There has been a lot of bad news in my life lately (not for me personally, but for people I love and am close to -- serious health problems, impending operations, the sudden death of my uncle), so it was lovely to open my e-mail the other day and find out some really fantastic news for a change:

Ultraviolet has been nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award!

This is the YA division of the Nebula Awards, which are legendary in the SF&F genre, so even being considered for the award is a pretty big deal, let alone actually making the shortlist. I am thrilled and honoured.

Here's the full list of nominees as posted on the official SFWA site:

• Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)
• Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder & Stoughton)
• Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
• The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
• The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)
• Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Lab)

I have actually not yet read any of the other books on the list, but I've heard amazing things about all of them. I think I'm going to make it my business to read all the other nominated titles before the awards ceremony.

***

For my fellow writers in the quasi-local area, I have more good news -- I'm going to be presenting a workshop on revision in Waterloo, ON at the end of March: 

( Poster with details under cut... )

So if you need a pep talk before launching into your own revisions or would appreciate some general tips on how to go about it, this may be the seminar for you! Or just come and say hi and hang out with me and some other writers. Whatever. :)

***

And finally, a vid that has nothing to do with writing but I've been posting it everywhere since I discovered it last night, just because it is so INCREDIBLY CLEVER. And also broke my heart a little.

From the author's introduction at her journal: 

In the beginning, there was Sherlock Holmes. And Holmes brought forth the brilliant doctor House, embodied by the lovely Hugh Laurie. Who prior to that in Fortysomething played a slightly less brilliant doctor, Paul Slippery, who begat three sons, the eldest of whom was played by the equally-lovely-if-somewhat-peculiarly-named Benedict Cumberbatch. Who of course grew up to play Sherlock. ... And then my head exploded.

All I can say is, watch. Enjoy. Marvel at the parallels. Surely some of them had to be intentional?!

Chachic's Book Nook has been hosting a Queen's Thief Week, with guest posts by various book bloggers and authors who are fans of Megan Whalen Turner's writing -- including me! So today I got the chance to ramble on about the things I like most about the books, particularly her handling of religion:

How I fell in love with the Queen's Thief series (and why)

It's been a whole week of great posts, though, so worth checking the rest out as well...

Over on Verla Kay's Children's Writers and Illustrators Chat Board (affectionately known as the "Blue Boards"), a writer calling herself Tamilyn just posted this bit of advice, and I thought it both smart and useful:

"If I'm not writing, but only wishing I could write, then I am a Moper. I have too much pride to be a Moper, so I remind myself that writing takes work and that I'm not afraid of work. Then I work."

Which, in the face of the self-doubt and discouragement that afflict all authors from time to time -- whether at the start of a new manuscript when the page is an alarming blank, or in the middle of it when all the shine has worn off and the faults of the first draft seem to far outweigh its merits -- is a very good thing to remember.

The only thing I might add to that thought is that researching, making notes, outlining, and other not-actually-writing-the-narrative parts that are necessary to the creative process do not count as Moping. They can count as Moping if you are doing them endlessly and unnecessarily to avoid the Scary Writing Part, which is a trap I have fallen into on occasion in the past and may yet fall into again; but otherwise, they too count as Work, because the story will be better for them.

So I have done Work today, and that is good. *nods emphatically*

***

Also, I am reading a big fat biography of Nikola Tesla and I love his little crackpot soul SO MUCH. I'm also discovering that the Sanctuary version of Nikola, personality and attitude-wise at least, is really not so different from the historical one as I'd supposed -- and I'm only three chapters in.

And the recipients of the North American ULTRAVIOLET audiobook have been chosen. Thanks so much to all of you who entered the contest -- I wish I could have given you all a copy! But alas, 'tis not to be...

The winners were @NicsYABookHaven (via Twitter), Irrel (via Tumblr) and ferretvamp14 (via LiveJournal).*

Congratulations to the winners, and do not lose heart -- I hope to do a SWIFT giveaway when that book comes out in March...

--
* I also had two Facebook entries, which I included with the Tumblr entries since there were the fewest of those. But neither of them won. Sorry, lovely Facebook people!

I was going to write a review of the movie I saw last night (in 3D, which was rather irritating as I had to fit the 3D glasses over my regular glasses and the distance between the lenses and my eyes was a bit too far, thus rendering me slightly seasick throughout) but then I found that teenybuffalo had already written a thoughtful and lovely review with which I entirely agree, and which you can find here.

teenybuffalo also makes some smart points about Tintin's character, which is really not the blank slate that some claim -- he's just unrelentingly heroic and unflaggingly loyal, which is frequently mistaken for lack of personality by those who prefer morally ambiguous and/or tortured characters. However, I happen to quite like characters who are doggedly committed to doing the right thing if it kills them, so it never occurred to me to see Tintin as bland. Especially since he is, at times, quite wickedly clever and flat-out hilarious. ("...since I've just been bitten by this mad dog!")

One thing I also want to mention since I haven't seen it in any other reviews: I did not at any time feel that these characters fell into the Uncanny Valley, which was a pleasant surprise after the trailer (which did give me such worries). I was particularly watching the characters' eyes to decide if they looked "dead" or not, and I was thoroughly impressed by the light and expression in everyone's eyes. Also, the level of detail is phenomenal. You can see the fine hairs on Tintin's forearms and the texture of Haddock's skin. And Sakharine's hair is fab. :)

Upshot: I want more movies, please.

...and I found an entire box of Virgin and BBC New Adventures and Missing Adventures novels, including some that are fairly rare and look to be going for quite a price on eBay. So I figured, why not post 'em and see who's interested?

Condition-wise, they have been read, some of them multiple times (*cough* COLD FUSION *cough*), and have slightly cracked spines and wear -- the Virgin NA's and MA's in particular. Though on the other hand, my BBC NA's are in excellent condition with little or no wear.

Basically, I rule make me an offer. I'm going to ask you to cover postage to your country, and I reserve the right to accept the highest bid offered on a single title if multiple people show interest in a short period of time, but otherwise, feel free to suggest whatever price you think reasonable. (PayPal only, please.)

Comments are screened. I'll strike through titles as they are sold.

( What's on offer... )

Suggestions for anywhere I should cross-post this are welcomed, or feel free to link people to it.

To celebrate the North American release of Listening Library's unabridged Ultraviolet audiobook read by Justine Eyre, I'm giving away 3 copies to readers in the US and Canada!

If you're eligible and want to enter, just comment here, or tweet with the hashtag #UVGiveaway on Twitter. I'll choose the winners randomly in the New Year.

Including me, so help us:



Maggie Stiefvater says my "sinister" part in this video did her in. (But what became of her new straw hat, what should have come to me? Somebody pinched it. And what I say is, them as pinched it done her in. *nods emphatically*)

After all the nonsense going on over on LJ, I am thinking more and more than I might need to migrate to Dreamwidth. Except that if I'm going to keep a blog, I should probably do it on a less fandom-centric location like Blogger or WordPress... but I don't like the way either of those handle comments.

Sigh.

Warning: The linked article opens with a photograph once featured on the cover of Time magazine, which many people will find disturbing. That doesn't mean you shouldn't look at it (you should), but it does mean you should be prepared.

Ever since I first read this article I've been wanting to link to it, but couldn't do so conveniently until now. The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's a relevant excerpt:

I was teaching my senior [high school] Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies -- multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha. Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions.

But I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.”

Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

My brother (yes, it is my brother who wrote the article, and I couldn't be more proud of him) goes on to make a number of important points about the failure of "character-based" education programs in a school system (and a society) that insists moral judgments are relative. Particularly here:

How can we claim to be forming character in our students when we refuse to commit to any moral position ourselves? If character education is to have any substantive value, it ought also to specify with what or whom we should empathize (or conversely, not empathize) and to explain why or why not. That said, there are areas in which we have been quite directive. In anti-bullying campaigns, homosexual rights assemblies, multicultural fairs, social justice drives and women’s rights initiatives, we do not hesitate to preach, admonish or dictate because we feel so fervently committed to our ground. But it is clear that the message of women’s rights had been, in the case of Bibi Aisha, outshouted by the metamessage too often embedded in these programs -- that there are no real standards, no certain moral truths, and no final ground to stand on; and that anyone who thinks there is, is simply naïve or a bigot. In this case, even the strong rhetoric of women’s rights could not survive the acid bath of universal tolerance.

G.K. Chesterton famously stated that "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions," and certainly the kind of tolerance expressed by the high school students in my brother's Philosophy class falls into that category. But what else can we expect from young people when they (and we) are told over and over, in the classes they attend and the TV shows they watch and the books they read, that making moral judgments about other people's behaviour is the worst kind of arrogance and self-righteousness, and that any views they might have about right and wrong ought to be kept strictly to themselves for fear of offending someone?