Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

In Richmond Next Weekend? Come Out to RavenCon

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The RavenCon science fiction and fantasy convention is next weekend — 25-7 April — in Richmond, Virginia.

If you’re in Richmond, stop on by the DoubleTree by Hilton, Richmond-Midlothian, and check out what’s happening. The Guest of Honor will be Elizabeth Bear, recipient of two Hugo Awards, the John W. Cambell Award for Best New Writer (2005), a Sturgeon Award, a Locus Award, an Asimov’s Reader’s Choice award, a Spectrum Award, and an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award.

I’ll be on several panels throughout the weekend, plus one intensive workshop. Here’s the rundown of what I’ll be doing, starting on Friday the 26th:

  • 5 pm: Signing
  • 8 pm: Panel on 3D-printing (I’m moderating)

On Saturday:

  • 9 am: Panel on Real-life Star Trek inventions
  • 10 am: Panel on “Exomusicology,” about music in alien cultures (I’m moderating this one, too)
  • 4-6 pm: Baen Books Traveling Road Show
  • 10 p.m. until midnight: Workshop, After the First Draft: The Next Step for the Aspiring Writer

And then on Sunday:

  • 9 am: Praise & Worship Hour
  • 10 am: Reading

For more information, take a look at the RavenCon web site. Come on out and we’ll have some fun!

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On My Last Day at NCSU-IES, Here’s a Song

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Today is my last day on the Industrial Extension Service staff, and it seemed appropriate to mark the day with the first “workplace ‘filk'” I wrote there, simply entitled “The I-E-S Song.”

I started in January 2008 as primarily the speechwriter for the Executive Director, and I filled my time between speeches with other — primarily marketing-related — writing and editing assignments. But along the way I had the opportunity to do a few unique and interesting things:

  • Planned the logistics for the statewide “Manufacturing Makes It Real” Tour in 2010 (which became the still-extant MMIR Network)
  • Got some of the “Made in North Carolina” products we collected into the NC Museum of History
  • Helped start the short-lived NC Aerospace Initiative in 2009-10
  • Produced the “Manufacturing Minute” series of videos in 2012-13

And along the way I wrote a few songs: “The I-E-S Song” in 2008; “The Economic Recovery Blues” and “Oh, How I Hate Groupwise” in 2009; “The 1B4NC Song,” “We Know Manufacturing Makes It Real” in 2010; “If You Want to Get Better” and “The Old, Old Days of Industry” in 2011; and “Dirty, Sexy Manufacturing” in 2012.

Note that none of my work-related songs made it onto my album, Truths and Lies and Make-Believe. The audience for my music is already pretty small, but the audience for workplace songs in particular is tiny.

Anyway, I wrote a little rhyme to mark my departure, too.

It’s been fun
I had a good run
And now I’m done.

Fare thee (or, fare me) well.

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Christians: Roses, Daisies, Dandelions, …?

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Some thoughts about metaphors that can describe the church — not the building, but the body of believers — and our relation to the world.

Best Overall Division Wildflower Program - 1st Place - Div 4
(Image by NCDOTcommunications, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

Is the church like a rose garden? Have each of us as individual believers been cultivated for special color or shape or fragrance, for what our beauty — despite our thorns — can offer to brighten an otherwise drab world? Do those we encounter find us winsome, and come to appreciate what we offer?

Or are we daisies or other wildflowers, growing freely and with less restraint? Less fragrant than roses, but more plentiful, and pretty rather than beautiful? Do we bring fleeting smiles to those we encounter, but leave them unsatisfied?

Or are we dandelions? Weeds, sprouting and taking root wherever? With less to offer in terms of beauty, but still with some aesthetic value? Do we annoy those who encounter us, and make them struggle to be rid of us?

It seems we may present ourselves as one or the other at different times of our lives. And the difference may be less in our appearance than in how we respond to those who encounter us.

As roses, we can be difficult to handle, delicate and easily bruised, and our thorns can injure the unwary and keep them at a distance. As daisies, we would certainly be easier to grasp, and tougher, but we may not be suited to the innocent who would pull our petals off one by one — “He loves me, He loves me not” — heedless of its effect on us. As dandelions, we can be deep-rooted but surprising fragile at the head, especially when we’ve gone to seed … at which point a breath or a breeze can blow us apart and send those seeds flying.

And the seed is important.

You can choose your own metaphor, of course, but as I think about how important the seed is maybe in the end it would be better to be like sunflowers: reaching ever upward, sturdy and strong and bright, producing seeds of truth and love that nourish those with a taste for them.

___

P.S. Thank-you to my newsletter readers who sent comments on the early draft of this post! If you’d like to receive my every-so-often newsletter, sign up with the “subscribe” button on my web site. GR

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Nominate the Baen Free Radio Hour!

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As the “Best Related Work” for the Hugo Awards, that is.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a Contributing Editor for Baen Books and have been on the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast. But so what? It’s related to science fiction and fantasy, so go ahead and nominate it!)

You have other choices, too, of course, if you’re nominating for the Hugos — but the good thing is that you can nominate more than one thing!

For instance, you could nominate the Monster Hunter International Employee’s Handbook and Role-Playing Game. That was a very successful Kickstarter project run by Steven Long. And if you hew to a rather expansive definition of “related work,” you could always nominate a certain science-fiction-and-fantasy-related album.

But whatever you do, do it soon! The nomination deadline is coming up fast.

___

P.S. This post was all about the “Best Related Work” category, but I’ll just add that I also have a novelette you could nominate if you have an empty slot in that category. “What is a Warrior Without His Wounds?” was in the July 2013 issue of Asimov’s. I can even e-mail you a copy if you like. GWR

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Ever Heard of the Logan Awards?

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Do you like comedy music? Would you like to nominate a funny song for an award?

Logan Award Robot Cat Statuette
(The “Robot Cat” statuette, designed by artist Jamie Noguchi in honor of Logan Whitehurst’s song “Robot Cat.”)

The Logan White­hurst Memo­r­ial Awards for Excel­lence in Com­edy Music are pre­sented by The Funny Music Project. The Awards will be selected by a jury and presented at “FuMPFest 2014” in Chicago, hosted by Dr. Demento.

The FuMP has presented the Logan Awards since 2011 for

  • Out­stand­ing Orig­i­nal Com­edy Song
  • Out­stand­ing Par­ody Song
  • Out­stand­ing Com­edy Music Video

If you want to nominate a song released in 2013 for the 4th Annual Logan Awards, use this handy nomination form. You can also see what songs have already been nominated.

The web site doesn’t say when the nominations will close, so nominate while you can — early and often!

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Frank Zappa, “Weird Al” Yankovich, and Me

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Now THERE’S a headline I never thought I’d write, and I get to do it courtesy of Dr. Demento!

Weird Al and Dr. Demento
(“Weird Al” Yankovich and Dr. Demento. Photo by Genevieve, from Flickr under Creative Commons.)

I felt as if I was levitating when I learned that two — not one, but TWO — of my songs had been played on The Dr. Demento Show since the beginning of the year. (Sure, since then other things have brought me down, but when I think about this it still puts a smile on my face.)

“Another Romulan Ale” seems like an appropriate song for New Year’s, and Dr. Demento played it on his first show of 2014. And, sure enough, Frank Zappa and “Weird Al” Yankovich were on the playlist — along with Cheech & Chong and Bob Dylan. Quite a group!

Then on the 1st of March the Dr. did a show focusing on music related to science fiction:

This week Dr Demento presents The History of Science Fiction in Song…from “Stardrek” and “Banned from Argo” to “Tauntauns to Glory” in 80 minutes…plus “We Won’t Give ‘Em Sex,” “Winestoned Plowboy,” “There’s a Baby On the Plane”, more.

Folks familiar with science fiction and fantasy music (a.k.a. “filk”) know that “Banned from Argo” is arguably the most famous filk song of all time. So it’s one thing for Dr. Demento to decide to play “Tauntauns to Glory,” but for him to list it in the show description in the same breath as “Banned from Argo” … that took this whole experience over the line into surrealism, even before I realized I was on the playlist again with “Weird Al,” this time plus Devo, Nat “King” Cole, Frank Hayes, and Leslie Fish.

So, yeah, good times!

If you like “Romulan Ale” or “Tauntauns” or some of the other songs from Truths and Lies and Make-Believe, and think Dr. Demento should play more of them, he has a song request form you can fill out. That would be cool, or I’d be much obliged if you would post a review on Amazon or iTunes or CD Baby or elsewhere. That would be awesome!

Meanwhile, as the Dr. would say, stay “deeeee-mented”!

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Want Some Insight Into Our Publishing Process?

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Then we have a podcast for you!

Two weeks ago at Mysticon, Baen Books editors Tony Daniel and Laura Haywood-Cory joined Baen author Tom Kratman and me — the slimy contractor “Slushmaster General” — for an episode of the Baen Free Radio Hour entitled “A Roundtable on Making the Book.” We talked a little about the creative process, a little about the submissions-and-selection process, and a little about how a novel goes from submitted manuscript to finished book.

Here’s a direct link to the podcast episode, which also includes part 2 of the serialization of “Murder on the Hoch-flieger Ost,” by Forever Engine author Frank Chadwick.

Hope you enjoy it! And let me know if you have any questions.

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A Quick (Late) Report-Out on MystiCon

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Wow, it’s already been more than a week since MystiCon! I can’t keep track of the days these days.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I trekked northwest to Roanoke, Virginia, for MystiCon, which in just a few years has become one of the hottest small convention tickets in the Southeast. The 2013 convention sold out during the event, and the 2014 convention sold out before it even started!

All of my panels went well. Author Guest of Honor Todd McCaffrey led a half-dozen of us through a humorous “Delphic Oracle” exercise in which we had to formulate answers to the audience’s questions but each of us could only say one word at a time. The “Science of Star Trek” panel I moderated covered a vast array of real and imaginary technology, though I was disappointed that Media Guest of Honor John De Lancie had not been scheduled to join us.

My reading was enjoyable for me, and presumably for my audience since they did not run screaming into the hallways. I mixed a few songs with the opening of my story “Lightweaver in Shadow,” which will appear in a Baen Books anthology this November. The Baen Traveling Road Show went as expected, though I wished it would have had a look at the cover art for that anthology.

The Baen Barflies organized a little soiree in the ConSuite on Saturday night, and Speaker-to-Lab-Animals invited me to bring my guitar — so I debuted my new song, “The Books We Call Baen” (sung to the tune of “The Hero of Canton”). It went over pretty well, and I followed up with a couple other filk songs including “The Monster Hunter Ballad.”

I had time to take in a couple of panels, including a songwriting panel with Bella Morte, and enjoyed several conversations with friends old and new. Finally, I found Sunday’s self-promotion panel to be interesting and a bit liberating, since I still cringe from time to time whenever I veer too close to crass commercialization.

Speaking of crass commercialization … I also sold a few copies of my CD. So, all in all, a good trip and another resounding success for the convention staff. Great work, everyone!

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I Have Some Pretty Cool Friends …

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And some of them just made the short list for the Nebula Awards!

Nebula Award Logo

Here’s the full list, with my friends marked in bold:

BEST NOVEL
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)
Fire with Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen) — I’m particularly pleased that this was nominated, for reasons that may or may not be obvious
Hild, Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island)
A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper)

BEST NOVELLA
“Wakulla Springs,” Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages (Tor.com 10/2/13)
“The Weight of the Sunrise,” Vylar Kaftan (Asimov’s 2/13)
“Annabel Lee,” Nancy Kress (New Under the Sun)
“Burning Girls,” Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com 6/19/13)
“Trial of the Century,” Lawrence M. Schoen (lawrencemschoen.com, 8/13; World Jumping)
“Six-Gun Snow White,” Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)

BEST NOVELETTE
“Paranormal Romance,” Christopher Barzak (Lightspeed 6/13)
“The Waiting Stars,” Aliette de Bodard (The Other Half of the Sky)
“They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov’s 1/13)
“Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters,” Henry Lien (Asimov’s 12/13)
“The Litigation Master and the Monkey King,” Ken Liu (Lightspeed 8/13)
“In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” Sarah Pinsker (Strange Horizons 7/1 – 7/8/13)

BEST SHORT STORY
“The Sounds of Old Earth,” Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed 1/13)
“Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons 1/7/13)
“Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
“Alive, Alive Oh,” Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed 6/13)

RAY BRADBURY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DRAMATIC PRESENTATION
Doctor Who: “The Day of the Doctor” (Nick Hurran, director; Steven Moffat, writer) (BBC Wales)
Europa Report (Sebastián Cordero, director; Philip Gelatt, writer) (Start Motion Pictures)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, director; Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, writers) (Warner Bros.)
Her (Spike Jonze, director; Spike Jonze, writer) (Warner Bros.)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, director; Simon Beaufoy & Michael deBruyn, writers) (Lionsgate)
Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, director; Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro, writers) (Warner Bros.)

ANDRE NORTON AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black (Little, Brown; Indigo)
When We Wake, Karen Healey (Allen & Unwin; Little, Brown)
Sister Mine, Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central)
The Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)
Hero, Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)
September Girls, Bennett Madison (Harper Teen)
A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty (Levine)

DAMON KNIGHT GRAND MASTER AWARD: Samuel R. Delany

SPECIAL GUEST: Frank M. Robinson

___

I admit to some disappointment that other folks I nominated did not make the list, but with the exception of the dramatic works and the individual categories, I have at least one friend who is a finalist for each category. I think that’s pretty cool!

Or, at least, I think my friends are pretty cool …

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