The Steampunk lifestyle means a dedication to being fancy!
Airship Archon Officers Gloria and Jennilee show us how it’s done at Ohayocon
The ever-dapper Master of Arts, Aaron, showing me how to straight-lace my boots
Two of our newest members keepin’ it fancy at the Laughing Ogre Comic Shop
The Captain proves it’s possible to be both fancy and silly at the Steampunk Empire Symposium
For more pictures of fancy people, check out the Airship Archon Flickr Group or our Facebook Group. If you’d like to hang out with these fancy people, you’re in luck! This weekend we’re hosting our largest event yet (and possibly ever), the Privateer’s Promenade, featuring Ford Theater Reunion, Ooh La La Burlesque, a fire dancer, and more! This might be the only big event we ever have, so don’t miss it!
Last night I saw Jurassic Park in 3D for the second and final time, and it was just as thrilling and amazing as it was when I first saw it twenty years ago, and just as awesome in 3D as it was when I first saw it that way three weeks ago. Interestingly, rewatching this wonderful film as an adult, and as a writer, made it a slightly different experience at age 32 than it was at age 12. My thoughts:
I still think it’s nearly the perfect film. The effects are amazing because they don’t over-rely on CGI like many recent movies do. The acting is stellar, every part pitch-perfect, right down to realistic reactions to the dinosaurs, especially Laura Dern’s scream as the T-rex bears down on the jeep, which still causes every hair on my body to stand on end. The music continues to be one of the most inspired scores John Williams has ever written, making my heart swell every time the helicopter flies over the island or when the characters get their first view of the dinosaurs (just listening to this clip while I pasted it into this post made me all teary-eyed).
And of course, there’s my crush on Dr. Ian Malcolm, which I was unsurprised to find is still in full force. You can’t argue with Jeff Goldblum though, he’s a heartthrob for all ages.
Dr. Conveniently Shirtless will see you now
These are features I admired as a kid and continue to admire as an adult. Of course now, I also notice other aspects of the film, like the three-act structure, and the brilliant way Crichton establishes characters with just a few easy lines of dialogue.
I definitely noticed some troubling things in my adult viewings, however. The movie is rife with silly plot-convenient behavior, like Dr. Grant and the children climbing over the perimeter fence even though the spaces are clearly big enough for the children to fit through (and why would you have spaces that big to begin with, in a park where children might climb through the fence and be eaten by a T-rex?). More irritatingly, there are a few lazy tropes, like Denis Nedry as the Evil Greedy Fat Guy and Dr. Sattler’s sudden blonde ditz moment when discussing Chaos Theory with Dr. Malcolm. This woman is a professional paleobotanist and therefore a certifiable genius, there’s no way this discussion is over her head unless she’s deliberately playing dumb to flirt with him. She’s either the Stupid Blonde or pretending to be a stupid blonde, and both are equally unacceptable. Basically Dr. Sattler is conveniently ditzy for a moment so Malcolm will have an excuse to be a sleaze (characterization) and expound on Chaos Theory (exposition). It’s very forced and frankly, lazy writing.
I’m not a ditz, I just pretend to be one in movies when the plot requires someone to ask a stupid question.
Something else I noticed, and the thing that gives this post its title: Jurassic Park is not an action movie. It’s straight-up horror, and, more to the point, Lovecraftian horror. The film takes its time to give us background, characterization, and setting, all building to horrifying revelations, which was precisely the way Lovecraft laid out his most successful horror stories. More pointedly, the story is about the intersection of human science, mathematics, and forces beyond our control. My favorite Lovecraft stories are about men discovering forbidden continents or forbidden mathematics. The characters, like John Hammond, think they can control their discoveries and inventions but in the end, chaos proves too powerful and no one escapes alive or sane. Lovecraft’s horror stories could be taken as cautionary tales, warning the burgeoning post-Victorian scientific community to slow down and ask not whether they can push humanity beyond its current limits, but rather whether it should.
It’s hard to be so sexy and so smart.
And naturally, just as in a Lovecraftian tale, everyone in Jurassic Park either ends up dead or horribly traumatized (if there wasn’t enough gore and death in the movie for you, check out the book, where even fewer people survive) because they played with forces beyond their control. And I think therein lies my obsession with this movie: the same thing that drives my obsession with Lovecraft. The horror of the unknown, the horror of loss of control, the horror of digging our own graves because we, as a species, are unable to leave Good Enough alone. Curiosity killed the cat…and drove his owner insane.
As a final comment, I want to say that Jurassic Park is one of the few films that I think actually benefited from the 3D treatment. If you missed being chased by a T-rex in all its 3D wonder, don’t worry, people in the know say that in the next five years we’ll all have 3D televisions anyway. So you won’t have to wait another 20 years to have a velociraptor jump right at your face. That…sounds less appealing than it ought to.
In every artistic endeavor, there are lulls, and these lulls are especially severe in the world of writing genre fiction. There is so much that can influence whether a writer is seeing her work in print, from market trends to cranky editors to publishers tanking to a simple lack of inspiration. 2012 was one such lull for me, and for a hot minute I sincerely believed that I might never emerge from the Valley of Rejection. Fortunately, 2013 seems to be a better year for projects! Hooray! I give myself some of the credit for that, as I’ve been much more aggressively looking for–and creating–opportunities and that has really paid off. I also give credit to the awesome editors and publishers who have taken a chance on me, a relatively unproven writer and editor, and hope that I lived up to their expectations.
The details:
My story “Invincible” will be appearing in the 2013 Origins Game Fair Souvenir Anthology, titled Heroes!, edited by Kelly Swails. I’m really, really proud of “Invincible,” I think it’s one of my best stories to date. Someday the novel that features two of the characters will be finished (and hopefully published) so you can read more of their story. There’s a good chance this anthology will only be available at Origins, and never again, so be sure to pick up a copy in early June.
My story “Wings of Feather, Wings of Brass” will be published in the anthology The Beast Within 4: Gears and Growls, edited by Jennifer Brozek. As you may have guessed from the title, this is a collection of stories about steampunk shapeshifters. My story is about an automaton, which makes this my fourth published story told from the POV of an automaton, which may mean I’ve found my demographic. This anthology should drop in the Fall.
Nayad Monroe just informed me last week that she wants to include my story “Charms” in her anthology What Fates Impose. I don’t want to give away too many details about the story, because the mystery is part of the fun, but it’s about a rune reader, a very special rune reader with a secret, and you’ll just have to read the story when it comes out to find out what her secret is. There will be a Kickstarter for this anthology in the next few weeks.
My essay “D&D For Girls” will be appearing in the nonfiction book Chicks Dig Gaming, edited by Jennifer Brozek and Jean Rabe. If you’ve ever wondered how to run a tabletop roleplaying game for your kids, this essay aims to help you do it. This anthology is due out shortly, I believe.
As the promotion for Sidekicks!winds down, I’ve started work on my next big project: an anthology of multicultural steampunk stories titled Steampunk World. The original plan for this anthology was to have open submissions, but my schedule isn’t going to allow for it, so I’ve spent the last few weeks inviting authors I think are up to the task. We will be funding the book through a Kickstarter campaign in August. I’m super-thrilled to have authors like Nisi Shawl, Maurice Broaddus, Alex Bledsoe, and Leanna Renee Hieber writing for it (and possibly Jay Lake, health willing). Diana Pho is writing the introduction and James Ng is doing the cover art. Keep an eye on this space for further announcements about this project, I’m SO EXCITED about it I can barely keep myself from writing this entire post in all caps. THAT’S PRETTY EXCITED.
Thank you, dear reader, for all your support and help up to this point. This ride has been wild and amazing and I can’t wait to see the places we’ll go next!
These deadlines are, as always, Submitter Beware, because I can’t vouch for any of these publishers. This is basically just a place for me to deposit short story deadlines to which I would like to submit work, so all the markets are paying (usually at least $.01 a word, or royalties) and accept electronic submissions. They’re all genre markets of some kind (horror, science fiction, steampunk, fantasy).
Please be sure to check Ralan and Dark Markets for more publications looking for submissions. This list is by no means exhaustive. Oh, and don’t forget to check posts from previous months (they’re all categorized under “Upcoming Deadlines”) for publications that are still open.
If you’re an editor or publisher and you’d like me to feature your deadline here, you can email me at sarah.hans at gmail dot com with the details.
If you’ve picked up a copy of the book, I hope you’ll write us a review! If you’d like to hear some of our authors read live, you can join us in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow night or in Columbus, Ohio on June 8th (time TBD).
As a rule, I don’t generally review anthologies that contain my work. I’m making an exception for Triumph Over Tragedy because 1, I’m not receiving an financial remuneration and 2, profits from the anthology go directly to the Red Cross to benefit the victims of Hurricane Sandy, so I want to encourage people to buy the book!
Triumph, edited by RT Kaelin, features 41 stories by a variety of speculative fiction authors. Some of them are big names–Marion Zimmer Bradley, Elizabeth Bear, Robert Silverberg–but most are new or midlist authors. The stories vary widely in themes, writing styles, and genres. As with any collection, there were a few stories I loved, a few I didn’t, and a lot that fell somewhere in between, though the effect was exaggerated by the staggering number of stories included in the anthology. I’m going to focus here on the stories I loved.
I have to start with Marion Zimmer Bradley‘s “Death Between the Stars.” Zimmer Bradley is widely considered to be one of the great classical speculative fiction masters, and this story proves why. It’s one of those stories that manages to be both small in scope–detailing the brief encounter of a human attempting to share a berth on a starship with an alien despite cultural restrictions against human-alien contact–and which manages to also explore universal issues, especially bigotry. The ending manages to be both satisfying and chilling, with the feel of a parable without being preachy.
“The Pope of the Chimps,” by Robert Silverberg, is another masterful story with a tight scope but universal implications. When a chimp researcher dies, the chimps develop mythology about him. Soon they’ve invented an entire religious hierarchy and the surviving researchers are left wondering whether they should halt the development of religion among their animal charges–and how to do it. The story is a brilliant meditation on spirituality, religion, and humanity.
I also really enjoyed Steven Saus‘s story, “The Burning Servant.” (FYI: Steve is a close personal friend and has published quite a bit of my work as Alliteration Ink. I just happen to also really enjoy his writing.) This tale of civil war demon-summoning and human sacrifice starts off dropping tantalizing hints but quickly builds to a horrific conclusion. If you don’t like horror, you should probably skip this story, but if you like a good scare, you’ll probably find it very enjoyable.
My favorite story in the anthology, however, was probably “Sargent Argent’s Moment in the Sun,” by Rob Rogers. Part of my love for it stems from the fact that it was one of few humorous stories in a collection that was, overall, very dark and serious (and I include my own story in that). “Sargent Argent” is the story of two friends, one of whom dies…and comes back. What would you do if your best friend returned from the grave, with newly minted vampire super-powers? Rogers weaves a tale that is charming and heartwarming, with a good dose of laughter and a killer ending. I’ll definitely be inviting him to submit to any future anthologies of mine that would benefit from a dose of humor.
The book concludes with another excellent story, Timothy Zahn‘s “The Ring.” Nick Powell stumbles upon a ring in a pawn shop, and is suddenly inundated with riches. He quickly comes to realize, however, that those around him are paying a terrible price for his success. Nick can’t figure out how to remove the ring, or undo the curse, but with a horrible fate in store for his fiancee, he had better figure it out, and fast!
There are a number of other excellent stories in Triumph, but these were my favorites. The ebook is only $6.99, so the anthology is well-worth the price even if you only like a handful of the stories. And don’t forget, 100% of the profits go to benefit the Red Cross. Though Hurricane Sandy is no longer in the public eye, cleanup continues, and for those who lost homes and loved ones, life will never be the same again. Buying a copy of Triumph is a great way to help them while also helping yourself to some great stories.
Sadly I won’t get to ramble on about being a writer much at SES this year, or lolita fashion, or how the Victorians got high, as the Great and Wise Panel Faeries didn’t choose any of my favorite panels. Instead I’ll be enlightening the masses regarding Steampunk fashion, literature, culture, etc. as the Second Lieutenant of the Airship Archon. We takes what we can gets. Looks like I’ll be in Salon A for much of the weekend, so I hope I’ll see you there!
I’ll be on the following panels:
Steampunk 320: Steampunk For Fun and Profit - Friday 5pm (Salon A)
Steampunk 101: Steampunk For Beginners - Saturday 2pm (Salon A)
Steampunk 220: Intermediate Steampunk – Sunday 10am (Salon A)
Other Airship Archon panels:
Make and Take – Friday 5pm (Salon C and D)
Charm, Swagger and Bravado: a Guide to Convention Confidence – Friday 7pm (Salon B)
From Disaster to Dashing: Dressing for Men - Saturday 12pm (Salon A)
Prominent Posteriors: The Art of the Bustle – Saturday 1pm (Salon A)My prominent posterior might make a showing at this one, wink wink!
Victorian Inebriation – Saturday 7pm (Salon A)
Prop and Costume Alchemy – Saturday 7pm (Salon C and D)
I’m really looking forward to seeing Les Odalisques and my friends both new and old!
These deadlines are, as always, Submitter Beware, because I can’t vouch for any of these publishers. This is basically just a place for me to deposit short story deadlines to which I would like to submit work, so all the markets are paying (usually at least $.01 a word, or royalties) and accept electronic submissions. They’re all genre markets of some kind (horror, science fiction, steampunk, fantasy).
Please be sure to check Ralan and Dark Markets for more publications looking for submissions. This list is by no means exhaustive. Oh, and don’t forget to check posts from previous months (they’re all categorized under “Upcoming Deadlines”) for publications that are still open.
If you’re an editor or publisher and you’d like me to feature your deadline here, you can email me at sarah.hans at gmail dot com with the details.
In case you’ve missed it, Sidekicks! is here. Now comes the hard part: asking for your help. Because you, dear reader, are the key to the book’s success. You are the difference between 20 talented authors, one hardworking editor, and the most honest publisher in the business getting royalty checks, publicity, and further success…or not getting those things, and seeing all our hard work go for naught.
Here’s what you can do to help. Even if you only do one of these things, it could make a huge difference to the success of the anthology. Many are so simple they will take you only moments.
Buy a copy of the anthology. Buying it from Alliteration Ink directly pays everyone involved the most royalties, but it’s also available from Amazon and other retailers.
Write an honest review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, or your blog.
Recommend Sidekicks! to your friends if you think they’ll like it. Loan (or give) them your copy and encourage them to write a review online.
Request that your library carry the book. They might actually order a few copies if they receive enough requests.
If you really enjoy the book, please nominate it next year for the 2013 ballots of any and allfictionawards you can find. Even if we don’t win, a nomination would be a HUGE amount of free publicity!
If you do two (or more) items from this list, and you’d like a personalized, handwritten thank-you note from me, the editor, just send your contact info (and the details of what you did to promote/support the book) to me at sarah.hans at gmail dot com.* Because it means that much to me. Because you are that important.
Thank you for all you do!
*I have no idea how many people will take me up on this offer, so there may be a date at which I have to say “STOP, NO MORE” because writing thank-you notes is taking up all my time and stamps. Get your request in early to avoid missing the cutoff, which will be arbitrary and most likely sudden.
Last night I went to a book-signing for Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) in Dayton with my friends Corielle and Christina. I wanted to bring Jenny some taxidermy but didn’t because Reasons. Instead I brought her a copy of Sidekicks! (in which I wrote a ridiculously gushy little note about how inspirational and encouraging she has been for ladies like me–the sort with anxiety problems, the sort who want to be writers, the sort who are beyond goofy in a world that expects adults to be, like, serious or something.)
You know how, when you meet people you admire, sometimes it turns out really well and other times not so much? Well I guess I’ve been lucky, because the vast majority of the people I fan over have been completely lovely. Jenny Lawson was perhaps the loveliest of all.
Me: I brought you a present. It’s a book I edited.
JL: Oh my god, really? Thank you! Oh my god! Did you sign it?
Me: (turning pink) Yes, uh, on the dedication page, I wrote you a little note.
JL: I’m so glad you gave me this, now I’ll have something to read!
Me: It uh, just came out this weekend, so, there are no reviews of it yet, so I can’t be like “Neil Gaiman loves this book!” but, maybe someday?
JL: (opens the book to a page and reads for a few seconds) Okay well, now you can say that Jenny Lawson read part of a page and really liked it. So there’s that!
Me: You’re awesome. Can we take a picture?
JL: Of course! Hey why don’t we get a picture holding each others’ books?
Me: (trying not to freak out) OKAY
True Story. Thanks to Christina King for the photographic evidence.
