Ryan posted this link. Apparently one of the people stuck in the Newark airport during the security-breach scare last week was a guitarist, and he rallied the strangers around him to sing “Hey Jude”. It’s a short video, but it’s hard to deny its feel-good potency. Partly that’s the power of the Beatles, but I think it’s also just people singing together, one person bringing out an instrument and trying to make the situation better.

I used to work at…what did I call it here? Oh yes, Queequeg’s Qoffee Qasa. One night I was filling in away from my home Queequeg’s, at one of the busiest QQs in the district. This store wasn’t as matey as my usual store, due to size, location, and existence of a drive-through. A few hours into my shift, we got a call from my home store. Did we have power? Why yes, we did. Because they didn’t. Okay, they’ll send customers there. Call waiting — the next furthest store. Did we have power?

The power continued to fail across town, as if it were herding all the customers toward us and the biggest Queequeg’s, the 24-hour behemoth to the West. Customers came in swells. The drive-through Qrewmember reported power had gone out across the street, in all the apartment complexes up the block. Our logo was shining out like a lighthouse of warmth and comfort, and they were coming. Then the phone rang again. The 24-hour store had lost power.

I don’t remember those hours in great detail. I was on the register, trying to serve the mob as quickly and kindly as possible. I know we had a line that filled the entire store, that we ran out of white chocolate sauce, that all the power outlets were taken and people were setting up camp in our lobby until their own power came back on. What I remember most clearly is the spirit that emerged. Usually, if there were five people in front of a customer in line, that customer would get anxious, check his watch, fret and bark a little when he finally got to the front. Now, with fifty people in line, everyone was friendly and understanding. They took normal chocolate instead of white chocolate. They bought the next person in line’s drink. They left epic tips. And when I tell this story with more brevity — say, in three sentences or less — this is the detail I always mention: someone brought a guitar and played quietly in the corner for hours. We turned off the stereo and worked as hard as we could. We made fussy employee drinks for the 24-hour store’s six chilly Qrewmembers, who had to sit on the sidewalk outside their store, waiting for light. We worked past closing time.

No one sang, that I remember, but that dude in the corner with his guitar made it official: that wasn’t just a Queequeg’s, that night. That was a community. Music does that, Beatles or no.

The Eyeliner Principle is simple. For decades, eyeliner on men has meant Evil in science fiction, adventure, and action movies and TV shows. (On women, eye makeup has little significance. I would say on women it means the character is awake, but we all know that Hollywomen sleep perfectly made up, and seeing them without eye makeup is about as common as seeing them in bras that don’t match their underwear.) Pirates of the Caribbean broke new ground using eyeliner for the merely morally ambivalent.

Now, you could probably come up with several cultural explanations for this: eye makeup is associated with women, so men with eye makeup are coded as effeminate and therefore transgressive, flawed. Or perhaps it’s playing on white audience’s xenophobia – certainly some eyelinered villains, like Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon, play on tropes of the dangerous, exotic Other. Maybe it’s a mish-mash of the two. Whatever the origins, it’s a pretty good bet when you see a guy in eyeliner in a mainstream piece of media, you shouldn’t trust him.

I bring this up because it isn’t just a handy way of tagging baddies like the fiancé in Titanic. It allows the omniscient viewing public to differentiate good male characters from their evil twins, clones, doppelgangers, possessed or de-souled counterparts. This incurs no plot damage, since the other characters always seem to be ignorant of the Eyeliner Principle (they seem to be slow to catch on about leather pants, too). This holds true everywhere from Young Hercules (Yes, I’ve watched that. Hercules isn’t the only one that was young once) to Star Trek. Which is really the reason I brought this up*. It’s important that you all know that Captain Kirk with eyeliner is evil. Seriously, if you ever see William Shatner wearing eyeliner, run…and thank me later.

*More on Evil Kirk coming soon!

When Leslie What came up to Portland to read in the CALYX reading a few months back, she proposed that we collaborate on a story for the themed anthology Is Anybody Out There?, edited by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern. I’d never co-written a story or written a story to fit a theme, but I am adventurous (when adventure doesn’t involve danger or leaving my house) so I said yes.

We just found out our story was accepted and will be published in the anthology! Is Anybody Out There? is due out in June, 2010 from Daw Books. Here are the details about the theme and the creation of the anthology from Marty Halpern.

Our story is called “Rare Earth” and one early reader calls it “PortlandTASTIC.” I’m really proud of our work, and excited to see it in bookstores next summer!

And yes, there was a fortune cookie for this too, but my camera is out of batteries.

I’m back home from a Thanksgiving filled with piemaking and nephew-chasing, and right back into the thick of things: Orycon 31 is, unlike other Orycons, happening Thanksgiving weekend. I’m a panelist as I was last year, so if you’re coming, you might want to know my schedule.

It’s surprising to think that Orycon 30 was only a year and a week ago. Some of the people I met there are now good friends! I’m a lot more confident now, walking into a con on the first day, and I have some idea of what to expect. It’s quite exciting to be able to go to a con and tell people my story is out right now!

And of course, I am keeping an eye out for the nice woman with long hair and bangs.

I always feel a bit self-conscious posting about my writing process. Not only do I believe fiction is a bit like law and sausage, but I’m also keenly aware the internet teems with unpublished novelists. I may be a special snowflake, but it’s positively blizzing in the intertubes. However, I’ve been encouraged to post about process, so here it goes again.

Some time ago, I made a daily wordcount goal. I stuck with it for three months before I missed a day. The day I missed was the day before my move, and then the day of my move, and the second day on the road, and, well, once you break a habit, it’s hard to glue it back together. My daily wordcount has been more of an unpredictable hare than a methodical tortoise of late. Over the summer, I started it up once more, and declared that, should I miss a day, I’d have to make it up plus penalty words the next day. That worked fine for a while, occasional deficits being repaid in massive fits of productivity. I filled a lot more pages in my journals. But eventually a hundred words lost here and there added up, especially with the steep interest applied by “penalty words.” The system was joyless and disheartening, and made me feel like a debtor to myself, rather than a creator. So I forgave my debt and scratched the system.

This tale I told, in brief, to some fellow writers at World Fantasy. (Specifically, over lunch at the delicious and reasonably priced Tandoori Oven in downtown San Jose.) “So I need to find a way to keep myself on the wordcount system without sucking the joy out of everything,” I said.

“What you need is positive reinforcement,” said Vylar Kaftan. This was one of the many times people have told me things that should have been perfectly obvious, but they break across my thick skull like glorious sunbeams, and I am filled with gratitude. I know I respond better to positive reinforcement than to negative reinforcement. I’m the kid that would stop putting her oboe together to practice when her mom yelled up the stairs “Why haven’t you played your oboe today?” but practiced ’til her lips lost sensation when her teacher said she was improving markedly. This is how I work. I should know this.

The brilliant Vylar suggested rewarding myself with $20 fun money for a week of accomplished daily wordcounts, but my new problem was that I can’t really make the reward monetary. And apart from money and things that require money, I couldn’t think of a reward. Making cookies for myself would be a reward (for me and for Ryan) but it would also mean I had to, you know, make a whole batch of cookies. Not so rewardly: another task to do.

And then my second wordcount angel flapped in. Ruth, Ryan’s mom, is a psych nurse. I told her I was thinking of just making myself Reward Coupons for successful weeks, and figuring out what they stood for later. “Honestly, that should work well,” she said. “You’d be surprised by the motivating power of gold star stickers.” I realized she’s right. Marking success is its own reward. After all, I want to write. I want to see the pages fill up and the stories finish. Why wouldn’t I feel richer when I see what I’ve accomplished?

I haven’t gone out to buy my packet of star stickers yet, but I have started counting again, as of the day Ruth and I talked, the 15th. And today marks the first completed week, each day over my wordcount goal, even when I spent hours revising (which has a tendency to generate something like -30 words per hour). I have more than a hypothetical gold star to show for it: I have a story more than halfway done. Many thanks to the wise women that turned my snoozing hare back into a tortoise.

The January 2010 Asimov’s Science Fiction with my story, “Conditional Love,” is available on newsstands and at bookstores! Many Barnes & Noble and Borders locations carry Asimov’s, and some independent bookstores — in either case, it’s good to call ahead if you haven’t seen previous issues there. The digital version does not appear to be available yet at Fictionwise, but I’ll update this post with a link when it’s available.

If you’re looking for this issue on shelves, here’s your quarry:

I’d like to keep this thread spoiler-free. If you’d like to discuss the story in depth, I can set up another thread for that, or you can hie you to the Asimov’s fora.

In case anyone is wondering, yes, it’s still incredibly exciting the second time around. The difference is that now it’s my third story out, and my second in Asimov’s, I can actually believe it without checking the table of contents every five minutes!

Thank you for your attention to this self-aggrandizing announcement.

Update, 11/24/09: The magazine is available digitally from the Sony eBook store. Have not found it on Fictionwise yet.

Update, 12/4/09: The magazine is now available digitally from Fictionwise. They sell all sorts of eReader formats and .pdf. Also, the magazine’s on sale right now!

Update, 12/17/09: Rich’s Cigar Store, an independent cigar and magazine shop in Downtown Portland, still has several copies of January’s Asimov’s, and they do ship. The February issue hits stands on the 22nd, so there are a few days left!

Spoiler: Still spoiling Terminator after more than a week.

As we all know — because surely those who have not watched Terminator have either rectified the oversight or abandoned my blog for the duration of Terminator Week — at the end of the original film, Sarah Connor has a dog. There is a certain thread of pro-dog propaganda in the Terminator movies which has always led me to believe James Cameron is a dog person. After all, he was stuck with that cat when he made Aliens: it was left over from Ridley Scott.

But perhaps something deeper is at play here. Let us consider the Terminator and the Alien.

5 by 5. Terminators don’t get along with dogs. Aliens don’t get along with cats. While they don’t necessarily eat them, it’s clear Aliens and cats have a natural antipathy, as manifested in copious hissing. Dogs, on the other hand, flip out when they detect a Terminator.

4. Terminators keep themselves clean. Aliens slobber. You don’t see any Aliens heading home to freshen up and check the mirror before continuing their killing sprees.

3. Terminators are lone predators. Aliens hunt in packs. Yup.

2. Terminators don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. Aliens are full of family feeling. Now here I’ll admit the cat/terminator parallel has its flaws — cats do appear to feel fear, tho’ pity and remorse are quite unlikely. But cats do tend to have a centered self-sufficiency more akin to the autonomous Terminator than the social xenomorph.

1. Terminators are manipulative. Aliens are straightforward. Either an Alien is going to growl and attack, or he’s going to sniff and attempt to snuggle you (really, Joss Whedon told me so.) There’s none of this “Oh, I’m just a cute cat, please further my mission goals.” Sure, currently they wiggle their way into our homes in order to eat food and sleep in the window, not open fire with chainguns, but you can give a Terminator a friendly mission too. Cats are infiltration units. We may love them, but let’s not let them have access to our launch codes. I don’t want to know how far this parallel goes.

I apologize for the delay mid-Terminator Week. I am at World Fantasy Convention and have not yet been able to wrest working wireless from my hotel (I type from my phone.) Rest assured two features are still planned for Terminator Week and sooner or later they will appear. I only wish I could send them back in time to prevent this pause!

Spoiler warning: Terminator Week may spoil the original Terminator, which you really should have seen anyway. Oh, and today there may be mild spoilers for the first trilogy of Dragonriders of Pern.Yeah, you heard me.

One of the reasons I love Terminator is that it’s not just a good action movie, it has a good sci-fi story. The dark vision of the future — the war machines grinding over a layer of human bones, children happily watching the fire they’ve made in an old TV shell — is compelling, but the actual plot is interesting, too.

I grew up loving time travel stories. I could probably blame Back to the Future for this, but let’s not let Star Trek off the hook either. In serious childhood conversations with my dad, I asked about how time travel worked (Hey, my dad knew everything. I probably thought he took a class in Time Travel at Caltech!). Based on the theories he outlined, I had to admit that a Back to the Future-style universe seemed unlikely, one where you could make changes, perceive them, correct them, et c. But it took a while for me to warm up to the Immutable Universe alternative.

Perhaps my first experience of the immutable timeline in fiction was in Anne McCaffrey’s original Dragonriders of Pern trilogy, where mysterious things have happened in the past, and the characters gradually realize they have the ability and the duty/destiny to go back in time and cause those events. It’s a tricky thing to write, but when it’s good it’s very good indeed.

And the original Terminator was one of those times. You can dispute me based on the movie you saw, but I’ve read the original script. In the original script, the reason they end up at the factory at the end is that Sarah wants to try to prevent the rise of Skynet by blowing up the company that will eventually build it. Reese thinks it isn’t possible to change the future, but she manages to drag him along. After the final fight, we see a manager of the company pocket a computer chip from the Terminator. It’s a perfect closed loop: Skynet is made possible by technology that came back from the future Skynet created. John Connor is made possible by the hot freedom fighter DNA he sent back from the future he saved.

Now, Terminator 2 used the reverse-engineering conceit, but one of the reasons my affection for it is tinged with regret (besides the fact the Kyle Reese dream sequence is a deleted scene! Oh, and that damn kid) is that it ruined the perfectly finished time-knot of the first movie. Sure, all the details in the original script didn’t make it into Terminator, but nothing in the movie contradicts them: closed loop. Suddenly in Terminator 2 you can change the future. The loop is open and frayed. Probably it made sense to a national consciousness emerging from the gloom of the Cold War, but I loved the austere fatality of the 1984 movie. It was an elegant little story, one that met the challenges of plotting in an immutable timeline admirably.

Gentle reader, twenty years ago today, the original Terminator came out. It launched a franchise, but we’re not here to talk about that. In the wake of three sequels and some sort of TV show, it’s easy for the first movie to be overlooked, and that’s a crying shame. It’s a compelling movie with good pacing and a pet iguana, and it pioneered James Cameron’s use of the special effect that would serve him so well in his early career: Michael Biehn.

But seriously, I love this movie, with all its 1980s fustiness and even its jerky stop-motion ending. I have ever since the time Mom was out of town and Dad and I roamed the video store aisles, looking for something suspenseful or violent. This week I’ll be sharing some reasons why. Very little mention will be made of T2, and none of T3, T4 (which I haven’t seen) or any TV shows (sorry, Summer Glau, I haven’t seen those either.) If you are allergic to time travel and fighting implacable robotic overlords, you’ve been warned: come back next week, when it’s safe.

Everyone else, come with me if you want to live.