I haven’t done one of these grab bags for a long while, so here’s what tickled my fancy this past week.

Firstly, I won second prize at agent Jenny Rappaport’s blog, celebrating the second anniversary of Lit Soup. The idea was to come up with an opening paragraph containing the following words: kerfuffle, whit, lenticular, wimple, and flabbergasted. You can read the three winning entries here. I gets books! And outside the United States, too! Thanks Ms Rappaport. Ah, a lovely start to the day.

Cracked magazine has the top 7 conspiracies that actually happened. It may be a reflection of my general knowledge / conspiracy theory-ness / political breadth / fund of questionable facts that I already know all of them, and assumed other people did too.

This YouTube offering on Hillary Clinton (beware, there’s lots of written profanity), titled “Hillary’s Downfall” is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.

And I wonder what Romancelandia is going to make of the latest research into male and female orgasms that’s currently published in Scientific American (via Boing Boing)? Essentially, neuroscientist Gert Holstege, said that (last sentence of page 3, if you’re reading the article): “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” Uh-huh. Climaxing robots. T’riffic.

Have a good weekend, all.

Shamelessly self-promotional, I know, but just wanted to let you know that Chapter Three of my free serialised novel, War Games, is up on my site.

Ahem, for anyone who’s interested …

THE STORY SO FAR: Senior Colonel Cheloi Sie is the cool, disciplined commander of Territory Nineteen, a strategic area of land that’s being held by the Perlim Empire in its bid to crush the rebels on its satellite planet of Menon IV. Her fiercest ally is her adjutant, Major Rumis Swonnessy, and her deadliest enemy is her second-in-command, Sub-Colonel Koul Grakal-Ski.

Two months after Cheloi’s driver/aide is killed in an apparent rebel attack, a replacement is found, but all it does is increase Cheloi’s suspicions, because her new driver is attractive and female … and Koul found her. Is she really who she says she is? Is she really who Koul says she is? Despite her reservations, Cheloi finds herself attracted to her aide. As is her adjutant, Rumis.

Read Chapter Three for a twist in the tale…

You remember how I described War Games as my “platypus” of fiction, because it seems to be neither one thing nor the other? Well, Good Morning Silicon Valley (of all places) had a lovely little piece on platypus research a week ago. I can’t improve on John Murrell’s always scintillating prose, so here it is, courtesy of GMSV:

The platypus (in this case named Glennie) has 18,500 genes, 82 percent of which it shares with the human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken. The rest form a record of evolution working to sort out the differences between reptiles and mammals some 160 million years ago. From the reptile side, it has genes for laying eggs and for making the snake venom it stores in its legs. On the mammalian side, it has genes for antibacterial proteins and lactation (though it didn’t get the code for nipples; Nature does love her little jokes). And instead of having just two chromosomes involved in sex determination (like our X and Y), it has 10, and the researchers aren’t sure what the heck to make of that. In scientific terms, said Richard Wilson, director of the genome center at Washington University in St. Louis, all of this makes it ‘a wacky organism.’ ‘There is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus,’ said Richard Gibbs, who directs the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. ‘You have got these reptilian repeat patterns and these more recently evolved milk genes and independent evolution of the venom. It all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is.’

For the originating articles go here (full article is not free) and here. If you’re wondering how a lactating animal can feed its young without nipples (and you are, aren’t you?), be aware that the milk oozes from patches of skin on the mother’s belly. No issues with “latching” there!

I’m proud to associate War Games with such a “wacky” specimen of Earth biology.

Yes, it’s that time again! The first of two scheduled monthly podcasts at Radio Free Bliss. And this time, it’s Carol Lynne at the mic.

I have to say, Carol was a bit of a surprise. She is so down-to-earth and such a reasonable person to talk to. She describes herself as “simple”, but I prefer “uncomplicated” or “unaffected”. Maybe this is my fault because, in my mind, I was expecting a much more flamboyant character but, regardless of my initial assumptions, her passion for what she writes, and her love for her home-state of Kansas, shine through.

Please do go over to the Radio Free Bliss site and have a listen to the interview. Thanks for sharing your time with me, Carol.

There’s a small resort nestled in the curve of a sandy bay. We’re talking sandy beaches, palm trees, and tropical weather. It has a supermarket, cinema, bowling alley, some fast-food joints, a golf course and, of course, the obligatory souvenir shop. It’s a bit exclusive, but — and, let’s face it, you normally never see this word in conjunction with “exclusive” — cheap. How cheap? From what I’ve read, US$42 (SG$58 / EUR28) will rent you a self-contained apartment for the night. We’re talking several bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, and air-conditioning. It’s not in Hawaii. In fact, it’s surprisingly close to the US mainland. Interested?

The name of the resort is the “Taliban Towers”. And it’s situated in the sun-drenched curve of Guantanamo Bay. The Guantanamo Bay concentration detention camp is part of the US Navy base at the southern end of the bay, so I suppose this little pearl of holiday merry-making must be further north. If you were one of the 3,000 construction workers involved, or one of the 1.5 million servicemen and servicewomen within the US military, you can travel to Taliban Towers for a holiday with your family.

The t-shirts you can buy at the souvenir shop have slogans such as:

• The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort
• Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun
• The proud protectors of freedom

You can get a mug with the slogan “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom”. Here’s a selection of the souvenirs:

I understand that service personnel are humans. I understand that they need time to unwind. But I really wonder at the mentality that enables its soldiers to, not only frolic with their families, near this:

but then also emphasises it by allowing the production of tacky souvenirs with slogans of questionable taste. And by “mentality”, I’m not talking about the soldiers’ mentality, but the mentality of the senior military personnel who made the decision to allow such a thing in the first place.

The full article on this “resort” is here.

As a civilian, I am repulsed by everything Guantanamo Bay represents, and the thought that there may be families swimming in the surf, while people — against whom no charges have been laid for 6 years — are force-fed food through unlubricated and dirty plastic pipes shoved down their throats, a couple of hundred metres away, is enough to make me ill.

As someone with passing familiarity with the military, I am also repulsed by the kind of screwing-over being inflicted on the soldiers, and their families. The handling of prisoners is a very serious matter. There are rules and processes governing this kind of thing. You do not trivialise it (especially if you’re supposedly dealing with “the worst of the worst”) by producing ghoulish dust-collectors for some young child, or non-combat adult, to take home.

Unless…. Unless you don’t agree that War is a nasty business. Unless you want to demean a particular section of the human population and present them as sub-human, and thus not worthy of consideration. If you wanted to, say, start brainwashing the next generation about the superiority of your own country and citizens over everyone else in the world, then I think “Taliban Towers” is an excellent way to do it.

Personally, I don’t think the genius who okayed this decision was really that smart. I can easily imagine a number of senior officers sitting around, saying, “Hey, we could have a place for the soldiers to relax. Y’know, bring their families. Enjoy a little downtime.” And someone else suggesting flippantly, “We can have souvenirs.” The entire room erupts in laughter. “Freakin’ souvenirs! Why not?” And then the next two hours are spent brainstorming the most atrocious strings of words you can put on little dolphins, keychains and t-shirts.

The problem is, what may have started as a joke can easily turn into psychological manipulation. How do you explain the bright and shiny holiday items next to the barbed wire and shuffling, brown-skinned men? Hell, there is even barbed wire on the holiday items themselves, so it’s not like you can run away from it.

What other inference is there but that the brown-skinned men are inferior to you — cowed and beaten. They don’t “deserve” better treatment. They don’t “deserve” any vacation time at the bowling alley or catching “Iron Man” at the cinema. None of these men — lack of charges withstanding — “deserve” to be free. These spouses and children will not only be taking back photos from their holidays at Guantanamo Bay, but also a moral dilemma that they will have to rationalise one way or another. As a student of history, I know which way these rationalisations tend to sort out. And it’s Not Good.

For the kind of holiday shots you can expect from the resort, go here (ironically courtesy of a United States Army officer). And here’s the accompanying article.

I had my name day recently. As a family, we’re always on the lookout for celebratory days of one sort or another. It became a bit of a running joke at work, where my co-workers would always ask what we were celebrating that week. My reasoning was that, for the price of one $2,000 plasma TV, I could afford to buy cakes and have a celebration at home or picnic outside once every two weeks for a year and a half.

So, anyway, when the time came to decide how the family should celebrate my name day, I didn’t hesitate. In this part of the world, there is no substitute. High tea.

I adore high teas, and have missed them dreadfully as I’ve travelled away from south-east Asia. It’s an Asian twist on the English afternoon tea, with an entire buffet laid out across a range of cuisines, from savoury to sweet. The Rose Veranda is a restaurant at The Shangri-La Hotel that holds a daily high tea, with two afternoon sittings on weekends. The ambience is lovely, with comfortable armchairs, low tables and full-length glass windows looking out on, er, well, other buildings mostly. This is high-density Singapore after all.

Foodwise, there were curries (mutton, vegetable, Thai fish, chicken), briyani rice, a variety of sandwiches, curry laksa with noodles, Thai salads, western salads, Indonesian stuffed hors d’oeuvres, fresh spring rolls, sushi and salmon sashimi, fresh bread rolls, a variety of cheeses, baked potatoes, crab cakes, quiche, and a small carvery station. For dessert, we could have strawberries and marshmallows in a chocolate fondue, handmade chocolates, cookies, a couple of cheesecakes, chocolate truffle cake, bread & butter pudding with custard, filled crepes, tiramisu, scones, vodka jellies with redcurrants, and fruit tarts, as well as a couple of other choices I forget.

The idea is that you pays your money and takes your choice. For 6 hours (weekdays) / 3 hours (weekends) you fit in as much to’ing and fro’ing as you can, accompanied by a teapot of one of 100 types of tea available. It is absolutely decadent and entirely irresistible. It’s also not cheap. We got barely any change from SG$200 (US$150 / EUR95), but I figured it this way. If J and I had decided to treat ourselves to a top-flight dinner for two somewhere, we wouldn’t have been able to get away without dropping around SG$150. For only $50 more, we had a family event for three adults and two children that the kids (and J’s mum) really loved and will remember.

Because I’m such a nitpicker, I have to admit that the High Tea wasn’t perfect. The service slacked off after the first hour. (We couldn’t get a refill of our water glasses for love nor money. Later on, I read on a board that the Shangri-La was supposed to offer free-flow tea, but that wasn’t evident either.) The delicious looking chicken from the carvery was seasoned heavily with five spice powder which, while loved by Chinese, tasted more like medicine to all of us at the table. A couple of chicken choices would have gone down better. Some of the food took too long to be replenished. When the delectable Brie and smooth blue-vein was finished from the cheese platter, they were replaced by a substandard cheddar type. The quiche was tasteless. The bloodline was left on the salmon sashimi, instead of being trimmed away. The price of ‘extras’ was breathtakingly extortionate. (SG$11 for an orange juice?!!) And the idea of having hot dessert plates to hold things like chilled cheesecake and handmade chocolates was pretty stupid.

We left before the end of the session and took a walk around the hotel before waddling home. The hotel itself is very opulent and the food there is good (this is my second visit to two different restaurants at the Shangri-La), but there are unmistakable signs of tiredness in the frayed furniture, and the clumsy way many fittings have been installed. Away from the main, and impressive, foyer, the air is musty, indicating carpets that are well past their use-by date.

High Tea at the Rose Veranda, Shangri-La Hotel Singapore: 7 out of 10.

One thing I try to do when writing a story is to pitch the technology right. The Fusion has things that the Republic, for example, wouldn’t have. Travel in the Fusion is always FTL (Faster Than Light) and always safe. It’s something the inhabitants take for granted. The Republic, on the other hand, has to rely on a network of ‘creases’ in another dimension they call ‘hyperspace’, and try to deal with the risks and anomalies that arise from using a medium they don’t fully understand.

The Fusion has such wonderful constructs as working dysons and semi-dysons, whereas the Republic can barely get by with limited terraforming and some anarchic asteroid mining communities living in low-grav. What are these societies’ timelines? On reflection, I think of the Republic as being about 400 years into the future, and the Fusion around 900 years (although the Fusion doesn’t even know Earth exists, so they might be very advanced yet contemporaneous). With such future societies, the issue then becomes making the technology advanced yet accessible.

People are fond of saying that if you plunked a person from Victorian England into the world of today, s/he wouldn’t recognise very much of it. They also quote Moore’s Law that posits, by corollary, a phenomenal increase, almost doubling, in the speed and sophistication of digital electronic devices every few years. While the law itself has proven to be true so far, I believe there’s a basic flaw in the surrounding thinking. Technology itself may have advanced, but the wholesale application of technology has not.

What I’m trying to say is, there is still no universal level of technological sophistication in the world. For every Silicon Valley, for example, there are dozens of unpowered villages, where the inhabitants live their lives in much the same way as their forebears did. Furthermore, all it takes to reduce an advanced edifice like the Valley to the level of more primitive villages is just one natural and capricious disaster. Think of any place around the world after a natural disaster, whether earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, or winter storms. Regardless of which country they took place in, the level of the subsequent technology is pretty well equivalent across locations (i.e. almost nil).

We are not as advanced as we like to think, and to say otherwise is, I feel, hubris on the part of those of us who have been exposed, and inured, to much of modern Western civilisation. On balance, if we average out every person’s experience of technology on Earth, I think we’d find that we are much less advanced than we’d hoped.

So what does this have to do with writing a sci-fi romance set four centuries in the future? Well, I try to use familiar terms so the reader can relate to what I’m trying to describe, and I do it for three reasons:

(1) I don’t want unfamiliar words to interfere with the plot,

(2) I want to establish some commonality between the present and my setting to evoke more reader empathy,

and, most importantly for the purposes of this blog,

(3) I really don’t think our applied technologies will advance at a cracking pace.

In a blog I wrote before the end of the year, I mentioned fleetingly that sf writers even 60 years ago were predicting such things as portable nuclear reactors, disposable paper clothing, meals in a pill, and fully functioning artificially intelligent robots to help us with our tedious chores. Also, by now, we were supposed to have mostly self-sufficient human bases on the moon and Mars, and beneath our oceans. It’s a measure of how much of a disconnect there is between technological advances and the human condition (sociology/psychology/politics) that we’re nowhere near there yet, despite our obvious technical and intellectual prowess. And it is that, I feel, that will keep the level of technology for humans rising only slowly and steadily across the world — and I don’t rule out some astounding stumbles — rather than in fantastical leaps and bounds.

In essence, our nature is our own worst enemy.

If you’ve been following my small career, you would have noticed that I have a novel written called War Games. It’s a Space Opera Romance. I use that term explicitly because, although space opera is intrinsically romantic, that romance has more to do with the setting and scope of the literary landscape. Here, in War Games, the romantic relationship between two of the main characters is also an integral part of the plot, hence the addition of “Romance” as an additional identifier. I finished the novel late last year. And I’ve decided to serialise it (a chapter a week) for free on my website. Why? Well, for a number of reasons:

• I liked it and didn’t want it to get lost within one small category. That is, I didn’t want people to say dismissively of it, “Oh, it’s a lesbian story”, as if that’s somehow demeaning or not worthy of any wider consideration.

• From people’s reactions (m/m hawt, f/f meh), I wasn’t about to get much money from it anyway, so I thought I might as well try to spread the cheer rather than limit it.

• I couldn’t think of a generalist publisher to submit it to. (In my opinion, there’s enough space opera in there to not fit comfortably in the romance genre, and enough romance in there to not fit comfortably in the space opera genre. But, hey, that’s only my opinion.)

• I wanted to increase my profile through giving away fiction, in the hope that people would like my writing and help me on my journey to become a professional stay-at-home (as in, no Dreaded Day Job) author.

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The genesis for War Games came from two sources. Firstly, it came from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, with Sarah’s article on lesbian romance back in February of 2007. And secondly, it came from a discussion of Polish TV with my husband, J. Combine that with my love of science-fiction and you have a Space Opera Romance with a lesbian bias. No more and no less.The novel is full-sized; that is, it’s approximately 81,000 words, and has been through several self-edits. If you’re interested in reading it, you can go here to get the prologue and first chapter. ::Deep breath:: Happy reading!

I suppose this is a roundabout way to promote the latest Radio Free Bliss podcast, but I thought the subject was rather interesting, so decided to mention it specifically.

A new sub-genre. Ecofiction, or ecological fiction. According to Lee Barwood (who I interview) it’s suspense or romantic suspense with an environmental twist. It can be from either side of the camp, the environment or corporate interests, but should really go beyond the standard cardboard villains. That is, you should understand the motivations of both sides of the argument while reading the book.

You can find further resources on ecofiction here and here.

Lee Barwood is the writing name of Marlene Satter, who is also a terribly interesting person in her own right. Both Marlene and Lee are very passionate about everything they’re involved with, from animals to finance to music. I ran out of time before I ran out of questions. So, if you’re interested in hearing what a freelance editor looks at when she reads your manuscript, how music could indeed have been the first human language, and more details on ecofiction, please head over to Radio Free Bliss for a listen. I think you’ll really be entertained.

I read in The Register last month that a week-long clerical seminar with the goal of increasing confessional throughput was held at the Vatican in Rome. The result is that many sins that were previously defined as “venial” (a temporary loss of grace that “does not result in a complete separation from God and eternal damnation in Hell” — source, Wikipedia) have now been promoted to “mortal” (your ass is toast ad infinitum — source, Kaz Augustin).

Among the new mortal sins are drug trafficking, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation. Now, this is a fairly nebulous list, and I sincerely hope that the Vatican is applying its usual exactitude to this problem so we may all breathe easier. After all, these were the guys who really figured out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (infinite, but they’ll all need a good foot massage afterwards).

Using generally known principles, if you litter because you’re a forgetful slobasaurus, then that’s a venial sin. Three Hail Marys and we’re sweet. However, if you look around for a bin, can’t find one, don’t want to put your candy wrapper in your pocket/handbag because it’s sticky, and end up flicking it onto the ground when you think nobody’s looking, then that’s mortal, baby … and don’t let the door hit your backside as you descend into the eternal fires of the damned.

Likewise, genetic manipulation. Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to take over the world and turn all humans into mindless automata who’ll obey your every whim, or find a cure to some rare congenital disease. God hates you.

The problem with increasing the moral weight of particular sins is that the minute you upgrade your list, the number of ambiguous situations start multiplying like rabbits in a warm, secure warren. If pollution is a mortal sin, is using a 5-star energy-saver washing machine only a venial sin? What about smoking a cigarette? Are we talking lung cancer and Hades here? Seems a bit harsh, even for a non-smoker like me. What about priests who drink beer (and God knows (no pun intended) there are a few of them around)? Will they go straight to hell because alcohol is a drug, never mind if it’s more socially acceptable than, say, marijuana? Or do they get a special Get Out of Hell card because they’re on the ecclesiastical payroll?

I love lists like this. They are bit like the blog on inflation I penned some months ago. (That is, inflation is only 3% if you don’t own or drive a car, buy insurance, seek medical care, have kids still in education, pay rent, pay rates, own a property or rent a property, use electricity, town water, etc.) If drugs, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation are now mortal sins, then you’re okay, as long as you don’t drink tea, coffee, herbal tea or alcohol; don’t breed animals or plants, not even for that local Terrific Tomato Festival; don’t own a single electricity-inefficient appliance; don’t drive anything bigger than a scooter; don’t buy from supermarkets or businesses whose owners are rich; don’t smoke cigarettes; don’t go for relaxing drives in the countryside; and, to be honest, don’t breathe because, really, you’re nothing more than a carbon dioxide emitter when all’s said and done.

Of course there’s an easy out to all this and it’s actually provided by the Vatican itself. One of the differences between a venial and mortal sin is the amount of deliberate intent there is in your soul. So, if you deliberately cultivate ignorance of everything in life (and, say, forget you ever read this blog), you’re well on the way of needing only a couple of rosaries to get off scot-free. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, it’s just as well that our souls are incorporeal or it’ll start to get crowded Down There real quick.

DISCLAIMER: This blog is no substitute for authentic theological advice. In situations of ambiguity, please consult your local cleric. Alternatively, you could also try thinking.

And my good friend, Maria, picks up the gauntlet. Welcome to the Land of Righteous Indignation, M! It was getting pretty lonely here for a while.