I do highly recommend the mixtura cum caseo with lagana (the lagana weren’t hard to make, but just for reference, a box of wheat thins would make an entirely acceptable substitution). Fabulous lunch. Also ginormous amounts of cheese.

Once I’ve managed to digest the puls punica–I expect that will be some time next week–I’ll be trying the moretum and maybe even trying to make some garum. The “if you don’t have the patience to leave a jar of fish and salt in the sun for six months” version, I’ll just say that right up front.
And there’s still quite a few breads, porridges, and soups, as well as one or two things with, like, meat or fish in them!

Anyway. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of a writing peeve of mine, and I thought I’d rant on that a bit, because.

The peeve is, complaints about “passive” characters, when those characters are not, in fact, passive–when in fact small choices in constrained situations do indeed lead to change, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes not. I most often see this when the characters in question are very hedged about by circumstances. The movements available to them can be small and subtle.

Now, it’s true that small and subtle movement often can rule out big, wide, adventury stories with exploding planets–though it doesn’t always–and it definitely rules out naked power fantasies where the MC is a Chosen One with all kinds of power–physical, political, economic–at their disposal.

But “very few choices, few of which involve much physical violence or action” is not the same as “passive” and I think assuming it is is particularly unfortunate. In fact, historically, in various times and places, women have lived in constrained circumstances, with options limited by custom, and yet quite a few women, historically, in various times and places, have done some amazing things within those limits, up to and including ruling empires. And there’s a great deal of drama available in those stories, in the ways people can, and did, manipulate the limited choices available to them with pretty astonishing results. Looking back on those and saying, “Well, but she didn’t really do anything, she was just passive” is….let me politely call it an error.

It’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it, that those stories and their real life analogues are so often about women or members of other marginalized groups, and when you look at that, the prohibition on writing passive characters suddenly looks very different.

Plus, while yes, it’s very fun to read about emperors and generals and whatnot, I have a problem with the unstated assumption that everyday people, just ordinary folks, must therefore have lives that are not interesting enough to tell stories about.

Not to mention the fact that thinking only the planet-exploding, power fantasy stories are worth telling is so extremely limiting. I mean, I like planet exploding power fantasies as much as the next girl, but I’d be so, so bored if that were all there was to read.

I know, I’m late to the Pulp-O-Mizer party, but when you gotta procrastinate you gotta procrastinate.

All day for two days, with occasional breaks for coffee and/or lunch. Or as it’s referred to in singing circles, Dinner on the Grounds. Which, translated, means “a ginormous potluck round about noon with so much delicious food that you can’t possibly try even a taste of every different thing, plus a zillion cakes and pies.”

I also attended Career Day at the nearby high school, where I talked to kids who were interested in writing. There were only a few students interested in SF&F, and several who were mainly interested in poetry, which I couldn’t really help them with. There were lots of good questions about quite a range of issues, including some technical ones (how to handle transitions, dealing with being stuck in a particular place in a project, etc) that really needed more complex answers–I mean, transitions? The choices are essentially limitless and without seeing the piece in question I could only give general advice (try just cutting to where you want to be, plus watch how the writers you love handle the same sort of thing and try imitating it to see if it works for you), but hopefully I was able to help a bit.

But my takeaway was, there are, locally, a good number of smart, eager kids interested in writing. They were a pretty wide-ranging group, too–I saw three sessions of about twenty kids each and they seemed to be from a pretty wide range of backgrounds from what I could tell just seeing them for a half hour or so. I really enjoyed talking with them.

Meantime, I just thought I’d mention that Ancillary Justice has an amazon page, and it is, it seems, quite entirely possible to pre-order it.

At some point–no idea exactly when–I will have some ARCs to give away, too. I am trying to think of a fun way to do that, and haven’t come up with anything more exciting than “send me your name and I’ll pull some out of a hat.” There’s time, though!

Whether you pre-order, or wait for an ARC giveaway, either way, you can also apparently add the book on Goodreads.

No, I do not keep looking at those pages over and over again. I also did not set the mockup of the cover I saw a few weeks ago as the wallpaper on my computer and also my phone. Because that would be silly.

One of the things that made me cranky was an assertion that omni was an advanced skill and only highly trained professionals with safety equipment firmly in place should attempt it. It was also suggested that because readers are mostly used to limited third, one should only deploy omni if one had a really good reason to.

I’ve said several times what I think about “don’t try this at home, kids” advice for writers, so I won’t repeat myself beyond saying I think that’s bullshit and you should absolutely try anything at all that you think might make your story as marvelous as you want it to be. Or even anything that sounds cool and fun. There’s honestly no real downside.

So, that disposed of. Is omni really all that advanced?

I don’t think it is. It’s just that limited third has become fashionable, everyone trying to learn to write is using models that used it, and in limited third headhopping is experienced as obtrusive so beginners are told to avoid it but not how to make it work or how it’s different from omni. So if you haven’t read much that uses omni, you won’t understand how it works, let alone how or why it’s different from limited third.

It’s true some number of readers just aren’t used to reading omni. But this is really not relevant. If writers only ever produced the kind of thing everyone was used to reading, sweet merciful Mithras, all of literature would be one gray, formless mass of uniform goo. It would be easy to read but why would anyone bother? And is that really what you want for your writing?

The question isn’t “is this what readers are used to?” The question is, “How do I make this work?”

You’ll be ill-equipped to make omni work if you haven’t read much of anything that uses it, or if you assume you can treat it like limited third. So the first thing anyone should do who wants to use it–and you don’t need any excuse to use it beyond the simple desire to do so, or the feeling that your story would be better for it–is to read work that uses it. In the conversation that triggered this post, Middlemarch was suggested, and I heartily endorse that suggestion. By all means, go read Middlemarch, it’s fabulous. But while you’re reading, pay attention to the POV. Notice that there’s a narrator. There’s a “someone” to be omniscient, to know all and tell us about it.

Limited third has no “narrator.” In limited third, somehow the impressions and thoughts of the POV character are arriving on the page. Omniscient, by contrast, only works if you assume Someone is telling the story. That someone needn’t be made explicit–you can do it by consistency of voice alone, if you want. But once you’ve established that narrative voice, by and large the reader will let you do whatever you like, because you’re never actually violating the main POV–that is, your (nearly always unnamed and often unmentioned) narrator.

That narrator can be a character in the story herself, named or not. Or they might be just an unnamed someone whose voice and comments make it clear they’re sitting there telling you this story, commenting on it, providing incidental information, their own judgments and opinions. Or they might be nearly invisible, barely detectable but for a few value-laden descriptions or one or two wry comments, or possibly just a certain distance in the narration–though of course it’s entirely possible to do an intimate omni and a very distant limited third, still, one quick and dirty way to establish omni from the very start is to open with a bit more distance than you’d expect in limited third. (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…It is a truth universally acknowledged….Once upon a time…)

Now, if you don’t like omni, and have no desire to use it, then by all means, don’t. And if you don’t enjoy reading work that’s in omni, well, don’t, but of course I do think a writer ought to at least sample as broadly as she can.

But don’t avoid it because someone has told you it’s advanced, or hard to sell, or something readers won’t tolerate. Do whatever it is you think you need to do to make your story the most awesome thing you can manage to make it. Editors aren’t sitting around hoping for bland imitations of the last thing they published. And even if they were, is that what you’re really wanting from your writing, in your secret heart of hearts? Or do you want your work to be freaking awesome?

And you’ll never learn to do the awesome stuff if you don’t try.

(BTW, I also highly recommend Hal Duncan’s Rule 4 for New Writers: POV is not a communal steadicam. Hell, just read all the stuff he’s got for “new writers.”)

The sort of thing that puts me off is generally the sort of thing that five minutes with Wikipedia would clear up. In this case, I ran across this sentence:

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who ran twice for president on the Free Silver platform–vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold.

Okay, so. This is mostly only recognized by people who have their pareidolia turned up way too high, and also a fine disregard for Baum’s stated purpose (and what the actual point of a parable is to begin with). I read that sentence and said, out loud, “Are you shitting me, Graeber?” and closed the book and sent it back to the library.

But a friend of mine suggested maybe I’d been too hard on him and maybe I should give him another chance. So I got it out again and paged past the offending spot, and dove back in. And some of it is interesting and I find myself going “yes, that makes a great deal of sense.” But every couple pages I feel like he’s making logical leaps–small ones, but still. Not enough to make me put the book down.

Then I run across a sentence where he seems to conflate a commentary on a source with the source itself. I raise my eyebrow. And then I hit this.

To the contrary, insofar as prostitution did occur (and remember, it could not have been nearly so impersonal, cold-cash a relation in a credit economy), Sumerian religious texts identify it as among the fundamental features of human civilization, a gift given by the gods at the dawn of time. Procreative sex was considered natural (after all, animals did it). Non-procreative sex, sex for pleasure, was divine.

The footnote at the end of this passage just cites two books, it doesn’t give any explanation or amplification. Now, I’m not an expert in this area, I’m only a hobbyist. But I know what “religious texts” he’s talking about here, that describe the “fundamental features of human civilization.” He’s talking about the mes. Which are–oh, let’s let Wiki tell us:

In Sumerian mythology, a me (Sumerian, conventionally pronounced [mɛ]) or ñe [ŋɛ] or parşu (Akkadian, [parsˤu]) is one of the decrees of the gods foundational to those social institutions, religious practices, technologies, behaviors, mores, and human conditions that make civilization, as the Sumerians understood it, possible. They are fundamental to the Sumerian understanding of the relationship between humanity and the gods.

So, if the gods gave us these social institutions, religious practices, technologies, etc. they must all be good things, right? Divine gifts from the gods? It’s not necessarily a bad assumption, but go look at that list. Lots of good things and then you get things like the destruction of cities, lamentation, and falsehood.

So, “prostitution is on the list of mes” isn’t really a very good argument for the ancient Sumerians holding a positive view of prostitution. I don’t say they didn’t, understand, just that you couldn’t necessarily know that from its presence on this list. (Or for that matter, from its apparently religious nature, at least in some cases, which is his other support for his claims about Sumerian attitudes towards prostitution. But that’s a whole other discussion.)

But Graeber is basing part of his argument on the attitude of ancient Sumerians towards prostitution (vs later attitudes), and this is his evidence for the attitude he says they had. And so the question for me is, did he not actually look at the list of mes? There are plenty of Sumerian texts that are mentioned or summarized in books but hard to find in translation, but this one, as I mention above, is easily available. So if he didn’t read the actual list of mes, he did sloppy research and I’m bound to wonder where else he skipped research he ought to have done.

Or did he know what was on the list, and that things like destruction of cities and troubled heart and fear and terror were there (they are) but went ahead anyway because darnit he was sure he was right and how many of his readers would question it, or had ever actually seen that list? Cause it’s pretty obscure.

Either way I can’t really trust him anymore–if he’s ignoring or eliding things in areas I know something about, surely it’s happening elsewhere in the book and I just don’t see it because how could I? And now it’s increasingly difficult to go any farther without going , “No, really? Can I believe any of this?” Which is a shame, because I’m interested in understanding his arguments, and I think his takedown of the “myth of barter” is spot on–I’m just having trouble following him much farther because I keep seeing moments like this that speak of either ignorance (which means some arguments, no matter how logically composed, won’t stand because they’re based on inaccurate premises) or dishonesty (which means he knows some facts won’t support his thesis but he’s going to deal with that by eliding those things).

Ugh. I hate when that happens.

But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that one of the entries on that list pleases me just a touch more than others–that would be the Nebula-nominated novella “All the Flavors” by Ken Liu. Published by GigaNotoSaurus.

I thought it was fabulous from the start, of course, but it’s really exciting to see that other people agree.

Anyway. Let’s start today off with something good! Back in the day I decided that I needed to write a post-apocalyptic dinosaurs on Mars story. The result was “The Endangered Camp,” which appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 2 Which was, itself, chock full of awesome stories–one was nominated for a Nebula (Saladin Ahmed’s “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela”), and several others turned up in various years best volumes.

But it was not avaiable in an ebook edition. Until now! Gentle readers, I give you the Kindle edition of Clockwork Phoenix 2! For $3.99!!!!

Editor Mike Allen has links to Amazon UK and Amazon DE and says it’ll be available in epub and mobi at Weightless Books next Tuesday.

Yeah, I’ve got Real Life Crit Group on Sunday, and a story I need to finish before then so I can, you know, get it critted. I’m up to the climactic scene, I’m kind of stuck for a detail. Normally I get those details by reading huge amounts of nonfiction, and then adding in showers or naps. So I ought to be using arcane methods of divination to figure out what nonfiction I need to read. Instead, of course, I’m writing a blog post.

I was, as I just mentioned yesterday, a victim of the Arthurian Virus. Around the same time, I also contracted a Sherlockian infection. It was mild compared to the Arthurian thing, but it left a lasting impression.

Before I recovered, I had ingested not only the entire Sherlockian Canon, but also The White Company and a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. It wasn’t nearly as hard-hitting as Arthur was–I was left able to appreciate most of the pastiches that occasionally hit the market (Carol Nelson Douglas FTW, IMO), but never amassed a collection or spent time tracking down related historical information. And I have to admit, besides the fake notes customarily tacked onto the front of pastiches about finding boxes of papers signed by Dr Watson, I have a decided aversion to The Game.

This desperately needs a cut. Don’t click unless you want to read nearly three thousand words of me blathering about Sherlock Holmes.

Anyway. Reading Sherlock Holmes from a modern perspective is…interesting. I enjoyed the original stories very much–but they’re so very Victorian. Even as a high schooler, the attitude towards women made me wince. And that’s even though, from all I can tell, those attitudes were in some ways strikingly progressive for their time. I love the fact that one of the few people to defeat Holmes was a woman–a woman whose intelligence he underestimated. But I wince every time I read the line about how…well, here:

When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. In the case of the Darlington Substitution Scandal it was of use to me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.

It’s hard to read that without wincing a bit. Doyle grew up surrounded by intelligent and formidable women, and it shows. But the prejudices of his time also show. Doyle himself thought the idea of women voting was absurd.

And then there’s the racism.

At the sound of his strident, angry cries there was movement in the huddled bundle upon the deck. It straightened itself into a little black man—the smallest I have ever seen—with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature. He was wrapped in some sort of dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed; but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with a half animal fury.

That’s The Sign of the Four. Of course, once again, Doyle could also be fairly progressive for his time. In “The Adventure of the Yellow Face” a white American woman married a Black man, who died, and she has hidden her child, lest her new husband find out and abandon her because her child is Black. The passage, where Holmes discovers this and the woman confesses, is today a trifle cringe-worthy, but having confessed:

“…and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me?” She clasped her hands and waited for an answer.

It was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.

“We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”

I can think of writers who’d have played out that scene very differently–indeed, the entire scenario would have been set up along very different lines, given another suitably disposed author. Doyle is due some criticism, but also a few cookies. Like anyone, he was a product of the time and place he lived. (Important note–this does not exempt him from criticism.)

So, why do I read and enjoy Doyle–and Dickens and Carnacki the Ghost Finder, and so on, why do I enjoy those, and wince at the sexism and the racism but still say, “Well, there’s good there too,” but when I read Steampunk, I don’t make those allowances as easily? I haven’t totally worked out the answer–but what I’ve come up with so far is that I can look at the time and place Doyle was writing and say, “Yeah, well.” I read someone writing today and I think “Why don’t they know better?”

Which brings me to Sherlock.

I watched the first episode on PBS just, what, two weeks ago? And I said to myself, “Self, this is freaking awesome.” Watson’s psychosomatic limp–I giggled aloud. “Afghanistan or Iraq?” The whole deduction from Watson’s cell phone thing. Rachel–ha ha! All the nods to the originals (that I caught–like I said, I’m a fairly half-assed Sherlockian).

And that cipher, Dr. Watson? Who in Doyle isn’t much more than a framing device with a name? Was now a much more interesting character in his own right. It’s the first time one of the modern pastiches/adaptations actually made me interested in Watson. Lestrade–Lestrade is fantastic. He’s not just there to be not-quite-smart-enough alongside Holmes’ brilliance, he’s an actual character. And the obvious ways things had to change, to move Holmes up to the twenty-first century. Cell phones! “Not your housekeeper, Dear!” I was really enjoying that. All right, the moment of slut-shaming made me wince, but the rest? Was awesome.

I was annoyed that I’d have to wait a whole week for the next one, and it would be airing during trick-or-treating and I’d have to watch it on the website the next day. Except, while I was wandering around the internet I kind of tripped over some files that were just sitting there completely unattended and…*

So I watched the other two.

The second one had its moments–Holmes demanding to know if Watson remembered the graffiti, for instance, was very amusing. But. That opening bit, with Holmes fighting the guy who was supposed to be, I don’t know, an Arab or something? I mean, what? Not seriously?

We’re dealing with Chinese smugglers–who make origami? A Chinese shop that sells Lucky Cats? It’s not just a criminal gang, it’s a cult? It’s…Doyle was a product of his time. Surely a contemporary writer should know better? It really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Pondering this issue (instead of working on my own stories, of course), the best construction I could put on it was that it’s another sort of nod. Doyle didn’t do much research. Well, he did for his historical novel The White Company, which he felt was far superior to his Holmes stories, more Important Work, but he fairly famously didn’t check some of his facts for the Holmes stories, things that were pivotal to Holmes’ solutions. You can’t actually tell from a bike track which direction the bike was going. Snakes don’t have external ears and while they can sense vibrations, the one in “The Speckled Band” probably wouldn’t have heard its owner whistling for it.

He wasn’t even very consistent about internal details. Where did that Jezail bullet hit Watson anyway? What was Watson’s first name, who was the landlady at 221B? During what period was Watson married? These inconsistencies lend interest in The Game, to those who enjoy coming up with elaborate rationalizations, but if you ask me, they exist because Doyle just didn’t care very much about that sort of thing. He only cared about a good, lurid story. The result was, foreign locales get, well, casually treated if Doyle hadn’t ever actually visited them. Same with foreign cultures, and anyone who wasn’t familiarly English. (Which included Americans–he felt, IIRC, that the Revolution had been a mistake on the part of the British, and he looked forward to the happy day when Americans were re-united with the British Empire.)

It’s entirely possible that the second episode meant to nod to this directly, mixing up Chinese and Japanese, exoticizing the foreign villains. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that’s what was intended. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it doesn’t work so supremely well as the first episode.

I think part of why it didn’t work for me was the fact that “ironic” racism is, to put it mildly, a really difficult thing to pull off. To put it mildly. And then there’s the fact that the first and the third episodes struck me very much as someone having carefully, surgically removed Holmes from its original setting and grafted it seamlessly onto the present, in a way that’s astonishing just because the stitches are so deftly done, it looks like it could have been a whole piece to begin with even though you know it isn’t, even though you can see the stitches. Whereas the second feels to me like it’s constantly elbowing me in the ribs and saying “Look, I cut this patch out of a Victorian antique!” I mean, the elbowing is bad enough, but the bit they cut out is only my least favorite bit of that Victorian antique, the actually problematic part, and the patch job doesn’t seem to recognize that. I couldn’t go, “Yeah, yeah, I love that bit too!” like I did with 1 and 3. Because that was exactly the bit I didn’t love.

Don’t get me wrong, there were good moments. I just really, really hope they rethink the racism bit in the future. To put it mildly.

You’d think that would be all I have to say, but it isn’t! This story I’m working on isn’t going to not-write itself, you know. Okay, well, it is.

So anyway. Then I got to thinking–what is it people love so much about Holmes anyway?

Take Holmes away, and you’ve got some fairly conventional Victorian stories. Some nice Gothic touches, certainly. But very conventional. It’s not just Doyle’s touch that makes them so popular, because Doyle wrote other stuff, work he thought was much better than his Holmes stories, and while most of us more or less know of the existence of, say The Lost World, how many of us have read Micah Clarke or The White Company? We think of Doyle, we think of Holmes.

It’s Holmes we’re interested in. Watson’s just the frame for Holmes’ picture, Lestrade, Gregson–they’re only there to contrast with Holmes’ genius, his justified arrogance thrown in relief against their self-deluding confidence. The stories are fairly conventional, if lurid. What we love is Holmes’ flights of deduction. It’s like a magic trick. Show him your pocket watch and he’ll tell you all about your dead, drunk brother. Show him a hat, and he’ll tell you its owner’s wife no longer loves him. But like a magic trick, there’s a logical explanation, a chain of reasoning behind it, and the recitation of that chain of reasoning is itself entertaining, one of the things we love about Sherlock Holmes.

The stories present Holmes as supremely rational. His arrogance is not sociopathy–Sherlock‘s Holmes calls himself a “high-functioning sociopath”** but I don’t think Doyle’s is, by any stretch of the imagination. No, Doyle’s Holmes is supremely rational, arrogant because he knows he’s smarter than anyone around him. Really, he’s kind of a jerk, but he’s a really really smart jerk, and he uses his powers on the side of justice and Victorian morality, so that’s all right, then.

Put that way, I’m not sure why I like Holmes so much, but I do.

It’s that “supremely rational” I’ve been pondering. Here’s Doyle’s Holmes:

From a drop of water,” said the writer, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.

“The writer,” if you haven’t already read A Study in Scarlet, is Holmes himself.

Here’s the thing–from a drop of water, you might infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara–maybe. If you knew enough about water. If you knew there was enough water in the world to produce either or both. Certainly if you were intimately familiar with only the Atlantic, a sample of Nile water wouldn’t really allow you to infer much about the Nile beyond what you generally might know about water. You could figure out some things, but you couldn’t go from there to crocodiles and Egypt. That idea–that from one drop of water, from one small sample of information, one can infer the existence of essentially everything else in the universe, isn’t really true. Holmes isn’t relentlessly logical, not really. If he were relentlessly logical he’d never have underestimated Irene Adler, for one thing. No, what he is, is hyper-aware of the details and associations of the social and physical context he lives in.*** Hop into your cross-universe time machine and ask Holmes to deduce your occupation from your appearance, and how far do you think he’d get?

I wonder if part of Holmes’ popularity at the time Doyle was writing didn’t involve a sort of unstated assumption that the society they (we!) lived in was merely a logical outcome of the nature of the universe itself. And now, of course, we still perhaps enjoy that assumption, and still love the magic trick, and there’s something attractive about the arrogant genius who uses his powers for Good. I’m not sure just what it is that’s attractive about it, but it’s there.

Well, I’ve wasted plenty of time. Vacuumed that cat utterly dustless, wouldn’t you say? I think I’d better get myself another cup of tea and actually apply my brain to my actual work.

____

*Don’t fret, I’ve ordered the DVD.

**Incidentally, rather like the originals, there are some odd holes in Sherlock. Both “psychopath” and “sociopath” are terms that have very fuzzy meanings, both in ordinary conversation and in psychology. Meanings have shifted, legal definitions don’t necessarily match current theories, and as a result splitting hairs about whether this Sherlock is one or the other strikes me as kind of silly and meaningless. It was an amusing line, nonetheless.

***Which is exactly why he underestimated Irene Adler. And why we wince when Holmes declares of the large-hatted man whose wife no longer loves him because she hasn’t cleaned his hat in weeks (because a loving wife is a good maid!) that he must be an intellectual because his head is so big. Phrenology FTW!

****And here’s another of Doyle’s odd holes–in order for Holmes to function, he needs as much miscellaneous information as possible. No detail should be too small or too irrelevant. And yet, in The Sign of the Four (and again in Sherlock, updated a bit) he tells Watson that he only has room for important information, that politics and art and society gossip and astronomy are useless to him. They’re not, of course–politics and art and society gossip are all overtly useful to him. And while astronomy never is in Doyle’s stories (that I recall), it’s trivial to construct situations in which it would be. As demonstrated already, yes, but I bet you could come up with more with five minutes’ thinking.

It’s November 1! Samhain, All-Saints, whatever you prefer to name it! And that means GigaNotoSaurus is live, with a story by Ruth Nestvold, “The Bleeding and the Bloodless.” If you’d like a portable version, something you can read on the train or whatever, there’s a link to an epub version right there at the top of the page.

And the etc. involves more fiction!

I saw this morning on Shweta Narayan’s journal that the Carl Brandon Society is…well, here:

The Carl Brandon Society is holding a prize drawing of five eReaders starting November 1st and ending November 22nd, 2010. The funds raised will benefit the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, a fund that sends two emerging writers of color to the Clarion writers workshops annually.

Entrants will have the opportunity to win one of two (2) available Barnes & Noble Nooks, one of two (2) available Kobo Readers (with Wi-Fi), and one (1) Alex eReader by Spring Design. Drawing tickets cost one US dollar ($1).

In addition, each eReader will come pre-loaded with books, short stories, poems and essays by writers of color from the speculative fiction field. Some of the writers include N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Terence Taylor, Ted Chiang, Shweta Narayan, Chesya Burke, Moondancer Drake, Saladin Ahmed, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and there will be many more.

How awesome is that? How much will a dollar set you back? For a chance to win an ereader with amazing authors on it? Go enter, you know you want to.

Next! Not a huge steampunk fan–though the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptation has me thinking even more about Steampunky issues and I might avoid fiction-writing by throwing those thoughts at y’all*–but, okay, where did that sentence start?

Not a huge steampunk fan, but look at the TOC of Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and tell me it doesn’t look tempting. You can pre-order it, it comes out in January.

ETA–Oh, and dang it! This is what happens when I have a bunch of stuff tabbed up and mean to post about it–I miss something.

Apex Magazine’s Arab/Muslim themed issue is up. I know what I’ll be reading today.

____
*Loved it! Except the second episode kind of bugged me a bit. I’ve been mulling over that. But I find myself watching the other two over, and I pulled my copy of the originals off my bookshelf this weekend, and that’s a sure sign something’s fermenting.