie Fish: As soon as I learned to write, I started writing stories, jokes, songs, poems, anything I could put on paper. I'd always loved storytelling, and writing was a way of preserving a story, plain and simple.

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover.

LF: I was poking through a local bookstore and came across The Sword of Aldones in paperback -- and I was hooked.

DJR: What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?

LF: I was fascinated with the idea of a society of psychics, complete with a technology of psionics.  And of course there were all the other fascinating intelligent beings on the planet.

DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover?

LF: Expanding!  My latest story is about one of the native non-human(?) species plotting and politicking to survive and succeed in the aftermath of the Terran Empire.  I can imagine countless tales about the human and non-human Darkovans dealing with that future.

Monday Wisdom From Mary Pickford

This thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.



When I read this, I think of how babies learn to walk -- by falling down a lot! Fortunately for the human race, we are too darn stubborn to let that stop us from trying again.

Original Vision vs. Compromising With the Market

A recent discussion with a fairly new, immensely talented writer highlighted for me a dilemma that most of us will face sooner or later. What do we do when what we really want to write, when the stories that catch on fire in our imagination, do not fit into a neat marketing niche? All of us fall somewhere along the spectrum from safely, predictably commercial to unclassifiable, idiosyncratic, and therefore of no interest to traditional publishers. One highly successful genre writer confided in me that her fantastic sales numbers were the luck of the draw. “I happen to write stories that are commercial and draw a large audience,” she said. “It's my natural authorial voice.”

I also know writers who are so original in their vision and so delightfully quirky in their execution that editors throw up their hands in frustration because although they adore this author’s work and see the author as the next great literary voice, they cannot envision a way to market it. In the best of times, such authors found a home in the midlist, and that still happens, although less frequently now than when editors had more power (and the freedom to discover and nurture new authors).

If you believe in your work, how can you be sure but this is not infatuation with your own words but that your work truly is of high quality? Every writer I know goes through spasms of self-doubt. Writing requires a bizarre combination of megalomania and crushing self-doubt. We need the confidence to follow our flights of fancy, and at the same time, we need to regard our creations with a critical eye. Trusted readers, including workshops like Clarion and Clarion West, critique groups, fearless peers, and freelance editors can give us invaluable feedback on whether our work really is as good as we think it might be. Of course, they can be wrong. It may be that what we are trying to do falls so far outside conventional parameters that only we can judge its value. It may also be that we see on the page not what is actually there but what we imagined and hoped.

Margaret L. Carter and Roy Carter on “A Walk in the Mountains” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing? (And anything else you’d like to share about yourself and your life.)

Margaret L. Carter: After reading Dracula at the age of twelve and becoming enthralled with vampires, horror, fantasy, and “soft” SF, I started writing fiction at age thirteen because I couldn’t find enough stories of the kind I wanted to read. In the early 1960s, my only sources were the public library and whatever paperbacks I came across in local stores. I especially wanted fiction from the viewpoint of the “monster.” I was writing my own “good guy vampire” stories long before they became popular. I eventually earned degrees in English literature through the PhD level, on the premise that as a college instructor I could get paid for reading books. That plan didn’t quite work out, given the post-1970s slump in the academic job market; I spent most of my working life as a part-time legislative editor for the General Assembly of Maryland.

When Les and I met as teenagers in a church group, he was also writing already, mainly science fiction. Our authorial aspirations drew us together. His father had retired from a career in the Navy and settled in Norfolk, Virginia, where I grew up. After getting married, we attended the College of William and Mary. Les became an officer in the Navy after graduation. His Navy career put his writing on hold for several decades. Upon retirement, he returned to it.


DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?

Monday Wisdom From William Penn

Look not out, but within… Remember it is a still voice that speaks to us in this day, and that it is not to be heard in the noises and hurries of the mind; but it is distinctly understood in a retired frame.

~ William Penn, 1644-1718, American Quaker and founder of Pennysylvania