Clarion West will hold a one-day workshop in Seattle on Sunday, December 2, on The Business of Writing.
Every writer needs to understand the business, not just the craft. We’re all responsible for our own careers, and today writers have more options than ever before. It’s an exciting, challenging, and potentially confusing landscape. That’s why I’m particularly jazzed that Clarion West can offer this workshop with experts from all sides of the writing/publishing equation. By attending, you get information, insight, and face time with editors, publishers and a writer all at the forefront of the business. Hear about the business from folks who are in it daily; get your questions answered; and come away with the big picture of the possibilities for all of us in the new publishing frontier.
This nuts-and-bolts workshop will provide emerging writers useful tips on how to make a living writing popular fiction. Editors and publishers from Amazon Publishing will share a behind-the-scenes perspective on publishing today, and bestselling author Robert Ferrigno will pass on skills and insights coming from his twenty years of professional experience. Topics covered include research techniques, time management, storyboarding and outlining, marketing, and learning from feedback.
Robert Ferrigno has written twelve best-selling thrillers, including The Horse Latitudes and Heartbreaker. His work has been nominated for the Edgar and the Silver Dagger. He thinks good writing, regardless of genre, is clear, resonant, and packs an emotional punch.
Like everyone else I know, I am insanely busy right now, but if you’re a registered US voter, I can still find a minute to tell you how to think about this election, just in case you are wavering about whether I should be allowed to get married or who should be your President for the next four years.
(If you live anywhere else in the world, you already know how we should all vote, and you are doubtless aghast at the polls right now.)
But wait, I don’t need to tell you how to think, because I have Nicola, Lena and Joss to lean on. Thank goodness!
Please, do think. Please do vote, wherever you live, to help keep your neighbors and your state and your country the kind of place where there’s at least a chance of coming together to survive, rather than splitting farther and farther apart. Your vote matters.
Read Nicola Griffith’s post about Washington State Referendum 74.
If you remember your first time, listen to Lena Dunham!
Ursula K. Le Guin is a brilliant writer, whose books are part of my personal canon. Ursula is a writer’s writer, and a reader’s writer, and wicked funny, and made an enormous difference to me when she blurbed Solitaire. She told me I used fuck too much in the book (grin). She once sent me a fall-down-laughing email about vanilla. Ursula is fascinating and incisive, with a wide-ranging mind and a gift for conversation. On Saturday, October 13, you have the opportunity to spend an evening in her company.
2013 is the 30th anniversary of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and we are kicking off our celebrations in the best possible style, as author and Clarion West founder Vonda N. McIntyre interviews Ursula K. Le Guin. Please join us on Saturday evening, October 13, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Seattle’s Uptown Hideway for drinks, light refreshments, and a splendid evening of conversation and community.
Tickets are $50 each, and attendance is limited to 100 people. All proceeds benefit Clarion West. Reserve your ticket now and come be part of a very special evening!
For the last few years, I have been co-captain of our neighborhood block watch, because apparently I do not have enough to do and so I need Even More Responsibility! Ah, well, it’s been good to see a small but committed community of neighbors coming together. Come the apocalypse, assuming that we are all at home, we will take a bit better care of each other than we might have. Nothing wrong with that.
In that spirit, I went with several of the neighbors yesterday to a free First Aid/CPR class offered by the city. I learned some things, although honestly I thought the first aid portion was too superficial — it was mostly based on video training which I thought wasn’t well-structured for teaching useful skills. I am thinking of how I would do this part differently, because there has got to be a better way.
It turns out that CPR has changed since I was last trained about 7 zillion years ago. There are now two versions on the menu, the real CPR and what I’m calling CPR-Lite, the hands-only version that means you don’t have to put your mouth on a stranger’s. It turns out, according to my instructor, that the average adult human in most cases of cardiac arrest has 4 to 6 minutes of oxygen in the bloodstream at any given time, and so keeping their heart beating can keep their brain alive for that time even if you don’t breathe for them. (It’s only 2 minutes for children.)
The problem is that if the heart in question has stopped beating because the person drowned or asphyxiated, there’s no oxygen there. And you don’t always know what happened when you stumble across a dead stranger….
Another thing that has changed in CPR is the compression/breath ratio. I learned 5 compressions, 2 breaths. Then I re-learned 15 compressions, 2 breaths. Now it’s 30 compressions, 2 breaths. Also, no pulse-checking or airway-inspecting. I think this is all fine. It’s easier for people to remember, and so many people can’t find a pulse even on themselves that taking precious time to check it on someone who is dying seems counterproductive.
So here is what I learned, step by step, with my editorial comments:
Assess the situation — is it safe to help? It’s amazing how many people didn’t do this step in the training. Stop, look and listen, cats and kittens! Because if you get hit by a car running out to save the accident victim, you are not helping.
Tap the shoulder and shout to see if the person is responsive. The old-school training was shake and shout. In other words, bang their head against the concrete several times in your panic, because that makes them easier to revive…
Tell someone to call 911. If you are in a public building and others are there, tell someone to get the AED (the basically idiot-proof defibrillator kit that most public buildings and businesses have now. They have pictures and they talk to you!). If no one is around, you’ll have to call 911 yourself. If you don’t have a phone or there’s no cell reception, you’ll have to make some tough choices. Our instructor advised to use your best judgment about leaving if the victim is adult, but not to leave an arrested child to find a phone — do at least 2 minutes of compression/breathing first, and then try like hell to find a phone and make that call in 2 minutes.
Make a 5-second check for obvious breathing. Look at the person from the head to the stomach. I think this is a very sensible update to the check airway/listen for breath step. Much more efficient. Because if they are breathing and you start compressing their chest or blowing in their mouth, you will probably not kill them. And if they wake up you will know, because they will probably punch you for whanging on them!
Begin CPR with 30 compressions at the rate of 100 compressions per minute, then 2 breaths, then repeat the cycle until help arrives, or someone else with training takes over, or you are too exhausted to continue. People in the class were surprised to find out how much work this is.
100 compressions per minute, it turns out, is essentially the pace/rhythm of “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees. It’s also, to my great although possibly in-poor-taste amusement, the pace/rhythm of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust”. But as long as you are doing your best to save a life, who cares which song you’re doing it to? No one will ever know.
If you don’t know how to control bleeding, immobilize a broken limb, do the Heimlich Manuever*, or perform CPR, please go take a class! (* My instructor did say not to bother with the back blows if the person is truly choking; tell them you are going to perform the Heimlich, and then do it.)
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, since Jeff Lemkin turned me onto it.
Little Free Library provides small structures you can set up outside your home, or in your neighborhood, for books. It’s a small, local, free book-exchange station, lending library, community resource… and it’s all about sharing books, which is a Very Good Thing.
I love this idea. I hope it spreads. I’m already casting my eye around my neighborhood and wondering where would be the right place, and what would be the right books… Now taht’s tricky. There are so many books, and mileage varies on reading taste. How would you stock your little free library?
This is for J, who is doing a hard scary thing and being very brave.
Doubtless some of you know this story already, but it’s a good one and worth retelling.
—–
A man walked along a beach where a storm had washed starfish up above the tideline. They were dying.
Up the beach, the man saw a little girl picking up the starfish one by one and throwing them back into the sea. She was slow, and she didn’t throw well, and there were thousands of starfish.
As she picked up another, the man said, You’re wasting your time. There are too many. Don’t try so hard. You’re not making any difference.
She threw the starfish and watched it sink into the water. Then she turned to him and said, I made a difference to that one.
—–
Enjoy your day, and please think a kind thought for everyone who makes a difference.
It is Labor Day in the US and I am laboring. Hmm, you’re thinking, clearly Kelley has missed the point… but no, one of the special perks of being self-employed is that you get to work on holidays! Now aren’t you jealous?
I labor for many reasons, including love and art and the mortgage. And I labor so that perhaps one day I can not-labor in one of these places.
Go look at the pretties, and think of me working and smiling and dreaming of big sky, endless water, the peace of vastness.
Enjoy your day. Enjoy where you are, and where you hope to be.
I am a bit behind in announcing that “Eye of the Storm,” a story I love so much that I would hug it hard if I could, has been reprinted recently in two excellent anthologies.
Beyond Binary is an anthology of genderqueer and sexually fluid fiction — the first of tis kind, as far as I’m aware — edited by Brit Mandelo. Stories by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Nalo Hopkison, and Cat Valente, as well as many other terrific established and emerging writers. Nicola did a long interview with Brit, and Brit also talked with Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious. There’s a review at io9 and another at Tor.com to get you started on investigating the book.
“Eye of the Storm” was first published by editor Ellen Datlow in Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, which is now available in e-book. It’s a fantastic anthology, folks, well worth your reading dollars, with stories by Neil Gaiman, Pat Murphy, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Yolen, Mark Teidemann, and Tanith Lee, just to name a few. I was thrilled to be included when Ellen put the anthology together in 1998, and I’m equally thrilled to see it in this gorgeous new edition from Open Road Media (who are also republishing her anthologies Alien Sex and Off Limits). Ellen is one of the formative editors of an entire generation of speculative fiction: she talks about editing in this interview with jim Piniciuk. And she is great to hang out with at the bar (grin).
Thank you to Ellen for loving my story all those years ago, and thank you to Brit for loving it now. I am happy to see “Storm” come out and dance again.
Recently a Jet Blue flight from New York to LAX was diverted to Denver so an unruly passenger could be taken off the plane in handcuffs. I don’t know if this happens more often than it used to, or if we just hear about it more. In this case, the world heard about it from film producer Cassian Elwes, who sat down after the flight to report the story on his Twitter feed.
Go read it. It’s immediate and tense. I imagine finding myself trapped near madness this way, seatbelted next to it, close enough to smell. It scares me. And, at least in this case, it also makes me enormously sad. Because we can be so human in our madness, so human even in moments of ultimate alienation.
I hope I never go mad. But if I do, then I hope someone treats me like Cassian Elwes treated Marco.
Enjoy your day. Be careful. And then, if you can, be kind.
