Here’s a fun little piece from io9.com that I got to participate in. Charlie Jane Anders asks an assortment of science fiction authors “What novel, by someone else, do you wish you’d written?”

Someone out there in twitter-land has declared this the 2nd Annual #ReaderThanks Day, with the theme “What are you thankful for as a writer, a reader, or someone who works with books?”

So, each in 140 characters or less, here are my highlights:

#ReaderThanks For the husband who keeps a roof over my head while I take this 2nd shot @ writing. Married 30yrs in May. How awesome is that?

#ReaderThanks For the readers on FB, twitter, G+, my blog, via email, &via reviews who let me know they like what I’m doing. You’re awesome.

#ReaderThanks For readers who don’t bother w/FB, twitter,G+, etc but read my books anyway. You might never see this, but you’re awesome too!

#ReaderThanks For those readers who take a chance on a writer you’ve never heard of. Even if it doesn’t work out, I’m grateful you tried!

#ReaderThanks For those writers who share their experience, thoughts, and opinions on the writing business, so I’m not fumbling in the dark.

#ReaderThanks For those writers whose work still captures my imagination despite the stress & time-crunch of these modern days.

I could go on and on, but instead I’ll just say Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

And here is something of an explanation, and an antidote, to yesterday’s ugly. David Brin writes on “Obama on the importance of Curiosity,” an essay in which he discusses the politics of our time:

If you like being part of a civilization that celebrates science and intellect and progress… while willingly negotiating in openness and improving through the reciprocal criticism of faults… then you are behooved to lift your head, this season, and note the implications in politics.

A reassuring read! Also see his response to comments, here on G+

My fantasy novel Hepen the Watcher is about the violent take-down of a misogynistic society. It’s a humorous book in parts, with what I hope are lively and likable characters. But other sections are grim, as any such book must be.

From time to time, I’ve wondered if I went too far in my depiction of the society, one that is deliberately engineered from On High to despise women and treat them as mindless yet dangerous chattel, its customs strictly enforced despite the better feelings of many men.

But there is no instance of oppression in Hepen the Watcher that hasn’t actually existed in the world with the hearty approval of authoritarian figures. Indeed, most of the goings-on in the book still exist somewhere in the world, while here in the USA it seems that every few days yet another politician — always of the Republican party — steps forward, eager to create more and more laws aimed at regulating women’s sexuality and reproduction. This, from a party with an Orwellian knack for hiding behind words like “liberty” and “freedom,” and crying out against excessive government.

Yesterday, Sunday, both twitter and facebook seemed oddly quiet until midafternoon, when word of Missouri’s Republican Congressional Representative Todd Akin hit. His asinine and ignorant comments on the biology of rape ignited a storm of utterly justified outrage. I’m sure by now you’ve heard what he had to say. If not, you’ll find Mr. Akin’s comments quoted in this essay by Ilyse Hogue at The Nation: The Danger of Laughing at Todd Akin. As Ms. Hogue makes clear, the enemy is not just this one individual who has somehow persuaded the people of Missouri — my father’s home state — to put him in a position of power. The enemy is widespread:

In the multidimensional chess that shapes public opinion, the game is less about individual elections and more about a sustained effort to mainstream radical ideas. In the case of denying women control over their lives, there’s evidence that the bad guys may be winning the long-game.

There is no justification for compromising women’s freedom, equality, and self-determination. Yield no ground. Don’t let the bad guys win.

This week I’m at the Launchpad astronomy workshop, put on each summer by Mike Brotherton. It’s a week-long, wide-ranging crash course on current astronomy, created for writers, editors, and people in film and other media. The lectures, presented by Mike, Christian Ready, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Jim D. Verley are fascinating–and they’re keeping us busy, which is one reason I haven’t written much here. But there will be more to come!

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!

Last year I wrote a Father’s Day post about my own dad and I’ll let that stand for this year too. Find it here.

There have been several fascinating essays posted recently by female science fiction and fantasy writers reflecting on their experience as girls and the disadvantage they felt from an early age. There’s a nice summary of these posts along with further reflections at a blog called Culturally Disoriented (hat tip to Kate Elliott for the link). The post is titled “I Never Wanted To Be A Boy.”

And you know what? I never wanted to be a boy, either.

Reading these reflections, I have finally — I’m fifty-one years old — begun to realize that I must have grown up blithely ignorant of the true nature of the world. Apparently I was living in my own geek bubble because, growing up in the seventies, I don’t remember feeling put-down or denied because I was a girl. I’m thinking specifically of those treacherous years between the age of ten and the hallelujah-thank-you-God salvation that was college at seventeen. As you may surmise from that statement, this wasn’t a great time for me — you will never catch me reminiscing fondly about high school — but my issues had to do with geeky things, not with the fact of my gender.

Like most of us who are into things SF-nal, I grew up reading adventure books, science fiction and fantasy among them, and I suppose that the protagonists were most often male, but I can’t remember that it bothered me. I used my favorite stories as a jumping-off point for my own imagined adventures. It was nothing for me to put myself into the plot, creating a female character I could happily inhabit, who had as much agency as anyone.

My ability to deny being denied probably has a couple of sources. First, I had no brothers, so even if my parents had been inclined to deal in boy privilege, they had no chance to do it. As it was, I don’t think they were inclined.

Mine was an odd, geeky, rather unsociable family. We did lots of fun and amazing things, but for the most part we kept to ourselves, which may be a second reason I wasn’t conscious of boy privilege — I wasn’t in close touch with more “traditional” families. And of course this was the northshore of Oahu in the 1970s. Caucasian families who had moved there from California were not expected to be conventional.

Mostly though, I have to credit my parents for my blissful ignorance. As I passed through my preteen and teen years, my ambitions ranged from being a primatologist in Africa (thank you, Jane Goodall, my hero!), to attending the Air Force Academy, to being an aerospace engineer, to being a field biologist. (The writer-thing didn’t occur to me until I was almost out of college.) I think my poor mother never knew quite what to make of her geeky, intellectual, overachieving daughter, but she never discouraged me from my interests. My dad actively encouraged me in many things. He was the one who put me on the back of a motorcycle at a tender age, took me camping and fishing, and let me take scuba lessons when I was thirteen.

If I was denied things because I was a girl, I frankly didn’t notice.

I even remember asking my dad once if things would have been different if he’d had sons, and he denied it, assuring me it didn’t make any difference to him.

So I grew up an athlete, swimming, hiking, snorkeling, taking on surfing for a brief time, and even running track one year—but I wasn’t reacting against traditional “girl stuff,” because I liked that too. I experimented with makeup. I wore dresses and high heels to school. These were the days when “Aloha Friday” was still observed in Hawaii, and I wore a mu`u mu`u to school. I even went to “charm school.” Seriously. Me. (What? You can’t tell?) I felt kind of weird about it, but I didn’t mind it. I was hoping it would help turn me into a competent woman. Even then, I could see how that could be valuable. Being a girl was not a problem for me.

Being a geek — different story.

I lived on the outskirts of a small plantation town. There was nothing wrong with the people there. They were nice. I never got in fights and I wasn’t harassed, but like so many quirky teens, I never fit in either. And the school wasn’t exactly a challenging intellectual environment. A large portion of the students had English as a second language, and at the time we had the lowest, or nearly the lowest academic rating in the state.

So it wasn’t my girl-self that was denied in my teenage years, it was my geek-self. I was a social misfit and yes, I had issues, but if I’d been a skinny, introverted, intellectual boy trapped behind glasses, interested in science, with my nose always in a weird novel, with a family that basically kept to itself — I don’t think my youth would have felt a whole lot different, or more satisfying.

So, to all the young geeks and misfits of any gender who are trapped in schools where they don’t fit in, there really is a lot to look forward to. Keep working on it. Keep working on yourself. There’s no need to be conventional. Find the people you fit with. Write your own story.

Yesterday was one of those very-interesting-computer-days. First, I have to confess that I have a stable of computers, though none qualifies as impressive. There is the iMac desktop, about 6 1/2 years old, the 5-year-old PC laptop which I use for all my writing, the Netbook which is maybe two years old, and my newest little addition, my Droid Razr phone. Which is a long way of saying, no need to feel sorry for me. I’m not suffering or anything.

But anyway… my iMac still runs an old OS–whatever the OS was before SnowLeopard–and it’s reached the point where it doesn’t get software updates, Firefox no longer supports it, and Chrome won’t deal with it. So yesterday I clicked on a twitter link, to someone’s blog as I recall, and Safari crashed. Okay, well, this happens, and I really wanted to read that blog post, so I pasted the link into Firefox and crashed that browser too. Ever since then, both browsers refuse to work. Even worse, when I try to use the browsers the entire computer goes non-responsive and I have to restart by holding down the power button. Everything else on the computer works fine, including email and tweetdeck.

So while all this was going on I booted up the Netbook and discovered it needed twenty-six updates. So I let it update–only it failed to start after that. It did go through a repair/restore and booted up. It seems to work fine again, except there are error messages. And I need to try to do those updates again.

So today I talked to the Mac store, and I may well take my machine down there on Monday and have a pro clean it up and maybe upgrade it and try to get it to work for another year or two.

But if I seem extra confused or disorganized — over and above my usual level — for the next few days, please blame it on the computer woes!

(Crossposted at BookViewCafe.com)

Most writers start scribbling stories at a very young age. Not me. I waited until I had graduated from college before I started writing fiction – and what was my motivation? Having read something dreadful, I was struck by the certain knowledge that “Even I could write a better story than that.”

Fast-forward to December 2011. The writers of Book View Café, being well aware of the limitations of our online bookstore, were eagerly anticipating the launch of a brand new website that had been months in the making – only to discover at the eleventh hour that the new website had serious flaws. Correcting the issues would require extensive programming which we could ill afford, and no one felt confident that at the end of it all, we would get the website we wanted.

So we decided to start over.

I’m a fairly new member of BVC, having joined last summer, and hadn’t been involved in the website process, but at that point my occasionally cocky nature reasserted itself. I could build a better website than that, I thought, so I stepped up and volunteered my services.

This wasn’t quite the level of chutzpah I’d shown when I suddenly decided to be a writer. After all, I’d worked for nine years in website development, PHP programming, and database-driven websites. But the website committee was adamant that the new bookstore should run on a WordPress platform, and I knew very little about WordPress.

WordPress is a brand of software widely used to run blogs, including BVC’s blog and my personal blog here at Hahvi.net. On my own blog I’ve modified WordPress to suit my needs. So I thought I knew some things about WordPress – but as it turns out, I’d barely dipped my toes in the ocean of WordPress knowledge and possibilities…

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Four of us joined forces in the effort to come up with a new online bookstore: myself, Dave Trowbridge, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Pati Nagle. The first task was to find and test ecommerce software packages designed to work with WordPress. This went slowly, taking up scattered blocks of time through January. There are a lot of ecommerce packages out there, but not very many that can competently handle downloadable products like ebooks. We found a good one though: by early February we’d agreed to go ahead with a product called Cart66.

In most group situations, I’m the cautious one: hesitant, careful, expecting the worst. So it was amusing to be outdone in this regard by Dave, who insisted that we should develop the new site on a test server, so that there was no way we could blow up the live website.

I was concerned. My expecting-the-worst nature reasserted itself and I worried that when we moved the website back to the live server, all the file paths would break. Nevertheless, working on a test server was proper procedure, so by February 21 we had our test site set up and we were ready to go!

Except that the hosting company hadn’t got it quite right. The file permissions didn’t allow us to make necessary changes, so there was very little we could do.

By the next day though, that was fixed, and we were really ready to go!

Progress through February was slow. Book View Café operates on a consensus system. We don’t really have a “boss,” and there was no supreme project manager. This can be a bit frustrating: issues are discussed, people have really good ideas or they bring up valid concerns, but many times no decision gets made—and besides, all of us had our own lives going on and our own work to do. So it wasn’t until early March that I started seriously looking at out-of-the-box themes designed to work with Cart66. I tried out one or two—and I quickly reached the conclusion that none of them were going to work for us.

WordPress themes are designed to make life easy for people who don’t know PHP or HTML. But when you do know PHP and HTML, themes can feel very restricting. It’s hard to design a theme flexible enough to satisfy any user. As an example, many WordPress themes have a massive header image. The one on my blog is a good example. This works on my blog, but in my opinion, it doesn’t work for an online store because the real estate on the page should be showing off the products, not the pretty magazine-style design of the header image.

So I eventually junked the Cart66 themes. Instead, I took a very basic theme, modified it to what I thought it needed to be, and asked my cohorts, “What do you think about this?” I got a thumbs-up on it, and in the process I learned all about “child themes”—something I hadn’t known about before. Child themes are a means of modifying a theme without changing the parent theme. This is important, because it means you can continuously update the parent theme without overwriting your customizations.

This became the pattern for me. Some new feature would be needed so, being used to working on custom programs, I would charge in and start creating it. But because the code is complex and modular, I would have a very hard time with it until, after much Googling, I would stumble over a function or a plugin that would do very easily exactly what I needed. So for me, WordPress was consistently hard to work with until I found the right way of doing something, and then it became incredibly easy. It was like mastering magic spells, one after the other, and I slowly began to grasp the logic and to learn where to look for solutions.

So the basic theme was settled, and Vonda and Pati were working on the details of the CSS. Meanwhile, I was having a crisis of confidence. I had a new book out, but hardly anyone seemed to have noticed. I’d stopped exercising, and my mood was growing bleaker with each passing day. I stopped writing—but at least I had the BVC bookstore to work on. What a great excuse to avoid writing! I enjoy complex website work. It’s challenging, like writing a novel, but the outcome is far more certain, and I can do it no matter how bleak my mood, so I put in a lot of time on the new store—it’s fair to say I was obsessed with it—and knowing myself, I figured it was best to just finish it, so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, and then I could get back to writing.

So before long I was satisfied. The store wasn’t a technical marvel, but it was a lot better than what we’d had before.

We showed it to our members. I was a bit nonplussed that the majority of comments we received involved the categories we would use to sort out our books—categories are very flexible and easily adjusted and not very interesting. What about all the cool and challenging stuff we’d done? Like controlling what posts showed up on any particular page? And creating pages for each author, showing their bio and all their books? We had to figure all that stuff out, you know! It’s not like there was a manual; each step forward was a sweet little victory.

But the thing about programming is that when you do it right, the difficulty becomes invisible.

Well, whatever, I thought. I just want to get this project out of my brain-space. So let’s load up our books and get this store launched!

That’s when Dave started making trouble.

In projects other than writing, I tend to be a minimalist. If it works, it’s fine. Right?

Dave, on the other hand, has vision. He’d been looking into what WordPress could do, he was thinking in the long term, and he had ideas. Me? I didn’t want to hear them. The store did what it needed to do. Couldn’t we leave it at that? I’d put in my volunteer hours and I wanted to get back to writing. But while I’m occasionally cocky, I’m not so cocky as to think that my way is always the best way, and eventually I settled down and paid attention.

And it was good.

WordPress comes with a basic blogging package that will get you up and running very quickly. Depending on your purposes you can then start adding “plugins”—additional pieces of software used to achieve some goal. Cart66, our ecommerce software, is a plugin. We’d already used several other plugins for different purposes. Now Dave wanted to introduce plugins to create custom post types, custom taxonomies, and custom fields. (Did you just zone out on all that terminology?) I won’t bore you with an explanation of what all those things are. Let’s just say that in the end, Dave came up with some backend stuff that is incredibly useful for keeping the store organized and making it easier to update—definitely worth the extra hours of work, even if we did have to re-engineer some things.

There were some false paths along the way. We tried some things that didn’t work out, or that might have worked out if we had a lot more time to invest in them. At one point we had a backup of the test site made prior to installing a new and possibly risky plugin. After a day or so we decided the plugin wasn’t what we needed, so we had the hosting company restore the site from the backup—but the backup they used was a backup made after the new plugin had been installed—so after fighting over file permissions again, we had to rebuild the site by hand. But by April 9 we had agreed on a final structure to the store, and on April 12 we had the hosting company move it to the live site.

Of course that didn’t work out quite as hoped. My initial fears were partly realized and there were some broken file paths, but there was also a WordPress magic spell that fixed most of them, and in the end the result was better than my pessimistic self had expected.

Suddenly we were aiming for a May 1 launch date.

Vonda worked like mad to load chapter samples and book covers into the new store.

Dave, Pati, and Vonda spent a lot of time writing up the instructions that would be passed out to BVC members. We’re a cooperative, which means everyone helps, so members were expected to load their own books into the store. The instructions took a surprisingly long time and turned out to be a bit too complicated, so Dave very quickly re-wrote them, and suddenly we were on our way. BVC members started logging in and adding their books to the new store. It wasn’t perfect, but it was working . . . and then, without telling us, the hosting company decided to migrate our website to a new server, but the migration failed, and BookViewCafe.com vanished from the Internet.

This happened on Saturday evening the weekend before we were scheduled to launch the new store. BVC members who’d set aside a block of time to load their books were unable to do so … and time ticked past. Sunday afternoon rolled around, and the website reappeared, but it was much too late for a Monday launch, and besides, our email wasn’t working. With the new store, our customers receive an email receipt that includes instructions on downloading their purchased ebooks. There was no point in launching the store if we could not send our customers this email. So we waited for word from our hosting company on when things would be fixed.

And we waited.

And by Friday we decided we needed a new hosting company. This took a few days, but by May 11, the entire website had been moved. Debugging followed, while Vonda and Pati worked hard to get the rest of the ebooks into the store and clean everything up.

Then on the evening of Monday, May 14, the new store went quietly live. We haven’t made a hoopla over it yet. We wanted to go with a quiet opening, that would let us address any issues that might crop up. So far, things seem to be going very smoothly.

We hope you’ll visit our new store, look around, buy a book or two if you’re so inclined, and let us know what you think.

The celebrated “grand opening” is still to come.

I stumbled on this Atlantic essay via twitter**: Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group, written by Jonathan Rauch. By the end I was wiping away tears of laughter because so much of it is so true.

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate?

Yes, I’m an introvert. Not a big surprise there, I suspect. Most writers are. I think a lot of people who might otherwise make great writers fail at it because they can’t abide sitting alone for hours on end, day after day. We introverts get pretty twitchy if we don’t get to spend hours alone.

When I decided on a career switch back in 2000, I took up programming for two specific reasons: So I could make lots of money, and not have to talk to anyone. Of course I was wrong on both counts, but hey, it was a plan.

I’m not antisocial. I like going out for drinks, talking to people, hearing what they’re up to. One-on-one and one-on-two situations are great. But where I absolutely flounder is in large groups: cocktail mixers, conventions, that sort of thing.

Conventions! (Cue burst of scary music.) Genre conventions involve multitudes of people all of whom apparently know each other and admire each other, while I know none of them. Combine this with my congenital challenges with facial recognition and my woefully inadequate reading of well-known works in the field, and I become a deer in the headlights, not knowing which way to turn.

The ability of other people to navigate a group astounds me. I’ve been in groups of women in which two will begin talking intimately about a matter of mutual interest within two minutes of being in the same room. Naturally, I’ll assume these women already know each other, only to discover later that they’ve just met and were only making conversation. How do you do that? How do you know what to say that connects you immediately to a perfect stranger? It’s like studying an alien life form.

But I’ll keep up the study, because after all, amongst others is where I live. Just please be understanding if I need to flee back to my cave after a few hours out in the world.

**tweet originated by @julietgrames and retweeted by @innaj