On Publishing

Blog entry on publishingby Edmonton author Krista D. Ball reads as if it were written by me, so might as well include it here.

Tigana Spring Recital

Tigana sings "Who Has Seen the Wind" (by Christina Rossetti and Douglas E. Wagner) and



"Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again"(by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart) at Spring Recital June 22, 2011.

Beware the Wrath of Kasia

Yesterday being the first day after the end of school, I took Kasia to the park. She chose to go to her school playground, having outgrown the baby swings at our local park and presumably missing the school playground already. Unfortunately, when we arrived, this is what we found:

Kasia was not amused. She couldn't believe the vandalism she was seeing, even though she known for sometime that the old playground had been slated for demolition and replacement with a more modern one. To her, the existing wooden playground was a magical place, not only for her and her grade 1 peers, but for her older sister, Tigana, who had spent 5 years at this school ahead of her.

So Kasia started complaining bitterly, while I tried to calm and reassure her that there would soon be a brand new playground in its place. But Kasia was having none of that and started screaming, "I hate them, I hate them!"

I tried to suggest that what she meant was she hated the necessity of tearing down her old and familiar playground, but that 'hate' was a very strong word that should only be directed against people one something bad to happen to.
Kasia's face turned red, and she exploded at me: "No, Dad! I literally hate them!" and I could feel Kasia's anger projecting out and forming this metaphoric black cloud above our heads.

It was kind of freaky seeing the intensity of Kasia's emotion, the blast of pure malevolence aimed at the hapless demolition workers. And a Harlan Ellison short story -- wherein the protagonist gets so obsessively pissed that the negative karma focused on the target effectively curses the object of his hatred -- flashed across my mind.

And as I am thinking Kasia's hate looks very much like that kind of elemental force, I hear a crash from behind me, and turn to see that the rear window of the Caterpillar tractor working on the demolition has been smashed in. The driver stops, gets out to survey the damage, and then grabs a two by four from the park wreckage to smash out the remaining shards -- dangerous, scary pieces of glass waiting to stab the operator in the back, where he not to finish the job of destroying the window.

You can just make out the top half of 'Caterpillar" brand name on the rear of the tractor, the bottom half having been written on the now missing glass.

When I turned around again, Kasia had calmed down considerably; she was now merely muttering about the waste of lumber and her annoyance that they weren't even recycling the wood to make another park somewhere else...her usual green rant. But um....bolt of psychic energy, definitely dissipated.



The next day, they had posted the plans for the new playground (above), but I have to agree with Kasia that I don't immediately see how the new one is an improvement. The old one was wood, which is kind of nifto in and of itself, and had lots of places to hide and to contest the high ground, and so on, whereas the new one seems to be entirely see-through. But perhaps that's the point from a playground supervision/safety pov. Anyway, we'll see what Kasia thinks when the new one is completed in late August (just in time for start of the new school year).

But forget about the playground. When I got home, I took Tigana aside and said, "Word to the wise: don't ever really, I mean really, piss off your little sister, okay?"

Father's Day 2011

Kasia's portrait of me for Father's day. Not sure if the lack of beard reflects her forgetting I had one or just that beards are hard to draw. Line across my forehead represents glasses, and two extra eyes are ears. Careful examination reveals my bald spot.

Portrait of Her Mom

Kasia's (age 7) portrait of her mom for Mother's Day.

Eight....

is the number of times I'm mentioned in Wikipedia. But no page devoted to me yet. Rosanne Runte, Alfred Runte and Fritz von Runte have their own pages; Dan Runte doesn't get his own page, but his truck (Big Foot) does; and Kurt Max Runte (the actor) gets eight mentions, just like me.

April in Lethbridge

The morning of April 14th, in Lethbridge.

See applicable Zach Hill commentary here

Mary appointed Director Social Responsibility

Monday saw the official announcement of Mary's appointment as Director of Social Responsibility and Not-for-Profit programs, for the Management Faculty at the UofL. She's been doing a lot of the ground work off the corner of her desk for the last couple of years to develop these two areas within the Faculty, so it is nice to see her not only being acknowledged for these efforts, but that the Faculty agrees that these are important foci for any Management Faculty these days, and is developing the structures necessary to support them.

It has been fascinating to watch how the management field has changed over the last decade. When Mary and I started attending the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada Conference ten years ago, there was no division within the ASAC for Social Responsibility; Mary had to found it. It became the fastest growing division, and is now (I believe) the largest division with the ASAC. (Mary was honoured with an ASAC Service Award for her efforts in founding and Chairing the division.) Similarly, ten years ago I could count on my fingers the number of Universities that had courses, let alone majors or minors, in CSR. Now, I'd estimate that the majority do -- including UofL.

Similarly, I remember the reaction way back when Mary started her MBA and went to York because she wanted to specialize in Ethics, and it was one of the few management programs with any ethics component -- her peers would ask her, "why would you want to study ethics? What has that got to do with business?" It was astounding to me how often she was asked that throughout her MBA and PhD programs -- and so a lot less astounding for me when various business scandals broke, e.g., Enron, or the more recent collapse of the American financial system and subsequent world recession. Well, gee, maybe corporate social responsibility deserves a little more prominence in faculties of management!

But we are seeing that change... CSR has become a more significant part of management training.

Now, if they would just get the message that the NonProfit sector is huge, growing, and in need of better, more broadly trained managers...I think we're beginning to see the realization that management training is about developing leadership rather than strictly staffing the for-profit sector. It will be interesting to see where that goes in the next ten years.

Of course, the one drawback with Mary's promotion is that she now outranks me! Fortunately, I'm in another faculty so I can pretend that I too am a leading faculty member in my own sphere-- though recently I've begun to suspect that when my colleagues refer to me as 'a senior faculty member' they are referring to my age rather than my influence....

New Ambassador Appointed to Babylon 5

Centauri ambassadors recalled, new younger ambassador appointed:




Okay, that probably doesn't really work since hair is pointing in the wrong direction, but Kasia was having a really bad hair day, so when I said the words, "Centauri ambassador" to Mary, she bent over laughing -- which left poor innocent Kasia hopelessly confused....

Short Story Published

Was pleased to learn that my short story, "Split Decision" has been accepted for publication in Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales, edited by Julie Czerneda and Susan MacGregor, (from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, ISBN 978-1-894063-58-6; $15.95 -- available for pre-order from Amazon.ca for $11.48.) Official release is set for September.

I am trying to find time for more fiction writing, but most of that energy has gone into my novel, and it is pretty slow going, so when the call for submissions for Tesseracts 15 opened, I decided to write something for it. The last short story I wrote was "The Luck of Charles Harcourt", which was printed in the first issue of On Spec magazine, summer of 1989, so it had been a while!

The theme for this issue was Young Adult SF. I had an idea for a short story kicking around for some time that might suit, but before I could put pen to paper, my daughter rushed in and started telling me about some incident at school. Making sense of an excited 13 year-old's stream-of-consciousness narrative is often quite challenging, because without knowing the context of her many self-referential allusions, it is often difficult to follow how the various bits of the story connect to each other. Like a detective, one has to use interview probes to slow and direct the initial rush of verbiage, and then deconstruct what is being said to tease out the unstated assumptions and the missing pieces that provide the logical connections between the various bits bulletting past. Standing there listening to this fascinating web of seemingly irrelevant detail, I asked myself, what would it sound like if my daughter were trying to tell me something completely outside my experience, where I had no chance to figure out the missing context? So I took Tigana and her friends and dumped them into an SF scenario, and the first draft was finished in about six hours. After some helpful input from my wife ("kids don't call it that any more -- my god, you're old") and Lorina Stevens (Shadow Song and From Mountains of Ice), I was done. Couple months later, I'm in. That's a little faster turn around than one gets with a novel!

Living SF

Two current examples of living in an SF age:

Invisibility cloaks and living in a glass world.

Gender Gap in Book Reviewing

Interesting post today at Society Pages (a sociological site) on gender gap in book reviewing -- major review outlets feature more book reviews by males, and more reviews of books written by males.

Of course, the larger question must be how big a role these print format reviews still play as arbiter's of taste, in a world shifting to eformat books and online reviews. Anyone up for doing a gender analysis of Amazon's or Indigo's or Goodread's reviews?

A cautionary tale for all...

As I was working on my computer this evening -- editing a book on organic gardening for Five Rivers Press, as it happens -- I became aware of a burning pain in my right thigh. I wondered vaguely what kind of muscular problem would cause a burning sensation in that particular spot, and why it was so much worse this evening, when I couldn't actually remember it being among the catalog of minor aches and pains that seem to be slowly multiplying as I age. This train of thought was still in the process of forming, however, not really even out of the station, when a more urgent message arrived from my leg to my brain: Your pants are on fire!

I jumped up out of my seat, confused, and grabbed my leg through my pants, hand instantly confirming that this was no false report from a misfiring leg nerve -- my hand too detected intense heat.

I plunged my hand into my pocket, and yanked out as best I could -- my fingers complaining that they did not want to touch the stove-hot item, but my leg urging them on with equally great need to get away from the pain, and less flexibility to act -- first my car keys, then a handful of inexplicably sizzling coins, and at last a too- hot-to-touch metal cylinder. I had to work that last item out toward the pocket opening by pushing through the fabric of my pants, it being far too hot to handle. What eventually plopped onto the table was a c-battery.

Close examination of the offending battery revealed that it had started to melt around the top edges. It took about 10 minutes of cooling before I could pick it up to examine, during which time both kids came over to tentatively touch keys, coins and battery with squeals of delighted horror. My 12 yr old looks at me and says, "Dad, really? You put a battery in a pocket filled with metal coins and keys? What were you thinking? Even I know better than that!"

Thinking back, I vaguely remembered temporarily stuffing it my pocket as I was trying to fit one too many D cells into my battery rack in the garage. I had stuffed the new Ds in the nearly empty C row while I tested some of the old Ds with the built-in battery tester. The one C had no where to go but my pocket while I borrowed the C row. And then forgot about it. It must have been in my pocket for five or six hours without issue. Then, sitting to edit, it must have just have scrunched up against keys and coins in just the right combination to short circuit.

Okay, not a mistake I am likely to make again any time soon! But in the past I have routinely carried pairs of AAs in my pants pockets as standbys for my camera, and nothing like this ever happened. I often have half a dozen AAs and AAAs in my computer case for various peripherals, mixed in the usual tangle of cables, coins, and pens and spare keys. I'm surprised, in retrospect, that I haven't been caught out by a short circuit before. Know better now.

Runte Christmas 2010

Yes, I know the tie doesn't go, but it is a Xmas tie from my 7 year old, so what could I do?

We had a quiet xmas at home this year: no travel.

Tigana mostly got cool clothes and is old enough, and enough of a clothes horse, to think that was fabulous. I gave mary a necklace from the museum of modern art catalog and a dress and shawl from Fairmount boutique; and I got a meteorite from Kasia (WAY cool), various fossils, a joystick driven etchasketch, a book on useless Japanese inventions (which Tigana also fell in love with), and a good winter coat.



Mostly Mary and I wrap up whatever we buy ourselves in Nov/Dec (e.g., dvds) and put those under the tree so it looks like a lot of stuff, but we do try to keep the materialistic orgy down to our usual quarterly purchases. The big present, though, was a Disney cruise for Reading Week in February. We usually need a break in Feb, both from campus and from winter in Lethbridge, and Mary got an unbelievable deal on the cruise -- much less than we'd pay for any other holiday -- about what it costs my brother-in-law for his annual stay in Jasper. Jasper's nice and all, but, you know -- Disney cruise!


Ghost Dancer's Shadow

The other memorable gift this year was that Tigana "adopted" a pony in a wild horse preserve and gave that to her sister, pony-mad Kasia. So Kasia got a photo and adoption package for 'her' pony, Ghost Dancer's Shadow, for Christmas. (Kasia is, of course, only one of many sponsors for the horses, but in her mind, she now has her own pony!)

Writer's Retreat Part II

Having done the Queen Mary, I moved across the street to the Carnival Cruise Line's port and boarded the Paradise for a four day cruise. The decor of the Paradise is pretty gaudy (especially in contrast to the magnificent taste of the Queen Mary), the entertainment painfully-excessive patriotic American musical tributes, and the passengers mostly out for a four-day drunken 'lost weekend', so not at all my crowd.

But the food was good and I was only interested in the cheap cabin and the chance to write. Indeed, I didn't even bother to disembark at either of the ports visited.
I mostly stuck to my cabin, emerging only for meals or to give the steward the opportunity to clean. I had brought my Neo2 with me, a wonderful portable writing tool, so would go to the library or an unoccupied corner to continue writing pretty much nonstop.

(The library on the Paradise is as tacky as the rest of the ship, with only a fraction of the bookcases of, say, NCL's Pride of America, and even half of that was given over to the storage of games or hymnals. The four tiny bookcases left for actual books contained nothing but trash -- the best I could find were two books by J.D. Robb and a Stuart Woods -- not exactly heavy-hitting literature. Clearly, "beach read" would be too challenging for the typical Paradise patron, interested only in gambling and duty free liquor.)

Unfortunately, I was mostly blocked. Under considerable pressure to put my retreat to good use, I ground away on the next chapter but without making much progress. The truth is, I had already written everything covered in my outline except for the final two scenes, but still have about 25,000 words of action between here and the end to fill in. Normally that wouldn't be a problem: I just start writing and see what happens. But I had stopped on a slightly complicated bit of business where the characters have to talk through who is going to trust whom, and I just kept getting bogged down in the problem that the basic premise of my hero winning over the others is completely ludicrous. Well, okay, that's largely the point of the novel, but there is only so much clever dialog a reader can wade through before somebody has to shoot somebody for the action to keep moving, and it just wasn't coming together for me. I'd try to speed things up and have one or other character cut through the chaff and say something to move things forward, but they kept balking and telling me they wouldn't say that until this or that condition had been met, which I couldn't get to without another 20 pages of dialog that was frankly beginning to bore even me.

Long experience has taught me that writer's block is largely a question of momentum, so rather than stare blankly at the keyboard, the trick is to get the juices flowing by writing something. (See anything by Natlie Goldberg for details on the technique.) So I switched to a short story I had wanted to submit to Tess14, though the deadline for that had already expired, but that wouldn't come either. So, I went further down the writing ladder to 'editor mode' and began work on a nonfiction manuscript that had been sitting on my desk, nagging me, for a month. That seemed to work, and I was able to bang through that in about a day (freeing up a day or two of writing time from my post-retreat schedule). Feeling better having accomplished something I turned again to the short story, and that started coming. As I got a bit of the story working, I switched back to the novel and made a bit of progress, though nothing like I had hoped. (But then, I always set unrealistic expectations for myself....) By the end of the cruise I still hadn't dug myself out of the corner I had written myself into, but I was starting to see a couple of possibilities -- when in doubt, you can always blow something up, and I had a couple of characters waiting in the wings I could drop in on the conversation prematurely....I just had to decide which one because each would take the story in very different directions.

Getting off the Paradise, I went to the Sheraton across the street from LAX for the day, wasted time bogging and emailing (Internet time on a cruise ship is too expensive for much of either of those) but did make some progress on the short story. Next day took off for Missoula, where I spent the night awaiting the bus to White Fish. Once again, the Neo2 came in very handy as I kept writing non-stop.


The view at the Lodge at Whitefish Lake

Mary booked me into the Lodge at Whitefish Lake, which was very nice indeed. The room they gave me was fabulous, with a spectacular view of the forest, and the dinning room was superb. We will definitely be returning there. Sitting with the Neo2 on my lap, looking out at that view was perhaps the most productive portion of the retreat, though it is fairly typical that I hit my most productive at the exact moment the retreat is over. Though in this case, I actually had the train from Whitefish to Shelby to go and was able to edit the first draft of the short story. The train back was even better than the first trip because of course during the day I had the benefit of the spectacular mountain views I hadn't been able to see going the other way. And the dinning car had real china this time.

So, all in all a successful trip, even though I did not complete my novel. The key, I hope, is that I was able to reconnect with the novel (I always re-read and re-edit what I have so far, before starting the next bit) which keeps the project alive. I have several colleagues who have half-finished manuscripts in their drawers, some as long as 100,000 words, that they just lost momentum on and stopped. I used to think that was crazy, but I'm starting to understand that a bit better now that mine has dragged on over three years with no end in sight, and with dozens of other writing projects jockeying for my attention. But devoting the week to the novel was enough to refocus me on the project, to get the enthusiasm back up, and to get me thinking about the characters whenever I have a moment. I've more or less figured out what happens next and can work on the details in my head until the next opportunity to get it down on paper.

And although I can already see that I will have to rewrite the short story before it can be sent off, I know what I have to do to make it work, so it is just a matter of squeezing a day out of my schedule somewhere to finish that up. I am quite pleased with it because it is entirely different from what I normally write -- it's good to push to the edges of

So, mission accomplished.