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This edition of the newsletter contains:
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Where I’m At. Figuratively and Literally |
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Hello! It’s almost August and time has certainly flown by this year! I’m working on the dev edits for RUMOR HAS IT, the third space opera book and finishing up writing WINGS OF TABAT, the last book in the Tabat Quartet. That’ll make two books delivered this year, along with at least a handful of story sales, several of which I’m really looking forward to announcing! A non-writing project has been the reclamation of my backyard, including planting lots of insect-friendly flowers and herbs. I harvested my first (but surely not last) summer squash this morning, and spent a few minutes watching a variety of bees enjoying both the newly-blooming sunflowers as well as the (by design) unmowed clover patch that has been christened “Beelandia.” I will be at GenCon next week and Chicago FanCon the following weekend. After that, my next appearance will be in early September at DragonCon, followed by a reading in NYC mid-September. |
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 New Classes for August and September |
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How to Give Great Interviews with Randee Dawn, August 26th, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time Got a passion project you want people to notice or buy? Then you’ll want to know how to speak to professionals with big megaphones out there: reporters! Veteran entertainment journalist and author Randee Dawn has been on both sides of the microphone, and in this class you’ll learn how to pitch, to prepare for your interviews, and become the kind of expert reporters want to call back. Join Randee Dawn for a workshop in which she teaches you how to get and make the most of interview opportunities. |
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Dial Up Your Dialogue with Cat Rambo, August 26th, 1- Â 3 PM Pacific time Want to make your dialogue more interesting, intriguing, and indicative of character behavior? How do you know to leave in and leave out? How can you use dialogue to successfully deliver vital information? How do you make characters distinctive through their voices? Join Cat Rambo for a workshop in which they teach you the ins and outs of dialogue. |
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How Not To Shoot Yourself In The Foot with Mur Lafferty, August 27th, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time You’ve mastered submission guidelines and cover letters! But that’s just the outskirts of the wild land of the pro author. This class offers advice on how to avoid some common early career mistakes, from how to choose the right agent to dealing with procrastination, self doubt, and more. We will also run a successful author “LARP” to illustrate some points. It may get silly. Bring dice. F&SF author Mur Lafferty will help you navigate the various pitfalls you may stumble upon in your journey. Join Mur Lafferty for a session filled with practical, irreverent advice designed to give you practical, applicable skills on planning your career and then executing that plan. |
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The First Draft Novel Blues with Cat Rambo, August 27th, 1-3 PM Pacific time You’ve got a first draft of your novel now, in all its messy glory. How do you go about revising it and getting it to the point where you’re ready to give it to your beta readers? How do you track the changes and account for the fact that a change to a first chapter can bubble all the way through to the end. Find out how to create a road map to guide you through the process. Join Cat Rambo for a workshop in which they teach you what to do next. |
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Keep Your Reader on The Edge of Their Seat: Creating Tension in Your Writing with Cat Rambo, September 17, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time How do you keep your reader wondering what’s happening next, and eagerly racing through your pages to find out? How do you create suspense and tension in a scene, and how tense is TOO tense? What factors remove tension from a situation? Find out how to dial up the tension and keep your reader eager to find out what happens next. Join Cat Rambo for a workshop in which they teach you how to be more tense. 😉 |
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Prosthetic Dreaming: How to Use ChatGPT, Meditation, and Surrealism To Unlock Your Creativity with Henry Lien and Jerry Lee Davis, September 17, 1-4 PM Pacific time. AI represents an existential crisis for humans, forcing us to face the question of whether there are more of us than needed. This question is particularly confronting for artists, many of whom already question the value of their own creations and themselves. This workshop embraces AI as an art supply by recognizing that an artist’s contribution is not just to create something out of thin air, but to observe the startling connections between seemingly unconnected things that no one else has noticed. AI, specifically ChatGPT, can be a remarkable tool to bombard your brain, help you enter your creativity sideways, and give you the “x-ray specs” to see those unseen connections. The workshop uses meditation and Surrealistic parlour games to bridge between ChatGPT’s sometimes spooky, sometimes hollow responses and your own subconscious. The workshop uses AI ethically, consulting it not to create anything but simply as a lens to see connections in the artist’s mind and the world. This workshop is structured to help all artists, but is particularly useful to those working in narrative mediums (fiction, non-fiction, drama, film/tv). This workshop is taught by author Henry Lien, who has nearly 20 years’ experience as a Surrealist art dealer, and author/playwright Jerry Lee Davis, who has over 20 years’ experience teaching meditation. “You will need access to ChatGPT for the workshop. You will need to create a free account to do so. Here is the link. Note that there is also an iOS app for iPhone and iPad. Here is the link. Please make sure you are downloading the official ChatGPT app by OpenAI, and not downloading one of the many copy-cats. Here is a partial list of countries where ChatGPT is available and not available. https://www.mlyearning.org/what-countries-is-chat-gpt-available/ “ |
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Cost of classes is $99, or $79 for former Rambo Academy students and Patreon supporters. To register for a class or classes, mail the name(s) of the class, and how you would like to pay (Paypal, Venmo, or other means.) Looking for something else? Here’s the list of available class videos as well as the portal for the Rambo Academy’s on-demand classes. The school will be on hiatus for the month of November, while the Wayward Wormhole Intensive Writing Workshop is taking place. The resident Wayward Wormhole students have been selected. We’re excited to congratulate M Levine, Beston Barnett, Cryus Fisher, Sarah Grey, Gio Clairval, Em Dupre, Madhu Guruprasad, Marissa James, Rosemary Smith, Stephanie Johnson, and Auden Patrick. Want in on the virtual version? You can find the details here. |
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Join the Disco Space Opera Street Team! |
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Check out the cool buttons I just got for RUMOR HAS IT! Want to join the street team for the book and get a pair of these buttons for yourself? Mail me at cat@kittywumpus.net with the subject line Street Team and I’ll stick them in the mail to you. (I have a limited amount for overseas fans, so mail fast if that’s your situation.) Optional street team activities include: posting pics wearing the buttons or of the book in a bookstore, requesting the book via your local library system, posting reviews or recommendations, and the most active promoters will be getting a follow-up thank you! |
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Lotsa Links |
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Cat-Related Links
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Community Links
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Market News and Related Links
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Informative Links
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Leaving Twitter and want to find me on other social media? Check the list here. |
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That’s it for now! Take care and keep writing! Â -Cat |
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Every culture tells stories. We keep our history alive this way. We all have rituals, whether they are secular or deeply religious. When you’re worldbuilding, you can communicate a plethora of culture and history through the traditions and festivals your characters observe.
Coming up on December 10th, I’ll teach Christmas in Narnia: Creating Traditions for Fictional Cultures for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Pardon the frosty pun, but a fictional holiday is an excellent tip to the iceberg of your world’s history. Consider the wealth of similarities and differences of the festivals of lights that originate from the Northern Hemisphere of our planet alone:
During the season of autumn into midwinter, things get darker and colder in most of the NH. The further north you go, the more stark that dark and cold becomes. Many traditions originating in the Northern Hemisphere have celebrations and rituals revolving around light and warmth at this time. India and its diaspora bring us Diwali and Deepavali, two different but similar multi-day festivals of lights, color, and life. Judaism celebrates Hanukkah as the observance of a historical miracle”“eight nights of light produced from barely any fuel oil. A fun side note: we eat fried foods like latkes and donuts on Hanukkah to represent the bounty of the oil! Who wouldn’t love a holiday that prescribes feasting on greasy carbs?
On Christmas, people celebrate the birth of the Christ child, destined to bring light, love, and goodness into a harsh world. As Christianity spread through Europe, this tradition appropriated, fused with, and replaced several midwinter traditions, such as the birth of God of the Wood on the winter solstice. This nature-based deity literally brings the light and warmth back into the world as the days finally grow longer instead of shorter. In addition to a festival of eating and drinking (lots of drinking), popular Christmas tradition involves putting candles and electric lights on everything, particularly an evergreen tree. That tradition did not come from Nazareth.
Notice that these traditions change over time and will even be different in each family or community. Just as no ethnic group is a monolith, neither is any religious or secular culture. There’s so much room here for worldbuilding, not to mention internal as well as external conflict. Some progressive Jewish families have introduced an orange among the symbolic food (roasted egg, lamb bone, bitter herb, et al.) of the Passover Seder plate, meant to remind us of the struggle of women, lgbtq+ folks, and people of color in Judaism as well as all who face intersectional struggles and are often left out of the popular image of the Jewish community.
I have a Jewish mother and an essentially Unitarian father. I grew up with secular Christmas as well as a heritage-rich Hanukkah, but I’ve always gravitated toward Pagan traditions. As a kid, I was particularly smitten with the Egyptian and Greco-Roman pantheons and stories, and I assume this is because I grew up in Miami, Florida. Flowers, fruit, and flowing water made more spiritual sense to me than the scarcity theme prevalent in Abrahamic traditions. This is the sort of subtlety that can communicate the history of a culture; temperate or tropical traditions are more likely to celebrate abundance and indulgence. Desert cultures are more likely to emphasize struggle, scarcity, and abstinence, but also patience and most importantly, charity. It’s no coincidence that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share these values and emerged from cultures living under harsh political and geographical conditions.
This brings us to another important subtlety of cultural norms. How hot is “hot?” How cold is “cold?” For that matter, how far is “far?” Does “nice” mean polite and friendly, or does it mean kind and empathic? These are the questions that shape so many nuances of a community and its culture, whether macro scale or micro. And don’t overlook the secular traditions”“what does Tax Day tell us about capitalist cultures? What about the Queen’s Jubilee? For that matter, what about Juneteenth?
For more on this, please join me for Christmas in Narnia: Creating Traditions for Fictional Cultures on December 10th. Happy holidays!
Bio:
Evan J. Peterson is an author, game writer, and Clarion West alum. His latest book is METAFLESH: Poems in the Voices of the Monster (ARUS Entertainment), and recent work includes Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag performance RPG. His writing appears in Weird Tales, Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, and Queers Destroy Horror. Evan’s serial novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, will be published in 2023 by Broken Eye Books. linktr.ee/evanjpeterson can tell you more.
Site: www.evanjpeterson.com
Twitter: @evanjpeterson
Insta: @evan.j.peterson
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Class: Different Kinds of Love: Writing Relationships that Aren’t Romantic
Next class date: Saturday, February 13, 2021, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time.
Instructor: Cat Rambo
There are plenty of loves that aren’t romantic in nature, ties of friendship or family. What sorts of speculative stories come from those alliances, and how does a writer convey the relationship in a way that makes the reader feel its strength? In this class, we’ll talk about how to write about non-romantic relationships as well as performing writing exercises designed to fine-tune your ability to convey these nuances.
Class: Where Babies Come From: Speculative Reproduction
Next class date: Saturday, February 13, 2021, 1:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time.
Instructor: Evan J. Peterson
How do magic and technology change the possibilities of reproduction? Whether on Earth or in alien lands, through futuristic science, historical alchemy, or outright sorcery, this class examines ways to reinvent the process of reproduction in your fiction.
Class: Consent is Sexy: Writing Consensual Scenes
Instructor: Sarah Buhrman
Next class date: Sunday, February 14, 2021, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time.
Consent is sexy. But how do you include consent without throwing ice water on the seduction? Keep those steamy scenes hot while making sure all parties, even the fictional ones, are respected and respect boundaries. Specific examples may include references to actions and kinks, however, content will be kept at PG-13 levels.
Class: In Flagrante Delicto: Writing Effective Sex Scenes
Instructor: Catherine Lundoff
The next class date is Sunday, February 14, 2021, 1:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time.
Live classes are taught online, are limited to 15 participants, and require reliable Internet connection, although in the past participants have logged on from coffee shops, cafes, and even an airplane. A webcam is strongly suggested but not required.
See http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/upcoming-online-classes/ for the full list of upcoming online classes.
Tired of fading to black every time your characters get intimate? Not quite sure what to do once they’re in the clinch? Want characters whose romantic moments have some spark, sizzle, and steam to them? Learn some of the building blocks for writing about sex and writing it well.
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My mason bees are all hatching and it’s quite entertaining to sit out on the porch and watch the tiny perfect new bees encountering the world for the first time. When they reach the sunlight they stop and preen themselves like cats. Grocery deliveries have become a source of great excitement, and I am currently on Fall of year 2 in Stardew Valley. The move to Portland is on hold for at least a couple of weeks while we figure out where the world is going.
While existence has become more circumscribed for many, my life has, weirdly enough, become a bit more social as a result of recent events. I’ve been doing daily co-working sessions, at least one, sometimes two, each day, for a group that includes a bunch of friends and family, current and former students, mentees, and Patreon supporters as well as trying out some different things like videocalls where we all log on and clean our workspaces at the same time while chatting or Netflix Party.
I wrote a piece for Medium on how to run a successful and productive co-working session, and I cannot recommend them highly enough, although I know that mileage will wildly vary, according to people’s process. If you miss coffeeshop writing or working in an office, though, this may be a reasonable substitute. Remember there are scholarships for the Discord server.
I’ve also been doing some consulting for people turning their material into online versions. If you’re undergoing this process, here’s Things to Consider When Converting Your Live Class Into an Online Version. I also turned in book three of the Tabat series, hurray hurray!
Coming up this weekend:
Remember that there are Plunkett scholarships for classes; even if you’re strapped for cash, these classes are available. If you’ve enjoyed Rambo Academy classes in the past, please spread word of the school!
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Hello folks!
Well, by now you know my big news, which is that my novelette Carpe Glitter is a Nebula Award nominee. I’m deeply honored to find myself in such fine company and absolutely twitter-pated to find out how many people have enjoyed it. The Nebulas are chosen by other writers who are SFWA members, and that makes this very meaningful to me. I will be at the conference that weekend.
If you’re not a SFWA member, but want some say in whether or not it appears on other ballots, it’s eligible for the Hugo Award and Locus Award in the novelette category and the World Fantasy Award in the novella category. You can see the cool banner that Meerkat Press did for me at the top of this newsletter.
If you’ve read the book and found it fun, please think about giving it a review or posting about it on social media!
Want to hear the first bit of it? Here’s a YouTube video.
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One new class I’d like to point you at is How Not to Feel Like a Failure in Your Writing Career with Jennifer Brozek, which talks about dealing with imposter syndrome, guilt, and other writerly frailties.
I’m excited to say Judith Tarr will be giving a workshop on how to write about horses on May 2, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time. I’ll post more details as soon as I have the full description but you can go ahead and reserve a slot if you know you’re going to want to attend.
Look for news of more upcoming classes soon – I’m hoping the list will include at least one with Seanan McGuire, plus I’ve got some other rad stuff in the works.
Here’s the complete list of live classes in March at the moment. Classes appearing for the first time are bolded.
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Want to join us in the Chez Rambo community? Here’s how.
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... Guest Post: Catherine Lundoff Talks About Gothic Horror And Me
Edward Gorey was one of the guiding lights of my teenage years. I saw his sets for “Dracula” on Broadway when I was about twelve and it was like coming home, aesthetically, at least. I loved his black and white drawings, his weird stories, his obsessions with cats and opera singers. I still do. I like to think of him as my posthumous Fairy Gothmother, who opened the door to a marvelous dark universe where I could wear black all the time and didn’t need to pretend to be happy if I wasn’t. I read Dracula, of course, and “Carmilla” and Poe and Wilde and Northanger Abbey. Austen turned me on to Ann Radcliffe, but I found Byron on my own. I discovered fashion, the kind where you rim your eyes with liner and wear multiple black on black outfits that have, perhaps, a hint of lace or silk, if you are lucky. And when I got to college, it was 1981 and there I found Adam Ant and Prince and Siouxsie Sioux, along with glorious morbid folk rock bands like Steeleye Span. So many murder ballads! So much gender play and glorious costumes! All of it became a part of me long before I thought of myself as a writer or a teacher or as Goth. I devoured Gothic romances by the likes of Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart, Gothic horror in its multimedia splendor, even more murder ballads, artwork, outfits with all the black lace my teenage heart could imagine. Starting to write ghost stories and tales of haunted mansions could not be far behind, though in my case it started with vampire stories and editing the first (to the best of my knowledge) anthology of lesbian ghost stories. From there, I moved on to writing ghost stories myself as well as monster tales, media tie-ins, psychological horror, each story shaped and honed by my earlier reading and watching. These days, I’m a huge fan of Gothic horror and romance films and shows like Crimson Peak, Penny Dreadful and The Addams Family. I’ve written horror tales for publications like Respectable Horror, Fireside Fiction and one of the Vampire the Gathering 20th Anniversary tie-in anthologies, as well as my own collection, Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic. A childhood enthusiasm has morphed into a lifelong affinity for ghosts, haunted mansions and various interpretations of the monstrous. I love watching authors and other creators turn their eye to new interpretations of female and queer monsters and different kinds of outsider survivors. The Gothic Heroine doesn’t have to be a cisgendered white Final Girl or married under dubious circumstances to a love interest who is, perhaps, not to be trusted. I want to read more of these stories, as well as classics like The Woman in Black and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Let me help you bring your dark fiction into the light and help it come alive, no pun intended. Crimson Peaks and Menacing Mansions is an online class that I’m teaching on 10/13 from 9:30-11:30 PST at Cat Rambo’s Academy for Wayward Writers.. It will include a mix of lecture, discussion and writing exercises, as well as the opportunity to ask questions. I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to check it out! ...  Rambo Academy Sale Through December 31 News and More Stuff from Chez RamboHappy end of the year to all of you!UPDATE: This went so well and everyone was so grateful that I went ahead and extended the sale through the end of the year. There are new links below to coupons that should let you access the classes at the $5 price. Let me know if there are any issues! We are wrapping up the end of the year with a special promotion Yep, that’s right. For less than $50 you can, in fact, buy access to every class we currently offer. This is a let’s-close-out-2018-with-a-bang promotion and won’t be repeated again until next December (if we do). Seriously, though. If you want to pick up one (or many) of the classes, now’s the time, and you have lifetime (well, Teachable’s lifetime, which may or may not match mine or yours) access. And pass this offer along to as many people as you like, particularly your writing groups and friends. The more the merrier. Want a live class? There’s still a few slots open in Stories That Change Our World as well as all the other live January classes, including opportunities with Seanan McGuire, Rachel Swirsky, and Fran Wilde. And look for plenty of new Rambo Academy material there in the coming year, including on-demand versions of the Flash Fiction workshop, Punk U: How to Write -punk Fiction, Rachel Swirsky’s Speculative Poetry class, James Sutter’s High-Speed Worldbuilding, a class from Diane Morrison on time management and writing in odd moments “” and more. |
