World Fantasy Report, Part The First - Getting There

Friday October 27, 2011 was a travel day. It's a long drive to San Diego, even if we don't get caught in traffic passing through or around Los Angeles. "We" are husband Dave Trowbridge and me. This leads me to some thoughts on packing for conventions. You'd think that after all these years of con-going -- going on 30 -- that most of it would be rote. And it is, at least when it comes to what to throw in my suitcase. One nice outfit if there's a publisher's dinner, underwear for n days plus one, layers to cope with the vagaries of hotel air conditioning, that sort of thing. I've got a travel kit of teas, packets of instant oatmeal, sweetener, spoons and immersion heater. I could throw together toiletries and prescriptions in my sleep. Then there are things I sometimes forget, like gold stickers that say, "Autographed Copy" (left at home this time), old cover flats and bookplates for autograph freebies (also left at home), and copies of the collection of my short fiction that I published through Anthology Builder and offer for sale at cost (also left at home). Mostly, these "left at homes" are not a big deal. I'm better and more organized some times than others, and I'm pretty relaxed about it.

Then there are the moments of sheer panic.

Off to World Fantasy Convention...

and will be either offline or too blitzed to make sense for the next few days.

Be patient, all, and a report shall be forthcoming!

Interview in Portuguese

Waldir Ramos Neto, a Brazilian fan, translated part of an interview with me on his blog, Flor de Kireseth. 

Em visita ao Flor de Kireseth, Deborah elogiou a qualidade visual do site (já que não fala portugues) e me deu diversas dicas de sites, blogs e grupos de discussão onde posso pegar mais informações sobre MZB, Darkover e Deborah J. Ross.

Hoje ela me enviou uma entrevista que concedeu a um site italiano sobre Darkover. Traduzi os trechos que achei mais pertinentes.

..... 

It is a strange and wonderful experience to read one's words in a different language. (And to see the covers with different artwork and oh yes, I see what that title was originally.) 

The Lady (Actual and Honorary) Writers' Lunch

Writing is a lonely business. Well, maybe if you write screenplays as part of a committee, it isn't, but for most of us, the process involves endless hours with just us and the words on the page. No wonder we end up talking to our characters and listening when they talk back. There's a listing for that in the DSM-IV.

One of my secret weapons against the perils of isolation is the writer's lunch. When I lived in Los Angeles, I joined my first critique group, an eclectic mix of sf/f writers, mystery writers, and mainstream "literary" writers, with a core of Clarion and UCLA Advanced Writing class graduates. One of the other sf/f writers and I started going to lunch once a month or so. The group meetings were tightly focused on critiquing manuscripts and there wasn't much time for schmoozing about general writing issues, nor was the group atmosphere hospitable to sf/f shop talk. I quickly learned the value of having a writing buddy, someone to cheer me on, help me choose markets, analyze the personalities of editors, commiserate with about rejections (and try to interpret those letters), and more.

Gender, Sex, Identity and A Bunch of Other Fascinating Issues

Last year, I attended a workshop at the Ben Lomond Quaker Center on "Gender, the Search for Self and the Search for Acceptance," facilitated by Chloe Schwenke, an ethicist who is herself a transgendered woman. (There's an interview with her here.) Although much of the workshop centered on personal issues of gender and identity, it struck me that as writers, we can discover much depth and richness by asking the same questions.

For the workshop, we defined sex as the classification of people as male or female. Intersex individuals, that is, people possessing the external characteristics of both, are usually "assigned" to one sex or the other. Gender, on the other hand, is a personal sense of being a man or a woman (or both, or neither). Each of these is distinct from sexual orientation, which has to do with an enduring physical, romantic, and emotional attraction to another person. Gender has been described as "who you want to go to bed as, not who you want to go to bed with."

In science fiction and fantasy, we have been playing around with such notions as more than two sexes/genders, none, fluid sexes/genders, and a diversity of gender role expressions. Every so often, a story that takes a new or not-new-but-splashy look at the field garners a lot of buzz, particularly in the queer and queer-friendly community. Yet much genre writing continues to perpetuate the world view of two oppositional and fixed genders, each with equally unyielding behavioral expectations. For many writers and readers, a character or society that goes too far outside the familiar becomes so uncomfortable as to fracture sympathetic identification. It strikes me, however, that even within the limitations of conventional portrayals of sex and gender, we can reach for greater depth. We can go beyond the Caveman Model of Gender Roles, the Separatist All-Men or All-Women Worlds, the Rambo-in-Drag/Supersensitive Male dichotomies and other variations already done to death.