Of Lions and Violins

I was researching some materials for my classes and I came across this tip sheet originally aimed toward journalists reporting in Africa. Apparently it's been widely disseminated, but I only just came across it.

"Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress....

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care."

"How to Write About Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina

...You definitely should check out the reboot of Publisher's Weekly SF/F blog, Genreville, run by my wonderful editor at Publisher's Weekly, Rose Fox.

Me in St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Melnik, Czech Republic

It occurs to me that I never go to more houses of worship than when I'm on vacation? From Buddhist temples in Japan to Gothic cathedrals in Prague, it's like I'm on pilgrimage.

Ceiling of St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Melnik, Czech Republic

Anyways, so I've been back in the U.S. for about a week now, but I still plan on posting some pics here and there. After K went back to the U.S., I took the an old Communist-era train to Bratislava, Slovakia, had lunch there.

Train from Prague to Bratislava, Slovakia

Then I hopped on a hydrofoil up (down?) the Danube to Vienna, Austria. Bratislava was like Prague, only with a higher ratio of ugly Soviet cement block buildings to pretty Baroque/Renaissance buildings.



The hydrofoil / catamaran was AWESOME. There is nothing quite like having a warm summer wind hit your face when you're zooming along the Danube at I-don't-know-how-many-but-it's-rilly-rilly-fast km/hr.
From the back of a hydrofoil, cruisin' the Danube, the famous (I have no idea why) Bratislava bridge in the background

On the way, I even spotted a castles here and there.

Castle on the Danube, Austrian side?

Vienna itself was fabulous. To be honest, I enjoyed Vienna a heck of alot more. Prague was the capital of a country, and Vienna, well Vienna was the capital of an EMPIRE, and you can totally feel that vibe. The EU, OPEC, and the European seat of the UN are all in Vienna. Furthermore, it's still got some relatively strong financial markets, all of which contribute to it being a much more cosmopolitan city

Sunset on the Danube

( Random musings about modernity (me talking about things I probably don't know anything about) )

And I know this doesn't fit anywhere in my post, but I have to leave you with one final picture from Prague.

Yes, that is a beer ice cream float. And it tastes like a beer ice cream float, which is to say not very good. I admit, I'm a suckered tourist, but hey, we were in the hundreds-of-years-old place that brewed the original Budvar!

So K & I thought it would be interesting to head to outside of Prague. It was a lovely train ride on an old Communist-era train that passed sunflower fields along the way. We decided to head for Sedlec and Kutna Hora, an old medieval mining town that is now a suburb.

One of the main sights of Sedlec is the Sedlec Ossuary.
Look closely and you'll see that the arches are decorated with human bones.
( (If the idea of a church decorated with bones is not something you want to think about, stop reading now.) )

Yes these are all real bones.

There were a whole lot more weird things but I just don't have time to post them all. Suffice it to say, K & I walked around, totally bashing the Middle Ages because we thought this was something that came about because of the Black death. When we left and picked up the brochure, we learned that this only dated back until the 1870s. It's a tiny graveyard, smaller than most American suburban yards and apparently what happened was that a couple hundred years ago, someone went on Crusade/pilgrimmage and brought back soil from Golgotha and sprinkled it around the Church courtyard. Suddenly everyone wanted to be buried there so there was just bodies piled on top of each other.

The odd thing about the place was that even though it had that dark coolness of stone in the mid-summer, it was also really humid in a way that it wasn't outside. Now it was probably all the tourists wandering in, but at the same time it felt very odd, as if the skeletons were reflecting our breath back on ourselves.

More later!

I'm in Vienna now, where I finally have time to post a few photos from Prague. Prague was a great little town, but to me (jaded New Yorker that I am) it felt more like a country town then a city. On the whole it was fairy-tale picturesque, except in a few places where you found giant Soviet concrete block buildings wedged in between Renaissance / Baroque loveliness

On my way to Vienna from Prague, I stopped by Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia, which used to be part of the country Czechoslovakia), and found it to be an even smaller version of a European country town, only with more Soviet concrete buildings (pics of Bratislava and subsequent hydrofoil ride down Danube later).

I'm quite eager to check out Vienna, seat of the Hapsburgs, and what seems to be a cosmopolitan imperial capital. Anyway, here are a few pics from Prague.

( More Pics undercut. I would have put them all under the cut but I really like Prague astle at night. )

View of Prague Castle from Charles Bridge at night

More pics to come including the Bone Church!

There was another fabulous KGB reading tonight, but it was extra special because it was a fundraiser for Clarion West, and because fellow '07 classmate lilahwild came too! It was crowded as usual but good food and good times were had at the post-reading dinner.

Now I'm sitting in Penn Station, using the internet in the LIRR waiting room as I wait for the midnight bus to DC for RWA. They're renovating the waiting room and I'm not really sure to what end. First of all, there are periodic fake bird noises playing in between the elevator music. I have no idea why. Second of all, on one of the two TVs, there seems to be this LIRR cheery propaganda footage being played over and over again. There's no words, no captions, just footage of janitors cheerfully cleaning the trains, passengers reading newspapers with big smiles and workers working hard. It's like video you might see for a Japanese karaoke video; bland and overly cheerful.

It's very strange. In Japan, it wouldn't be, but in New York City? That's just weird.

So when I was in Thailand a few years back, I found the most awesome internal frame backpack. It actually held the weight well, and was not too ginormous for my backpacking needs. I lent it to my brother, who after a long story, ended having it stolen in a Brooklyn laundrymat.

It sure could have been handy on this upcoming trip to Prague, Bratislava and Vienna. Anyone in the NYC area have a nice internal frame backpack they want to lend/rent to me? I'd buy one, but I'll be honest; I probably wouldn't get much use out of it over the next few years.

You know, I wanted to be busy and Not-In-My-In-Laws-House for the summer, but this is getting kind of ridiculous. I've been gone almost every single weekend since...Wiscon for various weddings, visiting family / friends.

Last weekend, we flew out to Wisconsin for a good friend's wedding. It was held on the farm that has been in their family since 1942. My friend's mom grew up on the farm, waking up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows, feed the pigs, all before becoming a jazz musician/teacher in NYC for most of her adult life. She's retired to the farm, which is no longer a working farm, but still incredibly beautiful. You know all those children's books written in the 1950s/60s about kids running around in the grassy fields and coming back to the porch to have a tall glass of lemonade? It was that kind of farm. Really awesome, even though it was interesting about how all the white NYCers kept talking about how strangers would wave to them when passing them in a car, which did not happen to any POCers (I'm just going to chalk it up to the fact those people probably don't know any POC, since the wave was explained to me as a just-in-case-I-know-them thing). Though there was an ad for a German festival in October that had the notation in the ad that "A Sgt-of-Arms will be posted to keep the Irish at bay" which I'm not sure if it was a joke or not.

We also got to visit his family friend's farm, which is a working organic sheep farm. If you are into knitting or spinning your own wool, I can think of no better people to support than Greg and Judie Sage at Hickory Hills Farm. They were the nicest people in the world, and took time out of their busy day to show us their farm. I held little lambs in my arms and actually got to watch a lamb being born (which was kind of non-eventful, until you saw a sheep swing around with a baby lamb head sticking out of its butt).

This weekend, I'm skipping Readercon to go visit a good friend in Maine who races sailboats. The following weekend will be the RWA National conference in DC and then the weekend after that, I will be going to Prague, thanks to my husband who was able to get me a free ticket with frequent flyer miles! Since I'm teaching World History this fall, I'm thinking about also a short trip to Bratislava, Slovakia and Vienna, Austria. Suggestions and advice would be welcome!

Not only did I find a place that makes it fresh and serves it to you in a cone, but they have pints for you to take home too!!! It's pricey (like about $5 after tax) but SO incredibly worth it. Cones are cheaper, but I don't remember how much.

I discovered Black Sesame Ice Cream at Cafe Zaiya. It's less than 1/2 a block away from the 42nd St Library. Literally, if you walk out of the library, down the steps, between the lions and straight across the street to the next block, it will be on your right side.

It's a perfect treat after accomplishing some writing goals in the Rose Reading room.  And it's even better than the stuff in Kyoto.

And if you're really hungry, I have to admit that Chiyoda sushi next door to Cafe Zaiya is not bad either. They actually had my favorite sushi (that I have not been able to find in the U.S.) negi-toro which is fatty tuna with Japanese green onion.

In case you haven't heard, the Clarion West write-a-thon is currently ongoing, and I'm one of the participants. I have to admit, my writing goals are a bit more amorphous, and I don't specify what my fundraising goal is. I figure that kind of works with the way I write; no outlines, just pushing through till you get to then end. We'll see what happens at the end!

And next month, In July, there will be a special Clarion West reading at the KGB Bar with Samuel R. Delany, Jack Womack, Cat Rambo, Kris Dikeman and guest-hosted by Rajan Khanna, July 15, 2009

In 2007, I had the privilege of having the wonderful Samuel R. Delany as one of my instructors. I owe alot to this workshop.

If you're in the NYC area, interested in learning more about Clarion West, or have been influenced by this fabulous writing workshop, I urge you to come out

In fact, I think this reading is going to be SO COOL, that I'm skipping the first day of the RWA nationals conference to go to this reading, and taking the 1:30am bus down to DC after the reading. Yea, I'm that hardcore.

So sponsor me, sponsor someone else in the write-a-thon and come out for the Clarion West KGB Reading!

One of my favorite graphic novels ever is Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis." I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking for insight into the revolutions and demonstrations in Iran. It's so sad that they overthrew a dictator, only to put another in place. But hopefully, the protests will continue!

Go Moussavi supporters!

I'm really enjoying Nisi Shawl's "Filter House" and Camille Alexa's "Push the Sky." I'm including them in a rotation through Ray Carver's "Cathedral" and Alice Munroe's "The Love of a Good Woman." Every night I read one story from each collection and I'm finding the contrasts and comparisons quite interesting. All of them are equally worth picking up, though I have to say Alice Munroe gets a bit slow at times.

It's been a crazy couple of days.

I'm cat-sitting for Kat-with-no-LJ who is in my long-time writer's group. It's a gorgeous Craftsman style house on the North Shore of Long Island, surrounded by tress, grass and a nearby pond with swans and herons. It's a lovely little retreat in the country.

I might have actually enjoyed it if I weren't so busy.

On Thursday, I drove into the city for the Interstitial Arts salon. Got in there late (I'm sorry you missed it michele_lang !) so I skipped picking up food, only to be starving when I got there. It was a great space, but luckily, a bunch of the Altered Fluid peeps were hungry too and we went and grabbed some food. Came back out on the LI, but it was thundering and I got the creeps from being in the huge house alone so I didn't fall asleep until 4am.

Woke up the next day late, which meant that I got to the LIRW luncheon late. Still, I managed to pitch my novel to editors, and THEY SAID THEY WANT TO SEE IT. (I'm both elated and terrified at the same time). And they were the two editors I wanted to talk to at the RWA conference in July anyway!

So now I have to try and finish this stupid novel ASAP. No wait, not try, I AM GOING TO FINISH IT.

After the luncheon, went further east on the island to safewrite 's wedding. She looked lovely and so happy. I'm so glad she found someone. I'm just sad she's leaving the area! I also had a great time hanging out with saycestsay .

After the wedding saycestsay  and I went into Huntington, grabbed some falafel and sat outside on a bench listening to a local band play. It was a lovely night.

And now, before I even begin looking at my novel, (All my novels, when I work on them, are given the title "stupid novel") I have a book to read and a review to write for PW.

And yay, K comes back from CA tonight!

Now I sit, in a room filled with windows, listening to the rain, with cat to keep me company.

I couldn't ask for a better writing retreat.

Edited because half my post got replaced by a random lj username.

...is surprisingly, in Manhattan.

I wrote a review on yelp here. But seriously if you're looking for a good spot in Manhattan near Grand Central, I can't recommend this (and the black sesame ice cream) highly enough.

So my last minute decision to go to RWA was supposed to be an "I'll-just-go-to-learn-and-hang-out-con" because I didn't have anything to pitch.

But I've decided that I'm going to finish one of my half unfinished novels by the time RWA rolls around so I can pitch it. I've been working on this paranormal romance for too long.  First I got caught up in research (it's partially set in WWII) and then...well, I think I started working on another novel because I think it started getting politically preachy again.

I'm fine with political, it's preachiness that I'm trying to stay away from.

Though the more I think about it, the more I think the politics is a part of it. The protag is a reverse Tomb Raider; instead of taking artifacts from random people around the world, she's a thief who steals them from museums and rich people in order to bring them back to the places they were originally (and wrongly) taken from. And unlike most biracial protags in fantasy, this protag actually is grappling with issues of dual heritage and being colonizer / colonized and the shades of grey in between.

But it's supposed to be a romance.

Even if it's not really pitch ready, I just need to finish this stupid thing and see what I have. (I keep thinking of that SNL skit where the guy keeps yelling, "Fix it!" only I think of him yelling, "Finish It!")

Just faxed off my registration for RWA, and since ya' know I didn't spend enough money at Wiscon, I registered for World Fantasy as well.

RWA is quite pricey, but looking at the actual conference, I understand why. Unlike SF cons where you go to panels to hear famous / infamous /semi-famous people talk about issues, the bulk of RWA's conference consists of workshops. Now, most of these are workshops geared to the romance genre of course, but there's quite a bit of good intro to publishing advice that would have been invaluable to me a few years ago. It's like the romance equivalent of Clarion West lectures, only shorter. What's nice is that not all of them are geared to the beginner and some are tightly focused on character, plot, suspense, etc. I'm thinking about going to a research presentation by someone from the Dept of Homeland Security, but I'm thinking it's possible that I could also get very very annoyed by this panel. We'll see.

There's a whole list of the workshops here, and in fact, you can even download some of the handouts for some of the workshops here.  Some of the handouts are just sketches of what they're going to be talking about, while others are actually pretty good notes. (I wish I had come across "Bootcamp for Writers" a few years ago!)

So I decided to hang out in Grand Rapids for an extra day after the workshop because I wanted to check out what the Midwest was like. As an urban East Coast girl, I wanted to get a sense of the region.

What I learned:

1) People from the Midwest are incredibly nice. Waiters actually act like they're in a commercial. They're THAT happy to see you (It's almost like it was Japan, only toned down a notch, and in English).
2) People actually drive the speed limit! And don't zoom up to a red light at 60 mph! And actually let you change lanes when you signal!

Yesterday, afterfairmer dropped us off at the airport, I picked up my rental car (woohoo for credit card points) and drove down to downtown Grand Rapids. They're are some really gorgeous buildings down there with all sorts of arches and detail. But at the same time, you could tell that the area had undergone redevelopment within the last 10 years. The sidewalks were wide and the streets clean.

And yet it was all so oddly empty. Of course, part of it was that it was a Sunday evening downtown. But those lovely buildings with historic storefronts? Filled with vacancy signs. Grand Rapids is built to handle a much larger population than it currently has. And the clean quiet streets seemed kind of sad.

I had some other thoughts about the usage of space and how it reflects the region's particular sensibilities, but I'm still processing those. It's an interesting contrast, because in someways it reminds me of Tsukuba in Japan (the size of the city) and in other ways, it's very very American.

Today I strolled through the Frederick Meijer Sculpture Gardens, which has been rated the 2nd best sculpture garden/museum in the world (who would have thought it? I read in the Delta airline magazine on the way here that only some museum in the Netherlands is better). It was well worth staying an extra day for this.

I don't usually get emotional with art. I'm a casual fan of art. I like classics and most of the time I just don't get modern art. But there were some sculptures that made my heart pound with fear, and others that almost made me cry (admittedly, I cry at the drop of a hat). However, art has never done that me before.

Unfortunately, I didn't bring a camera, but at the same time, I'm glad I didn't. A picture wouldn't capture the essence of the sculpture and the emotions it's meant to evoke as you approach it. And I think it's better this way, that the ones that made me feel something remain in my memories.

Afterwards, I headed back to downtown Grand Rapids to see if the emptiness was one of a Sunday evening. There were many many more cars, and definitely more people, and it was a bit gratifying to see that this was still a city. And yet, it was a little more empty than I would have expected.

My flight leaving Grand Rapids arrived late, so by the time it arrived to CIncinnati, I had missed my connecting flight to LaGuardia. No more flights to LGA for the day, so Delta set me up at the Hilton (and they have Lavazza coffee in the rooms!) with meal vouchers and a flight out tomorrow morning. To tell you the truth, I'm not really annoyed, because I'd just be going back to my in-laws place, and it's nice to have a little decompression / aloneness time, especially post-workshop.

The house where we had the workshop, on the shores of scenic Gun Lake, Michigan.

I knew this was going to be a short workshop but wow the Hastings Point Writers' Workshop went by fast! I was the final critique. Perhaps it was good that they were almost all midwesterners as they did not rip on me too badly for giving them a novel that was still very much a raw WIP.

I'm glad I came. It was good to see other people's reactions to my story. I've been feeling kind of annoyed about this particular novel of mine for awhile. I wrote this novel because I was kind of getting tired of urban fantasy becoming so big without any real "urban" elements, in particular, certain depictions of NYC which was just Manhattan, only white-washed without people of color (or hip hop, or GLBT). I was also sick of myth-based stories that only seemed to focus on English / Celtic tales. This novel was a reaction to that.

Living room where we did our crits.

However, I've come to realize that my stronger stories begin either with 1) character or 2) a really striking image in my head (oh Merrie, you pegged me so well). In this novel, I started with a concept and not character or plot. As a result, this novel has been floundering.

I felt like there were so many issues that had to be dealt with that I just didn't know where to begin. You know that feeling of being so helplessly lost in the forest that you don't even know where to begin to try to get out? Yea, that was me.

View from the living room

This workshop was just what I needed to realize, 'hey that's not so bad, I know how to fix that!' Hearing people talk about my story gave me back my spark of enthusiasm. (And it is quite funny to me, that my novel, which started out as being a reaction to the unrealistic depiction of NYC, garnered accurate criticisms of "there's not enough real NYC in this book! There are too many fairies and not enough people!" The irony is not lost.) But yes, underneath all the randomness, unconnected scenes, attempts (both conscious and unconscious) to make it into a political novel and then not a political novel, there really is a story!

I just have to keep digging and moving rocks until I get there.

Thank you Merrie Haskell, for hosting, and to Victoria Witt, Emily Kajsa, and Elizabeth Shack, Steve Buchheit, Larry Hodges for making this such a great workshop!

Arrived in Michigan for the Hastings Point Writers Workshop. The lillies of the valley are blooming and there was a color streaked sky for sunset over the lake. airmer's house on the lake? So awesome. My bed faces the lake and when I lie on it and look out it feels as if I'm floating.

This is my first time in the Midwest (other than airport layovers) and it really is such a different place. I walked into a bookstore in Detroit on a layover, and was totally taken aback by a sales clerk walking up to me, introducing her self and asking me if I needed help. I'm definitely not in NYC anymore.

At one point we were driving along the road and I said, "Oh look, is that a real cow?" and fairmer  and toriw7 burst into laughter.

I'm such a city girl.

I just got an email from the NYC Dept of Education that said NYC public schools are going to hold off hiring new teachers until August.

It also says that they have an overwhelming number of applicants this year. Last year they only hired 25% of the people who applied.

I went to a teacher job fair last week, and half the people there applying for places had had titles on their resumes like "Vice President of Strategic Assets, Merril Lynch."

Wow. You know it's a crappy economy when even NYC has too many applicants to be substitute teachers. (I mean, really, who WANTS to be a substitute teacher?)