It would be fantastic if I could say with complete honesty that I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been busy. It would be one fantastic lie. I’ve really been moping around and complaining a lot of being blocked and out of ideas and maybe having “lost my mad skillz” for writing.

That being said, I actually managed to get something accomplished. That something was mostly “finding impetus”. Not in the sense of “why am I doing this?” but more like “what can give me a push on a regular basis and won’t be too difficult?” I have seriously begun to doubt my ability and the only way to tell, I guess, if I really can’t write or if I’m in a funk or if I’m just being a lazy ho is to write some stuff. I keep starting out with that, meaning well, but I’ve found that projects I’ve taken on begin with the best of intentions from me but that I don’t have the strength to write extended narrative right now.

I have so many stories that are hanging out in my notes which began as outlines and degenerated into a mess of random notes. It’s very discouraging. Since I’m continually trying to find my writing sweet spot I’m trying yet another new thing. I finally got my deskal area cleaned off so I can start to write tiny fiction. Very tiny. I know I can write something tiny. Maybe I can do some tiny things and build up to some bigger things. No promises, though, because I’m a fickle creature and liable to mope again for several months at a moment’s notice.

I do have 2 short works of fiction in the works at UnMotivational Posters which will be a first for me, unless you count Pimpmanster. They’re longer than the tiny fiction I’m going for but I started them before I made up my mind to go small. They’re kinda smallish. Esque.

I’m going to write one thing definitely. Anyone who’s a blogger, please check this out. Finding Ada was begun last year by my friend Suw Charman, and is a blogging celebration of women in science and technology. On 24 March there’s going to be a wave of blog posts for Ada Lovelace Day 2010. Who’s Ada Lovelace? Whoa, dude! She was one of the first computer nerds ever! This is important because… Twitter hashtag is #ALD10.

I wrote a post for last year. It sucked.

So, to recap:
-Sorry for slacking.
-I’m going to try (again) not to do it again (again) again.
-Big narrative is too mighty for my puny narrative maintenance skills.
-Sometimes I write about men in lingerie.
-Short works in progress, other projects in pipe.
-Will try not to fail.

That is all for now.

For now.

I know Ada Lovelace Day is about celebrating women in technology but ever since I first heard about it I wanted to write about Alice Sheldon. Under the guise of James Tiptree, Jr. she guided me to the fantastical world of science fiction that I still enjoy today. I really had very little interest in it before her. This is not strictly technology, of course, but we were invited to “interpret” “widely” and so I did, to include the role of exposing to and arousing curiosity in technology and natch, science. It’s a little rambly, I’m sure, because it’s mostly like an open love letter, but I can say, definitively, I wouldn’t be half the geek I am today if I had never discovered Tip. Thank you a million times Alice, even though I am regularly somewhat disappointed to find I bit off your ideas without realizing it, more than once even.

*Transmission is indirectly inspired by and similar to “The Screwfly Solution” where “Harry and Debbie” is part of a story in which there exists a technology similar to that used in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.”

At this point in my writing habit I can identify several factors in that piece that inspired me. One of the biggest was that over the years I was pushed by my memory of it to pursue knowledge. I wanted to know if it was true what the story said about the screwfly. I wanted to know if the story events could really happen to us and if so, how? And if not that, then what? Ironically at one point I was intensely actually studying the screwfly and thinking “This sounds so much like a story I read when I was a kid.” The screwfly, also known as the screw-worm, was eradicated in the United States in 1982 and in many places in South American throughout the 1990′s and in continuing efforts using a sterilization technique that became the basis for the pest’s namesake story. This was it. What I had read so many times over the years and returned to in my thoughts so often was this incredible and frankly quite frightening story exposing real-life science in a fictional setting. The technique used to eradicate the screwfly aren’t appreciated or even known by many people outside of science class, but in that story it became disturbingly relevant when applied to my own species.

James Tiptree Jr, revealed in 1977 as Alice Sheldon, was an intelligence officer in the Army Air Forces (direct precursor to the Air Force), one of the earliest members of the CIA, and an experimental psychologist. The last name “Tiptree” came from a jar of Tiptree marmalade, though as the years went on it was altered warmly by friends and fans to “Uncle Tip” or just “Tip”. Her roles in the military and in the CIA were intelligence, while her later scientific work was primarily concerned with the mind. When she turned to writing, she was lauded for exploring gender identity and roles, and in such a distinctively male voice that compatriot Robert Silverberg said “There is something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing … his work is analogous to that of Hemingway … that prevailing masculinity about both of them — that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests.”

While “The Screwfly Solution” is credited to Raccoona Sheldon, I was inspired to seek out more of her work and found I had read other of her stories that similarly affected me, without realizing it was the same author. When I personally found out Tiptree was actually a woman, THE woman, I was bowled over. Here was a woman writer, a scientist, the themes of whose stories often explore the result of some scientific or technological advancement. She was asking the same questions I was and am asking. Her thinking had inspired mine and all that time she was secretly a woman. That Google search changed everything. While much has been made, rightfully, of her forays into sexuality, exogamy, and the eventual end of human society, running underneath those themes is the pulse of a woman in love with science. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Earth is a world populated solely by women who manipulate genes to ensure the survival of the (female) human race. CP in “With Delicate Mad Hands” is a girl so tormented by lack of acceptance on Earth that she is driven to become one of the best spacecraft pilots her world has known, and eventually her skill and determination lead her (by sketchy means) to the peace and happiness she has sought all along. While not all of Tiptree’s stories feature women protagonists and not all of them contain the sometimes-cataclysmic effects of technology on humanity, what her stories frequently do feature is the assumption that women are not afraid of science and technology and are neither unable or unwilling to make use of those tools and disciplines for their own ends. They embrace them and they do what they can because they feel they must.

What is it we look to technology for if not some form of wish fulfillment? We wish the screwflies would leave our livestock alone. We wish the world were more peaceful. We wish to find whatever it is we’re looking for and we continually work to make that happen by applying science to the problem and developing new technologies based on what we learn. In Tiptree’s works the rumination is not on the technology itself but on what drives it and what can be driven by it. The human drive to discover what is happening around us and then how to change it to suit us are channeled into tales which eventually expose the human consequences of that technology.

As a writer of science fiction I am deeply indebted to Alice Sheldon for simply being herself: a woman interested in science and technology and what can be wrought with them. Her skill in telling a story and portraying strong, competent women characters in roles traditionally given to men in fiction of the time: scientist, pilot, keeper of humanity’s final memoir, were the impetus which gave me the confidence to pursue science fiction writing. I am not a scientist. I am not an engineer. I am not a mathematician. I can, however, write about people – particularly women, operating in those capacities and perhaps inspire a future generation of scientist, engineers, and mathematicians in the tradition of sci fi writers who have inspired scientists. Just as Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” was inspired by Freeman Dyson’s sphere, the Waldo suit was inspired by Heinlein’s short story “Waldo“. I can’t speak to Sheldon’s goals or to Tip’s, but my goals are to carry on her work of exploring the role of science and technology in our lives and the consequences on both society and individuals, and to inspire other young women to look at the world with new and more curious eyes.