Addio 2007

31 December 2007 | Comments Off

2007 started hard, in sadness and worry, and in some ways it stayed hard. Some disappointments, some hopes dead and others deferred. But those aren’t the biggest kind of hard: I didn’t lose my home, my partner, my mind or my life. So perhaps it’s better to think of it as a learning year. (Oh goody, another learning experience. As a wise lad named Calvin once said, I feel smarter already.)

Well… I’m not sure I’m smarter, but a little wiser about some things. Maybe a little more of a grownup.

A lot of 2007 has been trudge-trudge-trudge a little further down the road of adulthood — Lookee here, missus! Responsibility! Fewer easy answers! Sucking it up! Come get some of this wacky adult fun before we run out…. But in spite of that, okay, fine, maybe because of it, I feel better, more clear, younger than I used to. I’m a little less likely to just take people’s bullshit, and I’m also a little more likely to let the small stuff slide, which can turn into a pretty interesting moment of choice when someone’s bullshit is about the small stuff.

I feel a little more free.

And so that makes this hard year a good year.

Every New Year’s Eve, Nicola and I buy the best bottle of champagne we can afford (which varies pretty spectacularly sometimes, but this year is lovely — Alfred Gratien Millésime 1997). We prepare a meal (prepare is a relative term that includes everything from cooking five courses to running out for Indian takeaway, and by the way Indian food is great with champagne). We eat and drink and talk about the year that’s ending and the year ahead. We don’t make resolutions, we make dreams and visions and goals.

One of mine, this time last year, was to feel more like a writer. Not just to have written, but to be more rigorous and more honest. To dig deeper, be more brave. To work harder. And to write things even if I know I can’t, even if I know I’m not good enough or honest enough or brave enough. To suck it up and do it again.

And so I did. In 2007 I wrote a screenplay and a novella that make me fizz — both of them more quickly, more rigorously, than I have written in ages, in spite of the sadness and worry and various fucking grownup responsibilities. It’s the year I started a (second, original) screenplay with an opening scene that makes me wiggle, it’s so cool. The year I came up with a master plan for conquering Hollywood. The year a real live editor asked me to write a young adult novel, and I began to find young people in my head with some things to do and say, some big feelings to feel, some life to live. It’s the year I taught Clarion West and was privileged to work with an amazing group of writers: I think I helped a few of them, and I know they helped me. 2007 is the year I gave myself back to writing, and now I feel like a writer again. Who knew it could be so easy (huge laughter here….).

This year I started going dancing again. I reconnected with old friends. Nicola published her amazing memoir and began writing an even more amazing novel (more about it on her myspace blog). And she began some other stuff that I feel unexpectedly deeply hopeful about, but it’s her stuff so that’s all I’m saying about it, except that it’s both hard and good to feel hope.

This hard year has been a good year. I’m grateful to it, and I’m glad to see it go. Addio, 2007. In 2008, I look forward to hopes realized, dreams lived, hard work, good times, and doing more than I think I can. Bring it on.

My very best to you for whatever you want from the new year. May it come to you in joy.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, life 

More best

27 December 2007 | Comments Off

Nicola and I talk about our favorites of 2007 over at Colleen Mondor’s Chasing Ray.

If you’re interested in adult and young adult books, you’ll find an ongoing fascinating conversation at Chasing Ray. Colleen’s interests seem limitless, and she offers readers a constant cornucopia of good stuff — books, interviews, musings on writing and reading. I enjoy Chasing Ray and am delighted to be in the favorites gang this year.

Here’s Nicola’s take on 2007.

And here’s mine.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, news, reading 

Giving it up in ’07

21 December 2007 | 9 Comments

It’s my turn to talk on the Aqueduct blog about my favorite books, movies, tv and music of 2007. It turned out to be less of a list and more of a rant, or maybe a riff…

If anyone has suggestions for the kind of text I’m looking for, let me know — I’d be grateful. Or we can talk about what you’re looking for in text right now. Use the comment form below, or start your own conversation (the link takes you to a form where you can submit a question or comment about… well, anything. As soon as I can, I’ll respond and post both your question and my response to the blog).

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading, writing 

EW thinks @U2 rocks!

21 December 2007 | Comments Off

Entertainment Weekly has just published its list of the 25 Essential Fan Sites of 2007, and I’m totally jazzed that @U2, the U2 fan website I write for, is #4. We are the highest-rated music website on the list. Congratulations to the amazing @U2 staff. I’m proud to be among you.

If you’re interested, you can read my @U2 articles here. But don’t stop there — stay at @U2 for great interviews, essays, news reports, album and concert reviews, and more.

@U2 is special not just for its content, but for the quality of the writing, the wonderful sense of teamwork among the staff, and the great leadership of our founder and editor, Matt McGee. I’ve said before that Matt is one of two or three people on the planet that I’d actually consider working for in a real job… and I’m pretty picky these days.

And Matt’s writing a very cool book!

Waiting in the GA line to see U2
Waiting in the GA line to see U2

My total fangirl goobiness is revealed.
I waited in this line for 12 hours to see U2 in Seattle in 2005. And once inside, I got supremely lucky and ended up in the front row, 8 feet from the band. There is nothing like seeing the music being made, nothing like it. It was a beautiful night.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, music, news, writing 

Sounds like Paradise to me

19 December 2007 | 2 Comments

I love music, and this is my love letter to Radio Paradise. I feel like I just wandered into a party where all my favorite music showed up and brought its friends. I have been hanging out in the space between my headphones with album cuts from The Cure, David Bowie, Golden Earring (Radar Love!), Ani DiFranco, Pearl Jam, The Shins, Jeff Beck, John Martyn, Thievery Corporation, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Morcheeba, Cocteau Twins, Beth Orton….

Amazing programming by Bill Goldsmith. It’s nice to be in the hands of an expert. Go check out the playlist for yourself. Go have a listen.

When was the last time you heard something on commercial radio that you had to have right now? Stations like Radio Paradise and sites like Pandora, along with MySpace, are where most people find their new music these days. And then they go the band website to check it out, listen to the tracks, download a few for free from the site or for pennies from the million music services out there. They watch the videos and sign up on the fan club lists. They trade bootlegs of live shows on torrent sites. And they pretty much utterly ignore the music labels’ circus-pony marketing campaigns, the print ads in Rolling Stone and the MTV appearances and the pay-to-play arrangements with commercial radio. The labels are starting to figure out they aren’t in charge of music anymore…

And here’s Radio Paradise, a seriously cool 21st-century operation: a human touch on music and a high-tech delivery system that offers a wide variety of streaming options and handles programming through multiple server locations that can be controlled by a laptop from anywhere in the world. They’re building interactive community around music (and that’s so important, because art is not a one-way street). They don’t accept advertisers. The whole shebang is run by two people who clearly know music, really know music and love it. They do it all on listener support, and they certainly have mine — I’ve heard more amazing music in the last couple of weeks on RP than in the last five years of radio in my car.

I have found my party, and now I can go back anytime I want.

You’re invited too.

Edited to add: Traffic! And Michelle Shocked, Suzanne Vega’s Blood Makes Noise, and Pearl Jam’s live Black! And that’s just in the last 6 hours… I love this station.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, music 

Nicola’s best

17 December 2007 | Comments Off

Several folks have asked me and Nicola to participate in variations on “what I liked in 2007″ lists. One of the most interesting requests came from Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct Press: Timmi didn’t choose to limit responses to “books,” but asked instead for our favorites among any kind of text.

Nicola’s response leads off this “pleasures of the year” event at Aqueduct. As you’ll see, she had a lot of fun thinking about this (and played Faster Kill Pussycat at full volume, which was great fun for me too).

There are more lists coming in the next several days.

(And thanks to Cat Rambo and Eleanor Arnason for the shout-outs for Dangerous Space.)

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog 

Old story, newly found

15 December 2007 | Comments Off

Nearly 10 years ago, Ellen Datlow (in her role as the fiction editor of Omni Internet) invited me into an online round robin storytelling event. From the time I began writing in my 20′s, Ellen was “the editor” for me, the person I always wanted to sell to. (And I did — Ellen published the first two Mars stories, and I’ve always been particularly grateful because those stories are so close to my heart.) So when she said Do you wanna, I said yes.

Here’s how it worked. Ellen put together a group of four writers — me, Graham Joyce, Kathe Koja and Ed Bryant — to take turns writing installments of a story that were posted online as they were written. We were meant to write quickly, so that a new installment could be published every few days, and of course we had to build off what had come before — the point was to write an actual story, not just get wacky on the internet.

We got together through email and settled on a loose structure — the order of posting, and the general framework of the story. I’m not sure whose idea it was to do a Shirley Jackson hommage, but we all fell on it with glee (and if you haven’t read Jackson, please, please go do so immediately! She rocks. The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the stories, oh my god….).

And so our round robin story became a sort of flash-Jackson — we’d show up on the interweb, see what the person before us had done, and then do our own thing with it. I don’t know how it was for the others, but for me it went like this: come home from the corporate job, kiss my sweetie, grab a beer on the way downstairs to my basement workspace, and… just do it. Write the damn thing by the time the beer was finished. Let it sit overnight, fix it the next day, send it off.

It was a rush. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and more to the point, I found out I didn’t have to get all precious or superstitious about writing — I could just do it.

I was sad when Omni went dark months later. And after several years, the archives disappeared as well. Ah well, I thought, there goes the story.

And then today I found it online, on Pamela Weintraub’s site. She was the Editor-in-Chief of Omni Internet, and I’m thrilled that she’s preserved all four of the round robin stories. This is a huge thing — you can read collaborative fiction from some of the best writers in the field: James Patrick Kelly, Rachel Pollack, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, Karen Joy Fowler, Maureen McHugh, Roasaleen Love, Terry Bisson, Kathleen Ann Goonan, John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, Kim Newman and Jonathan Lethem. I’m so glad I got to be a part of this, and that I can point other people to a part of SF history that wasn’t always so easy to find.

The writer does the happy dance.

And here’s our story. Enjoy.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, news, writing 

Can the lady write like a man?

14 December 2007 | Comments Off

*Snork!*

Gakked from Cheryl, who very sensibly points out that if Drs. Riccobono and Pedriali really think this is such a new topic, they should sit down with a cup of coffee and a few Tiptree stories. (Mom, can I be ineluctably masculine when I grow up? Of course, dear, now put your pith helmet on and go outside…).

You can learn more about the fascinating Tiptree from the fascinating biography by Julie Phillips.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, gender, writing 

Plus ca change…

9 December 2007 | Comments Off

There’s an interesting conversation going on at Nicola’s blog about the concept of being a digital native vs. a digital immigrant — in other words, division along (and distance across) generational lines by whether or not one is “born to” a particular level of technology. Nicola cites an article that does a good job of dismantling that idea, or at least showing all the ways in which it’s reductive. And she posits in turn that this division isn’t about age, it’s about temperament. It’s about how each of us responds to change.

I think so too. There are so many ways that humans deal with change. We run away from it. Or we use it to run away — the abrupt and radical changes that take us away from problems, from fears, from love, from commitment, from the cages we’ve made out of our lives. Or maybe we “don’t believe” in change (news flash: it sure believes in us). Or we throw ourselves like lovers at the new thing because it’s part of our identity to be the person whose edge is always leading… We tackle it with plans and checklists, we wake up scared in the middle of the night, we celebrate it, we yearn for it.

And then we have to learn the new software at work, or we’re expected to navigate the hospital by following the colored lines on the floor, or the Syrian restaurant we really liked is just gone one day, and I stop and think You know, when I said all those brave words about change, this is not what I was talking about.

I think most of us are actually pretty good at stepping up to the seismic shifts in our world — we may not be graceful or happy about it, but on some level humans are built for it. I think it’s the thousand small daily changes that wear us down and do us in. And I’m coming to the reluctant conclusion that it happens to us all. I don’t want to stop learning, you know? Even if it means having to change in all the daily ways. When I stop being willing to do that, I don’t know if I’ll still be myself… I want to be one of those 90-year-old women with long gray hair and a fierce face who still updates her own website, even if by then we’re all managing content with our eyebrows or whatever…

I guess we’ll see.

(To find Nicola’s post about this, visit her blog and look for the entry “digital immigrant/digital native”. Would someone please tell MySpace to get with the permalinks?)

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, life 

Interview: The Seventh Week

8 December 2007 | Comments Off

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers.

The Seventh Week, the Clarion West newsletter, published a brief interview in their Spring 2007 issue. The interview was edited for length (I’m sure this surprises no one who has ever talked to me), but they graciously gave me permission to post the entire interview here.

The interview includes talk about why I write, and my advice to Clarion students (and by extension anyone who wants to learn to write).

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, interviews, news, writing 

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