Year: 2017

Why I’ll take Wonder Woman over Sarah Connor any day

Post author By Karen
Post date 27 August 2017
No Comments on Why I’ll take Wonder Woman over Sarah Connor any day

“She’s an objectified icon … to me, it’s a step backwards.”

[Cameron] believes one of his popular protagonists, Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise, sets a better example for female leading characters in movies.

“Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit,” he said. “And to me, [the benefit of characters like Sarah] is so obvious. I mean, half the audience is female!”

News.com.au James Cameron Slams Wonder Woman: “It’s a step backwards.”

Sorry, James Cameron, but you talk about objectified icons.

I am sure Sarah Connor is everything you say she was. Plus, I suspect, you’re talking about the second and subsequent Terminator movies, too, not the first.

I don’t know. I only ever watched the first movie. I couldn’t watch the rest.

It’s not because I didn’t like most of the movie. It was okay. And Arnie’s terminator is certainly iconic, and goes down in history as one of the great movie characters of all time.

But we spend the whole movie having the Terminator chase Sarah, only to find out that he’s after her because she’s somebody’s mother.

Sarah Connor is a victim.

Sure, she fights back. And I like it when a victim empowers her-or-himself to fight back against their oppressor. And I don’t mean to denigrate anyone who fights their way out of being victimised like that, for they are inspiring. Woman or man.

But if I want a hero—someone to hold up as an example, someone to emulate—I’ll take the woman who starts out with a conscience, and a determination to do right by the world. Someone who lives by that standard, and embodies it in everything they do and say.

Rather than someone who simply reacts to a situation they have been placed into.

So that I, and the Sarah Connor’s of this world, know we can live by those standards, too.

Wonder Woman is not about beauty. Hollywood objectifies everyone, male and female

Wonder Woman is encapsulated by the scene in No-Man’s land. Where a woman knows this is wrong, and says so, only to hear others say, “Sure, but we can’t do anything about it,” and she chooses to do something anyway.

Writing process

Down in our little corner of the world

Post author By Karen
Post date 20 August 2017
No Comments on Down in our little corner of the world

If you’re not part of the solution …

Right now the Australian government ministers are behaving like kids in a classroom, where the teacher has left the room, and been gone for a while. Calling each other names, doing stupid things, bullying, offending our nearest neighbor.

We’re waiting on an envelope in the mail to vote whether or not we want to allow same sex marriage, but even if we all vote yes (I’m voting yes), that doesn’t necessarily mean the government will allow it. It just means that that the government will introduce a bill to allow them to debate whether or not to allow same sex marriage. It also, I think, allows members of parliament to vote as per their own conscience, not along party lines.

Confused? So am I.

We haven’t even got problems, compared to other countries.

I don’t have to mention the United States, where it seems that the craziness has escaped the confines of the White House and infected the populace. We’re hurting for you.

It seems like whole of the democratic world has been infected by … I don’t know what you’d call it. The pendulum, having swung one way, is swinging madly the other way. It feels a lot like Galloping Gertie right now, ready for that final swing.

The new Anne Leckie

On a more positive note, Anne Leckie’s newsletter dropped into my email the other day. Provenance is out in just over a month.

I like the way Anne does her newsletters. Only when she really has news. And she put the first three chapters in the newsletter. Yes! (Lots of exclamation marks here.) We might try this ourselves.

Naturally, I read the excerpt immediately.

There are characters you take to immediately, and I love Captain Uisine. He’s not the protagonist, so I hope he’s in the book more than just two chapters.

Afterwards, I went straight to Amazon’s pre-order page. I’m looking forward to late September.

And lastly

Writing process

Sydney turned on a nice weekend

Post author By Karen
Post date 13 August 2017
No Comments on Sydney turned on a nice weekend

Need I say what this is? Sydney Harbour Bridge.

I went up to Sydney last week for a work conference. (Excellent conference, by the way, and the closing keynote speaker, Mike Monteiro, gave an wonderful, thought-provoking speech about ethics and design, using the current US political state, along with examples from businesses. He deserved the standing ovation we gave him.)

Breakfast this morning. Criniti’s, Darling Harbour

I convinced Sherylyn to come up for the weekend, afterwards. Sydney turned on lovely weather for us.

We do find it difficult to write on these breaks, however. (Although we did get some accounting done, believe it or not.)

So here are some pictures of Sydney. Mostly around Darling Harbour, because the first thing we do when we get to Sydney is find a ferry.

Another food place. This one at the hotel. It’s a hard life.

Writing process

Taking my work home

First round of sorting. More similar to our current site than we expected.

I try to leave work at work when I leave the office for the day, but how can I not use this technique from work (card sorting), when we’re redesigning our web site?

As you can see from the sorted topics in the image, above, it’s not a total redesign, just some tweaks to make things easier to find.

Incidentally, if you have any ideas or suggestions as to what should go on the site, let us know.

Writing process

Leveling up as a writer

Leveling up in computer games is a process whereby a character gains enough points or experience to unlock a whole new level in the game.

Writers level up too. The first time they finish a book, the first time they learn to take critiques properly, when they learn that writing is not just writing, it’s rewriting.

Here’s a fun diagram of a writer leveling up. We’ve made some assumptions.

The writer is going the trad pub route, and they get an agent first, who then sells their book to an editor
Both editor and agent are legitimate and doing their best to sell/make the book as good as it can be. That is, the writer isn’t caught up by scammers.
A lot of these things loop. You can keep going around and around in circles, but we’re only doing it the once.

Writing process

A couple of quick things

Giveaway finishes at the end of this month

We’re running a Goodreads giveaway. One lucky reader can win a copy of all three books. If you’re interested, head over to Goodreads to enter.

Competition closes midnight 31 July.

Linesman eBook reduced on

Linesman is $2.99 over at Amazon, and at Barnes and Noble. We don’t know for how long.

Writing process

Not in the mood for reading dystopia

Post author By Karen
Post date 23 July 2017
2 Comments on Not in the mood for reading dystopia

I wanted a picture of utopia to balance this blog. Interestingly, my stock images supplier had lots of pictures with the word ‘heaven’, but little else. Except pictures of Roman ruins kept cropping up as well. I googled, but couldn’t find any reason for it.

I started a book today.

It was well written, and had a characters I cared about, right from the start. World building was superb. And yet … I couldn’t keep going with it.

Too many bad things happened to the point-of-view character in the first two chapters. Nasty, horrible things. Beatings, starved, torture, being branded on the face with a hot iron. Worse, the world he lived in was the sort of place where that could happen to anyone except the truly rich (and sometimes even to them). Where the people in power treated those outside their circle as lesser beings, and did really nasty things to them.

I stopped at the start of chapter three.

I couldn’t read any further.

It’s starting to feel as if I live in that world already. I don’t want to read about it too.

I think it’s human nature to want to read positive stories when the world around us seems quite depressing. I certainly do, anyway.

I picked up another book, more light-hearted, and read that instead.

Fun stuff

Saturday night

If you’ve read this blog in the past, you might know I’m a big fan of Jon English and David MacKay’s rock odyssey, Paris. It’s about the Trojan war.

A concept album came out in 1990, with John Parr (who sang Man in Motion, from St Elmo’s Fire) as Paris, and Sheila Parker as Helen of Troy. The album had some impressive talent on it—John Waters, Barry Humphries, Philip Quast, Doc Neeson, John Parr, Sheila Parker, Joe Fagin, Demis Roussos, David Atkins and Terence Donovan. It was backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Choir.

It’s one of the albums we listen to a lot when writing.

The show has been produced as an amateur musical since, but it has never been produced professionally.

Not until Music Theatre Melbourne (MTM) produced a four-show concert series.

Paris is a rock opera. I’d never even imagined it as concert. I mean, an orchestra in the back, a choir behind them, and the singers down the front.

It was great, and the singers were superb.

Afterwards, they all sang a Jon English song as a tribute. Fantastic.

Fun stuff

More cat pictures, please

“And then Mrs Wiggles the cat, and Martha the girl, went up the ramp, and the spaceship took off.”

(If you haven’t recognised it, the title of this post is a play on Naomi Kritzer’s Cat Pictures Please, which won the 2016 Hugo and 2016 Locus Award for best short story, and was also a Nebula nominee for the same. You can read it on Clarkesworld magazine.)

Sometimes, all you want is something beautiful, but the news is depressing and everywhere you look, people are doing horrible things to each other. So, today, I present to you … cat (and dog) pictures.

Progress report

The word count is going down … slowly

Post author By Karen
Post date 2 July 2017
2 Comments on The word count is going down … slowly

Sometimes our word counts feel like Sisyphus. Cut the words, add the words, cut some more.

Winter is not just coming, it’s here

We had the first real frost of winter today. Enough to ice up the car. It’s only the start of July. It feels like it’ll be a cold winter.

I’m almost glad we’ll be inside with the heater on, editing.

Although, I confess, our heater is great when it’s working, but the thermostat is placed in the one part of the house where it’s always warm. The passage. Individual rooms can be quite cold, but it’s always warm and cozy in the passage.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in the passage.

When it gets really cold, we take the remote—which is also the thermostat—bring it into the room where we’re working, and watch the temperature drop.

It’s become a running joke in the house. “Oh, the thermostat’s bored again. Wants a different view. Where will we put it today?”

Editing

Sherylyn has finished the first round of cuts on Stars Uncharted. She got the story down from 128,000 words to 112,000. Now I’m looking at what she cut, and doing my take on (Editor) Anne’s notes.

Sometimes the word count goes up.

I’m trying not to.

As you can see, I’m always reluctant to cut words we’ve written. Sometimes I flat-out refuse. Most times, we sort cuts out away from the computer. Over dinner, or over coffee. Or tea. We did that last night.

There was a section I didn’t want to cut. Sherylyn did. We spent half of dinner talking about it, and realised by the end that the real issue was that I wanted this particular scene to show how tense everyone was getting, waiting for the coming battle. Sherylyn wanted it gone because all they were doing was talking about food. The food talk wasn’t doing anything about the tenseness of the situation.

Final solution. Rewrite the scene.

Goodreads giveaway

Our Goodreads giveaway was going well … until I went in and corrected a typo. After the competition had started. Silly me. Now it’s back waiting to be approved. On a 4 July weekend. So if you want to enter to win a copy of the whole series – it will come back, I promise. We’re just not sure when.