ArmadilloCon 2008: Campfire Stories

Joe Haldeman and Joe Lansdale told a few good stories ot the Campfire Stories panel, which took place on Saturday night in a darkened room. The four panelists were seated around a beautiful fake campfire. Joe Lansdale had entertained us Austin fans with his storytelling before at Nebula awards. The point of his Toastmaster's speech was how Texas is so weird it can't help but churn out great numbers of science fiction writers. He illustrated it with a story about the time an epileptic woman visited his house. It can be found in my article on Nebula wards ceremony. He recalled it here at the Campfire panel, as well as other incidents from his life. He shed some light on his family background, which kind of explained how he acquired all that colorful life experience. :-) Joe Haldeman was not to be outdone. I'll post only one of his stories here, as the other might contain a bit too many controversial details. ;-)

Joe Haldeman's story

One day Joe Haldeman was riding his bicycle home from a grocery store in his neighborhood in Florida. (I did not quite understand whether his neighborhood was in a "good" or "bad" part of town.) In these most mundane of circumstances (oh, and yay Joe for using a non-polluting form of transportation!) he got shot by a man in a passing car. The car sped away. The shot wounded him in the butt, but the wound wasn't very serious. He managed to bike home, then had his wife take him to the emergency room. The X-ray showed constellations of old schrapnel wounds. The X-ray technicians asked Haldeman: dude, which one is new? They couldn't tell, and neither could he. Thinking the wound wasn't serious, he declined surgery. He was afraid of surgeons more than of getting shot. The ER professionals replied: "dude, you don't know where that bullet is now! It went into your butt, by this time it can be in your brain!"

Once they figured out which of the multiple wounds showing up on the X-ray was the new one -- it looked round from several different angles -- the surgeon agreed it was better not to operate, since he would have to cut so deep into the flesh it would cause more harm than good. "But if you leave the bullet alone..." he gestured to the X-ray: "what's one more spot to a leopard?"

Joe Lansdale's story

Joe Lansdale's first experience with violence happened when he was 5. He had a little dog with who he bonded very deeply; they were like brothers, going everywhere together, and eating out of each other's dishes. A neighbor once saw Joe's dog digging in his flower bed, so he whacked the dog in the head with a pipe, grabbed him by hind legs and tossed him in a ditch -- all that while Joe was watching. Devastated, the boy went home and told his mother, who then went out, found a phone (they didn't have one at home) and called Joe's father. The father came home and headed straight to the neighbor's house. When the neighbor answered a knock on the door, Joe's father said nothing, just hit the guy really hard in the face. When the guy collapsed, the father took him by the ankles and swung him across the flower bed until the flower bed was completely flat. Then he tossed the guy in the ditch. His method of revenge was ironic, Joe said, because Joe had not told him that this was exactly what the guy did to the dog.

Surprisingly, the dog survived and lived until Joe was 17 years old. The neighbor survived too, but moved shortly afterwards. Back then people weren't so eager to sue as they are now, Joe said -- in fact, the neighbor would have been mortified to let the public know he had the hell beaten out of him. So he moved.

Joe Lansdale talked at length about his father, adding details that puts this story in context. His father was a carnival wrestler and boxer. He could bend coins with his bare hands. He could squeeze an apple with his hand to a pulp. People who tried to take advantage of him did not try to do it twice. One time, when he worked as an automechanic, a guy tried to take his car back without paying for the work; Joe's father knocked the guy out so badly, the guy forgot he had a car to begin with. Joe told of a few more episodes of his father solving conflicts with his fists, scaring poor Joe to death, and making even the local cops fear him. The only person he was scared of was Joe's mother.

After Haldeman and Lansdale spun their yarn, there was a moment of silence, until Bill Crider said: "I once stepped on a gum." He and Scott Cupp seemed a little embarrassed they did not have anything to top Haldeman's and Lansdale's tall tales.

ArmadilloCon 2008: Living With A Creator

"Living With A Creator" panelists were five spouses of creators (writers and artists): 3 women and 2 men. Perhaps unintendedly, the panel provided material for observations as to how an experience of living with a creator differed along gender lines. Take housework. One writer's husband said one of the perks of living with a professional writer is that he never has to lift a finger around the house. Never needs to rush home to feed the dog, does not have to take time off to wait for a plumber, and hardly knows how to operate a washing machine! It's all his wife's job because she has the flexibility of being at home whenever she needs to. It was apparent that not all spouses viewed it the same way, though. One artist's spouse said her husband's cleaning is a sign that he is in the "incubation phase" of his new work. When he's thinking about about his next project, but haven't started it yet, that's when he cleans -- as a way to procrastinate a little before plunging into work.

This reminded me what I heard on another panel, "Why I Write", in which more than half of the panelists proceeded to tell us why they don't write. Some of them put their writing on hiatus for predictable reasons, such as jobs and personal lives being too overwhelming at the moment. One author said that even though her husband lets her stay home and write, she can't. Instead she spends hours on Facebook. "Perhaps having a regular job to go to would help me structure my life for writing?" she asked. "I feel very guitly not writing, but I enjoy playing games on my computer". Well, well -- it resonated with what I've been thinking, that I am lucky my financial circumstances do not allow me to write full time. Otherwise I would be like her, and I would certainly not be a nice "creator" to live with. :-)

"Creatives" not too willing to collaborate

Do creative professionals and their spouses often collaborate? Is it common for spouses to offer ideas to writers / artists? The prevailing answers were: yes to the second, no to the first. Spouses' suggestions are not taken very often if at all, though some good may come out of unsolicited offering. When Joe Haldeman is facing a roadblock in the plot of a book he's writing, his wife Gay Haldeman tends to offer him ideas on how to proceed; he rejects them all, but after a few rounds of that he often figures out what to do next. So all this bouncing of ideas off of one another is not in vain. And Karen Lansdale once helped Joe Lansdale come up with an ending for his story which he had not been able to figure out himself, probably since he had been looking at it too long. So Joe put her name on that story. (I don't know if didn't mention the title of the story, or I just didn't catch it.)

Creative or not, it's tough to work in solitude

A big part of the panel revolved around the more mundane aspects of writers and artists jobs, that are not much different from any self-employed person's. The panic attacks that set in when you find out you've miscalculated the taxes you owe by $8000; the compromises necessary to balance the interactions between a spouse that works alone all day, and the one that comes home in the evening fried from their job. People who work at home face characteristic challenges of loneliness and lack of motivation. Two panelists revealed their writerly spouses seek distractions from solitude. One writes while watching old movies to keep her company, another works while reading a newspaper and chatting with a friend on the phone. (And I thought I was bad for checking email every 30 seconds while writing! :-) But unlike me, they had produced something publishable. So perhaps not all is lost for me despite my distractibility.)

What about the glamorous aspects of a creator's life?

There weren't many stories about dealing with the more esoteric or glamorous aspects of a creator's life. No groupie stories -- imagine that! Not even in science fiction writers' lives! :-) Perhaps we should have invited Neil Gaiman's wife to the panel. :-) And what about the perception of creatives as brooding, emotional, self-absorbed types -- isn't there a rich vein for stories there? The panelists didn't go far into that topic, except to admit that their spouses' moods are indeed affected by whether their creative project is going well, and what kind of reviews their books have been getting. One panelist put it this way: living with a woman who's writing a book is like living with a woman who's just had a baby. All her attention goes to it, so you have to learn to take a second seat.

The upsides of living with a creative

And the upsides of living with a creative professional? For one thing, you get to go to exclusive parties at conventions; though not all spouses enjoyed convention going, and some found SFWA parties boring, it turned out to be worthwhile for some of them when they unexpectedly ran into a Very Important Person they've always dreamed of meeting.

In a more extreme case, Gay Haldeman recalled someone saying to her: "I'm thinking of stealing your Rolodex", because there were all those famous people from Stephen King to George Lucas in it. "Oh, are they?" Gay replied. I don't know what I should be more envious about: the fact that she had rubbed shoulders with all those people or that it was so commonplace for her she didn't realize it was noteworthy! :-)



Gay Haldeman, David Lee Anderson's wife, and Karen Lansdale. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2008 are available in my photo gallery.

A less tangible perk of living with a writer or artist is that your kids (if you have them) often venture into creative professions too -- if only because they don't know any other way of life. In addition, they may develop other kinds of creativity, such as finding ingenious ways to talk back to grownups. David Lee Anderson's wife said their son never put his name on his homework, even though that was required in school. When asked why he didn't do that, he said: mom, you sign a painting when it's finished. "He never finished his homework," David Lee added.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2008 are available in my photo gallery.

Nebula Awards 2008: speeches and anecdotes

Being in Texas, the Nebula award ceremony had to have some Texas flavor, and that was amply supplied by the MC John Moore and the toastmaster Joe Lansdale. Moore started by explaining Texas dialect to the out-of-state folks. He said, "in Texas you don't say 'I'm going to have a glass of wine', you say 'I'm fixing to mosey down to Hospitality Suite and rustle up a Shiner Bock'. And right now I'm fixing to introduce our toastmaster. He's a kick-ass Texas writer, and I mean it literally: he founded a school of martial arts."

Joe Lansdale's speech was the highly anticipated highlight of the award ceremony. Everyone in the Texas fandom knows Lansdale is pretty damn funny. And his speech was funny indeed, although a bit rambling. I managed to remember a couple of anecdotes Joe told; for the sake of brevity, I'll compress the details which, in my opinion, didn't add much to the story. (Though what do I know? Perhaps readers adore Joe Lansdale precisely because of those details I consider rambly.)

His point was that Texas is such a weird place it can't help but inspire science fiction. Here is an incident that happened to him and an even stranger one, to another Texas writer. Lansdale also listed his rules for the attendees of science fiction conventions.

Michael Moorcock, who was bestowed a title of SFWA grandmaster, gave an acceptance speech I found (rushes to pull on asbestos underwear :-)) as unmemorable as any of his books. I've read three of those before giving up. Moorcock's speech still did not inspire me to read his prose. So shoot me. I think he was saying something about those dark ages when science fiction was despised by the society-at-large, and when the mainstream media viewed SF writers and fans as "geeks with slide rules for genitals" -- the only phrase I remember from his talk. :-)

But he had his own funny stories to tell about life in Texas -- and why he likes it here.

Pictures from the Nebula awards can be found in my photo gallery.

Nebula Awards -- general recap

Here is my brief recap of Nebula Awards, which were in Austin last weekend. I could not pass up a chance to go, although there wasn't much for fans to do. It's a pro event, after all. The only fannish opportunities were to mingle with the pros at the autographing session on Friday and to watch the Nebula awards ceremony on Saturday. So I did both.

Missed a chance I would have killed for 20 years ago

The only autograph I got at the autographing session was Connie Willis', since none of my favorite writers were there, and neither was anyone so famous that I would want their autograph no matter what. Before getting Connie to sign a book, I got to eavesdrop to her amusing rant on Bush, in which she supplied some factoids about Bush I never heard before. Later at home I reviewed the pictures I took Friday night, and googled some of the names on the name tags, just being curious who those people were. The guy sitting next to Connie Willis was called Barry Longyear. Teh Intarwebs told me he was the author of "Enemy Mine", a story (and later a cycle of novels) on which a movie by the same name was based. That movie was my fondest remembered SF movie of the 80s. It pushed all the right emotional buttons for me. But I was no more than 18 when I saw it. If I had known that almost two decades later I'll encounter its creator! I probably would have prepared a speech and carried it in my memory for years to come, agonizing about the necessity to wait longer than I had been alive until I meet this person. :-)

Connie Willis, Barry and Regina Longyear. More pictures from the Nebula Awards 2008 can be found in my photo gallery.

As it were, I briefly regretted not knowing who this guy was, and then realized that even if I had known him, I wouldn't have had much to say. I'm not under the spell anymore, and haven't been in a long time. Though I still remember what the spell felt like, and that's good.

Broken camera and photogenic faces

On Saturday, as I was driving to the award ceremony, my camera stopped working. No, it does not mean I take pictures while driving. :-) The camera was hanging on my neck, and it turned on by itself. It does that occasionally, I don't know why. Even a little jostling can cause it to turn on. But when I tried to turn it back off, it did not -- it got stuck in a halfway state with its lens partially extended. I tried to troubleshoot it the only way I knew -- by changing the battery. :-) It didn't work. I'll take it to a camera shop to see if they know of a quick fix. If not, I'll root through drawers for an extended warranty, on the off chance I bought one for this camera.

So it sucked not to be able to photograph the Nebula awards ceremony with equipment any more decent than my cell phone camera, which produces postage stamp-sized pictures so blurry your own mother wouldn't recognize you. And that's a shame, because there were some faces that begged for crystal-clear pictures. I'm talking, of course, of Michael Chabon, the winner of this year's Nebula for best novel ("The Yiddish Policemen's Union"). I remember when Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, wrote that famous column for New York Times where she said she loved her husband more than her children. She said she could survive a death of any of their 4 kids, as horrible as such event would be, but if anything happened to her husband, she would see no reason to go on. Oh, what a shitstorm this column set off in the blogosphere! How horrified all the sanctimommies were that any woman would admit such feelings! So what I'm saying is, after I laid my eyes on Michael Chabon, I could kind of see how she might feel this way. :-) Even though my taste in men does not run towards delicate Elvish features combined with boyish charm, but... a face like that made me wish I had a good camera to immortalize it. I'm just sayin'. :-)

I'll write more about the highlight of the award ceremony -- Joe Lansdale's speech. I made sure to write down the stories he told before I forgot them. Some were funny; some were way too rambling for my taste. If I post them, I'll make sure to trim down the word fat (fortunately, I already forgot the details I consider irrelevant :-)) ... But what do I know -- maybe the rambliness is why people adore Lansdale?

What I Should Have Read This Year: an ArmadilloCon 2007 panel

I've noticed over the years that some of the "What I Should Have Read" panelists have tastes so unlike mine, it's as if we are from different planets. (It's different people each year, by the way.) For example, some people's idea of good science fiction is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective story with time travel, as you'll see further in the text. I'm sure a time-travelling Sherlock Holmes can be done very well, but... I've already read the original Sherlock Holmes, so why would I want to read the same story again? I read science fiction for something new, although it becomes increasingly harder to find. But the moment I truly realized I landed on a wrong planet came when I listed to Rick Klaw praising a comic book "I shall destroy all the civilized planets" by Flether Hanks. (More about it behind the cut). I sat there thinking, well, I'm not against weird, but I would never read SF just for that. Even the weird needs to have logic.

I found it a bit comical that while the panelists praised obscure, bizarre books like the one mentioned above, they had hardly anything to say on this year's Hugo nominees. A person in the audience asked which of this year's Hugo nominees they would recommend most highly, and Willie admitted he drew a blank on who the nominees were. Jessica Reisman corrected the situation somewhat by recommending "Blindsight" by Peter Watts.

Without further ado, here is the list of the recommended books.

Some of this year's must-read books garnered nominations from more than one panelist, and we shall start with them.

Books recommended by 2 people:

Two-handed Engine, a Henry Kuttner story collection. Joe Lansdale says: "Kuttner is one of the best SF writers, although he's a better short story writer than a novelist. The reason Kuttner still survives is because he's a damn good writer. Ideas, charcters, writing -- he's got all that."

"Thirteen" by Richard Morgan

Books recommended by 1 person:

Rick Klaw and Jessica Reisman.

Here is the list of Willie's recommended science fiction books (each title is followed by Willie's short comment):

Brasyl by Ian McDonald -- In McDonald's "River Of Gods" it was India taking over the Universe, now he's doing Brazil taking over the universe.

The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds -- a quintessential space opera.

Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod -- an almost mainstream thriller that has pretty amazing stuff in it.

Mainspring by Jay Lake -- trying to imagine a world where Newtonian clockwork idea is in fact true, and where the world is composed of springs.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon -- alternate history.

Hurricane Moon by Alexis Glynn Latner

Here is the list of Willie's recommended fantasy books (each title is followed by Willie's short comment):

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville -- the villain is amazing.

Renegade's Magic by Robin Hobb -- a conclusion to her current series.

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill -- Stephen King's son who writes under a pseudonym.

Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves

Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson

Ysabel -- Guy Gavriel Kay

Legacy -- Lois Bujold

Here are books recommended by CJ Mills. (All of these books were more than a year old.)

The Prodigal Troll by Charles Coleman Finlay

The Terrorists of Irustan and The Maquisarde by Louise Marley

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Books recommended by Joe Lansdale

Pearls from Peoria and The Best of Philip Jose Farmer: story collections by Phil Jose Farmer.

Books recommended by Jessica Reisman:

Territoryby Emma Bull -- alternative history.

Precious Dragon by Liz Williams

Jessica Reisman, Bill Crider and Joe Lansdale.

Books recommended by Rick Klaw:

Fast Forward 1, edited by Lou Anders -- a pretty incredible anthology. It's got an incredible Robert Charles Wilson story. There's also a story by Tony Balantyne about a world operating system, infected by a virus.

Acacia by David Durham. It's a violent fantasy with no magic. It's closer to George R. R. Martin, not to Lord of the Rings.

Michael Moorcock's detective stories -- they essentially Sherlock Holmes stories. They go to plaes you would never expect.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: the Comics of Fletcher Hanks. Rick Klaw says: "You have these cosmic power shadow charaters who would punish people for doing the wrong things. They would freeze people's heads, they would dissect them. There is a guy there with flaming hands who goes around killing people."

Or -- and I'm not sure I got this right -- there are people who want to kill everyone on Earth except themselves, so they tie themselves to Earth and spin up the Earth so that everyone would fly off of it. The last idea sounded so absurd that I really don't know if I got it right. At that point I just sat there thinking, well... this panel is going to be less helpful to me than I hoped.

Books recommended by Bill Crider:

The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig -- a riff on Hamlet. A dark, but hilarious book. And if you've read Hamlet several times, you'll get a lot of in-jokes about Hamlet.

There was also a book that, in my calculation, collected 0 nominations, despite being mentioned by two people. One of the mentions was positive, the other negative, so I guess they canceled out. That was Un Lun Dun by China Mieville.

Here are more of my pictures and blog posts from ArmadilloCon 2007.