Umm... yeah.

Amazon is apparently going to switch to an "agency model" for Macmillan books. They way they put it is:

"We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."

Excuse me, but "a monopoly over their own titles"? Yes, this is technically true. Authors have a monopoly on how their works are distributed. It's called copyright. They typically license certain exclusive rights to a publisher, like Macmillan. Nobody else then gets to publish those books until the rights revert and the authors license the rights to someone else, or until the books fall into public domain.

The quoted sentence reads like "We're going to lob in the word 'monopoly' now so that you can see what meanies they are." Either that, or they really hate copyright and wished it didn't exist so that they could legally publish their own editions at cheaper prices. (I suppose they may want to do this. I have no idea what Amazon's stand on copyright is. If they're against copyright though, I'd be surprised.)

"Monopoly" gets used to tar the other side a lot in the blogs and forums on the computer industry. It's used so often that the term starts to sound meaningless. I was just surprised to see it here.

Whee! I loved loved loved this story when Strange Horizons published it. Cheyenne Wright gives it terrific reading, full of vocal color and expression.

Tim Pratt blogged about writing this short story over at Magic District as part of him getting back into the habit of writing short stories. Months before its publication, he called it "an epic fantasy — in about 4,000 words." (And it is.)

That seven word description inspired me to write the short story that got BRAWL to invite me to join them. It's also one of the stories I sent off to Clarion as my best work to date. (I blew past 4000 words though and it's only epic fantasy in a vest pocket sense. Yes, the one with the bicycles.)

I love how "Another End of the Empire" plays with structure, and as krylyr says, how it deconstructs the evil overlord. Everything that happens is simultaneously surprising and absolutely right. This is one of those stories I wish I'd written.

Given the relative fact vacuum, I don't know that anything else needs to be said. Also, I'm looking at this from a great remove of distance. However...

Whether Google made a political move or not, it can't avoid being seen as one. Witness all the blog posts congratulating Google on no longer censoring its search results. Likewise, it's a political statement that it's a sad state of affairs that we all refer to this censorship so openly, as if it were normal or expected. Also, it's amazing that no one has whipped out the phrase "interfering in China's internal affairs" yet.

However, it's not just politics. It's not merely politics. For whatever reason, the P-word gets hauled out to imply unimportance or irrelevance, as if the process by which we negotiate access to our rights (and how that process gets abused) has no effect on anyone's life. It's not a misunderstanding to see Google's action as political, as a rebuke of the Chinese government. It is, however, also incomplete. There's more to it than an empty rhetorical gesture. (For one thing, while Google had a surprisingly high percentage of the search market considering that it isn't a China-based company. It's no surprise that Google stock went down and Baidu stock went up.)

The Great Firewall of China obviously serves to maintain political control, but I bet it serves an economic function too. (This is pure speculation on my part, but if I'm right, then I'm sure someone has already made this point better.) We really have two internets. There is the Chinese internet and there is the internet for the rest of the world. In keeping out the rest of the world, China is fostering its own home grown versions of services the rest of the world takes for granted. (i.e., it's not just oppression, it's protectionism. China is in this weird place where it simultaneously claims to be as modern as any first world country while demanding all the advantages of its putative third world status.)

Now, for whatever reason, the most unreasonable person tends to be the one that wins any argument. It's not hard to imagine a future where we voluntarily abandon the internet for the rest for the world for the Chinese internet for economic reasons. e.g., it's the only way to get access to the huge Chinese market because we've implicitly accepted the Great Firewall as just the way it is. I don't think that will happen so long as the internet for the rest of the world is necessary. (e.g., if it's more innovative than the Chinese internet.) But I wouldn't be surprised if what happens is that rather than freeing China, we enslave the rest of us. (And we have our hook for a Futurismic story.)

This is why Google's move is both important and political. Whether they intended to or not, the message they send isn't merely some token against censorship in China. The message they're sending is, "We have some really awesome stuff, and you can't have it because you've locked yourself inside your internet."

[Wow, I feel like I've spent the past month just blogging about gay or Chinese characters in genre fiction. In this case, I'm talking about gay characters,]
This is more like it. Again, it's not to say that "The Threnody of Johnny Toruko" was poorly written or unenjoyable. "Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts", however, had characters that made a more immediate and intense connection to me. James is gay whereas Johnny Toruko talks about gayness at a remove.

By this, I do *not* mean James gets to have sex whereas Johnny doesn't. (It happens to be true, but this isn't my point, For one thing, anybody having sex seems out of place in the Team Shikaragaki series. For another, "being gay" is not a synonym for "having sex with a member of the same sex.") Being gay is not solely who you have (or want to have) sex with. Being gay is ultimately a set of experiences that influence your decisions and reactions. It's pervasive and subtle. I saw it in what James worried about, in what James did. What I saw in Johnny Toruko is a heart fluttering and a declaration of "love" with little that shows it except one dream sequence that Johnny had to explain to us.

(Jeffrey R. DeRego made his job much harder when he decided Johnny was so good at being The Boy Who Flirts With All The Young Female Fans that no one caught any hint he might be anything else. If nothing else, it makes TK's assertion that she could see it in his stray glances utterly unconvincing, and to Mr. DeRego's credit, he has Johnny say so.)

Anyway, "Tio Gilberto..." is a lovely piece of slightly self-referential magical realism. Well worth the listen.

Dave Brendon writes about Gay and lesbian characters in SFF on his blog. It's ostensibly laudatory and gay supportive. However, he expresses his support by showing surprise that "not only did their gender preference not overshadow the storyline, but they were amazing characters, characters that readers, no matter their own gender preference, could identify with and like."

*gasp* You mean, gay characters can be just as well-written as their straight counterparts? Knock me over with a feather.

He opens the fourth paragraph with "The first time I encountered a gay main character (last year) there was absolutely no sense of shock, no recoiling in disgust, no okay-now-that-was-a-bit-too-freaky-for-me, nothing like that." Let's do a little thought experiment here. What happens when you replace "gay" with "black"? How about "left handed"? How about "right handed"? How about "white"? Just saying...

Now I should say again that the blog post is obviously intended to be gay supportive. The last thing I want to do is to slam a straight reader who actually recognizes that it's possible for him to identify with someone who doesn't share his orientation.

I had a response all worked out for him. However, since I'm probably never returning to his blog (I read too many as it is), I'm posting my response here:

I know you mean well. I really do. It's always good to read people root for gay characters. However, it's hard not to interpret your first few paragraphs as saying, "Hey, I read books with gay protagonists and they didn't get their icky homosexual cooties all over me!" (Before you even say it, I know you didn't mean it that way. I'm just saying this is how it comes off and I'm about to explain why.)

Why is no one ever worried that heterosexuality might "overshadow the storyline"? It's not like there aren't stories where the sole purpose of the (in some cases literally) disposable female character is to establish that the male protagonist is straight. Have we lost count of the number of stories where the sole purpose of The Wife/Girlfriend is to die so that the Male Action Hero is Spurring Into Action? Relatively few complain about how the heterosexuality overshadowed those storylines. Certainly, it doesn't come up every time someone mentions straight characters in movies. However, if it's gay characters, something like "overshadow the storyline" pops up every time (even, in this case, which supports gay characters).

(Also, you're implicitly saying that gay characters are ok as long as they aren't, you know, gay. Again, I know. You didn't intend to say this. You may even insist that you didn't say this at all. I'm just making you aware of how your words are coming across to me. Basically, I'm sick of "overshadow the storyline" highlighted as a potential hazard of writing gay characters when I see heterosexuality "overshadow the storyline" all the time.)

Like I said, I'm extremely happy you've discovered that you can identify with characters who don't share your orientation. (Gay people have had to do this forever.) I definitely hope it leads to a further mainstreaming of gay characters, especially in SFF.

Next time, can you please express your support in a way that doesn't unintentionally reinforce old prejudices? I know what you intended to say, but you said a few other things at the same time. Thank you.

[Ok, this is me blatantly cat waxing while I'm on vacation. I suppose I really ought to post parts of this at various Escape Artists forums. They would sound like conclusions there though rather than questions that I'm still puzzling out for myself. Finally, as much as I would love Escape Artists to podcast my stories, I know I need to be patient, extremely patient.]

I started thinking about this listening to Eugie Foster's Daughter of Bótù at PodCastle. Due to some miscommunication, Diane Severson received the wrong pronunciation for the Chinese words used in the story, most notably, 奶奶. (That's nǎinai in pinyin, pronounced roughly "nigh nigh", not "nay nay"). Chinese is a tonal language and she did yeoman's work of indicating that (if the tones weren't always the correct ones). On the whole, her narration met the exceptionally high standards I associate with Escape Artist podcasts. I just found the mispronunciations a little painful. The story itself is terrific.

What I found interesting is that other people had exactly the opposite reaction to how Diane Severson handled the Chinese words. i.e., no pronunciation qualms, but didn't like that she represented Chinese as a tonal language. (To be fair, they may not have realized the words weren't being pronounced correctly.) Basically, the intrusion of a different accent disturbed them. Hmm...

Fast forward to a few days ago. I listen to S. Hutson Blount's Littleblossom Makes a Deal with the Devil. In a neat bit of turnabout, the narrator is Eugie Foster. Like Diane Severson, she easily meets Escape Artist's impeccable standards, but unlike Diane Severson, she makes a different choice when it comes to pronouncing the Chinese words in the story.

It's easy to compare their pronunciations because both stories have 奶奶, grandmother, in common. Now I'm sure Diane Severson would have used the correct vowel had she known to. Eugie Foster does use the correct vowel, but she chooses English intonation rather than Mandarin. (The story makes it clear that when people speak in Chinese, they speak Mandarin. More on this later.) She does this for every Chinese word in the story. Now, I find this jarring especially when we get to place names. e.g., 東北 (Dōngběi). The good folks at the discussion forum though praise how natural her Chinese sounds. Um, ok.

They're obviously entitled to their opinion. And who doesn't favor the familiar over the foreign? I'm just a little disconcerted that throwing out half of how a language sounds makes for a more natural experience.

(Incidentally, when demonstrating tones, I don't know why everyone uses the syllable "ma." In context, you're likely to figure out whether the person meant to say "mom", "hemp", "horse", or "scold." No one ever demonstrates more interesting mix ups like "buy" vs. "sell" or "kiss" vs. "ask." Actually, ChinesePod once did a video demonstrating the latter, among others.)

I have to admit though that some of my unease also has to do with the story itself. Again, from what I've glanced, the good folks at the discussion forum praise how Chinese the story is. Well, it feels like a veneer to me, painted on as if someone had applied rouge and lipstick. I never got the sense, as I did when I read Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, of a story that grew out of the culture.

Now, rouge and lipstick are not bad things. People wear them all the time to wonderful effect. In this case though, I wonder what the reaction would have been had the author written about a papoose who had named her missiles after the animal spirits, and used fire water. Moreover, the security authorization prompt was the computer asking for a sacrifice to the buffalo, or perhaps by asking our papoose to rain dance. Would people talk about how Native American the story was? (Yes, I've mixed up cliches from different Native American traditions here. Perhaps I'm making a point here.) I'm not saying that one couldn't program a computer to replicate, in metaphor, traditional Chinese culture, but why would a military do this or allow this?

Besides that, little stupid things tripped me up. It's frustrating because they're so easily correctable. If you're going to put on the rouge and the lipstick, the rouge ought to go on the cheeks and the lipstick on the lips, and artfully.

The story refers to the main character as Xiaoying. "Xiao" could be 小, meaning "small" or "little." Try as I might though, I can not find a character pronounced as "ying" in Mandarin that means "blossom." I looked in four different dictionaries, each having over 100000 entries. Now, I'm not saying there isn't one. I'm just saying that I can't find it, making for a potentially obscure, or easily misrecognized nickname. (If I guess on the tones, Xiaoying could mean "small photo of one's self" or "smiling expression" among a few others.)

The story then refers to the bad guys as gweilo. On one hand, this is pretty expected. On the other hand, it's also colloquial Cantonese. Having gone to the trouble of making it clear that everyone speaking Chinese is speaking in Mandarin, the story springs a Cantonese expression at us. Two of my dictionaries of standard Chinese don't even list it, and the term has been around forever. I understand why S. Hutson Blount used it, but it doesn't strike me as an expression that would pop up from the point of view of a native Mandarin speaker. (There are a couple similar expressions that might though.)

This is obviously my very personal and idiosyncratic reaction. I haven't mentioned anything that would make me want to throw my iPhone against the wall. Other people enjoyed it a lot praising both the pronunciation and the story's depiction of Chinese culture. Clearly, I'm not trying to dictate how other people should react. I expect I'm fairly alone on this (just like relatively few Firefly fans know or care that much of the Chinese in that show is well nigh unintelligible). That's to be expected.

If I ever podcast a story though, and there is some Mandarin in it, I'm going to pronounce it as accurately as possible. (In some cases, like "Xiaoying" you can only go so far. Then there is my own accent to consider. It asymptotically approaches "Chinese newsreader.") Likewise, if one of my stories with Mandarin gets podcast, I'd insist on the same if I can. The people who get wigged out will just have to get wigged out.

asians scared sarah palin away from hawaii.

When she was 18, she spent one semester in college in Hawaii before moving on to the University of Idaho. Apparently, the reason she left was that "the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable."

Now, I don't know that the now older, more mature Sarah Palin feels the same way as her 18 year old self. Certainly, moving from Alaska to Hawaii must have been a culture shock in so many ways at the time. And, not that I've ever met her, but being The First Chinese Person Someone Has Ever Met was not an unusual experience for me when I was in college. I do think that her one small taste of Being The Other could have developed into some empathy for minorities in this country. I haven't seen any sign of this from her though.

Various Harold teams are auditioning for new members, and so I've auditioned again. If nothing else, the process of auditioning is good experience.

As usual, I have no idea if I did well enough to get cast. However, it was a fun Harold and I think managed at least one fun scene. I feel about as good coming out of the audition as I ever have. (Of course, thinking back, I can see what I could have done better, but that's par for the course.)

Like I said, if nothing else, it was good experience. I'm always nervous going in, but I think I pulled it together for the actual audition.

[ETA: Didn't get cast. Not a surprise, unfortunately. Oh well, still grinding away...]

orogeny's story The Second Conquest of Earth is now up at Strange Horizons. It's utterly wonderful...

It has a beautifully evoked history and world that's absolutely relevant to the story at hand. It implies so much more though.

(Thanks krylyr and orogeny for pointing it out. I hadn't gotten around to checking Strange Horizons yet today.)

The improv show went surprisingly well for an emergency replacement show. If I were to quibble, I'd say we were doing more short-form pacing rather than long-form pacing. That's not something anyone who just wants to be entertained really worries about though. Next week, it'll probably be a little less seat-of-the-pants.

We pretty much put this show together over email, text message, voice mail and phone calls. (The first chance we all had to get together was at the show.) I gave them my Google Voice number because I figured it was time I started using it. It works really well.

Keep in mind that I've set the bar pretty low here. The last time someone left me voicemail on AT&T, he'd left it on a Thursday, but AT&T didn't notify me until Saturday. If Google Voice had merely notified me on the same day, that would have been awesome. It'd probably notified me within the minute. (Sadly, any phone call eventually lands on the AT&T network, then gets dropped. This is why I ended up getting voicemail in the first place. The weird thing is that I've never had problems with the data network.)

The only failing was that I'm not used to using Google Voice yet, so I don't always remember to go to the Google Voice website to check for voicemail. Yes, you can have it text message you when you get voice mail. Perhaps unwisely, I'd turned that off. I pay per text message. With the previous phone, I never sent or received any text messages so I got the basic calling plan. I'm not regretting this yet. Even if Google Voice sent me a text message for every voicemail, it wouldn't amount to much. (I don't really get phone calls. This is why I wasn't too concerned about moving to AT&T.)