Category: blog

Sounds like Paradise to me

I love music, and this is my love letter to Radio Paradise. I feel like I just wandered into a party where all my favorite music showed up and brought its friends. I have been hanging out in the space between my headphones with album cuts from The Cure, David Bowie, Golden Earring (Radar Love!), Ani DiFranco, Pearl Jam, The Shins, Jeff Beck, John Martyn, Thievery Corporation, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Morcheeba, Cocteau Twins, Beth Orton….

Amazing programming by Bill Goldsmith. It’s nice to be in the hands of an expert. Go check out the playlist for yourself. Go have a listen.

When was the last time you heard something on commercial radio that you had to have right now? Stations like Radio Paradise and sites like Pandora, along with MySpace, are where most people find their new music these days. And then they go the band website to check it out, listen to the tracks, download a few for free from the site or for pennies from the million music services out there. They watch the videos and sign up on the fan club lists. They trade bootlegs of live shows on torrent sites. And they pretty much utterly ignore the music labels’ circus-pony marketing campaigns, the print ads in Rolling Stone and the MTV appearances and the pay-to-play arrangements with commercial radio. The labels are starting to figure out they aren’t in charge of music anymore…

And here’s Radio Paradise, a seriously cool 21st-century operation: a human touch on music and a high-tech delivery system that offers a wide variety of streaming options and handles programming through multiple server locations that can be controlled by a laptop from anywhere in the world. They’re building interactive community around music (and that’s so important, because art is not a one-way street). They don’t accept advertisers. The whole shebang is run by two people who clearly know music, really know music and love it. They do it all on listener support, and they certainly have mine — I’ve heard more amazing music in the last couple of weeks on RP than in the last five years of radio in my car.

I have found my party, and now I can go back anytime I want.

You’re invited too.

Edited to add: Traffic! And Michelle Shocked, Suzanne Vega’s Blood Makes Noise, and Pearl Jam’s live Black! And that’s just in the last 6 hours… I love this station.

Nicola’s best

Several folks have asked me and Nicola to participate in variations on “what I liked in 2007” lists. One of the most interesting requests came from Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct Press: Timmi didn’t choose to limit responses to “books,” but asked instead for our favorites among any kind of text.

Nicola’s response leads off this “pleasures of the year” event at Aqueduct. As you’ll see, she had a lot of fun thinking about this (and played Faster Kill Pussycat at full volume, which was great fun for me too).

There are more lists coming in the next several days.

(And thanks to Cat Rambo and Eleanor Arnason for the shout-outs for Dangerous Space.)

Old story, newly found

Nearly 10 years ago, Ellen Datlow (in her role as the fiction editor of Omni Internet) invited me into an online round robin storytelling event. From the time I began writing in my 20’s, Ellen was “the editor” for me, the person I always wanted to sell to. (And I did — Ellen published the first two Mars stories, and I’ve always been particularly grateful because those stories are so close to my heart.) So when she said Do you wanna, I said yes.

Here’s how it worked. Ellen put together a group of four writers — me, Graham Joyce, Kathe Koja and Ed Bryant — to take turns writing installments of a story that were posted online as they were written. We were meant to write quickly, so that a new installment could be published every few days, and of course we had to build off what had come before — the point was to write an actual story, not just get wacky on the internet.

We got together through email and settled on a loose structure — the order of posting, and the general framework of the story. I’m not sure whose idea it was to do a Shirley Jackson hommage, but we all fell on it with glee (and if you haven’t read Jackson, please, please go do so immediately! She rocks. The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the stories, oh my god….).

And so our round robin story became a sort of flash-Jackson — we’d show up on the interweb, see what the person before us had done, and then do our own thing with it. I don’t know how it was for the others, but for me it went like this: come home from the corporate job, kiss my sweetie, grab a beer on the way downstairs to my basement workspace, and… just do it. Write the damn thing by the time the beer was finished. Let it sit overnight, fix it the next day, send it off.

It was a rush. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and more to the point, I found out I didn’t have to get all precious or superstitious about writing — I could just do it.

I was sad when Omni went dark months later. And after several years, the archives disappeared as well. Ah well, I thought, there goes the story.

And then today I found it online, on Pamela Weintraub’s site. She was the Editor-in-Chief of Omni Internet, and I’m thrilled that she’s preserved all four of the round robin stories. This is a huge thing — you can read collaborative fiction from some of the best writers in the field: James Patrick Kelly, Rachel Pollack, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, Karen Joy Fowler, Maureen McHugh, Roasaleen Love, Terry Bisson, Kathleen Ann Goonan, John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, Kim Newman and Jonathan Lethem. I’m so glad I got to be a part of this, and that I can point other people to a part of SF history that wasn’t always so easy to find.

The writer does the happy dance.

And here’s our story. Enjoy.

Can the lady write like a man?

*Snork!*

Gakked from Cheryl, who very sensibly points out that if Drs. Riccobono and Pedriali really think this is such a new topic, they should sit down with a cup of coffee and a few Tiptree stories. (Mom, can I be ineluctably masculine when I grow up? Of course, dear, now put your pith helmet on and go outside…).

You can learn more about the fascinating Tiptree from the fascinating biography by Julie Phillips.

Plus ca change…

There’s an interesting conversation going on at Nicola’s blog about the concept of being a digital native vs. a digital immigrant — in other words, division along (and distance across) generational lines by whether or not one is “born to” a particular level of technology. Nicola cites an article that does a good job of dismantling that idea, or at least showing all the ways in which it’s reductive. And she posits in turn that this division isn’t about age, it’s about temperament. It’s about how each of us responds to change.

I think so too. There are so many ways that humans deal with change. We run away from it. Or we use it to run away — the abrupt and radical changes that take us away from problems, from fears, from love, from commitment, from the cages we’ve made out of our lives. Or maybe we “don’t believe” in change (news flash: it sure believes in us). Or we throw ourselves like lovers at the new thing because it’s part of our identity to be the person whose edge is always leading… We tackle it with plans and checklists, we wake up scared in the middle of the night, we celebrate it, we yearn for it.

And then we have to learn the new software at work, or we’re expected to navigate the hospital by following the colored lines on the floor, or the Syrian restaurant we really liked is just gone one day, and I stop and think You know, when I said all those brave words about change, this is not what I was talking about.

I think most of us are actually pretty good at stepping up to the seismic shifts in our world — we may not be graceful or happy about it, but on some level humans are built for it. I think it’s the thousand small daily changes that wear us down and do us in. And I’m coming to the reluctant conclusion that it happens to us all. I don’t want to stop learning, you know? Even if it means having to change in all the daily ways. When I stop being willing to do that, I don’t know if I’ll still be myself… I want to be one of those 90-year-old women with long gray hair and a fierce face who still updates her own website, even if by then we’re all managing content with our eyebrows or whatever…

I guess we’ll see.

(To find Nicola’s post about this, visit her blog and look for the entry “digital immigrant/digital native”. Would someone please tell MySpace to get with the permalinks?)

Interview: The Seventh Week

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers…

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers.

The Seventh Week, the Clarion West newsletter, published a brief interview in their Spring 2007 issue. The interview was edited for length (I’m sure this surprises no one who has ever talked to me), but they graciously gave me permission to post the entire interview here.

The interview includes talk about why I write, and my advice to Clarion students (and by extension anyone who wants to learn to write).

Interview: Speculating Gender

I recently sat down with Jesse Vernon of Aqueduct Press for beer and conversation about Dangerous Space, Mars, and gender in life and fiction. I enjoyed it: I hope you will too.

Read the interview on the Aqueduct Press blog, and wander back this way if you’d like to talk more about it.

@U2 articles posted

I’m a stone U2 fan, and am fortunate to be part of the writing team at @U2, the world’s most popular U2 fan website. My work for @U2 includes personal essay, vehement opinion-spouting, articles, and an interview with a most interesting French-Italian author… On the horizon, another “Like A Song” essay in early 2008.

I’m proud to work with @U2 — the quality and passion of the writing, and the teamwork among the staff, are the flat-out best I’ve found in a volunteer or fan organization. You’ll find links to all my writing for @U2 on the Essays page. Enjoy.

Humans At Work

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” — Peter Drucker

A few people have asked me about the consulting business I’m putting together, Humans At Work.

The company motto is Work is a human thing. Let’s treat each other that way. The core of the business is a training program that gives new managers a grounding in the essential skills of managing human beings.

Because Drucker is right. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have at least one horror story of a Manager From Hell — most of us have more than one. And it’s my experience that bad management happens not because people are evil or insane, but mostly because they have no idea how to be good managers. When we get our first management job, no one sits us down and tells us that the most important thing we can do to be successful is to deal well with the other humans in the building — to communicate clearly, build relationships that help everyone be more effective, share information, collaborate on decisions with the people whose work will be affected, and give people control of how they do their jobs. No one teaches us how to do these things. If we’re lucky as managers, we eventually figure out how to be better… generally at the expense of the people who work for us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. So I’m going to see if I can do something about it.

No one can learn to be a good manager in a classroom or a seminar — like writing or cooking or sex or conversation, or any of the other really fun stuff, being good takes practice. But it’s absolutely possible to point people in the right direction and give them basic tools and skills to help them start right. That’s what I plan to do with Humans At Work.

Managing is something I do well. I’ve been thinking about these ideas for 15 years. I have the skills and the passion for passing them along. I have notions for the training, and the business model, that I think will surprise people. We’ll see. The training curriculum is nearly done at the detail level, and I plan to start building the website in the beginning of the year.

This is not something I’ll ever give up writing for. If I’m doing it right — if I manage it well (grin) — I can help other people without having to lose myself.

So that’s what’s up. And I’d love to hear from you what you think good managers do, or don’t do, and what you wish your managers had known how to do better.