A First-Time Visitor to the Nebulas

A quick note here, as I just got back from attending the Nebulas in Pittsburgh. Put on by SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), it’s a little like the Oscars for genre fiction. I had a marvelous time, and came home with far too many books.

The conference was a great time to network and meet other writers, as well as my first opportunity to meet the folks who work for my publisher (Colin, Jae and Kaelin of Parvus Press). I also met one of Parvus’ other authors (Rekka Jay, whose steampunk/space opera Flotsam was released two months ago). This was the first time I’ve ever attended a conference of this sort, and SFWA goes out of their way to make the conference friendly, and a welcoming space for newcomers, in all stages of their career. One of the facets I particularly enjoyed was the conference’s mentor program - pairing new conference attendees with others who have volunteered to give pointers about making the best of the conference. I was paired with the lovely Shanna Swendson, and we spent a nice half an hour on the first day of the conference chatting. Between her, and the folks from Parvus (most of which I only knew via email), it was good to have some folks I already knew.

After the awards, I watched some of the Alternate Universe speeches, which is an amazing thing I hope more awards programs will take up. Basically, it gives all of the nominees a chance to get up and deliver their speech. Some of them were amazing (like a ukulele ballad), and I really liked the fact that the Nebulas was making space to give voice to and celebrate all the nominees’ work, not just the winners. Just another instance of how welcoming and supportive I found the conference to be.


As the alternate universe speeches would down, I ended up standing next to an acquaintance of an acquaintance, listening to a Notable Statesperson of Fantasy talk to a small group of rapt writers.
“You’re here for him, aren’t you?” said one of the gathered folks - a woman I knew only vaguely as someone acquainted with my publisher - and quickly pulled me in to the circle. I listened for about half an hour as the Notable Statesperson talked about the publishing business, and handed out some advice for early-career writers, before he was called away to have his picture taken with a Muppet. (Several were in attendance, as puppeteer Martin P. Robinson was the Emcee.) The next day, Notable Statesperson  gave me a signed copy of one of their books at an autographing event, which cemented my need to have a checked bag sent back that was pretty much entirely full of books I’d been gifted or bought at the conference. Particular favorites - ARCs of Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, and V. E Schwab's City of Ghosts, a signed copy of Peter S. Beagle’s The Overneath, and Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells, which Rekka recommended and I’m excited to read. Oh, and Rebel Mechanics by Shanna Swindson, my lovely conference mentor.

I also liked that the conference actively solicited volunteers, even among the ranks of new attendees. I signed up to help with the last Office Hours session - mostly involving helping people who had signed up for a session locate their person, and a few instances of gently reminding people that someone else was waiting to start their slot. The office hours themselves are a great idea - a sort of curated form of networking and after-hours chatting, wherein willing attendees make themselves available in 15-minute blocks to talk with anyone who wants to sign up for a slot. The topics ranged from hypnosis to social media marketing, and many conference goers seemed to be taking advantage of the opportunity to chat.

Of course, one of the highlights for me was meeting Connie Willis, who has been a favorite author of mine since I stumbled on to her book To Say Nothing of the Dog as a teenager. (This also gave me the entirely erroneous starting assumption that the worst that was ever going to happen in a Connie Willis novel was someone attempting to murder a cat…) It was an incredible honor to meet her, both because I admire her work (I stayed up until 2 AM to finish Passage before leaving to go back to work on a boat… Anyone who has ever read Passage will realize this was a terrible life choice…) and also because her work, especially the Oxford time traveling novels, have left their fingerprints on more than one of my own works.

The Nooks and Crannies of the Inside Passage

Rumor has it the first seasonal worker of the summer has been spotted on the streets of Seward - a sure sign that summer is approaching. In a few weeks, I'll be headed down to Seattle to join up with the crew of the Discoverer, for another season exploring the nooks and crannies of Southeast Alaska. This year will be my fourth with the vessel, and my eleventh summer in the state overall.

In honor of another season as a guide in one of the planet's most captivating and untrammeled wild corners, I want to share a handful of memories from last summer - some of the memories that explain why I feel so lucky to be able to work in places like this. This is from two days at the end of July, part of a week when the Discoverer hosted a tour group from Japan.

Sunset, looking out over the bundled kayaks on the lowest deck

July 24, Glacier Bay National Park. At Gloomy Knob we spent about a half an hour watching the mountain goats - reasonably low, a few kids galloping along the cliff edge while their elders stand stoically overlooking our boat. Three hard-to-see eagles; which this trip are haku-toe-washi.  Todo is sea lion. Kuma is bear. Travis printed a bunch of Japanese/English field guides with two reams of paper he bartered from the Bartlett Cove front desk; slowly I'm figuring out what means what. Coming through Russel Cut, we find four bears!  Two on the beach, slinking behind rocks and in and out of the alders; a mother and cub, tucked even further into the foliage on the slope above. Mostly, the bears were present as bending branches in the alders, glimpses of bear-brown among the tree-brown and leaf-brown and dirt-brown. Kuma, kuma, lobbed back and forth - the one word becoming a plea for directions, or a photographer's frustration, or a binocular-wielding guest's delight.
The bears were frustratingly hard to see; the boat was restless; Alaska was hiding just out of their viewfinder. We moved on.

Bilingual Glacier Bay Wildlife

As we were pulling out of the cut, we spot another bear on the island, golden brown, pacing along the mussels just above the waterline. The call goes out - kuma, kuma, kireina kuma; the boat laboriously turns around in the narrow cleft. He is a beautiful bear, all whitish and brown, standing out so clearly from the dark mussels that in the late-evening dim he almost seems to glow. He stalks the tideline, flipping over rocks, the muscles in his humped shoulders rippling. The entire boat is on deck; the entire boat is silent. It's like the first bears were practice bears. The warm-up act, and now Glacier Bay is done with the previews. Turn off your cell phone; forget the popcorn. Here comes the real thing.  Don't look away.

Brown Bear, Glacier Bay National Park

One gentleman is walking around the deck with a huge camera around his neck, and both hands over his mouth, like he knew he was being too loud before. I think he's a bit of a riot. The park ranger is giving a talk now, with the aid of one of the Japanese translators; got a shower with hot water for the first time in four days.

The next morning fog settled into Cross Sound; you could barely see the shore from our usual anchorage. We debated delaying the skiffs; Lex and I ended up going out with our skiff group after only a slight delay. The fog looked like it was trying to lift, but as we went into the pass between the islands,  it settled in thicker than before. We kept close to the north side, going slow. A lakko - a sea otter -  popped up with a mussel in his paws; the sharp clack as he broke into it echoed off the side of the island. Near the far end of the channel, we ran into more sea otters, and sea lions - todo. The fog was starting to break up; but the cover of the mist seemed to tempt some of the big bulls to come even closer to the skiffs than usual, as though they were having as much trouble seeing us as we were seeing them. They come to the surface smoothly, bellowing an exhale, loud and sudden; the guests facing the wrong way would jump. Some of them definitely were checking the boat for fish guts; I had to warn the folks to be careful with their fingers. Maybe I need to add it bites to my list of need-to-know Japanese phrases.

Steller sea lion - probably disappointed we aren't a fishing boat.

The Ethnographic Underpinnings of Court of Twilight

If I hadn’t ended up reading two fantastic ethnography books back-to-back,  Court of Twilight might never have been written in the first place.

Back in 2012, I was living in New Zealand, and working as a receptionist for a hostel in a remote part of the South Island. The closest bookstore was over an hour away on the other side of the Southern Alps, and the closest library wasn’t much better. However, there was a small lending shelf at the hostel, which became my primary source of reading material for the four months I lived there. As a receptionist, there were often several hours a day when the rooms had been cleaned, the laundry folded, the plants watered, and the lobby swept, when there was legitimately nothing I needed to do other than sit at the front desk and wait for someone to walk in about a room. Which meant I spent a lot of time reading.

Two of the books that came my way that season were ethnography books, which I ended up reading within the same week. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca is a book depicting Roma culture in Europe. The author lived among Roma people, mainly in Eastern Europe, for several years in the 1990s, and the book recalls her experiences as a guest and participant in their culture. The title is a reference to a devastating Roma saying – bury me standing, for I have lived my life on my knees.

This is an excerpt: 

As we left Grabian, an old woman, so thin that her cheekbones seemed to be pointing out of her face, hung onto my sleeve. She wanted to show me something. She reached into her apron pocket and produced a fuzzy scrap of white paper, no bigger than a gum wrapper, folded down to the size of a thumbnail…She held it up close to my eyes, and I saw nothing – maybe a slight smudge of dirt.  I took it from her and checked the other side. Nothing. Apart from the grubby crease marks it was blank…

What had I failed to see? Written on that piece of paper, she claimed, was the telephone number of her son, a refugee in Italy. It probably had been once, written in pencil that had long since worn away. If she was illiterate, which seemed likely, and had never been able to read the characters, what she had seen there was already an abstraction. Anyway, I am sure that she did see and continued to see that telephone number. “Te xav to biav,” the old woman called after me as I climbed into the car: May I eat at your wedding.

The picture Fonseca paints is of a resilient society struggling against both the poverty and upheaval of Eastern Europe, as well as the discrimination they faced, and both the pride and difficulties the Rom face in being a people who consider their true home the road.

The second book is Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland, by Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green. It’s a unique book of Irish folklore, set as a series of first-person accounts of events attributed to fairies, along with brief passages by the authors attempting to fit these stories into a framework that might explain the fairies’ habits, beliefs, behaviors, and motivations. The book takes a very open-minded view of the fact of fairies’ existence, treating them as an invisible culture that lives along side, and occasionally intersects with, the culture of the human inhabitants of Ireland. Many of the stories have the flavor of ghost stories (and if some of the accounts had happened in West Virginia, where I was raised, they would likely have been attributed to ghosts.) Most of the book is written in dialect, and keeps closely to the oral traditions that produced many of the tales.

An example, from the story ‘The Fairy Frog’ in which a girl has been taken to a fairy dwelling to assist a fairy woman giving birth:

He took her out, anyway, up on the horse behind him again, and off they went as fast as the horse’d go, and never stopped till they came to this grove o’ trees.

He pulled up the horse and he says, “Did herself give you anything that time they called you back?”

“She did,” says the girl.

“What was it?”

She was half afraid o’ him, that maybe he was going to rob her.

“Tell me,” says he, “what was it.”

So she told him about the bag o’ gold and the necklace.

“You aren’t the first one to get the line,” says he. “And if you’ll take my advice, and if you want to see your father and mother safe and sound again, take that necklace now and tie it around the branch o’ that near tree there.”

Reading the books pretty much simultaneously, I saw some very clear parallels between the literal invisibility of Lenihan’s fairies and the figurative invisibility of the Rom people. Both were societies that kept themselves separate from their neighbors, and considered themselves different in certain key respects. Relationships between their culture and the wider community were fractious, and prone to misunderstanding. Interactions between one culture and the other were proscribed by a set of rules and expectations. For example, fairy folklore stresses the importance of not eating fairy food, with the results of doing so ranging from an unbearable longing for it, to being trapped permanently on the fairies’ side of their vaguely-defined border.

In Bury Me Standing, Fonseca describes the Rom she lived with in Albania having similarly serious concerns about food.

“The real reason Gimi stayed outside when we stopped in at the house of Albanians was the food. Inevitably, and whatever the hour, our hosts would prepare a meal. It was impossible to decline the hospitality, but whereas for me it was at worst a nuisance, for Gimi it presented a danger. Gypsies everywhere do their best to avoid eating food prepared by gadje [non-Rom], which almost by definition is bound to be mahrime [unclean].”

I want to be clear that I didn’t intent my own fictional Others, trows, to be in any way representative of the Rom - or any other human culture, for that matter. What I did want is to use issues brought up in both works of ethnography – issues of belonging, invisibility, and erasure, and interactions across disparate cultures that can still go wrong even with the best of intentions on both sides – to help inform the background and culture of my own invented Others.

If you’re looking for more recommended books with perhaps a more literal treatment of Ireland’s rich cultural history and beliefs, I would recommend any of Juliet Marillier’s works. Daughter of the Forest is an engaging retelling of the traditional story The Six Swans, but embeds its magical elements nicely within a real-world story about family and betreyal. Heart’s Blood is another compelling standalone novel, where the magical elements are portrayed more as a burden than a gift. The Iron Druid novels by Kevin Hearne, starting with Hounded, takes elements of Irish belief and transplants firmly them into modern day America. The first books are a little more combat-oriented than I generally read, but the stories are engaging. I first got into the series through my enjoyment of Oberon’s Twitter account (Oberon being the narrator’s talking Irish wolfhound), which is worth following even if you aren’t into the books.

Fiction, and in particular fantasy fiction, inspired by Rom sources is a little harder to find. The only fantasy book I’m aware of in which Romani beliefs and characters are central to the narrative is Charles de Lint’s uncharacteristically gruesome horror novel Mulengro.   Outside of the fantasy realm, I can thoroughly recommend Oksana Marafioti’s introduction to modern Romani culture through her memoir American Gypsy, detailing her family’s immigration from Russia to Los Angeles when she was fifteen.

If you can recommend other books with an Irish or Romani connection, let me know! Or let me know what real-world histories, ethnographies, memoirs, and other real-life inspirations you've used, or seen used, in a fictional piece.

2017 in a Nutshell

So as we creep towards the end of 2017, I wanted to summarize a few of the things that happened this year. Which was a lot – partly because a lot of things came to fruition this year that had been in the works for a while.

So, in no particular order:

Court of Twilight was published this fall! This is definitely the final stretch of a years-long process in writing and editing it. The first draft was written in 2013, and the book came out almost exactly four years later. It’s felt very satisfying to be finished with the book and hearing from readers who’ve enjoyed it.

Changeling has a second draft! While it’s still unclear if or when this will actually make its way to readers, I finished the second draft right before Christmas. This was another long-term project; the first draft was written as a National Novel Writing Month project in 2014, and it’s gotten only sporadic attention since.

I worked in Mexico! I was in Baja California Sur in January and February working as a guide on the Sea of Cortez. I saw my first blue whales, and we were running into big pods of dolphins about every week. I saw grey whales on their calving grounds. I skiffed around with playful juvenile sea lions, and saw tropicbirds and blue-footed boobies. And a ton of beautiful sunsets.  And at the end of the month I met up with my friend and amazing co-guide Teresa and traveled around the southern cape hiking, beach camping, and wallowing in natural hot springs. If you get a chance to travel to Baja, I would highly recommend spending time there.

I worked an amazing Alaska season! This was my third Alaska season guiding aboard the Discoverer. The crew on board this year were lovely, and we had a bunch of great trips. Probably the highlight was the week a Japanese tour company chartered the whole boat. They brought five of their own guides and translators, and a bunch of really, really good food. We got to stop at a bear-viewing location that I had never been to before, and watched brown bears fishing for salmon.  And got to watch a group of bubble-net-feeding humpbacks get streaked by an orca pod that charged through right where the humpbacks were trying to get themselves organized…

I wrote a few small things that turned out well! One is an article being published next month. And I wrote the first short story I’ve written in maybe eight years, of which I am super proud, and might be unintentionally hilarious to anyone who’s ever worked at the Glacier Lodge.

I‘m making an ops guide to Southeast Alaska! I journal every day when I’m guiding. Over the past three years, I’ve accumulated a huge amount of notes on the places I’ve visited while tooling around Southeast on a tiny expedition ship. Last spring I started compiling the entries by location, and I’ve ended up with a huge Scrivener file listing over seventy different locations I’ve visited, with info on bushwhacking and paddling routes, landmarks, wildlife sightings, and notes on the history of the area. It’s going to be a great resource for refreshing my memory on these locations as I revisit the sites this summer on various trips. And since most of these sites are bays in the middle of nowhere, (not designated wilderness, but close), there’s very little existing publicly-available documentation on them. (Yes, this is why you should visit Southeast Alaska on the Discoverer, because we know where the cool stuff is…)

I’m done with the requirements for my captain’s license! This is another thing I’ve been working on for a while. I first started working on boats ten years ago, as a deckhand on the Aialik Voyager back in 2007, then spent five years hopping on and off water taxis while working at a lodge that was only accessible by boat. Three years ago I joined my current company, working as a guide on the Discoverer.  At the end of the summer, I finally earned enough sea time to apply for my license. I spent the fall studying, and passed the exams earlier this month.

I worked a few winter kayak trips! I was lucky enough to meet up with a Seward-based kayak company, who was looking for someone to run trips for them in the winter. It’s slow, as it’s winter, and we’ve had a few of the trips turn into winter hikes because the seas were snotty, but it’s been lovely to be able to get out on the water in the off-season. On our trip yesterday, we ate lunch at the base of a 75-foot frozen waterfall, and three juvenile sea lions were following our boats on the way home. Tell me that isn’t an amazing day job? (Of course, the day before, I beached us a half-mile into the paddle, because the wind came up and my novice-paddler clients were getting blown into a giant sandbar. Ran the rest of the trip as a hike. And got frost nip on two toes from walking around on snow in rain boots. This is why guiding is like a giant lottery, and I can never bring myself to stop playing.)

I spent time with my grandmother. This isn’t an entirely happy update; my grandmother passed away in August. But I was able to spent over a month with her in March and April. I came back to see her twice on my breaks from the Discoverer, including just before she passed. If there are two things I can say that will in any way sum up the sort of person she was, it’s this: by the time she died she had happily given away most of the paintings hanging in her house to people she thought would appreciate them, and the day before she passed, she asked me to come over and fix her ceiling fan (which I did, and it was the last time I saw her).

So that was 2017. I hope you're finding some good memories to look back on as we start a new year, and I hope you have many exciting things to look forward to in 2018.

The Real-World Science of Ignoring Gorillas

I want to take some time to talk about a few of the sources that helped to shape my novel, Court of Twilight. One of these  is a well-known cognitive psychology experiment, that's actually mentioned in the book by one of the characters. The experiment is also the titular illusion in the book The Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. Written by two cognitive psychologists, The Invisible Gorilla is an explanation of erroneous assumptions about how our brains work - what the authors refer to as everyday illusions. The researchers discuss the effects these assumptions have on how we perceive our world, and also how we act based on those erroneous perceptions.

The Invisible Gorilla cover image. Credited to ABSODALS/Getty Images

The Invisible Gorilla's cover is striking . A man in a business suit, reading a newspaper, stands obliviously next to a gorilla, who is also reading a newspaper. I think the visual image, as much as anything, was something I remembered when I was mulling over my own ideas for a story about modern-day fairies. Here is an image of something entirely unexpected (for a gorilla) but also something entirely normal (for a person). Aur gorilla is standing next to a rather urbane-looking businessman, who is either completely indifferent to his simian companion, or else completely unaware of him.

If you’re not familiar with the titular experiment, I would highly recommend you experience it for yourself. There’s a link to it here, at the Invisible Gorilla website.

No, go ahead, I’ll still be here when you get back.

Got it? Pretty cool. To summarize, the video shows two teams of players passing a basketball back and forth. The viewer is asked to watch the video, and keep track of the number of passes made by the players wearing white, while ignoring the passes made by the players wearing black. After watching the videos, the researchers ask the viewer how many passes they counted. And then, the researchers ask if the viewer saw anything unusual in the video – such as an actor in a gorilla costume walking through the middle of the players?

Although the gorilla is clearly visible in the video – it turns and thumps its chest at the camera, no less - about half of viewers fail to see it. The authors refer to this phenomenon as inattentional blindness. The brain, when concentrating on a task, shunts its attention to that task to such a degree that it starts ignoring everything irrelevant to that task - even things that are unusual, notable, and significant. Something else that Chabris and Simons note is that many people, when told that they did, in fact, ignore a gorilla walking through the middle of a basketball game, react with shock. Some study participants even went so far as to accuse the researchers of tampering with the tape, so certain were they that there hadn’t been a gorilla in the video they’d seen.

It’s a startling experiment – I was certainly surprised when I saw the video, posted on a friend’s Facebook page several years ago. And no, I did not see the gorilla either – which was probably a good thing, because I don’t know if I would have remembered the video if I hadn’t been one of the people on whom this rather suprising illusion worked. The illusion is startling mainly because we’re not used to distrusting the accuracy of our perceptions. Our brains, we’d like to think, present us with an accurate and infallible view of the world – with no omissions, paraphrases, or edits. When we do happen upon an instance where our brain’s editing, filtering, and paraphrasing mechanisms are revealed, it feels like a cheat. Like we’re getting the Cliff Notes version of reality, instead of the real thing.

When looking for a way to ground a traditional feature of fairies into a modern setting, using a beefed-up version of inattentional blindness seemed ideal. It gave me a way to ground the trows’ magical abilities (or liabilities) within a framework that had a real basis in psychology. I hope that the mention of inattentional blindness in Court of Twilight might also provoke some readers to learn more about the cognitive illusions discussed in The Invisible Gorilla. As Chabris and Simon say in the introduction to their book “When you finish this book, you will be able to glimpse the man behind the curtain and some of the tiny gears and pulleys that govern your thoughts and beliefs… Ultimately, seeing through the veils that distort how we perceive ourselves and the world will connect you – for perhaps the first time – with reality.”

The Invisible Gorilla is available for purchase here.  More information on Chabris and Simons' experiments on everyday cognitive illusions can be found on their website, The Invisible Gorilla.com.