Baycon schedule

Please drop by, listen to what are sure to be some fascinating conversations, and say hello!

 1. Refurbished History: Looting the Past for Fun and Profit on Saturday at 10:00 AM in Stevens Creek (with Professor David C. McGaffey, Irene Radford (M), Kyle Aisteach, David Weber, Chaz Brenchley) Is it cheating to mine the past for story elements? Can you leave identifiable marks as long as they don't disrupt your story? And what about retooling historical figures? When is using identifiable places or characters truly a better choice than being original?
   
 2. The Unpanel: Deep Listening on Saturday at 2:00 PM in Napa III   (with Dave Trowbridge) This panel is a way to come down from the ego-high of an SF Con and spend an hour being heard, rather than just talking.
  
 3. Countering Online Hate Speech on Saturday at 3:30 PM in Alameda    [I am moderating.]     (with Amy Sterling Casil, Colin Fisk, S.L. Gray, Robert Lawrence)    Online hate speech can devastate the lives of the person under attack and everyone around him or her. Panelists discuss effective online responses, ways to support the person, building tolerant communities, and what to do if you yourself are a target.

The Tajji Diaries: Confidence and Joy

Waiting for the ball

 Our friend Mitch Wagner recently adopted a female shepherd/basenji/terrier mix  that shares some of Tajji’s “issues. He writes that Minnie “lunges and goes nuts when she approaches another dog when we're walking.” One of the things we’ve learned from our trainer, Sandi Pensinger, is that this kind of excitement is not fun for dogs. Whatever their specific history, they act this way because they’re overwhelmed. They no longer can calm themselves or communicate friendly intentions to the other dog. One way to look at this is the dog attempting a “pre-emptive strike” because bad things have happened around other dogs in the past. Dogs on leashes are particularly vulnerable to feeling threatened, because their freedom to act in their own defense (or escape) is impaired. Dogs that are tied up are particularly dangerous.

Another way of thinking about this behavior is in terms of self-confidence and trust. A confident dog with good social skills with other dogs is capable of lowering the tension not only in herself but in the other dog as well. Contrary to the “alpha dog/dominance” model, dogs are highly cooperative, social animals. They communicate their feelings and intentions to one another all the time, and many of these signals are calming signals. In earlier blogs, I’ve discussed how Tajji learned to communicate her peaceful intentions to the cats once she’d found a signal they both understood – the “look-away.” Turid Rugaas’s book On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals beautifully illustrates this. Here is a slide show from her book, illustrating the “look-away,” play bows, lip licking, and lying down, all powerful calming signals. 

Dogs who are poorly socialized with other dogs or who have had traumatic experiences can be easily overwhelmed (“flooded” with negative stimuli), especially in situations where the other dog is approaching head-on. A direct approach is threatening, as is fixed eye contact. Our dogs need our help in reducing the degree of threat and resulting arousal. The dogs in Rugaas’s slide show aren’t “friendly” in the human sense, but they have excellent social skills and confidence in themselves.

How do we help a dog re-build her self-confidence?

NEWS FLASH: More Darkover Novels!

Now that the contracts with DAW and the Marion Zimmer Literary Works Trust have been signed, I can tell you what I’ve been up to: proposals for three more Darkover novels. Here are a few “sneak preview” details.

The first of this new group will be Thunderlord, the long-awaited sequel to Stormqueen! Marion intended to write this novel and left a couple of pages of very rough draft, essentially recapitulating Stormqueen! as backstory, but establishing that the central character (one of them, anyway) would be Renata and Donal’s son, the heir to Aldaran, set against a backdrop of the smoldering feud between Aldaran and Scathfell.

The Laran Gambit continues the timeline after The Children of Kings, bringing Darkover and the Star Alliance into conflict and pitting the laran of the Comyn against machine-generated psychic powers.

Arilinn takes us back in time to the founding of the most prestigious of Darkover’s Towers. (And I have a secret hope that if you readers adore Arilinn, I’ll get to write the stories behind the other Towers, too!)

Likely publication dates are 2016, 2017, and 2018, but you never know. Stay tuned for writerly inspiration and more details!

Adventures in Author Readings

Over the decades, I’ve done many readings, and each one has a story behind it.

All kinds of things can go wrong at readings. Nobody shows up – that’s the classic “worst fear” of newer (and experienced!) writers. Sooner or later, it happens to all of us. I consider the experience part of being a working writer interacting with the public. It’s not a reflection on my work or me personally, it’s just the way things go. I wait for a reasonable amount of time to accommodate late-comers before deciding it’s a no-go. What’s reasonable depends; I’ve had people come in as late as five minutes before the next reading. The important thing then is to be gracious and friendly. Conventions are busy places, and I appreciate any effort to get to my reading, particularly if it’s scheduled in an out-of-the-way place or at the same time as something really popular.

Then there are solo readings where only a few people come and half of them leave, and those who stay have the pained expressions of those who find themselves in the wrong place but are too polite to leave you with no audience at all. At times like these, I don’t plod through what I’ve planned (unless, of course, those stalwart few are perking up in surprised delight). I may cut it short or do something outrageous to liven it up, like interspersing paragraphs with interpretive dance. Or I pass the manuscript or book around, round-robin style, asking for dialog to be read in silly voices. In other words, I try to make the reading a fun experience, even if my audience is there by mistake. If I’m reading from a print-out, I’ll autograph it and offer it to a lucky winner.

GUEST BLOG: Thoughts on Daoism and Dog Training from Dave Trowbridge

In "the meadow"

“Rulers should always avoid giving commands…for commands, being direct and verbal, always bring to the subject’s mind the possibility of doing the opposite. But since rituals are non-verbal, they have no contraries. They can therefore be used to produce harmony of wills and actions without provoking recalcitrance; if a man finds himself playing his appointed part in li [ritual] and thus already — as it were de facto — in harmony with others, it no more occurs to him than it occurs to a dancer to move to a different rhythm than that being played by the orchestra.” 

Master Zhuang, 4^th century BCE Daoist philosopher
and proto-anarchist

That quotation was seminal in creating the anarcho-monarchical politics of the Panarchy, the interstellar polity that’s the setting of the space opera Exordium. The Panarchs and Kyriarchs all wielded theoretically unlimited power, but most of them died, or were killed, before they learn how to work the hyper-complex network of interlocking traditions, institutions, and governance that executes their will.

It’s also, I now find, a perfect encapsulation of the rather Daoist aspects of the positive dog training techniques that Deborah and I are using to rehabilitate Tajji, a process more like conversation than education, and certainly one in which learning flows both ways. Certainly, our work with Tajji is teaching me that much of dog training, if not all, is about the negotiation, establishment, and performance of rituals rather than the issuing of commands.

As Master Zhuang might have said, those who do not acknowledge the power of ritual will find themselves helpless against it, and it can be argued that this is a fundamental reason there are so many ill-trained dogs in the world: dogs that have established their rituals as the rule of life for a household.