Yesterday was the last day of Writing Month. During November, 2024, I wrote 23,100 words. I did not reach the goal I had set of 50,000 words. I knew the goal was probably unrealistic even in the beginning. But then my mother was in the hospital for the first week in November, which explains part of my lack of progress. I was also simply too busy with work. In the end, I was still satisfied with the progress I made.

Writing Month was a hack put together by a guy to replace NaNoWriMo. He had grander ambitions, but managed to only create a very bare-bones site by the beginning of the month. But he did! And the site worked flawlessly for me — at least in terms of tracking my progress. It didn’t really have any mechanisms for discovery or social networking, so I only found one other person as a “buddy” and never figured out how to see how they were doing.

The final statistic showed that 44 authors wrote a total of 40,174 words towards a total goal of 1,427,380 words. That suggests that maybe only one or two other people entered word counts. (Or maybe several did for a few days and then dropped off.)

I spent Writing Month working on my manuscript for The Ground Never Lies. This is a sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem who has given up on love, but who then discovers a capacity for love she didn’t realize she had. I wrote a pilot for the story a couple of years ago, but shelved it because I couldn’t decide if a shorter version worked or if I should commit to writing it as a novel. I had this idea that the geomancer has a day job doing land assessments for properties in a karst region, where people want to be sure that a sinkhole won’t open up wrecking the property. But that the geomancer also moonlights as the crime-scene assessor for the local constabulary. But, as I wrote the story, I didn’t see any way to work in scenes of her doing other crime-scene assessments. Then I realized that there are two stories here: one is the original arc. But the other is how she became the person she is at the beginning of the story: embittered and disgusted with herself and life. So once I finished writing the original arc, I spent a week writing this second arc. Then I’ll have to figure out how to stitch them together.

I might using the Writing Month structure again in January, when it will be Intersession and I’ll have more free time to write.

I’ve served in leadership and Board roles in non-profits a number of times over the years. I’ve been a Secretary, Vice President, and President, in addition to serving on boards. I’ve learned some things about what makes a Board work.

Foremost is that the primary goal of the leadership should not be to make decisions, but rather to defend the power of the Board. I’ve served in organizations where tensions develop between the Executive Director and the elected leadership. And sometimes Presidents bring their own agenda that they would like to push through. It can feel simpler for the leadership to try to push their own agendas and treat the Board like a rubber stamp. But the leadership needs to resist that. The Board should remain in control and the leadership should only decide when the Board cannot.

Second, any decision you make as a Board is going to make some people unhappy. In dysfunctional organizations, the leadership can become paralyzed because it can feel like only way to avoid making people angry is to do nothing. Of course, doing nothing will also make some number of people angry. But it also guarantees the organization will founder and drift, rudderless.

A former Chancellor at my university had a saying about leadership that’s stuck with me. He said, “Money matters, quality counts, and time is the enemy.” Point being, money matters, but it’s not everything. Quality counts. If something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly. But you need to prioritize, make tradeoffs, and not try to do everything if it means that everything is bad. Finally, the more time you spend deliberating and deciding will put the organization behind.

Since my recent election to SFWA, I’ve been reassured to find that the Board and leadership are aligned and prepared to work on addressing the real challenges that exist. I have great confidence that we are well positioned to more forward together as an organization.

One more observation: Shortly after I assumed a leadership position for the first time, I discovered an interesting phenomenon. The moment you step into the role, it’s like a target gets painted on your back. You assume ownership of all of the problems of the organization. And people who bear some grudge against the organization immediately start targeting you. So it has been here.

You can’t let it stop you.

This year, the fixup for Revin’s Heart was published, which included three short stories. And I wrote a short story that was published in an anthology.

  • Brewer, S.D. 2024. Revin’s Heart, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California, including
    • “Where There’s a Will” pp 269-282,
    • “Curtains Rise” pp 283-302,
    • “Riva’s Escape” pp 303-329.
  • Brewer, S.D. 2024. Always a Destroyer (pp 99-111) in Romancing the Rainbow. Knight Writing Press, Parker, Colorado. 240pp.
icon for wss366

Wandering Shop Stories, a writing prompt that began in January and recently migrated to wandering.shop, has now taken a new step to be more available to the wider SFF community: We ‘re now on Bluesky too!

It looks like the announcement that birdchan would start using everything everyone posted to train its AI finally roused a huge number of people to get up and leave the Nazi bar. And it appears that Bluesky is where the SFF community is going to land. Personally, I find this a bit disappointing as Bluesky is funded by venture capital. It’s currently very nice, but I suspect it will inevitably become enshittified. But, like it or not, that’s where the vast majority of the SFF community is going.

I decided, therefore, to see if I could create a bot to share the Wandering Shop Stories prompts at Bluesky in addition to Mastodon. I still prefer the vibe at Mastodon and am not planning to leave. But I’d like to be able to cross-post stuff. So it would be nice if the #wss366 hashtag would reference something. And there may be people that would like to play along at Bluesky. So, I decided to see how difficult it was to adapt the python script I use for Mastodon to also post at Bluesky.

It turned out to be super easy. Well… Sorta.

It also turned out that when I installed the atproto library, it updated something else that caused the Mastodon bot to quit working. I hate when that happens. After spending a few hours fighting with it, I decided to just do a side-install of a newer version of python and use a virtual environment to make sure that everything was separate from the system install of python. I should have done that in the first place, honestly.

Then, everything worked. Well… Almost.

It turns out you can’t just emit text and have it auto-format it, like it does if you post it. You have to run it through the filter on the client side to build rich-text using a utility called “textbuilder” before you submit it. That was a bit cranky and not well documented. But, eventually, I got that to work just tickety boo.

I used to do this kind of technical work all the time. It’s nice to see that I still can navigate programming and building reliable unix services. But, honestly, I’m pretty glad it’s not my day job anymore. My father always described these kinds of things as “just like using a computer.”

In the end, I’ve found spending a few minutes a day writing a very short story — especially when I’m otherwise too busy — to be really helpful at sustaining my creativity. The prompts that we choose are aimed to be ordinary words that have multiple meanings, so you can spin them a bunch of different ways. I love how it makes me feel to write something short and sweet.

Even more, I love seeing the contributions that other people make. I’m looking forward to seeing what people on Bluesky choose to contribute!

potsherds

I attended a craft workshop organized by the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild about translating poetry by Jesse Lee Kercheval. She’s Zona Gale Professor of English Emerit at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The workshop had to be rescheduled when she had computer difficulties several weeks ago, but it was still pretty well attended for a Zoom event on a rainy Saturday morning.

She talked a bit about her path to translating poetry. She grew up speaking French, but learned English in her childhood. For the past 15 years, she’s been going to Uruguay and learning about the language and literature of the region. She’s published both original poetry and poetry in translation.

She brought several examples to show the kinds of choices translators make when trying to share a poem from one language to another. They were fascinating and gave the audience the opportunity to discover how choices throw cultural and linguistics aspect of both the original and target languages into relief.

One poem, translated by her and by another poet was particularly fascinating to me, as I could see how the other poet created a more masculine take on the poem showing cultural differences in how men and women speak. It reminded me of how in Japanese, men use a much rougher, more clipped, kind of speech.

Another poem showed the challenges — and limitations — of trying to bring a cultural construct from one language into another without intersecting with different cultural biases in the target language. The word “barrio” has different cultural connotations in the two communities: do you try to translate it or leave it in? Even the title of the poem, which was purely metaphorical: do you translate it literally? Or try to capture a corresponding metaphorical meaning in English? Choices!

For many, many years, (more than 30!) I have been writing poetry in Esperanto and trying to translate it into English. I’ve also done some limited translation of English poetry into Esperanto. And as an undergraduate, I studied Spanish for many years. So this was just a perfect fit for my interests and needs. I’ve been thinking about making a new chapbook of Esperanto haiku and now I’m even more excited to get started.

In 2001, Philip kept a diary while attending the Clarion East speculative fiction writing retreat. He had a transformative experience that I got to watch from the outside.

Years later, he wrote a round up post, where he collected some of his most meaningful reflections and provided a link to his Clarion at home page where he describes how to accomplish similar goals to attending the workshop, for people who can’t attend. Because attending Clarion is a huge commitment.

Clarion, as currently constituted, is difficult for most people to attend. It requires leaving home for 6 weeks, probably getting a leave from work, and being able to pay for room-and-board someplace while maintaining one’s current housing. Many people just can’t do that. Moreover, it requires living in close proximity to other people which I can’t do because of my chronic lung condition.

So I was excited to see that, next year (in 2025), Clarion is moving to an online format. Next year, at that time, I’ve already applied to participate in the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat. It’s a shorter online workshop that I think could be a good fit for my needs. But maybe next year, I’ll apply for Clarion.

The other workshop I’ve always wanted to attend is Viable Paradise. In the past, I couldn’t attend because it takes place during the fall, when I’m busy with work. But now that I’m in my phased retirement, I’m only working half time and might be able to attend. Applications open in January and I may well apply.

pine cone

Yesterday, I attended my first Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) Board Meeting as Secretary. It was a thoroughly positive experience. I took notes carefully and generated a set of minutes. I shared both my raw notes and my proposed set of minutes with the Board in order to get feedback in terms of how much detail people would like in the minutes. Some boards I’ve served on would like the full set of notes, but a set of minutes is generally a concise set of notes that captures only the essentials of what was decided. It will take me a while to get a sense of this Board to understand what is needed.

I had only met a few of the board members previously. We did around of introductions and it was interesting to see the range of perspectives and backgrounds present. I think it’s a nicely diverse board with members who bring very different life experiences, although many of us have teaching backgrounds. I immediately was made to feel at home and I think I will fit in well.

Initially, I had no plans to be Secretary. During the summer, when it became clear that SFWA was facing some challenges, I offered myself as a volunteer. Since I am beginning my phased retirement, I have more time available to dedicate to service. When the special election was called, I saw that someone had immediately offered themselves for Secretary and I was like, “Great!” If someone else wanted to do the work, I was happy to let them have at it. But then, due to some new opportunity at work, that candidate decided they had to withdraw. Seeing no other candidate step forward, I was happy to do so. I’m familiar with the work of being Secretary and happy to do what I can to support the organization.

SFWA is going through a major transition. I was aware of SFWA long before I began seriously writing speculative fiction. When I first started getting my fiction published, I was eager to join. At the time, however, the rules were such that it seemed an insurmountable challenge to become eligible. The rules required getting certain number of publications in markets that paid “pro” rates — except hardly any did. I spoke with my publisher — a small press — about the issue. They pay about a quarter of pro rates and admitted that without some other significant source of funding, they would not be able to sustain paying higher rates. But then SFWA changed the rules to be measured against absolute earnings through publishing. I was immediately able to join as an “associate” member and, when I renewed my membership the following year, I had reached the level necessary for “full” membership.

Not everyone is evidently happy about the change. It has produced a large influx of eager new members but, reportedly, some of the old-time members preferred the exclusivity of the previous, more restrictive, rules for entry. Personally, I think the new rules are better and produce a population that is more representative of the population of speculative fiction authors the organization is designed to serve. But I recognize the diversity of viewpoints on the matter.

A number of people have been worried about SFWA. The Romance Writers of America recently collapsed into bankruptcy. When SFWA experienced a number of resignations in a short time, people worried that there was some deep, dark secret that meant that the organization itself was in jeopardy. I have seen nothing that suggests this is the case. There are some challenges, but they are ordinary sorts of challenges. I have every confidence that the current board will meet those challenges and the organization will emerge all the stronger.

I would again like to thank everyone who had the confidence to vote for me for Secretary. I know that I was a bit of a dark horse. But I will work hard to repay your trust and help SFWA to meet its challenges.

icon for wss366

On November 1, 2024, the curators of Wandering Shop Stories met up via Zoom for the first time. We had, in fact, cast a wider invitation, but we were the only ones who came. We had a good discussion.

We spent a bit of time just meeting one another (some of us for the first time) and talking about writing in general. But we quickly turned to Wandering Shop Stories. I spent a little time just reviewing the history of how wss366 came to be and contrasting it with vss365, which had been the inspiration.

All of us are very satisfied with how the project is working. We talked a bit about choosing prompts. We agreed that our current practice of choosing ordinary words that have multiple meanings gave us the most satisfactory results. We debated the importance of avoiding repeats (probably worth doing, but not always worth the time or effort).

Our initial impetus had been to discuss how we approach writing our story fragments. Each of us approaches it somewhat differently and it was fascinating to hear the various strategies.

Finally, I was able to announce that wandering.shop had approved allowing us to migrate from botsin.space that recently announced they were shutting down. I had originally chosen botsin.space because they welcomed bots and I sorta kinda personally knew the guy that was running. He had recently come to the conclusion that he needed to either substantially gear up to support the increased demand or shut down. He decided he really didn’t want to make the commitment to run the service, so he announced it would shutdown in mid-December. I approached the staff at wandering.shop and, after some discussion, they established a set of rules for allowing bots (from known members in good standing under defined conditions).

On November 3, I reviewed the documentation and made the necessary changes to migrate the bot. I was reminded of how straightforward it is to work with Mastodon as compared with when I did set up bots for birdchan and Discord. It only took me a a couple of hours to create a new account, configure it to receive the posts from my script, update the script, test, and then trigger the migration of followers from the old to the new account. It went about as smoothly as could be imagined.

We hope to have more meetings periodically. Perhaps we can have the next one between the holidays to talk about getting ready for the new year.

This semester, my writing students are studying lichens. Mostly not by choice, but because every semester I try to pick a different theme for my students to study and this semester seemed like a lichen kind of semester. To be fair, the students have been good sports, gamely looking at lichens and thinking deeply about how to study them.

On campus, there are lichens pretty much everywhere: on trees, rocks, buildings, light poles, benches, etc. But mostly not on the ground. Lichens get excluded anyplace where plants can grow well, so you generally only see them on very poor soil. But there are a few places in the region like that. One of them is the Montague Plains.

The Montague Plains are a delta where water from the glaciers flowed into glacial Lake Hitchcock during the last ice age. When a stream flows into a body of water, it creates a triangular (delta) shaped structure with sorted sediments: the gravel drops out first and then the sand. The silt stays suspended, but settles out on lake bed during the winter, producing varved clays. So most of the the delta is just sandy. Very sandy soil is tough for plants to grow on. It tends to be very well drained (i.e. dry) and there’s little organic matter, so few nutrients. And nothing for fungi to grow on, so few mycorrhizal relationships to help plants.

Few plants grow there. Some sparse grasses and trees, mostly pitch pine and scrub oak. Moreover, there tend be frequent fires, which end up burning off most of the organic material that might otherwise accumulate in the soil. So this is a recipe for lichens to grow. You have to look under the grass, leaves, and pine needles to find them, but they’re there.

It’s probably too far for any of the students groups to study there this semester. But I thought I’d stop by to take a few pictures to share with them anyway. Moreover, I always like visiting places with interesting geomorphology and botany to help me write fiction.

On October 23, 2024, I was elected Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Thank you to everyone who supported my candidacy! I learned I had won from the Interim President (who will be Vice President going forward) who met with me via Zoom.

We had a good conversation. We discussed the expectations of the Secretary and a number of the upcoming activities: the business meeting and current thinking about how to organize the Nebulas.

He commented that I had received a very respectable number of votes — a surprisingly good showing for a write in candidate. I was gratified that my efforts of outreach — drafting a post to introduce myself, making postings in the SFWA Discord and Forum, and attending a SFWA Writing Date — were effective at introducing myself to the membership.

SFWA is currently facing a number of challenges. There have been a significant number of staff and officer resignations. And most recently, a newly elected board member had to be removed for cause. But it appears to me that the fundamentals of the organization are strong. I am hopeful that with new leadership, we can restore the organization to smooth operation.

My term is scheduled to begin on November 1, 2024 and will run through June 30, 2025 (since I am completing the term of the former officer). That should be plenty of time for me to determine whether I am a good fit and should continue in the role. I have typically enjoyed serving as Secretary: it’s work that I’m generally good at and allows me to play to my strengths. I look forward to meeting the rest of the board and getting to work!