laylalawlor

This is the personal blog of Alaskan writer/artist Layla Lawlor. A list of my published works to date is under the cut. No need to ask before friending me. I don't necessarily friend back on request, but I rarely post locked content. You're welcome to introduce yourself if you like.

( Short stories )

( Graphic novels )

All entries to this blog are mirrored at both laylalawlor on Livejournal.com and layla on Dreamwidth.org.

Palin stepping down as governor, effective July 26.

WHUT.

The only problem is that now we're stuck with Parnell, who I used to think would be worse, but I'm starting to think that ANYTHING is a step up from what we have now. Y'know, I defended this idiot when she was first tapped for McCain's running mate. All she's done ever since is prove that she's even more of a complete chowderhead than the liberal blogosphere originally thought she was, and make Alaskan politics into a national laughingstock instead of just the statewide laughingstock that it used to be.

So long, Sarah. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Jamie Smith of Ink & Snow did a nice write-up on the talk I gave to his art class on Tuesday evening. Jamie is a friend from school who's been doing a weekly gag cartoon for the News-Miner going on ... fifteen years now, I think? A gallery of some of his work is online. He's damn talented and has a wonderfully distinctive style. There are a lot of artists in Fairbanks, but very few people doing cartoony or graphic-design-type stuff.

Okay, so ... the Sun-Cutter graphic novel deals pretty heavily with the Tertia-Secuba conflict in the Kismetverse. As I'm working on today's page, I realized that I'm going to need some slang that both sides use for each other. The only thing that came up in Hunter's Moon was some of the Secubans calling the Tertians "terties", which is really just my half-assed "damn it, I need a slur here, what can I use in a hurry?" On this page, I need something kinda similar for the Tertians soldiers to use to refer to Secubans they're not fond of, and this got me thinking about my desperate need for fake-offensive but not actually offensive slang in the Kismetverse.

So I'll throw it out to you -- do you have any suggestions for slurs that the Tertians and Secubans could use for each other, preferably terms that aren't particularly offensive or politically loaded in our world?

Some salient points:

- Secuba is a clement, roughly Earth-sized waterworld; Tertia has a climate similar to Venus, though it's bigger with gravity about twice Earth's.

- Since the two groups diverged only about 150-100 years ago, there aren't any physical/racial/phenotype differences between them to speak of (as a population, I mean; not as individuals, obviously). Both planets were settled by North Americans and the majority of them are white.

- Secubans gain a tattoo on their arm when they reach the age of majority. Tertians seem to have kept the fondness for tattoos (since we've seen that both Signy and Sagan have tattoos) but don't attach any particular cultural significance to them.

Tertia's "hive" mentality is the thing that it strikes me the Secubans would be most likely to use against them, while the Tertians are equally appalled at the Secubans' loose political structure and lack of respect for authority. (Especially if the authority happens to be them.)

Ideas?

It's here! The new Kismet graphic novel will update a page a week (at least for now), every Monday. Updates will be posted here and will also appear on Sun-Cutter's page on Webcomicsnation.com.

Movie-trailer-style blurb: The Sun-Cutter is a revolutionary new ship that would make the wormhole network obsolete. Everyone wants it, but control of the ship is in the hands of two women -- the scientist who built it, and the only pilot who can fly it.

This story is more of a companion than a direct sequel to Hunter's Moon; some of the same characters appear in both and some of the events from Hunter's Moon influence events in Sun-Cutter, but the two stories occur more or less concurrently. In fact, the start of SC is actually several months earlier than HM, but it soon catches up.

And now, without further ado ...

( Sun-Cutter: Page One )

There's a post up this morning at Elizabeth Bear's LJ on the responsibility of the artist to Art that ties in interesting ways to some of the stuff I've been thinking about lately, on my own writing and why I write and how it's changed over time. (Also to the Patricia Wrede discussion, and this post on art vs. humanity, which I agree with 110%.) In fact, Bear's post and her core argument is pretty much a capsule example of Why Layla Dropped Out Of Art School. It was to get away from people who thought like that.

... Okay, that's not entirely fair. But when I read that post, my knee-jerk reaction was, "Oh god, it's like I'm a freshman again!" -- and not in a good way. The thing is, I loved studying art; I loved learning the techniques and studying and riffing off famous artists from the past. What I did not love, and what made me realize (among other things) that art-as-a-career was not for me, was the pretentiousness and self-importance of the fine-art world. I realized that I didn't have much in common with ahteeests whose goal as an artist was to discomfit or disgust or sicken their audience under the guise of Making A Statement.

I recognize that everyone is drawn to art (all sorts of art) for many different reasons. I believe that there is a very valid and necessary place in the world for art that discomfits and disturbs the complacent. But I resented (and still do resent), very deeply, the prevailing sense in the pro art world that this is the best and only way to be a "proper" artist. I loathe the pervasive idea that art which is created because it's fun, or created for the sake of pleasing or entertaining people, is less in every way, which goes hand-in-hand with the equally loathsome idea that the artist who creates it is not smart enough or artistic enough or brave enough to do real art.

I hate it because I've spent most of my adult life unlearning that idea and learning not to look down on myself for not being that kind of artist, even though, tangentially, my art is about what's important to me, and sometimes does make statements -- it's just that that's not my primary reason for making it.

The bit from Bear's post that really stood out for me:

My job as an artist is not to console you or distract you from the things in the world that make you unhappy. That's my job as an entertainer, and often it's in direct conflict with my job as an artist--but conflict is what makes narratives interesting, so that's okay. My job as an artist is not to give you characters and stories you care about and invest in and want to spend time with. That's my job as a storyteller, which supports and informs my job as an artist.

Yeah, well, I'm primarily a storyteller, and I'm proud of it. It's not that my work is never about anything -- my original work in particular is very often About Important Stuff. But it's more importantly about people -- telling their stories, getting invested in their lives, caring about them and making my reader care about them as much as I do. There's definitely a valuable place in fiction for making your reader think (and good fiction does), but I resent the implication that I'm not a proper artist if I'm more interested in telling my readers a proper story than poking them in the eye. And I don't think it would have prickled me so hard in the case of this particular blog post if artistic/creative academia wasn't full of this attitude (and if this one particular artist hadn't been brought up for failing to recognize her readers as people in the past, too).

Working on a Sun-Cutter page, sketching out a street scene -- it's a train station, on a planet other than Kismet -- and thinking, hmm, since all I have is this one panel to give a sense of this world, what sort of stereotypically science-fictiony thing can I put in the background to make it obvious at first glance that this is not twentieth-century Earth? Then I thought, ooh, pterodactyls! Pterodactyls are cool! And easy to draw. *sketches pterodactyl*

Sadly, this is how a lot of world-building decisions in Kismet are made.

This was the only scene that was supposed to take place here, but really, a planet with dinosaurs is just begging to be explored. I wonder if they're some kind of natively-evolved analogue or a genetic experiment.

We've reached that time of year when the Arctic nights are very lovely and just a bit strange. I went out walking just now, after 11 p.m. It was still broad daylight, with virgas drifting to the west and the sky to the north slowly purpling into something like sunset. The air was cool and damp and rich with the smell of the trees -- the sweetness of rising sap and the faintest hint of perfume from the catkins on the willows and alders. Robins were singing, as they do; I'm not sure when the Arctic birdlife sleeps in the summer, if it does, because the birds sing through the day and all through the bright nights. The days are warm and the nights are cool, and I saw the first hint of green on my rosebush today. I love this time of year.

I started to include this with the previous entry, but decided that it needed to be on its own.

Hmm. Not really sure where to start with this. I guess the short version is that there's this shiny new YA fantasy novel by Patricia Wrede called "The Thirteenth Child", in which the basic premise -- okay, quoting from the glowing review at Tor.com:

The elevator pitch for Thirteenth Child would be “Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic.” ... This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical. In this world the frontier is perilous and settlements need magicians to protect them, but the railroads are creeping across the continent and covered wagons are crossing the Great Barrier that runs along the Mississippi.

In the comments at the Tor thread, the point is immediately made, and then discussed, that this sounds an awful lot like a lite-fantasy version of the very worst aspects of 19th century ideal of Manifest Destiny. All the fun of colonial expansion + mammoths without the pesky natives getting in the way! No guilt over claiming the land because nobody was using it anyway -- for real this time!

Wrede's own comments from her brainstorming sessions on rec.arts.sf.composition do not help matters.

There's a link list at naraht's blog archived under this tag; oldest links at bottom.

I already discussed this a little bit at Leigh Dragoon's post on it. It's partly a moral issue, partly a world-building issue, I guess; the problem, really, is that Wrede appears completely oblivious to the idea that she'd be pushing some really sensitive buttons with this, and therefore didn't devote much effort at all to seriously exploring the ramifications of it. The less problematic your basic premise is, the more slack people are going to cut you for not working through the details. I really enjoy Naomi Novik's Temeraire books, for example, even though the basic idea (Napoleonic Wars + dragons) is completely unworkable if you start thinking about it -- the history of a world with actual dragons would almost certainly have more and greater points of divergence from our own. But it's a fun idea and nobody's getting hurt in the making of it. (Well, for the most part; Novik's books aren't entirely devoid of problems either, but she seems to try hard and to be genuinely committed to improvement.)

But when it comes to something like this -- the real-world history of this continent is so terrible and so fraught with pain and death, and is basically the story of a semi-successful effort to wipe out tens of millions of people and erase their memory in reality; to basically use it as a side plot point in a cheerful YA fantasy about a white girl and mammoths skeeves me horribly. I certainly don't think it would be impossible to seriously address the idea of an uninhabited America and its influence on world history -- but f'r pete's sake, you've got to understand what you're writing about and how it works in a broader historical context (both in terms of your created world, and in terms of the real world and the real readers with real feelings who are going to be reading your book). If all you want is a happy magical fantasy with mammoths, and there are dozens of other, less emotionally loaded and potentially offensive ways that you can do it, why not do that instead?

I struggle with these issues in my own writing, because I'm very much a magpie when it comes to ideas, and a lot of this magpie-ism is directed towards other cultures and various periods in history. I used to believe that there wasn't an idea that I wouldn't try to tackle; however, the epic mess that is "Raven's Children" taught me some humility and my reading on cultural appropriation over the last few years has taught me a lot more, and I'm still learning. I don't believe that being a writer absolves a person of the need to be a responsible and considerate human being also; those of us who work with words for a living have no real excuse if we carelessly use those words to hurt people.

Hmm, I started to make one mega-entry, but decided to break it up into two, so I'm not lumping happy fun stuff in with serious thoughtful stuff. Happy stuff first ...!

1. Sun-Cutter will debut on June 1, as planned, and will update a page a week, on Mondays. I'm not as far ahead as I wanted to be -- these pages are taking me way longer than a Hunter's Moon page used to take; on the other hand, they do look a lot nicer. And it's been 3 years now since HM finished (wow, that's hard to believe); I'm really looking forward to moving forward with the Kismetverse.

2. Saw the Star Trek movie! I kinda loved/hated it. ( Very mild spoilers; more mood-spoilers than anything else )

3. For those of you who live in Fairbanks, there's a new deli/bakery downtown that I recommend if you're out and about in that area. It's called The Red Couch and it's on 2nd & Dunkel, over by American Tire. I got a fantastic sandwich there on Friday and picked up a couple bags of loose-leaf ceylon and oolong tea that's quite nice; they've also got assorted tasty-looking baked goods that I managed to avoid (for now ... but for how long?!). It's always nice when a new restaurant opens up in town, so I figured I'd mention it. (The owner's sister works with me at the News-Miner; she's been talking it up for some time. :D)

Today's project: working on the website. Most of what I did was behind-the-scenes cleanup, mostly invisible to everyone but me, but I also got the Kismet fiction on the site (with pretty header from a panel in Sun-Cutter) -- all but the "apocrypha", i.e. the stories that either were never supposed to be canon in the first place, or got self-Jossed when I changed something important later (including all of the Dusty and Elaine stories). These have been down for a while and I really do want to get them back on the website, but not tonight, I think. The sticky post at the top of my journal page now links to the website rather than the old Icefall Press LJ (which will stay up, but as an archive only; I'm not adding anything new to it.)

I also gave the Kismet comics and graphic novels their own directory page, something I've meant to do for a while. The gallery still sucks and I don't know what to do with it. *sigh* I've tried so many different designs over the years, but never have managed to come up with something that's halfway decent-looking, smoothly navigable, and easy to add new art. Edit: oh, and I streamlined the character page (which was getting really unwieldy with all of them on one page) and added a few who'd been left off, plus a few new ones from the recent KCL comics and Sun-Cutter. Also addressed a few CSS issues (and I keep finding new ones, sigh).

Looking over the old Kismet stories has really impressed on me how much my writing has improved over the last few years. I have actually written a lot (hundreds of thousands of words), even if all of it is either unfinished, unpublished, or fan fiction. And it made a big difference. I wasn't really aware of the progression in my skills, but there's a really noticeable difference when I look back on what I used to write vs. what I can write now.

I noticed driving to work today that the trees on south-facing hillsides are breaking out in their first, faint flush of green. I want to say to them, "No, little trees! It's Fairbanks! It's only May 4th! It'll be snowing by the end of the week! Your poor wee buds will freeze!" But they won't listen. Trees. Can't tell 'em anything.

The weather has been truly awesome -- 75 degrees, gorgeous and sunny. Today is back down to 55 and feels like Fairbanks again; ah well. It was a lovely weekend. We walked the dogs up the abandoned mine road for the first time in month (the snow was too deep, and it's not maintained; it's just been the last few days that there's been enough snow gone that you can go anywhere).

With breakup happening so fast this year, the whole town is flooding ... well, bits and pieces of it, anyway. Driveways are eroding alongside the highway out in Fox -- the usual thing at this time of year, really; even on a good year, Goldstream Creek tends to overflow frozen culverts and run over the gravel driveways alongside the highway, but this year it's pretty bad. South of Ester, where the highway is (fortunately) banked quite high above the surrounding swamp, there is apparently a lake 30 feet deep where no lake is supposed to be, covering telephone poles and trees. (I'm halfway tempted to drive down that way just to see it...) So far we've been really lucky; things are actually better than usual for us, because the creek has melted out so quickly that it's not backing up and threatening the driveway as it usually does.

Today we ushered in spring with the semi-annual mucking-out of the chicken coop. Naturally certain members of the household wished to lend a hand.

Dog: oooOOOOOooo! Can I help?

Me: Nope, got it covered, thanks.

Dog: But I can really be useful! See! And, wow, this stuff smells *awesome*.

Me: OH GOD! I HAVE TO LIVE WITH YOU!

Dog: ... dude, have you tried this?

Me: *gags*

I've been paring down my friendslist today. If I took you off, it has nothing to do with you as a person and a lot more to do with the fact that we hardly ever interact on either of our blogs -- I took off a number of people that I kinda vaguely know through Girlamatic or conventions or whatnot. Most of what's left are a) authors whose blogs I find interesting, or b) personal friends, or least people who comment to this journal occasionally, or people in whose journals I comment.

I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for unfriending me at this point, considering that this blog has been extremely dull and not often updated the last year or two. I, uh, have no idea if that'll change in the future, though I plan to do all my project updates over here, and I plan to actually have project updates to post, hopefully. Anyway, every day is defriending amnesty around here; I don't pay that much attention to who has me friended, and I friend/defriend on a regular basis as my reading tastes change.

I was lucky enough to get an invite code to the closed beta of Dreamwidth, so I've been noodling about over there. See this post for why I'm considering moving, or at least cross-posting between there and LJ.

Because it's still in beta, Dreamwidth's style selector is not up and running yet (or rather, it is, but there are only two styles to choose from, neither of which is very pleasing to my eyes) but here is a very handy guide to modifying an LJ style to work on a Dreamwidth journal and I made mine pretty!

The import function seems to work like a charm -- entries, tags and comments all ported over. When I got my Dreamwidth journal, the cross-posting function wasn't working yet, but it's appeared in the last few days, so I'm basically posting this to test it and see what happens. (Edit: It worked! And so does editing!)

One more link (basically here for my own reference): useful post on how to follow a person who has moved their journaling to Dreamwidth without actually getting an account there.