I’m awake way too early on New Years Eve, so I decided to spend the time contemplating the end of this year and the beginning of the next. Because that’s what people do, right? Shortly to be followed by angst-ridden resolutions and the fear of failure in living up to our own meager expectations of willpower. So, let’s not.

2017 was a dumpster fire of a year politically, climatologically, culturally, and yet, not everything was horrible. While 45 was setting the United States back fifty, nay, one hundred years in advancement in some areas, other humans were working their butts off for their fellow humans. There are the wonderful compilation videos of 2017’s best news bloopers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD3DjN7i1Fg), but that’s not what I’m talking about (though those ARE funny). I’m talking scientific breakthroughs in water production or how we managed to make the first edit on a human embryo’s genome which will allow us to edit out disease before implantation. Or, going the other direction, scientists are one step closer to being able to effectively treat some forms of paralysis which brings hope to so many people who struggle in their daily lives in a world not suited to those differently-abled.

But for all the stunning new discoveries in science, the one thing they haven’t figured out is why humans are so terrible to each other so consistently. Every time I opened an internet browser this year, I was besieged by stories of another mass shooting, of another racially/gender/sexuality-based crime; of another march against the injustice of living while POC/female/immigrant/poor/sick. God forbid you are any combination of the afore-mentioned as it is nearly impossible for you to pull yourself up by your second-hand bootstraps. If you even have boots. And all the cis-het-white-males of the world get their panties in a bunch at the phrase white privilege, so maybe we should restyle it as white advantage and rebrand it as just that, an advantage on the game of life that allows us to have the luxury of making a difference. Our advantage is in being heard, in having weight and influence, and it should be used to help lift up our fellow human. Our worth as humans lies not in what we manage to acquire for ourselves but in how we treat and help our brethren with the losing tickets in life.

In response to this madness, I choose to take advice from Mr. Rogers: Look for the helpers. The heirs to fortunes who speak out against tax policy that would be greatly beneficial for them, but ruin the rest of the country. People turning out in record-breaking numbers to show their dissatisfaction of the government. And the few politicians standing up for the well-being of the entire American population, despite being verbally attacked and forced out of hearings whenever possible. (I’m pretty sure Senator Warren is fueled by the insensate screams of her opponents.)

With all of this weighing on our hearts as we head into the new year, it can be daunting to try and feel hope and optimism that things will be better. I’m not going to make false promises to you about the direction of politics or how the only direction is up. There are too many competing factors to even begin to make those sorts of observations. The only thing that is true is that at this time tomorrow the number on the calendar will have changed and its up to us to find our place in the dystopic America we are now mired in. Here’s what I can say, though:

It’s time to stop looking for the helper and instead become a helper yourself. You don’t need to become a national politician or an award-winning writer with death-threats from the conservative elite to make a difference. That’s where most people come up short, terrified of failing, certain there is no difference they can make in the world because they aren’t big enough. So start small.

First, you have to decide which issue you want to focus on. You can’t focus on them all, it’s too much pain, too much suffering, and you’ll become overwhelmed by it all and paralyzed into submission. So do you care about women’s issues? Or the struggles of POC in our country? Or the homeless epidemic? Or the opioid crisis? Pick one thing that you can connect with on a personal level and latch on. Now, pick a small way to make a difference. Maybe it’s a five dollar donation. If you can’t afford the money (let’s be honest, a lot of us in this country have empty pockets right now) what about an hour of your time? Can you help the local homeless shelter by volunteering one hour to clean the bunk room? Can you spend one afternoon tutoring kids at a local free educational center? Can you take ten short minutes to email your political representatives to express your concern for a particular subject in your area? Pick just one, do it tomorrow, while the sun comes up on a new number because nothing in this world will have magically changed for the better. We have to be the change we want to see, even if it’s one tiny step at a time, so small we think it’s insignificant. You never know where that one step will take you, or how grateful people will be when you take a step towards them and hold out your hand. So start the new year right, not with hope, but determination and resolve.

For the first time ever, I had the opportunity to attend Geek Girl Con and it was everything I hoped it would be. I’ve never seen such a joyous celebration of geek-dom with a broad range of cosplay, gender expression, and family attendance. All of the little kids dressed up as their favorite characters just about made my ovaries explode with cuteness. And the artists! Oh my gosh, I have so many new favorite vendors, and I’ve included a list of my favorites below.

There were a couple of other standout events I wanted to give a shoutout to. First of all, I was privileged to be chosen as a model for the fashion show on Saturday night and it was wonderful seeing the broad range of sizes, ages, and skin colors that were represented between the five designers. If you want to see the designer I modeled for, check out the Geek Girl Fashion Show – Haute Geek Catwalk Video!

Second was a panel on inclusivity in table top role playing games. The panelists were Jaden Emme, Lauren Karp, Jessica Lanzillo, Kristine Hassell, and Nicole Jekich. We stopped by one of the panelist’s booths after the fact to chat and she was awesome (Nicole Jekich for Daily Magic) and we traded some tips and gossip. The main gist of the panel for those of you who couldn’t attend: Tabletop gaming comes from a very male-centric genesis and has a lot of problematic features. The best way to combat this and create a welcoming space is to be conscious of your choices as a game master/dungeon master/story teller, and to make sure the way in which you are running the games is conducive to accommodating any quirks and limitations your players may have as well as making sure the game is a safe space where everyone is having fun. Some specific tips I walked away with:

• Create math cheat sheets/short cuts for anyone who struggles with the math heavy portions of RPGs
• Use an X-card that is available for players to utilize whenever they become uncomfortable with something that is happening at the table in order for the DM to address it and rewind. Turns out we’d been doing this already with shop bells, though those are normally used at our table when we just want someone to stop describing something gross.
• Banning phones/tablets at the table if people aren’t paying attention to each other, also limiting people’s talking time during rounds if someone is an over-talker.
• Confront your usage of traditionally problematic characters/races such as the Drow. In safe spaces, work on subverting their traditionally colonial presentation.
• To assist people with possible physical impediments do things like call out all dice rolls rather than depending on the table to be able to see them. Also color-coding dice for new players or players who have trouble distinguishing shapes.
• Make sure to have a large range of representation in your miniatures and reference images. Use resources like Medieval POC, Deviantart, and Writing with Color tumblr to help expand your references.

Also, with impeccable timing, this article appeared on Tor’s blog today: “Where are all the women?” which explores the absences of women in speculative fiction roles.

And the shopping list you’ve all been waiting for: Favorite Vendor List!

• Haute Geek is run by two fabulous sisters who create the art and make the skirts. I modeled the Heroes skirt and purchased These Are Our Voyages for myself!
• The other vendors in the fashion show that I desperately want to purchase from: Little Petal, Jordandene, Elhoffer, and Booty and the Geek
• We bought five pieces of art from Monkey Minion Press, including this one:
  
• GeekStar Costuming has the best flashy acrylic jewelry and I bought a set of earrings and a necklace of shiny silver bat’leths! If you need me to tell you what those are, we can’t be friends…
• Boutique Academia has gorgeous and affordably priced science and math jewelry. Definitely need to order some…
• Women Write About Comics is a fantastic blog about…well…it’s pretty self explanatory, though it’s expanded beyond its initial mission and also has an awesome goat-themed journal called Bleating Heart Press. I can’t get over that pun!
• Razorgirl Press is local and awesome and had some quite excellent books up for sale.

As my quest for non cis-het-white-male spec fic authors continues (now and forever abbreviated as Non-CHWM) I delve into the worold of Malka Older in Infomocracy. In this novel, we follow several characters as they navigate a world where the internet is run by a single entity called Information and the world government has been broken down into micro-democracies with hundreds of political options to be voted on to run your small corner of the world, and a super-majority government that sees to the inter-governmental interactions. What follows is a fast-paced and rousing political intrigue including, but not limited to, election tampering and natural disasters.

I have to say, the plot, the characters, and the writing are all phenomenal. Older does a fantastic job making sure you don’t get lost between jumps of characters, helped along by the fact that they span a world’s worth of ethnicities and so have vastly different names and identities that help the reader keep them separate. No, where I struggled with this novel was in the world building.

It took me a long time in the novel to pin point where my feelings of disjointed-ness were coming from and an even longer rambling rant to my husband to figure out what exactly it was that wasn’t working. The problem was two-fold: there were too many small unnecessary details thrown in each time we changed global locations, with a lot of new food and clothing and vocabulary that was hard to keep track of and instead was a distraction from the plot. That’s not to say that ethnically appropriate details should be omitted, just that in this instance there were just too many and the changes between locations was too fast and too abrupt for me to be able to even begin to grok the local cuisine, let alone figure out why the knowledge of it was relevant to the story.

The second problem was that I just did not believe the technological aspects of the novel, or that the micro-democracy as it stood would ever be functional. On the political side of things, it felt like a thought-exercise for a political philosophy class was put into action, but had no real basis in reality for surviving. I would have expected it to have dissolved into anarchy and infighting between the microcosms long before the twenty years it had survived thus far in the novel. It’s the same problem I have with books like Divergent; I just do not believe humans would suffer that political system without rebellion and pitchforks. It reminded me a lot of Snow Crash in its attempted feel, but without the elegance or feeling organic like Snow Crash. But on to the technological problems…

The world supposedly revolves around a version of the internet referred to as Information: an unbiased, and ungoverned, controlling bureaucracy which handles all world-wide communication, dissemination of knowledge, and voting. Everything, and I mean EVERYthing is routed through Information, including social media, payment, etc. **SPOILERS** At one point in the novel, Information is compromised and everything goes down except for Information’s intranet and a few other intranets that have been set up, but they can still access data from before 3 weeks ago, or essentially, cached data. But that’s just not how the internet works. It’s as if the entire thing suffers a giant DDOS attack, but Older doesn’t really explain how it’s attacked, why it fails, or even really how they get things working again, and as someone who works in a technological field, the entire concept and proposed reality of Information drove me NUTS. When it was a passive background part of the world I was like, okay, fine, sort of 1984 Big Brother, but whatevs, and then it gets compromised and I was like, “NO…WAIT…STOP. THAT’S NOT…NO…STAHP PLZ.” **//SPOILERS**

All that being said, I enjoyed the interpersonal stories, and the political intrigue and the writing itself was amazingly fun and it kept me turning pages regardless of its flaws, so that should show you how strong the other elements in the book actually are. If you don’t mind technological hiccups, or wouldn’t know a cloud computational solution if it bit you in the butt, then you would really enjoy this novel and not have any trouble with it like I did. However, if computers or poli-sci are your life, I would probably steer clear unless you like yelling at books…

Reviews keep coming in for Less Than Charming and it is gaining more and more traction in all sorts of arenas, huzzah! I’m hard at work on the second one, and we may be able to do a paperback version of the book in the near future.

Most recent is a review by Book Princess Reviews, and I’m glad to say it continues the trend of loving the book. And I promise, those of you who thought the plot started a little slow in LTC will be rewarded for your patience with the plot of the second one. There was just a lot of set up that needed to happen in the first book,but since the world is solidly in place, I can just jump right in now!

A while back, I had a marvelous sci-fi short story titled “Pit Stop” accepted for publication by Geminid Press for their space opera anthology. Today, it was released! Check out the Night Lights Anthology on Amazon and get it for free for your Kindle, but only for a limited time!

 

Its finally time! Less Than Charming is up for pre-order, and we’re doing it through Indiegogo so we have a chance to get you guys some awesome extras while we’re at it. So go check out our page and get your reservation in soon for your hardback book!

Sorry for the long hiatus, friends, but there was a LOT going on in the last year. Started with some health issues, then getting engaged, getting married, and then moving across the country, among some exciting (and time consuming) writing projects. I am now finally settled enough to come back to this page, and boy do I have a lot of news for you!

First: Less Than Charming has been picked up for publication by Parkhurst Brothers Publishing! And I got to do the design for it as well! Check out the cover:

Its launching in June of 2016 and I will keep you updated on its progress and event news.

Second: Zosozo of Oz, the second novella in the Ozite cycle (see what I did there?) is almost ready for release and should be hitting shelves by the beginning of November! Again, I’ll keep you posted.

Third: My short story, “Pit Stop,” is going to be featured in the Night Lights Anthology by Geminid Press! I’ll let you know when that’s available for purchase as well.

I think that’s all for now, but rest assured that during my silence I’ve been hard at work creating more content for all ya’ll! Happy reading!

As most of you know, I have spent most of the last year working with the new Seattle Play Series on their debut set: The Green Lake Collection. Not only do I have a short play in the series, I was also in charge of all the design and layout for the project. For those of you who backed the Indiegogo project, your copy is being mailed to me as we speak and you should have it before Thanksgiving! For anyone who hasn’t purchased their copy yet, but wants to, click the link above, or the picture below, and it’ll take you straight to Amazon to get your own copy! The play is available in print, in every digital format, and, really, any way you could want it. Let me know if I missed a format…

Since I had been posting my voting record for the Hugo, I figured it was only fair to post the final results and how I feel about them.

BEST NOVEL – Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (Orbit US / Orbit UK) Yay! Perfect. This novel is beautiful and all of you need to read it RIGHT NOW.

BEST NOVELLA – “Equoid” by Charles Stross (Tor.com, 09-2013) Eh…well, its well written but I don’t normally enjoy horror and this was rather gruesome for my taste. But no ill will.

BEST NOVELETTE –  “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal (maryrobinettekowal.com / Tor.com, 09-2013) Wish it had been the other, but this story is beautiful, so congrats Kowal.

BEST SHORT STORY – “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu (Tor.com, 02-2013) YAY! Again, this story was just beautiful and you all need to read it right now.

BEST GRAPHIC STORY –  “Time” by Randall Munroe (xkcd) Yes, yes, yes! Congrats Randall, you deserve it. This was a truly unique piece of work.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM – Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Esperanto Filmoj; Heyday Films;Warner Bros.) Grumble grumble grumble…first true disagreement…this was nothing but trite disaster porn…

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM – Game of Thrones “The Rains of Castamere” written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter (HBO Entertainment in association with Bighead, Littlehead; Television 360; Startling Television and Generator Productions) Eh, I’m not a Game of Thrones fan, I find it all just excessive and unnecessary, but whatever, people like it.

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST – Julie Dillon, congrats, your art is stunning!

BEST FAN ARTIST – Sarah Webb, again, congrats!

And stuff I didn’t vote on…but congrats guys!

BEST RELATED WORK – “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative” by Kameron Hurley (A Dribble of Ink)

BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM – Ellen Datlow

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM – Ginjer Buchanan

BEST SEMIPROZINE – Lightspeed Magazine edited by John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, and Stefan Rudnicki

BEST FANZINE – A Dribble of Ink edited by Aidan Moher

BEST FANCAST – SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester

BEST FAN WRITER – Kameron Hurley

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER – Sofia Samatar

The 2014 Hugo Award winners were announced on Sunday evening, August 17, at the ExCel Converntion Centre in London, England. The ceremony was hosted by Justina Robson, Geoff Ryman. Text-based CoverItLive coverage of the ceremony was provided through the Hugo Awards web site. Video streaming coverage was provided by Ustream.

The 2014 Hugo trophy base was designed by Joy Alyssa Day

See the Final Ballot Details for a full breakdown of votes, subsequent placements, and nomination counts.

Check it out, over on 10-Minute Interviews!