Today my third novel, CodeSpell, is coming out from Penguin's Ace division. It's a great day for me. It's also a very hard one. In mid-March my grandmother, Phyllis Neese, died. She had a huge role in raising me and in my becoming a science fiction and fantasy author. She was my grandmother, she was my friend, and she was one of my biggest fans. Not having her here today to see the book hurts. She was born in 1924 and she was a grand old lady on many levels.

Howdy all,

I'm a relatively long time member of the community, and occasional diarist and commentator. I'm also a science fiction and fantasy writer and my second novel, Cybermancy, is out today from Penguin's Ace division. It's the sequel to WebMage, though it's intended to stand on its own.

Like any book, it has a story behind the story. In this case the decision not to quit. Which is, I think, quite relevant to today's political situation.

Crossposted from wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com with edits.

Free Science Fiction.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in the blogosphere, there is some gentle* debate among the professional community of fantasy and science fiction writers about the utility and advisibility of allowing some of one's work to appear online for free.

This has parallels to the blogger/mainstream media kerfuffle that made me think it might be of interest to folks here in the political part of the blogosphere. The threat that electronic media poses to the old style content models and to writers and publishers who can't learn to adapt in the fiction world is almost a perfect mirror for what's going on here on the political side.

We need to drive the following message home, and we need to do it quickly, while the election is fresh in everyone's mind:

Now that the election is over, let's talk about its implications. The country has seen complete Republican control of government and did not like the results.

Make no mistake, the policy disasters of the last six years are not primarily a function of incompetence, though that was certainly to be had in abundance. They are the result of the unfettered implementation of Republican policy. This Republican majority has controlled the policy agenda to an unheard of extent. They controlled all the levers of government. They did exactly what they set out to do and said that they would. And the results have been catastrophic.

The American people have now seen what happens when those who believe that government is the problem are placed in control of government, and they have resoundingly rejected the results. Not one Democratic incumbent at the national level was defeated. Not one. This is unprecedented in modern American history. But it should not come as a surprise. Not with the disastrous results of Republican public policy now clear for all to see. Hopefully it is a lesson we will not soon forget.

Yesterday over at big Orange Eric Massa had a diary  that introduced a powerful meme: They were warned and they did nothing.

Here's my letter to the editor on that theme:

They were warned and they did nothing

That is going to be the epitaph of the current Republican control of the national government. They were warned about Bin Laden in August of 2001 in the Presidential Daily Brief and they did nothing. They were warned about the disaster Iraq was likely to become without sufficient troops or planning and they did nothing. They were warned that Hurricane Katrina was likely to drown New Orleans and they did nothing. They were warned that their tax cuts for the rich would create record deficits and they did nothing. They were warned about one of their own, Rep. Mark Foley (R) Florida, and the dangers he presented to the House pages and they did nothing. They were warned that their isolation strategy for North Korea would lead to the nuclearization of the Korean peninsula and they did nothing. The evidence is overwhelming. They were warned and did nothing time and again. This is the Republican record. This is what happens when you hand control of government to people who believe government is the problem. It's time to vote them out.

This diary also available in Orange.

Howdy all,

I've been around close to a year now as an occasional diarist and regular commentator. As many of you know, I'm also a science fiction and fantasy writer with a first novel out today from Penguin's Ace division, and I thought that was worth a diary. So, read on if you're interested. The book, WebMage is a contemporary fantasy/cyberpunk hybrid available pretty much everywhere, and it's been getting some pretty great reviews:

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly. called it an "original and outstanding debut..." and said "McCullough handles his plot with unfailing invention, orchestrating a mixture of humor, philosophy and programming insights that give new meaning to terms as commonplace as "spell checker" and esoteric as "programming in hex." And even, "this is the kind of title that could inspire an army of rabid fans..."

I wanted to say thank you to women of bootrib for sharing your stories. This started as a comment in IndyLib's diary which quickly grew into a diary and I'd also like to send a many years later thank you to the friend who was there for her when she needed it, and to all those friends and family who helped these people who I care about through their own bits of hell. And thank you, Booman for providing this forum.

I haven't been commenting much in these diaries though I've been reading and crying and raging for so many friends hurt so deeply. You all have my love and respect and a nigh infinite number of electronic hugs. I'm so proud of you all for the courage it takes to tell these stories.

I promised a number of people that I'd write a World Fantasy Convention Report.

So, World Fantasy Convention (WFC) was held in Madison this year, which is practically on my doorstep. I still don't know if I have enough for a real diary since it wasn't that coherent an experience, but here goes. This was my third WFC, so I'll lay things out about WFCs in general then this one in specific.

Hello all,

Many of you know that I'm an F&SF writer and have expressed an interest in my work. By happy coincidence I just got a note on my latest short story publication.

It's humorous SF and it's in the latest issue of Cosmic SF. Unlike most of the venues that buy my stuff, Cosmic is an electronic magazine and currently available for free in PDF format via the above link. It's one my older stories, written in 1997, but I'm still quite fond of it.

For people who are interested in a completely different sort of SF, currently also free, a cycle of stories that I wrote as part of a middle school science curriculum is available in PDF format. These stories are primarily designed to convey specific ideas in physical science and scientific reasoning. I think they're fun, but they're not what you'd call representative of my wider body of work.

In order to get there, go to http://interactionste.net/ then click on the link http://cipskids.sdsu.edu/ and fill in the username and password visible on the bottom of that first page (http://interactionste.net/) then one more click on the link labeled "Chronicles of the Wandering Star" and there you are.

(Warning, BFD-big fat diary)

As some of you know I was recently asked to join an organization that's trying to work on progressive message coordination and formulation statewide in Wisconsin. I thought some of the same ideas that I'm working on over there might be useful to a broader community and so decided to post the initial plan on Booman, both to see if people are interested in using some of those ideas here and to get input on how to refine them.

After poking through their site and thinking a bit I decided that the best thing I could do was help set up a forum for collaboratively building progressive letters to the editor and aggregating talking points.

I'm currently calling it bullet points and I see it as a place where people could drop aggregated, research-based talking points on a specific topic like say the Plame investigation in the form of quotes and single sentence summaries. It's not quite posting letters and not quite framing, but somewhere in the land between, call it framed letter templates.

The following is long, but illustrative. Here are five of my letters to the editor published in the Dunn County News with the generalizable bullet points extracted for reuse in other sorts of letter. Each of the bullet points has a set of topics attached to the end with the idea that letters in these areas could use these examples as reinforcement. These were all built around Hurricane Katrina and the Federal response, but all have useful points for other arguments.

I'll discuss how the idea might play out here at Booman below the letters.

More on the flip

Dear Republican Neighbors,

I'm asking you for a favor. Please, please, please write to your leaders in Washington and ask them to take a break. Three weeks, a month, two.

Now, I'm not asking this because of patriotism or fellow feeling for my countrymen, though a break from Republican "leadership" would be good on both those counts. I'm asking because, quite frankly, I'd like a break from letter writing.

Tom Delay Indicted

On Wednesday the 28th, Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay was indicted for conspiracy involving money laundering and he stepped down. I can already hear the Republican apologist brigade warming up to declare this a partisan witch hunt. For the record, the prosecutor responsible for the DeLay indictment has prosecuted 11 Democratic and 4 Republican officials over the course of his career before DeLay. Prosecutor Ronnie Earle is and always has been a straight shooter, smoking out government corruption no mater where it hides.

More on the flip

Why "tone" is important:

Tone = Framing

Framing is in its essentials a way of choosing the right words, the "tone" to convey your point in a way that will convince people to agree with you.

One of the key things I want my writing students to come away from my class with is the importance of using their prose to tune the mood of the piece to match the message. This translates directly from fiction into politics or any other place where convincing the reader or listener is important. If I say something so rudely that I cause my allies to walk away, I've made a substantial mistake. If one looks at history one can see all too many examples of alliances broken by tone.

So, if you don't care about tone, you don't care about winning.

More on the flip

[From the diaries by susanhu. What a coherent, concise LTE.] This will be going to my local paper in response to someone who wants to know why so many of us are holding Bush to account over New Orleans. The fact that I even have to write this speaks volumes about the Kool-Aid. Arggh!

Bush and Katrina Accountability

Why have so many critics spoken out against Bush on Katrina rather than looking at local officials? Here are three reasons, each adequate in itself.

More on the flip: