Author: skzb

I play the drum.

Roast Sirloin Tip Special

I’m setting this down because I’ll want to do it again sometime, and it sort of happened by accident.

Scene 1: The second floor of a Midwestern fourplex

Take a nice sirloin tip roast, salt and pepper. Preheat oven to 350°F, and start heating up the cast iron skillet over high heat on the stove-top.

Put olive oil in the skillet to cover, then sear the roast on all sides.

Put the skillet, roast and all, in the oven, uncovered, meat thermometer set for 140°F.

Take some broccoli, cauliflower, a sliced onion, and mushrooms. Put them in a bowl with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, and red wine vinegar. Mix well.

When the roast reaches 140°F internal temperature, remove it from the oven, but leave the cast-iron skillet with the juices in there.

Put the veggies into the skillet, and let them roast while the meat rests.

Eat.

Fade to black.

Scene 2. Same place, several hours later

Cook up some brown rice, using the leftover stock from yesterday’s chicken soup experience

Cut off some of the roast, and dice it.

Put it into a frying pan with olive oil, minced garlic, and the remains of the vegetable mix.

Heat quickly.

Mix with a really good barbecue sauce.

Eat over rice.

Curtain

Boskone:Doing it Right–Plus Pointers For Those Doing it Wrong

Geez, Boston. Got enough snow?

Boskone, or Snowkone, if you prefer, was everything I hope for in a convention.   I don’t like mentioning people, because I’ll leave someone out and feel bad, but the whole thing was a joy. I was very well taken care of by the convention, the panels were fun, and the weather wasn’t all that much of a problem except that too many people I wanted to hang out with couldn’t make it or could only make it for a while (I’m looking at YOU, @rnmelton). I missed saying hello to my old friend Vicki, and would have liked to have spent more time with Charlie Stross, but I can’t really complain. The VP dinner was a delight. Great good times. Thanks to everyone who made it so much fun.

I need to specifically mention the bio that Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote for me.  Some conventions seem to have abandoned the old tradition of finding someone to say nice things about you in the program book, and then laughing at you when you get flustered.  And since I’m on the subject of conventions, here are a few things that Certain Other Conventions can learn from Boskone (and Minicon, and Loscon, and many others who do it right). Some of these are from my experience, others from friends.

1. If you can’t afford to give your guest’s “+1” a free membership, you can’t afford the guest. This applies to GOHs, and to those invited to participate in programming in exchange for a membership. When you say, “We will give you a free membership, and give your friend a special reduced rate,” you look like you’re in over your heads, and many of us worry about being trapped at a convention that is going to fall apart. (Some of us have been to those, and failed to enjoy them.)

2. If someone in your department, or in another department, is screwing up, do not try to enlist the guest on your side of the political infight this has produced within your convention committee. If you aren’t all working together in perfect harmony, fake it.

3. The thing of offering the GOH a choice between giving a speech and being interviewed is relatively new, and awfully nice. (Thanks, Jo–that interview was a high point of a great weekend.) But if the GOH must give a speech, let him or her know about it. Preferably before the convention.

3.1. Heads-up: A panel with one person on it is called a “speech.” See above.

4. Do not ask the guest to write a free story or draw a free picture or whatever, even for charity. (I’m a little embarrassed to mention this one, because after feeling all put-upon by one convention that asked me to do that, I developed some major health problems, and the next year I was the charity. It was extraordinarily kind, and I still have warm thoughts about them. But still. You ought not to do it. Or at least, make sure the guest knows about it before accepting.)

5. Checking the guest into the hotel before he or she even arrives is not required, but, oh my god, it is wonderful when it happens. I mean, Cesare H. Tapdancing Borgia, is it nice! You get to the hotel, exhausted, stressed, worried that you’re going to suck as a GOH, and someone walks up to you and says, “Here’s your key. Go to your room and chill out. Want help with your bags?” Until you’ve been in that situation, you have no idea just how big a deal that is.

6. First thing, even before the room, make sure the guest knows where meals and such are coming from–ie, if you’re supplying a per diem, put it in the guest’s hand before he or she has to ask; if the charges can go to the room, say so. This is to save embarrassment. Some of us feel really weird saying, “So, um, I’m hungry. Can you, er, buy me a meal?”

6.1 ETA: This is more of a note-to-self to check on it before accepting an invitation, but, if you’re offering a per diem, make sure it is actually enough to feed the GOH and any guest for the time you’ve asked them to be there.

7. Having a programming questionnaire that includes things like, “what events do you not want to be against,” and, “who do you want to do panels with,” and, “who do you not want to be panels with” is also relatively new, and a very fine thing that saves a lot of irritation. For the record, there was no one at Boskone that I asked not to do a panel with, but I very much appreciated being asked.

8. After the convention, if the guest didn’t suck, say so. I mean, give us a bit of reassurance. You would be amazed at how insecure we can be. “They hated me,” we say to ourselves. “I was stupid on panels, and didn’t talk to enough people, and they really wish they’d invited Jerry Pournelle instead.” (To be fair, as a guest, you should do the same–if they ran a good convention, like Boskone did, tell them so. Hey, Boskone, you rock!)

 

The Mechanisms of Ignorance

This is one of my favorite kinds of blog posts: where I dive into it not knowing the answer. Usually when that happens, it’s what I write a book about, but some questions I don’t want to turn into novels.

So here’s what we’re starting with: global capitalism cannot meet the needs of the world’s population.  More and more as capitalism demonstrates its exhaustion, we are seeing income disparity, which in turn drives the militarization of local police, increased police state measures such as spying on citizens and extreme persecution of whistle-blowers, and war measures as capitalists who can no longer count on economic bullying resort to violence to secure resources, market share, profit.

As these things increase, we notice something else: a drastic rise in ignorance.  And that’s where I’m mystified.

Let me be clear that in some cases, the ignorance is easily explained: belief in climate change is a direct threat to oil profits, so of course there will be climate change deniers.  And then, as capitalism finds it has less and less need for educated workers, education is slashed, hacked, and burned, so the ground for mass ignorance is being laid.

But there’s more to it, and that’s what I’m not getting.  To be precise, whence comes the rise in anti-vaxxers?  It isn’t just that they view children as property and want to debate who owns them (“The state doesn’t own the children, parents own the children.” — Rand Paul), it is very conscious ignorance and refusal to see reality.  Similarly, those who deny evolution.  In both of these cases, and others, there is a strong correlation to the most appalling right-wing political positions, with the ugliest forms of bigotry, and, moreover, such nonsense has become more widespread as the crisis of global capitalism has deepened, hence I do not accept coincidence as the answer.  What I’m not seeing is why this correlation exists?  Where is the relation between preserving private property as the highest goal, and a literal interpretation of the Bible?  And, above all, what is the mechanism by which these ideas slither down from the conscious reactionary to the merely ignorant?  I’ll be interested to hear what some of you think.

 

Fantasy Series: Keeping the Big Secret

I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I do when I’m struggling with a book is read nice things people have said about my stuff–it helps me get cocky, and that helps me write. This often leads me to reread Jo Walton’s stuff on Tor.com because, well, it says nice things. Today I noticed the following thing she said: “I think Brust must be the best person at keeping a secret in the world. There are revelations late in the series that it’s quite clear, on re-reading, that he knew about and was hinting at all the time.”

This gave me to think. At the time, I never considered it as, “I have to find the right moment to reveal this thing.” In fact, I don’t ever remember thinking that. For one thing, it contradicts the “burn story” rule that I have at least tried to keep as a guideline. So, how, in a long series, do you keep the Big Secret until the right moment for the reveal while simultaneously burning as much story as you have wood for? Well, here’s the thing: You don’t. It’s never about keeping anything secret, exactly. It’s simply an extreme case of that other rule, the one about the writer knowing more than the reader.

****** Spoiler for Orca ******

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, certainly, I knew all along that Kiera was one of Sethra’s disguises; it was a necessary and not terribly brilliant part of defining Sethra’s character that she would want to keep informed of what the Jhereg were up to, and, if she were to be a thief, obviously she’d be a very good one. But I never said to myself, “I will save this revelation until the right book.” For one thing, when I wrote Jhereg, I had no idea there would be any others.  What I told myself was, “This will probably never emerge, but it will have a huge effect on the relationship between Vlad and Sethra, and thus on Vlad’s entire career and development.” No one was more surprised than me when I suddenly came to a moment when it seemed right, necessary, and cool to let the reader in on that–in fact, the only thing I had to do was go back and plant a couple little things to explain how Vlad figured it out.

 

 

****** End Spoiler ******

 

 

 

James D. MacDonald, in his lecture at Viable Paradise, displays a miniature house he built and talks about how he constructed it. There is a room where there is a figure of a guy that you can’t see because it is fully enclosed. But, Jim says, he knows it is there, and that knowledge informs how he constructed the house. This is a perfect metaphor. There are many things I know about the world I’m building, and the relationships among the characters, that never make it into the stories, but that, simply because I’m aware of them, have an effect, greater or lesser, on what happens. So, then, the “reveal the big secret” moment never, to me, feels like, “Now I can finally reveal that,” but rather, “Oh, the story would be really cool if this happened right here, and, hey, look, I just happen to have that all set up; ain’t I clever?”

My point is not, in fact, that I’m especially clever. My point is that the old chestnut that speaks of knowing things about your world that you do not reveal not only gives your world additional depth, but can sometimes pay off in other ways. As long as you aren’t so cryptic about so many things that the reader is left in a fog (or you, as a writer, get so wrapped up in inventing things that you never write the story), there is no downside to knowing things you don’t reveal.

Rant: Idiocies About the American Indian

Someone on Facebook published this quote by Ayn Rand:  The Native Americans didn’t have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using…. What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their “right” to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent.

I would like to believe no one on this blog needs an explanation about how utterly disgusting that is.  In my opinion, it flows naturally from the concept that property rights are above–or a part of–human rights.  This is what one would expect of such an ugly, reactionary philosophy.  But it was the comments of some of those attacking the quote that made me roll my eyes.

“They were one with the land,” went one predictably inane remark.  And, “they were a part of nature,” went another.

First of all, probably the most offensive thing is referring to American Indians as a monolith.  I mean, seriously?  The pastoral (in the literal sense) lifestyle of the Navajo is somehow identical to the complex agricultural life of the Powhatans or the Aztecs?  The nomadic life of the Lakota is the same thing as the settled life of the Cherokee or the Seneca? The ancestors of the Pueblo who lived in Mesa Verde had the same life as the Iroquois of the Great Lakes?  Some tribes in the Kansas Territory supported abolition, others owned slaves  But they’re all the same?  What the fuck?

Second, what is this, “one with the land,” bullshit?  Like every human being ever on the planet, the American Indian, in different ways, according to the development of productive forces and the nature of his environment, consciously altered that environment. That is what human beings do.  If we are “a part of nature” then the form that “oneness” takes is conflict.  We wrest our living from nature, in conflict, as does every other living thing right down to the microscopic parasites in the intestines of our dogs.  What makes human beings unique is our ability to planfully alter nature in accordance with our wishes–we not only build tools, but we build tools to build tools.  This activity changes nature, adapts it to our needs.

This “one with nature” crap is only one, tiny step up from the racist “noble savage” idea every serious anthropologist had abandoned by the end of the 19th Century.   And speaking of anthropologists–it is very popular today to dismiss the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, and cry racism for his use of terms like, “savagery” and “barbarism” and “civilization”  in defining cultural states.  But Morgan, who took the time to study and learn the nuances and subtleties of the different tribes with whom he lived, was far, far more respectful than the “one with nature” types we run into today.

By claiming that those who lived on the North American continent didn’t planfully change their environment, and by lumping them together, you are, in essence, denying them humanity, every bit much as Ayn Rand does.