You know how I made a hammer dulcimer sound like an orchestral double-bass with studio tricks, for Bone Walker? Well, that’s easier now, because this guy makes bows for the things.

It’s kind of awesome actually. 😀

Hey, Anna and I are on the final episode – for now, anyway – of the Seattle Geekly podcast. We talked about Norwescon 2015 and Anna’s books and the new album and making characters lives more complicated and all that fun sort of stuff.

It’s sad that it’s the final episode, but it’s still a good one. And they play bits of Kitsune at War and Anarchy Now! Shannon has read and really liked both of the Free Court of Seattle books, calling them some of her favourite new discoveries in urban fantasy, and she made some very flattering author comparisons.

We actually went over to the Geekery last weekend for this – Anna tweeted about it at the time. They have a nice little studio setup, it was like being back in an actual little radio station. (I worked in professional radio during graduate school, part time. It was fun.) If I ever did a podcast again, I’d totally want a table setup like they have – it sounds really weird to say that you sit on the corners but it works, but it does. And when not in use it all collapses into a (rather large, but still much smaller) cube.

Also, I like their cats.

So, anyway, yeah! Go give it a listen!

TODAY IS THE RELEASE DAY FOR BONE WALKER, THE NOVEL! Book Two of The Free Court of Seattle, the thing this album before, is out today. Anna has posted about it in detail here, and here all the places you can buy it – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Smashwords, Kobo, Google Play, etc., in eBook form.

But! If you want the physical copy, and you don’t know Anna personally, there’s one place: right here, via our page, because reasons. Faerie Blood, the first book, is also available in print format here. You don’t need PayPal, even.

So Shiny

Anna is taking questions for characters and answering them in character, over at her blog. So if you’ve ever wanted to interrogate the world’s only unseelie Elvis impersonator, now is your chance. XD

But seriously, both books are good, go read them, you’ll like it. Maybe listen to the soundtrack while you’re reading, too. It’ll be fun. 😀

So remember the guest post that Jeff Bohnhoff wrote for the Studio Buildout Series of articles I posted while building out my studio?

Jeff has his own blog now for his own studio, and yesterday he put up a really good and extensive build report on his latest round of studio room conditioning, including a lot of details on building really large and pro-style sound baffles. They look spectacular and if you have any interest in home recording or sound control in a room, you should go look at it. It’s great.

Advance Review Copies of Bone Walker went out last night and we already have an awesome surprise that I can’t talk about yet. But I will, later. so exciting

Not much going on at the Lair tonight; we’ve been binge-watching Book 1 of Legend of Korra, now that the Korrasami Is Canon after-parties are in full swing.

And, y’know, even as a very happy Korrasami shipper, I really gotta say two things. One: Bolin and Korra were kind of adorable together. They really were. I’d kind of forgot that, and it’s a lot of fun watching that all happen again. Sure, they’re better as drinking buddies, but that’s still adorable.

And two: I’m sorry, but Korra and Mako were terrible for each other. They just were. I thought that at the time, and I think it again in rewatch. They bring out the worst in each other – and the people around them, except for Asami – all the damn time. And I’m not even blaming Mako. The dynamic is just kind of toxic. They spark off each other, sure, but seriously, these sparks set the wrong kind of fire.

Also, I don’t care whether they said they weren’t writing it in book one, you add a little blush tone on Korra when Asami is all over her after the tournament semifinals in “The Spirit of Competition,” and that would be our first hint. Not Book 3. Book one.

Korra shys from spiritual and emotional issues and wants to charge in with everything. Korra’s and Tenzin’s frustrations they haven’t yet dealt with. Mako and Korra making a bad kind of fire. Korra and Asami’s then-crackship being not such a reach. Benders and non-benders being so out of balance – with our Avatar quite atypically later falling in love with a non-bending technologist.

Which all comes back to the theory that I had that Book 1 would be better in retrospect. Specifically, as Books 3 and 4 have progressed, I’ve had the thought that the characters in Book 1 and how they work with (and against) each other would make more sense in the complete context.

Knowing the destination, all of these mixed emotional signals came over time to form a prelude, carrying a set of themes which came to be addressed in both general, and specifics, over time. Again and again, this whole series has been about dealing with the scars of the past – revisiting political scars of our world, and personal psychological scars of characters.

I like Book 1 much better after having read The Promise, which tells us more about how Aang’s life progressed in certain key emotional ways after the end of The Last Airbender. Korra is dealing with Aang’s issues, too. I like Book 1 much better after finding out more about the Gaang’s kids in general, and how the traumatising dangers and adventures of their childhood affected their parenting and children, and how their issues were addressed in Books 2-4, where we learned about all that history. I like Book 1 better knowing better that each year’s Big Problem was an interpretation of one or another political extremism of the last century, instead of just skimming an idea for cheap drama.

I like Book 1 better knowing that the bad-dynamics relationship did fail, and that the failure was handled maturely and well by those involved. And I like Book 1 better knowing that the accidental relationship everybody joked about but which just seemed to flow given even a hint of a chance came true.

JMS on Babylon 5 used to call this “holographic storytelling.” This is where episodes of the past would become more relevant and revealing later, in the future. Ivanova gave Talia her water during a Series 1 interrogation. Korra thanked Asami – rather tenderly – for the chance to keep playing. Both were seeds.

I think it was more of a strength in B5 than here, truth be told. But I am very happy that Book 1 is made better by Books 2-4 – not “fixed,” not “retconned,” but explained and in a way that mades a whole. I just wish it had been a little more palatable before all that. Sure, it’s great that it came together and became wonderful. But it would’ve been even more lovely had – to paraphrase Tenzin – the ride not been quite so bumpy. Not for the characters, but for us.

Even so – goddamn I am glad I stayed along for the whole ride.

This was supposed to go out earlier, but for some reason did not. But if you have celebrate a holiday today, I hope you enjoy it. If you celebrated one last week, I hope it went well; if you will be celebrating one in a few days, or one in a couple of weeks, well, I hope it goes wonderfully. Me, I got my present. Korrasami is canon, and, at least for now, nothing hurts. 😀

There is a big debate – following a edit war – on Wikipedia’s Korra page. A couple of editors are bound and determined that the Korra-Asami ending is not true, and are demanding a statement from the writing team as the only evidence they’ll accept – which isn’t even how Wikipedia works, but let’s put that aside.

I’ve been fighting this particular bit of queer erasure today, because we finally got one. And now we need to defend it.

They are leaning heavily at this point on “room for interpretation,” how the ending is “ambiguous” in their eyes. And to that, I wrote this response.

I want to talk about “room for interpretation” for a minute.

What’s that mean? “Room for interpretation” is usually invoked to imply that there are reasonable grounds for differing conclusions based on evidence. In fiction, one fandom example is the original Battlestar Galactica (1978). We don’t see Pegasus destroyed; we see Pegasus destroy two base stars successfully and go in for the kill on a third. Then we do not see Pegasus again. Given that we had not seen Pegasus before, and that Pegasus had escaped similar situations in the past, it does not seem unreasonable to assert that Pegasus might have survived the battle – limping away needing months of work before getting back underway, who knows? Pegasus was most likely destroyed saving Galactica and the fleet, but it’s not unreasonable to consider the alternative. That’s “room for interpretation.”

I want also to talk about “deniability.”

Deniability comes in to play when you’re forbidden to talk about or do a certain thing, but you do it anyway, with just enough obscurity to it that if observers really, really, really want to, they can deny you are doing what you’re actually doing. An example is in the film Spartacus, and the “oysters and clams” discussion, which was cut from video for many years because it wasn’t quite deniable enough for television censors. But that was the attempt; a discussion about gay sexuality that wasn’t about gay sexuality, but was about seafood. It was deniable that it was about sexuality, at least for initial release.

Now, how does this apply to the Korra finale?

Nickelodeon has a known policy against showing clearly GBLT relationships. This has been discussed extensively in regards to work such as Adventure Time, so I won’t go into it here; it suffices to know that this policy is in place. It has to do, we are told, with overseas markets – but they don’t make special cuts for places like North America and Japan, either, so we all get to fall under those rules.

This leaves creators who want to go in that direction with the reality that they must include at very least deniability. They cannot explicitly state the presence of GBLT relationships. They can only hint or imply, and the only question is how hard in that direction one can go.

In a context of women in relationships in particular, this can be difficult, due to the blinding phenomenon often referred to as “lesbian invisibility,” or the cultural assumption in the west that two women involved in a relationship can’t really be in a relationship until – and often not even after – it is stated explicitly. This causes many people to ignore vast swaths of contextual (and real-life, for that matter) evidence.

You can also see this phenominon in reactions online to this episode. Personally, I was surprised when I started seeing evidence of Korra and Asami building a relationship in Book 2, and told myself I was just overreading it – until it became pretty obvious in Book 3. Even then I was thinking that there was no way the show would be allowed to go there – until Book 4, when it became so strongly stated, given the limits of their allowed range.

And despite all that, a small but meaningful percentage of online reaction calls the Korra/Asami relationship ending “completely out of the blue” and “unexpected.” This is lesbian and bisexual invisibility syndrome at work.

But at the same time, this reaction also indicates how far the authors went in this episode; even those people most likely to ignore and/or downplay same-sex relationships between women as “just friends” are reacting to the finale. It is that conclusive in their eyes; they can’t ignore it – however much they might want to.

What does this have to do with “room for interpretation” vs. “deniability?”

I assert this to be supporting evidence that we are well past “room for interpretation” and into “deniability.” When people who routinely ignore implications of same-sex female relationships are confronted with evidence so strong that they’re reacting against it, “lesbian invisibility” has been shattered. Yes, deniability has been maintained, as we see in discussions above. If one insists, one can ignore enough parts of the source material to conclude it didn’t happen. This allows the show to be aired in places like Russia – “see, it’s legal, we didn’t say romance. We didn’t say elopement. We didn’t say girlfriends.”

But you’re certainly out of the “room for interpretation” field. It’s not ambiguous. It’s just deniable. Which we already know is a Nickelodeon requirement. And I think all of this must be considered in any reasonable discussion of the topic. Context matters, and this is our context, and to ignore it is to do a disservice to everyone.

To celebrate Bone Walker‘s release to mastering and manufacturing today (preorder here), we’re posting some of the many creative things our friends and fans have told us about. These are things they do; check out this list of awesome. That’s an order.

JEWELLERY:

• Jenny comments first, so gets to be first here, and reports that she makes wire elf ears. These are the current favourite with her fandom: Custom Royal Fairy Ear Cuffs on Etsy.
• Jarandhel Dreamsinger hand-builds a whole bunch of types of pendants, mostly along a Tree-of-Life theme. And look – there’s also a tutorial! Participatory culture, fuck yeah!
• Gwendolyn Kestrel makes chainmail jewellery, showing mostly at gaming events and craft shows. But she has the Mythic Treasure shop on etsy as well.

MUSIC AND WRITING:

• Irfon-Kim Ahmad is the electronic madness behind RAMP Music, and he’s all about the trance and electronica. He also has a big Tumblr fandom, I’ve seen it. I suspect him of being a Cylon, but don’t tell him I said that.
• Maria-Katriina Lehtinen really needs two entries in this list. First, she composes neo-baroque music and performs on the organ. She’s endlessly frustrated that the people at the cathedral in Vancouver won’t let her re-tune their organ to better frequencies. On top of that, she writes and makes stained-glass windows! But she doesn’t provide links. Take that, commercialism!
• Angela Highland also writes as Angela Korra’ti, and writes books. Under the Highland name, she’s behind the high fantasy trilogy Rebels of Adalonia for Carina Press. Under the Korra’ti name, of course, the Free Court of Seattle. “Urban fantasy for the geekily and musically inclined, and I can guarantee you that you won’t find another urban fantasy series anywhere that features a Newfoundlander bouzouki-playing hero as the main lead, an Unseelie Elvis impersonator, and most importantly, a violin-playing heroine who’s a girl of color.” Find out everything at her professional website.
• Elizabeth Barrette is a poet, and a working poet at that! She also writes books, of course. Penultimate Productions is the top of the fold, but a list of her books currently in print is here, and she provides writing and editing services. She actively posts on Livejournal, where she also posts scrapbooked poems.
• Skellington is on the album! She’s lead fiddle on Kitsune at War. But her main band is Pinniped, a trad band who have a good bit of local traction. You should listen to her stuff!

PERSONAL ITEMS AND CRAFTS:

• JC Brazil is a maker of Glatta Papa body butters, lip balms, and moisturisers. “The hair pomade was created when I went through hospital hell and began losing my hair. It worked! Huzzah! When I met my boyfriend who is biracial, and now my husband, he couldn’t find anything natural to help him style his hair and didn’t smell like gummy bears. I offered him my pomade and he’s been using it ever since.”
• Paula Milburn makes a huge range of items, and makes them available two different places – one place for fannish audiences, one for general audiences. The general-audience work lives at KraftyKatz Unique Handmade and Personalised Cards and Gifts, while the fannish-friendly projects live at 4K Kollections.

CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES:

• Sunnyjim makes All The Things, and seriously, she does, I’ve seen it. “The current obsession is Women’s High Heel Shoes. That’s right, I’m a cordwainer – a person who makes shoes. I also do art quilts, mosaics, stained glass, spinning and weaving, costuming, calligraphy, and the occasional oil painting. As they say at Weta Workshop: Be Creative, and Make Cool Stuff. (Yes, I have the t-shirt.)”

FANAC AND CONVENTIONS:

• Jen Kilmer helps make Conflikt, the Pacific Northwest Filk Music Convention – she’s chair and head of publications! Go buy a membership and attend, particularly since somebody cough will be having a big CD and book release show there.
• Linda Wyatt does things with vintage Star Wars memorabilia, Topps cards, and other hockey cards from the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly she did not include a link where I could point you at samples.

And, finally, of course, we make with the musics. I also have a history of illustration and other arty designy stuff and fandoms and houses and a fair bit of science!, but mostly these days it’s about the music.

All of these creative people wrote up all this in their own words in comments. So go check out their arts! Maybe you’ll get inspired too.

If the forecast is right, we have about, I dunno, a 60% chance of losing power this afternoon, so this is LAST SURE CALL for creators and makers to post about their things! Do you make a thing or things and want to tell people about it? GO COMMENT HERE Some of the things people make are for sale, some aren’t, that’s okay. Go put it in comments here and it’ll be in the megapost on Monday!

Do it now, too. If we go down they’re saying it could be a couple of days before we’re back up. Of course, now that I’ve posted all this, it’ll breeze right over – BREEZE! HA! – and we’ll be fine.

We’ll be back for sure by Monday, of course, so that post should go up fine.

I have an idea about the Hunger Games movies. It’s something I’ve toyed with a bit since reading the books as they came out – yes, for once, I was the one who had read all the books first and had to STFU to avoid spoiling people.

Mostly it’s on my mind because we just finally Mockingjay Part 1 last weekend, and I thought it was really good and quite faithful to the first half of the book. But it’s very much a middle movie, and I don’t think people are reading it as a “middle” movie, because it’s supposedly the first half of the conclusion (as evidenced by the name) and because it’s the first half of the third book. And I think that’s causing some some of the complaints about stretching the story.

But the more I think about the structure, the more I’m seeing the first book (and film) as almost a prequel to a primary arc which spanned two books. Yes, they’re connected, tightly so. But I’d argue the events of The Hunger Games sets up the the action of Catching Fire and Mockingjay, and that those two books (and three films) form an arc of their own – and that the first half of Mockingjay really is its own piece, thematically.

I mean, let’s face it, Catching Fire is kind of a restart. It’s kind of a restart storywise – not from worldbuilding standpoint, no, but a bit of a narrative restart nonetheless. You’ve just got the characters’ backstories already. It’s a chance to restart, in media res.

As other examples of this phenomenon, I offer Book One of Elfquest vs. The Grand Quest (books 2-4, which form one story), and also, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

I’m thinking that seen in this light, dividing Mockingjay into two films makes a lot more sense. Giving the middle of a story like this time to develop and breathe is sound, rather than rushing in to the big climax; you’d like to be able to treat this separately. (See also the variety of parallels between Mockingjay Part 1 and The Empire Strikes Back, particularly with Peeta and Han, who is, let’s face it, still in Carbonite, even if they’ve got him moved back to rebel territory, and who will start being freed in Part 2…)

Part 2 will tell me whether or not I’m on crack. Part 1 was so much lower key than the previous two films, in so many ways. That can read as being less ambitious – or as a lot more tightly confined, which isn’t just thematically appropriate, but is arguably thematically necessary to the story.

So if the atmosphere and character of Part 2 changes sharply from Part 1, I’ll consider that a degree of confirmation. You can change tone sharply between films without it feeling forced; if they’d done all of Mockingjay as one film, the feel of one or the other half would’ve been sacrificed, and I think to the detriment of the overall story.

I just kind of wish they’d gone all the way and given them separate titles. I can see why not to, from a marketing standpoint – but from an artistic standpoint, I rather wish they’d had.

But, yes. That’s my theory. Thoughts?

ps: We’ve had a lot of people posting in the Maker of Things comments section! Add your own, or check out what people have been saying, there’s a surprising lot already.

Do you, yourself, make a thing that you want to show or even sell to other people? THIS IS YOUR POST! It’s kind of like what Scalzi does, but just one post, rather than a whole week of them, because his audience is way bigger than mine. But I know I have creative people following me, too.

So, your crafts, music, books, electronics, sculpture, arts, whatever: talk about it HERE SPECIFICALLY in comments! Not on whatever echo this is, but OVER HERE. I’ll collect and repost them as a separate blog entry next Monday.

And tell friends, so they can do it too. 😀