Spontaneous ∂erivation

Note: I set up an unfortunate implication in both the title and the following paragraph that “calm and white” should be listened to over “angry and non-white” posts. I hadn’t yet seen N. K. Jemisin’s highly relevant and very good post when I wrote this post—and it was also stupidly presumptuous of me to have remarked upon “most calm” even before a day had passed vis a vis the Spinrad Incident. Apologies for my own FAIL here. This post is otherwise unmodified, because BAHLETION fixes nothing, and should be read with this note in mind.

Indeed, of all the reactions to Norman Spinrad’s recent fail of the week, Nick Mamatas’ is the most reasoned, informative, and calm. Read his column on Haikasoru, “World SF, Worth Reading BEFORE developing an opinion”:

The problem is that Spinrad is just making an appeal to ignorance. He’s not familiar with the many writers of world SF, so he assumes they do not exist. For whatever reason, though he could be familiar with Japanese SF as some of it has been translated into English, he decided to ignore actually existing Japanese SF. He also utterly ignores Chinese SF, which has been a going concern since 1904 at least. China is also the home of Science Fiction World, the most widely read SF magazine on the planet.

[more at Haikasoru]

I think Norman Spinrad just decided he already knew enough, and didn’t need to do the research. Old dog, tricks, etc.

I really must add a wisdom-of-nick-mamatas tag.

As to Norman Spinrad:

Thank you, Cheryl Morgan, for your grace and frankness under fire when responding to some of the, shall we say, tinfoil hat fans in the comments.

Thank you, John Scalzi, for your wisdom and humor and also your very succinct reprisal of Adam Roberts’ little note to fandom.

Thank you, John Picacio, for your wonderful rebuttal of Roberts’ rather feeble attempt at art critique.

Adam Roberts, I knew your name was familiar from somewhere. I actually don’t like your writing, but I always thought, maybe I’ll give wossname another try after a year or so.

Now I’ll remember your name a bit better so as to avoid it in the future.

Update:

Thank you, Nick Mamatas, for making me laugh about some of the ensuing wankery. I already ponied up for you to review G.I. Joe, though! So I’m not namin’ the perceived father of stream-of-consciousness writing here.

I actually do like the dead dude’s writings, as emo as they sometimes are, and would toss some of his classics into the YA section.

Update 2:

Contrary to perceptions of some folks, me and my card-carrying fan friends actually aren’t a group of Midwestern Conservative White Males.

Most of us are pretty liberal, one of us is an out and out libertarian, one of us is actually a Buddhist (it’s not me), half of us are atheists, and while over half of us do come from the Midwest, we left it for various reasons that tend not to, um, pool us into whatever the “Generic Middle America” taste is, which by the way, tends not to touch upon SF/F very much.

Half of us are women. And many apologies, but a quarter of us are non-white.

Most everyone has a college degree, and one guy is so wise he should’ve had one in philosophy long ago.

All of us hate Sarah Palin. None of us are interested in the elitist-versus-non-elitist game. If an “elitist” writes a book we like, we read it. My general sense of fandom is that it’s mostly like us, small sampling that we are.

So, sorry about nominating for the novels that we did, but you can’t blame it on us being Conservatives-with-a-capital-C.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been keeping tabs on pragmatic Writing for Money articles on le web, and these are the must-reads I’ve come up with.

Of course, I always go for the snark.

Three from Nick Mamatas:

Freelance Writing Money, Part I: How To Find Freelance Writing Work:

Look for it.

In 2005, for the Prattshaw project Flytrap, I wrote an essay about freelance writing and suggested that if you could not make a living as a freelancer it is because your standards were too high, both for what counted as writing and what counted as a living. A couple of years later, a new science fiction writer (he’d debuted in Baen’s Universe) wrote me a letter of thanks. He happened to be reading the little zine in a hospital hallway while on the other side of the wall his wife was giving birth. At that moment, he decided to get together a few pieces of writing he’d completed in the hope of getting out of the job he had in a warehouse. He wrote to say that he credited my article with his new gig writing computer software manuals, which meant more money for his family.

(Continue reading…)

Freelance Writing Money, Part II: Writing For Non-Publication:

Be the writer in your social circle.

If you spend a lot of time hanging out with other writers, going to your little writer’s group, and not talking to anyone who isn’t fascinated with writing, writing, writing, you can stop reading now. Sucker.

Remember that our goal here is fast money for writing, not a living doing technical, business, or commercial writing, which is great and pays a lot (I have friends who bill $85-$125 an hour for pamphlets and such) because it just takes a long time to break in. And speaking of suckers, people have degrees in this dumb crap sometimes these days. Though, like a lot of computing gigs, business writing is one of the highly paid jobs that one can snag without a degree.

(Continue reading…)

And, of course, Freelance Writing Money, Part III OR Shocklines Post of the Day!, which is probably one of the better examples of “ads” you should avoid.

Here’s a recent post from John Scalzi’s Whatever:

Dear Writers: For God’s Sake, Don’t Assume You’ll Get Paid:

An interesting and frankly alarming thing in the comment thread of the last post. I noted in the last post that a major issue I saw with the proposed F&SF online writing workshop, which offers the chance that work in the workshop could get published in the magazine, is that there was no indication that those chosen stories would then be paid for. To which several people in the comment thread said something along the lines of “oh, well, that wasn’t a problem for me, because I just assumed there would be payment.”

Jesus, people.

Never assume as a writer that you’re going to get paid.

(Continue reading…)

And now for something not quite completely different: the Washington Post recent scandal about WaPo canceling their plan to get funding from, um, lobbyists.

Addendum:

From Mark Tisdale’s comment on the Whatever thread, here’s a YouTube clip from Dreams with Sharp Teeth, wherein Harlan Ellison talking about getting paid:

Addendum 2:

For people looking for much linked coverage of the WaPo scandal, Politics Daily has the scoop.

I wouldn’t even have remarked on the most recent slight flare-up—I didn’t even comment when Helix Magazine took its ball home shut down, what, a couple months back?—but the minor wank spawned of course spread to the SFF.net newsgroups.

So apparently Helix Magazine, of late racism, wank, and lols, has decided to pull all of its archives after all, claiming that they were scared of Janis Ian after she requested Helix remove a story of hers because

And she is, after all, a well-off popular entertainer, with legal and financial resources we could not hope to match; and none of us had the time nor the energy for a courtroom fight.

Yes, Janis Ian, who had to resort to the resources of the SFWA grievance committee, obviously had deep pockets of cash to drop on this.

And of course the right response is to pull down all the archives, even though this was not requested.

Deathless comment by Nick Mamatas: “I’d call even remarking on this beating a dead horse, except that in this case the dead horse has actually managed to get a bat in its teeth and with a posthumous twitch, smack itself!”

And because this is William Sanders, the baby train wreck doesn’t stop there.

Oh Sanders, never change.