Madeline Ashby's Blog

Note: I received this question via the contact form above. If you have questions that you’d like addressed here, post them there! I reserve the right not to run them, but if I think that they might help other readers (as I suspected this might), I will write up my answer and post it. Unless requested, I will keep any future questions anonymous.

Question: “[A mutual acquaintance] thought you might have some tips about running [a] story summit remotely. Most of our writers won’t have met in person before, and I’m trying to figure out ways to emulate the writers’ room experience, and make everyone feel like part of the same team, despite being separated physically. Any recommendations you have would be a great help.”

First, I chose to answer this publicly because I believe that plenty of other writers and creators are dealing with this question right now, and I thought it might be more helpful to address it to a larger group.

For context, to those who might be reading this post years from now, whether as insomniacs or historians or members of an alien race sifting through the detritus of Earth (or some combination thereof), this is the year 2020, and a major pandemic is afoot. In terms of its impact, this pandemic is unlike any other since the 1918 flu. It’s a Swiss Army knife of a disease (please search your relevant dictionary of metaphors to understand this reference, Future Reader). The virus, SARS-CoV-2, lurks dormant for up to 14 days before presenting symptoms in symptomatic patients. During that time, it keyholes the ACE2 receptor, a protein receptor that lives in every major organ system of the human body, including the lungs, the heart, the brain, the pancreas, the intestines, and kidneys. Some patients experience nothing more than a mild flu. Some patients have long-term damage to the afore-mentioned organ systems. Some patients have heart attacks and strokes. Some patients can no longer walk up a flight of stairs without losing their breath. Some of these patients are elderly. Some of them are children. As of this writing, the global death toll is over one million people, although studies suggest that the number is likely much higher. It is, as Dan O’Bannon once wrote, “The perfect organism. It’s structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

During this time, people are expected to work for money, in order to keep their bellies full, their debts paid, and a roof over their head.

I know, I know. You don’t believe me, Future Reader. How could such a thing be possible? you’re asking. What kind of barbaric civilization does this? Surely this is some bizarre sadomasochistic work of historical docu-fiction, a blog post from an invented past much darker than our own?

But no. It’s true. Your ancestors, my dear Future Reader, endured this trial and many others. They endured mass graves, and refrigerated trucks full of corpses, and conspiracy theorists, and governments that moved too slowly. They endured the sudden cacophony of home-schooled children, and the buffering video calls, the delayed surgeries and chemotherapy, the lost jobs and missed opportunities, the furloughs without pay, the empty shelves and long lines, the spiralling uncertainty and the false promises. They endured the bone-deep horror of strapping on diminishing supplies of plastic armour and facing death, day after day, hour after hour. They endured wave after wave of this.

But. They endured. If you are reading this, they endured.

One way they endured was by working. Which brings us to the above question: how the hell do you run a writers’ room under these conditions? Which at its core is actually another question: how do you bring people together across time and space to accomplish a goal?

I’m not an expert in writers’ rooms. I freely admit that. But I do have some experience, thanks to my work on continuing the story of Orphan Black for SerialBox, and thanks to working on a contract basis with a company six hours ahead in time, including the writing of a book. I do most of my creative work on a remote basis. It’s rare for me to be in the same room with any other writers, or any editors or publishers. It’s rare for me to meet my clients in person. What was common for me years ago is what many people are still getting used to: hours-long video calls, shared documents, editing in real-time, constant texts, keeping someone else’s timezone and schedule in mind at all times, committing to long-distance writing sprints and wordcount goals.

This is not to diminish the magic of working together in person. With the right people, you’ll eventually learn the difference between a sigh that means, “I’m hungry,” and one that means, “this page isn’t working.” And working together in person is inevitably faster — you can probably put down thousands of words in a day based on sheer competitive zeal and instant communication. (There’s also a lot to be said for sharing a kitchen, or a bar cart, and for having people around who will gently remind you that it’s time to down tools and eat, now. I’ve done my share of writing retreats, and they always work best when there’s a set schedule for meal times.) I look forward to returning to that kind of work, someday. But it’s impossible right now.

So, with that in mind, some tips:

Ask yourself what kind of writers’ room you want to have.

It’s not enough to emulate a traditional writers’ room experience, because a lot of traditional writers’ rooms have some serious problems. There are a lot of blindspots in those rooms, and a lot of missing staircases. Don’t focus on replicating an exact experience: no one really wants terrible coffee; they want camaraderie and creativity. Focus instead on how you can leverage the strangeness of this liminal period to create something new and innovative. Can you improve on the traditional formula? Probably! Not least because you’re no longer hidebound to the idea that everyone who’s a writer has to live in LA or New York! Remote work grants you access to people whose life experience is fundamentally different to yours, because they can come from literally anywhere. As we say on the stage, Use that.

Be realistic. Be honest.

Are you distracted by kids or spouses? Do you have anxious dogs who need frequent walks? How many people are in your remote writing space? Are you going through a crisis, whether familial or financial or physical or mental? Be up front. You don’t have to overshare, but if you’re only making writing dates in between appointments with your divorce attorney, let your team know. Normalize real life. Normalize struggle. Normalize imperfection. Normalize vulnerability. Normalize needing time and space and help. You are not asking for pity; you are showing up for your team with authenticity and self-awareness. Pretending you can handle things that you can’t is fundamentally dishonest, both to your team and to yourself. Be honest.

Know and establish your schedule.

Whether you’re using a Pomodoro system, or some other system of writing sprints and breaks, make sure that everyone in the room knows the rules. Even if you’re literally phoning it in, you should be “on” the call for the agreed-upon times, and then have freedom to step away at the other agreed-upon times. At SerialBox we used a 42/12 system for this, but you could do 45/15, or a Pomodoro system of 20/5/20/5/20/15. Pick one that’s realistic. Be realistic by being honest.

Stick to it.

Yes, even if you’re on a roll. Yes, even if you think you can go without a break. The on/off writing periods are there for a reason. They are the agreed-upon boundaries that ensure everyone can contribute their best. When you push past those boundaries, you’re violating them. If you do this as a manager or showrunner, it makes you a toxic manager or showrunner. It means you don’t respect your team, their time, or their needs. I had a professor who did this consistently: taking the class way past the scheduled ending, despite knowing that some students needed to pick up kids from school or take long train rides home. Everyone hated it. Everyone stopped listening to their lectures. Finally, some students learned that they just had to get up and leave when they felt like it. Boundaries are there to keep people safe. If you can’t keep your team safe, your team won’t trust or follow you. When you break your own rules, you forfeit any right you have to respect as a leader.

Outline.

This was hard for me. I was never an outliner, until I worked on Orphan Black. I had even written two masters’ theses with minimal outlining (and it showed). I felt like outlining kept my ideas rigid, as thought the outline were an ironclad contract in itself, with no room for new ideas. What I failed to recognize is that outlines are essentially to-do lists.

There’s all kinds of productivity lore out there about how to organize to-do lists. I’m a big fan of the Productivity Planner, which asks you to prioritize tasks based on the amount of anxiety they cause. They might be small tasks, like making a simple phone call, but if their emotional gravity is heavy enough, they will suck you and your whole day down with them as you procrastinate in avoiding them. But chances are that if you take that heaviest task off the list first, you’ll have an easier time accomplishing the other ones.

I mention this because asking what the priority is while creating an outline is important. Despite their inherent function as an organizational tool, outlines can be a path into the weeds. You will know you’re in the weeds when you’ve completely lost sight of the scene’s purpose in the story. A tight outline is one wherein each scene has a purpose, and those scenes add up to episodes, and those episodes add up to a season. LeGuin reminds us of this in Steering the Craft, when discussing varying sentence structures: a book is made of chapters, a chapter is made of paragraphs, a paragraph is made of sentences, and a sentence is made of words. Each word is a choice. It either advances the goal of the project, or it doesn’t.

In an episodic context, the priority or goal of the scene might be to advance the plot, to develop character, or to establish the world. The best scenes do all three: consider the first meeting between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Most of the scene is about character development, so much so that Hannibal spends most of the scene diagnosing Clarice’s neuroses (“you’re a well-scrubbed hustling rube,”) while Clarice proves her diffident disregard for his mania (“you ate yours,” she says calmly, when referring to trophies). But the end of the scene lands on a plot coupon (“Go seek Miss Mofet,”) that Clarice earns by surviving her encounter with Multiple Miggs in the next cell. Everything we really need to know about those characters and their goals is in that scene: Clarice is dignified, resolute, and ambitious, whereas Hannibal is hungry (pun intended) for attention, connection, and the chance to lead another patient in therapy. Clarice has a clear task at the end of the scene (follow up on the clue Hannibal gave her), but we also know more about who she is, and more about the emotional and professional stakes at play if she fails (washing out of Quantico and going back to the “poor white trash” Hannibal accused her of being).

One helpful way to frame this is to ask yourself and your team, What does the audience need to know by the end of this scene?  In plot-driven genre stories this is doubly important. In a team environment, focusing on the goal of the scene can help everyone focus on what’s most important. You (and everyone else on the team) should always be able to answer the question, Why is this scene here? when looking at the final outline. If, instead, you are looking at the scene’s sticky note like it’s a lava lamp you bought on Amazon after too much mezcal, you may be in the weeds. Asking this question over a big conference call is a way to check in with the entire team. Especially in a remote work context, developing and sticking to an outline is a way of maintaining a sense of cohesiveness.

Clarify.

Are you a mind-reader? Well, maybe you are, if that’s your particular cognitive distortion. Maybe you really do carry around a high-fidelity simulation of another person’s mind at all times, in part because you grew up in an unstable environment that required hypervigilance and constant threat assessment. I don’t know your life. But what I do know is that even if you’re good at guessing the thoughts, intents, and meanings of others, you can’t do it for literally everyone literally all of the time when you’re not in the same room. Which is to say, you can’t do it for people you don’t know very well. So when working remotely (and when on the Internet in general), it’s best to clarify in moments of doubt. Get really used to saying, “I ask this because…” or “What I’m hearing you say is…” or even my least favourite, “Say more?” (“Say more,” is a blunt tool, but very effective.)

Celebrate success.

None of this will matter if you don’t recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate it. Celebrate progress, even if it’s small. Celebrate the fact that you were able to focus on the room despite the distractions of kids and spouses and media and politics and a killer virus Hell-bent on destroying human life. You were creative! You put ideas down on paper! That’s huge! We grow what we feed. What we celebrate, we encourage. You can’t cultivate what you don’t celebrate.

Say “thank you.”

This is a thing I tell all my students when they’re doing work with others. Whether they’re making short films or doing expert interviews or facilitating workshops, they need to end every day with gratitude. When I teach, I often open class by thanking my students for showing up. When I facilitate workshops, I thank my participants for joining me, and for taking the risk of sharing their ideas. This goes double for remote learning. Which would you rather hear: “I’m sorry I’m late,” or “Thank you for waiting for me.”? Which actually makes you feel more appreciated?

There is always more to learn.

Is this it? No. Of course there’s more to learn about this process. One thing that will help you is realizing that and cultivating a growth mindset. Yes, you are capable of learning more. Yes, you are capable of change. You may not be an expert, but you can become one. But you have to take the risk, first.

 

 

 

 

The post Overt Intelligence: How do I manage a remote writers’ room? appeared first on Overt Intelligence.

This time last year, we were talking about going to California, to promote How To Future.

We were supposed to hit LA and SF. We were supposed to eat a daily avocado and drink mezcal and smell star jasmine and orange blossoms. I was meant to re-visit the Mystic Museum and Dark Delicacies and Gepetto’s. I was meant to return to my spawning grounds. Now my spawning grounds are on fire, and so is everything else.

But, the show must go on. And so:

18 September, 6pm ET, FutureCon
25 September, 10am ET, Atolye FutureTense
30 September, 12pm ET, IFTF Foresight Talks
23-25 October, check listings, OutpostCon

If you’re curious, you can also read this Institute for the Future report I provided some creative assistance with: Families in Flux: Imagining the Next Generation of the American Family. And if you’re really, really curious, you can now watch The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel, a documentary film that I consulted on years ago when it was in its inital planning phases.

In the meantime, in the immortal words of Michael Mann: Stay alive. No matter what occurs.

 

The post Fall 2020 Appearances appeared first on Overt Intelligence.

My first Locus interview!

In anticipation of ReV finally hitting doorsteps and tablets, I’ve been doing some interviews:

My first Locus interview
An interview in Clarkesworld
The Big Idea at Whatever (I’ve done The Big Idea for all three Machine Dynasty novels, I believe, but this particular entry is pretty special to me.)

 

If you’re curious about my books or my process (or lack thereof), I definitely rambled on enough in each of these places to wipe that curiosity away forever. Snip:

The thing about the literary conversation is that yes, you should do your homework. But there are a lot of ways to go about that: there are people who swear up and down that you need to read a classic writer’s entire backlist, but they’ve never picked up a book of peer reviewed essays critiquing that author’s work. Reading those books doesn’t mean you’ve delved into them. How can you have a “literary conversation” about a book or a writer if you aren’t aware of their position in a larger critical discourse, or the broader implications of their ideas? Am I fake geek girl if I tell a hardcore Vinge fan that I found A Fire Upon the Deep almost impenetrable, but I’m fascinated by the Tines from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness and Nagel’s critique of materialism? No. I’m just a slightly different order of geek.

Life is too short. Read stuff that speaks to you and then read the authors that inspired those people. And then, look at the gaps in your reading. Who aren’t you reading? Who got left out? Why is that? That’s the homework.

 

 

The post Some Recent Interviews appeared first on Overt Intelligence.

My first Locus interview!

In anticipation of ReV finally hitting doorsteps and tablets, I’ve been doing some interviews:

My first Locus interview
An interview in Clarkesworld
The Big Idea at Whatever (I’ve done The Big Idea for all three Machine Dynasty novels, I believe, but this particular entry is pretty special to me.)

 

If you’re curious about my books or my process (or lack thereof), I definitely rambled on enough in each of these places to wipe that curiosity away forever. Snip:

The thing about the literary conversation is that yes, you should do your homework. But there are a lot of ways to go about that: there are people who swear up and down that you need to read a classic writer’s entire backlist, but they’ve never picked up a book of peer reviewed essays critiquing that author’s work. Reading those books doesn’t mean you’ve delved into them. How can you have a “literary conversation” about a book or a writer if you aren’t aware of their position in a larger critical discourse, or the broader implications of their ideas? Am I fake geek girl if I tell a hardcore Vinge fan that I found A Fire Upon the Deep almost impenetrable, but I’m fascinated by the Tines from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness and Nagel’s critique of materialism? No. I’m just a slightly different order of geek.

Life is too short. Read stuff that speaks to you and then read the authors that inspired those people. And then, look at the gaps in your reading. Who aren’t you reading? Who got left out? Why is that? That’s the homework.

 

 

The post appeared first on Overt Intelligence.

It’s true! For real, this time! You can buy it here! (You can buy it lots of places: Amazon, B&N, Powell’s, Waterstones, Book Depository, Chapters Indigo, Bakka-Phoenix, and elseswhere!)People have been telling me all day that they’ve received Fed-Ex notices and Kindle alerts, so this is really happening! For real!

To those of you who have reached out over the years asking where this book was, or when you could read it, I apologize. I’m sorry it took so long. I wish I could tell you in detail what took so long. Eventually, I will. But for the moment, I’m simply grateful to those of you who waited, and to the people who made this moment possible, including my agent Sally Harding at Cooke McDermid and the editorial staff at Angry Robot, specifically Eleanor Teasdale and Gemma Creffield, who did the impossible at made this happen when no one else could.

For those of you who have known and loved and hated Portia all these years, you’re in for a treat. Let’s just say that it’s entirely appropriate that this novel makes its appearance on Bastille Day. Quels transports il doit exciter ! / C’est nous qu’on ose méditer / De rendre à l’antique esclavage !

Thanks for waiting.

The post ReV is out! appeared first on Overt Intelligence.

It may feel like the world is slowing to a stop, but publishing grinds on.

Did I mention I have two books coming out this summer? Well, I do. They both come out this July, within (I believe) a week of each other. One is How To Future: Leading and Sensemaking in an Age of Hyperchange . (I swear there will be a blurb on that cover — we just can’t reveal it yet.) The other is ReV: The Third Machine Dynasty. Yes, it’s done. Yes, it’s coming*. No tricks, just treats.

It’s hard to describe what these two books mean to me. In a weird way, they’ve both taken the past decade to write. ReV took forever to write (and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite), because I had set myself a task that I now suspect was beyond my reach at the time: writing the memoir of a globally-distributed artificial intelligence slowly going mad. (Also, I was very sick at the time, and that didn’t help.) I had no idea, when I first conceived of Portia ten years ago, that she would still be so important to me now. I had no idea that giving her a whole book would force me to confront truths about myself and my history that I didn’t even have the language to describe. I had no idea how much of her was in me, and what it would be like to give her a voice.

There’s an interview with Jane Fonda about Klute, one of her best films, where she says that before that role, she performed only in the topmost registers of her voice. She made her voice higher and lighter for all her roles. Klute was the first time she had the courage to use her real voice and speak from her centre on camera. Giving Portia a whole book felt like reaching down into my lowest registers. It’s not necessarily my real voice, but it is a voice that’s real. “I’m sorry this book is so broken,” I said to my editor Gemma Creffield, as we worked together on the book. “But Portia is broken,” Gemma said.

It took years for an editor to say those words to me. To view the book, and the character, and me with the compassion that I myself could not muster. When she said those words, I had to sit down. Finally, someone got it.

Thanks for waiting.

How to Future started as a different project entirely. But from the start, I knew I wanted it to involve my colleagues at Changeist, Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith. I’m not kidding when I say that these two between them literally saved my life. They were there for me when I was very sick with pneumonia and other things, and the bowls of nuclear-spicy pho and the extra blankets and the orders to go up to bed, immediately, right this second, were the least of their assistance.

I’m really only a contributor to How to Future. I had other books on my plate when the project came up, which meant that a) I had very little time, and b) doing a full co-authoring would put me in breach of contract with my other publishers, Tor Books and Angry Robot Books, and c) my agent might actually find a way to reach through the Internet and throttle me. But size matters not, as they say, and I’m immensely proud of this book. For me, it represents ten years of freelance foresight work distilled into a series of war stories. It’s a capstone on ten years of experiences, some of them wondrous and others very strange. The last four years of that time has been spent with Changeist in addition to my own science fiction prototyping work. I could not have asked for better people to ride out the weirdness with. There are people you work with, and then there are people who meet you at the airport at 04:00 and defend your honour before hotel staff to the point that they send up free dessert (true story).

One of the most frequent questions we receive is how we do our job. Well, this is how. It’s a practical, tactical guide to future-ing. Unlike a lot of foresight texts, it’s not an impenetrable wall of jargon. It’s accessible for a reason: we wanted to empower our readers the way we strive to empower our students. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the C-suite, or the basement of a community centre. It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge organization, or a ragtag band of misfits, or a lone wolf howling in the wilderness. These tools can and should belong to everyone. The one thing we know for certain about the future is that it’s going to be weird. It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.

*Barring a problem at the printer related to COVID-19, of course.

 

The post Did I mention I have two books coming out this summer? appeared first on Overt intelligence.

When I saw reviews of The Rise of Skywalker saying that it had “walked back” much of what made The Last Jedi so interesting, my sudden protectiveness of that film surprised me. Why I was I so loyal to it? It was a big corporate franchise picture; it didn’t need my help. And then, I remembered what the film had given me. I’m in a much better place now than I was when I first saw the film, which is how I’m able to write this essay. But if discussion of being in a dark place is hard for you right now, it’s okay to come back to this later.

It is a Sunday afternoon in January, 2018, and I am standing in my office looking out at the snow, and I want to see The Last Jedi in theatres for a second time. I have the time. I have the money. I have checked the bus schedules and the showtimes. The Force, it seems, is with me. The only trouble is that I seem to be paralyzed. I don’t know why I’m paralyzed. I don’t know why my feet won’t move, or why I can’t go put on a coat. I don’t know why I can’t grab my bag and my phone and my snow boots (a dirty Hoth white, this season) and just go. This is something normal people do all the time, I tell myself.

When I try to move, my throat closes. My body feels as though it is stuck in a flow of sticky resin. I am watching myself fossilize, trapped forever in a piece of dark amber that no one else can see. When I try to break free of it, when I even consider the act of seeing this movie, a voice inside says,You have deadlines and You’ve already blown them and You’re squandering all your opportunities and How dare you, how dare you, howdareyou, howdareyouhowdareyouhowdareyou.

I am frozen in my own carbonite.

Depending on how deeply you immerse yourself in the transmedia storytelling that has come to define the Star Wars franchise, you may already know that the Dark Side had its eyes on little Ben Solo as far back as the womb. His mother Leia comments on it in one of Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath novels: she dreams about the dark side ensnaring the boy quickening inside her. Later, it’s implied that young Ben heard the voice of the dark side whispering to him all along, telling him he wasn’t good enough, that he would never live up to his potential, that he was a disappointment to everyone around him.

Epigenetic trauma is the process by which the impact of stress is passed down through the expression of DNA. Like us, our genomes are constantly expressing themselves in reaction to stimuli, including traumatic experiences. Each time they do, tiny “tags” are added to the genome, like footnotes. There’s a footnote for genocide. A footnote for starvation. A footnote for warfare. A footnote for abuse. A footnote for violence. These footnotes interrupt the flow of an otherwise simple narrative: infinite combinations of the same four letters, a curse word that echoes across an entire planet.

The footnotes to that curse can be reproduced, like a reprint of a special edition volume that has restored versions of the same old additions. One hypothesis of depression (and other conditions) among families is that epigenetics is a key mechanism by which it’s transmitted. Your mother watches her whole civilization die, and you are born screaming her grief. Your father escapes slavery, but still you are born feeling his shackles. Like midichlorians, except instead of lifting rocks you can barely lift yourself out of bed.

I have it. My father has it. My sister has it.

I try explaining this, sometimes: I explain family members dead of alcoholism and suicide. I explain family members hospitalizing themselves, having rage blackouts, having panic attacks so severe we want to call an ambulance. I explain, but I forget who knows and who doesn’t. When I have a panic attack that puts me in the emergency room, someone tells my husband that I was really just faking a heart attack for attention. I don’t tell people about the other three that put me there.

I tell one person about the therapy dog I meet in an emergency room, when I’m breathing so hard my vision blurs at the edges. He’s an Irish wolfhound appropriately named Fergus. His handler gives me a trading card saying so. I know it’s meant to emulate a Pokémon card or a baseball card, but I can’t help but think of the holy cards my mother once collected, with the saints and their beatitudes. He leans against me and I lean against him, and everything dissolves. The pain in my solar plexus drains out as from a lanced wound. And for the first time I acknowledge that maybe it’s not GERD or a gallbladder attack or a weird cardiac flutter. Maybe, if the most effective treatment is this dog, it’s something much bigger than that. Maybe it’s bigger than me.

It is the Christmas of 1988 and my father is filming me with a camcorder he borrowed from work. He is working retail and my mom is a receptionist. In a month or so, they’re going to borrow money from my grandmother to get me an adenoid removal surgery. The video is to preserve me, to freeze me in this moment. I am highly conscious of being recorded, as I am every time my father points a camera at me. Later on, he’ll work in surveillance. For now, he records me saying “What?” to every question.

My ears are full. I have constant ear infections. I have a case of pneumonia that never really goes away — it simply ebbs and flows. We’re such good customers that my pediatrician starts giving us the freebies that the drug companies give him: pens, pads of paper, a magnet shaped like a pill that is still on my parents’ fridge. A steady stream of adult-dose antibiotics annihilates my gut flora and my ability to eat. The pencil marks on the white bedroom door frame chart my growth in millimeters, not inches.

(Years later, when I fuss over someone’s small bruise, they’ll ask: “Were you sick a lot, as a child?”)

I get very good at things I can do by myself, like pressing buttons on the Betamax. I watch Star Wars — all of them — over and over. It has big sounds that I can always hear and big performances that don’t require careful listening. At night, when I breathe deeply through a nebulizer for twenty minutes before bed so I don’t wake up choking, my mom calls it my Darth Vader mask. I play pretend Star Wars with my mom, but never as Darth Vader. For some reason I always play Han Solo, but not the Han Solo who saves everybody during the trench run, or the Han Solo who shoots first.

For some reason, I always play the Han Solo who is frozen in carbonite. I stand perfectly still against my bedroom wall, hands up, mouth open, eyes shut. I stand there until she thaws me out, until I am allowed to peel myself off the wall and crumple to the floor, alive again.

It is that Sunday afternoon in January of 2018 and I have somehow forced myself to stand inside a bus stop and wait. I don’t remember the walk between my front door and the bus stop. I lose time, like that. I have no idea this is a symptom. I think I’m just flighty, or lazy, or unreliable. (I’m dissociating.)

The bus doesn’t seem to be coming. I check the time and realize I’m going to miss the movie. I think about going back home. I shouldn’t be here, anyway. I should be doing something else. Anything else. I should be writing. I should be cleaning. I should be exercising. I should be blogging. I should be hustling. Everyone else is working so much harder than I am. Everyone else is so much more deserving than I am. Everyone else knows what to do and how to be, and who the hell do I think you are, going outside like a normal person?

I travel all the time for work. Between January of 2017 and 2018 I have been to Dubai, London, Amsterdam, New York, Calgary, Edmonton, St. John’s. I breeze through airports. I make eye contact with customs officials. I stand up and speak publicly for hours. I teach classes and facilitate workshops and give keynotes. I relish these moments. They’re how I know it’s possible to feel something different. I hold tightly to this knowledge. I have to keep reminding myself of it. I’m like Galileo facing my own internal Inquisition. Although the torture never really stops, I can remember those moments and think: And yet, it moves.

It’s when I consider getting coffee for myself somewhere that I cave. Coffee, as they say, is for closers. It’s for other people. The other people I am perfectly fine standing up in front of when it’s in another context.

It is January of 2018, and I am eight months away from a prescription that will allow me to casually make jokes on my own again. I am a year and four months away from an official diagnosis. When I sit down to write, everything comes out broken at first. (I write a story about a woman hiding the cancer that is slowly killing her, told from the perspective of someone furious at her for hiding it. In terms of metaphor, it’s a bit on-the-nose.) I am cut off from myself. I am on an island that no one else can find, and at its core is a dark place. It’s cold. It’s calling me.

But there is also this other darkness, the darkness of the cinema, and in that darkness there is a flickering light and a story. The story is about how no one is alone, how failure can be learned from, how lineage isn’t destiny. Sitting watching it, I’m suddenly able to breathe and smile and laugh. I can get swept up in dogfights and sword fights. I can have fun. I can enjoy things. I can allow myself that. I can experience these things — adventure, excitement — without shame. The darkness of all theatres is a place to explore our own. Inside the cinema, like a certain cave on Dagobah, we have only what we bring with us. Fear. Failure. But also the truth. Also the possibility for something different, something new.

Somewhere inside of me is a little girl up against a wall, slowly thawing back to life.

With gratitude to Rian Johnson, and Carrie Fisher.

The post A Star Wars Story appeared first on Overt intelligence.

This summer, the nice folks at Gizmodo asked if they could stop by my place to film me talking about smart glasses. I explained (at length) that my office is too small to accomodate a film crew, and that our home itself is naturally very dark, but they were undaunted and agreed to film me in the living room. This was very much appreciated — I’ve done talking-head gigs in the past, and they always involve flying somewhere. It was nice of Gizmodo to come out to my place, for a change. They were really kind and also very patient with our cat, Claudius, who worked the room like a tiny furry production assistant. He had to inspect every piece of equipment, and introduce himself to each member of the crew, but he vanished the moment they called “Action!” and re-appeared the moment they called “Cut!” He’s a natural.

I haven’t watched all of the video (it was a big deal for me to look at even a few seconds of myself on video; I really don’t like seeing myself), but people tell me they really enjoyed the segment. The interview was also really fun, both the pre-interview and the actual recorded interview. What was a conversation about glasses turned into a conversation about ways of seeing, design, affordances, and science fiction.

Speaking of which, I should probably mention that I have a couple of pieces up at Hilobrow:

This piece on Blade Runner
Lie the Fuck Down, Lord Jesus (A poem I wrote from the perspective of the Blessed Virgin that you may find enjoyable this holiday season)

There is also a Secret Project coming up that I can almost tell write about, but not quite yet. Watch this space.

The post In which I talk to Gizmodo about smart glasses appeared first on Overt intelligence.

At long last, I am finally attending a WorldCon again. I missed it in recent years, but this year it’s in Ireland, where some of my family is and where some of my family is from. I couldn’t miss it. And it’s a good thing, too, because I have a surprising amount of programming!

Fleshy fears: horror and the body

Format: Panel

16 Aug 2019, Friday 11:00 – 11:50, Wicklow Hall 2A (Dances) (CCD)

From body horror to body snatchers to possession and beyond, how has horror explored, exploited, and pushed the limits of bodily integrity? What is the subtext of different approaches to body horror, and what practitioners are exploring these assaults on the flesh in the most interesting ways?

Kaffeeklatsch: Madeline Ashby

Format: Kaffeeklatsch

16 Aug 2019, Friday 12:00 – 12:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Can technology save the world?

Format: Panel

16 Aug 2019, Friday 15:00 – 15:50, Wicklow Room-3 (CCD)

Elon Musk and others believe that technology can and will save the world. Can tech handle growing demands on the earth for resources? Can we invent our way out of climate change? We talk GMOs, nanotech, geo-engineering, and also our faith in tech as a ‘get out of gaol free’ card.

Why is it always raining in Gotham? Noir themes in SF

Format: Panel

16 Aug 2019, Friday 21:00 – 21:50, Wicklow Hall 2B (CCD)

Noir tropes are hugely popular in science fictional settings, such as China Miéville’s The City and the City, or William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In what ways are noir tropes adapted or subverted within the genre? Is there a difference in the ways SF books, comics, and movies use elements of noir? The panel will discuss the uses of noir across SF genres and formats.

Reading: Madeline Ashby

Format: Reading

18 Aug 2019, Sunday 19:30 – 19:50, Liffey Room-3 (Readings) (CCD)

AIs and the female image

Format: Panel

19 Aug 2019, Monday 10:30 – 11:30, Odeon 1 (Point Square Dublin)

Whether in smart homes or wearing mechanical bodies, until recently many ‘female’ AIs emphasised beauty and sexuality. Now some portrayals emphasise strength and intelligence. Can we do both? How does the representation of ‘male’ AIs differ? Must we anthropomorphise AIs and assign them genders? Can we have non-binary AIs?

The post My 2019 WorldCon Schedule appeared first on Overt intelligence.

Finally, it can be told! I am continuing seminal Canadian science fiction TV series Orphan Black under the watchful eye of SerialBox and Malka Older, our fearless showrunner, alongside Heli Kennedy, Mishell Baker, Eugene Meyers, and Lindsay Smith. Tatiana Maslany is in studio as we speak, giving life to our words.

In other news, my story “Domestic Violence,” written for the Future Tense series at Slate, has been nominated for a Sunburst Award! Thank you to everyone who took the time to read the story. This is a big win for Future Tense, the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and dark, discomfiting near future fiction everywhere.

Speaking of which, you can also read my story “Blue Lotus” in Current Futures: A Sci-Fi Ocean Anthology from the people at XPRIZE. The anthology also features stories by Lauren Beukes, Malka Older, Vendana Singh, Kameron Hurley, Nalo Hopkinson, and more, so you should definitely check it out. My story is about perfume, disinformation, and AI, and also it features a cameo from the (offensively rebuilt) Notre-Dame de Paris. It stars the protagonist of “Tierra y Libertad,” so if you enjoyed that story, you might enjoy this one.

Oh yeah, and I turned in a book last month, while I was in Geneva for AI For Good, and right before I spoke about “Blue Lotus” to a black tie gathering at the XPRIZE Ocean Discovery Awards in Monte Carlo. Sometimes I feel bad about not blogging more, and then I look at my schedule. This has been your latest update!

The post Oceans, Orphans, and Sunbursts! appeared first on Overt intelligence.