Write With Me in Brazil Next Summer!

So here's my first announcement of a very cool thing! I'm going to be teaching a fiction writing course this summer in Brazil! At the seaside city of Florianópolis. We'll be reading Brazilian writers (in English), but writing whatever fiction students want to - including SFF if they're so inclined. This is an undergrad college deal, for credit. USAC is based at the University of Nevada, Reno, but enrollment in this program is available to college students anywhere in the country.

Please spread the word! Five weeks of hanging out in a lovely city, writing, reading, eating, drinking, and - if you're up for it - surfing! (Yes, they offer surfing for credit!)

It's going be a blast! Questions about it? Email me at ddurham@unr.edu.

Did You Know? Pizza Counts As A Vegetable!

Okay, true enough, not many thinking adults would accept that as reasonable, but the House of Representatives does. I wonder what convinced them?...

Here's a short NPR piece on it.

The League Platforms?

A kind reader, Mark, just wrote alerting me to an article he said reminded him of the league platforms from the The War with the Mein. It's about a Silicon Valley billionaire - a Paypal creator and early Facebook backer - that is working to "create floating libertarian countries in international waters... The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place".

She's quotes a longer profile in Details magazine, saying the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

Oh my. That does sound like a place the Sires might think up...

The brief article is HERE.

The longer Details article is HERE.

Should I laugh? Or be afraid...

Assassin Of What?

A while back I had a strange experience with a student. While reading her paper on some literary topic or another, I got the feeling that the words weren't hers. I took a few samples and googled them, and sure enough I found that she had copied them - probably from the same source it took me a minute to find. Not only that, she had taken whole paragraphs from lots of different sources. I kept finding them. An hour later... I was amazed at how much stuff she had cut and pasted - and from how many different sources she had stolen from. It must have taken hours to put it all together. She wasn't lazy! Why didn't she just write the thing herself?

When I confronted her on it, I got a different sort of surprise. I came away believing she was genuinely shocked to learn that cutting and pasting other people's ideas wasn't the same as writing similar ideas in her own words. She had spent all that time seeking out things she agreed with. When she found them she just kinda said, "Yeah, that's what I think!" and inserted them - without any attribution whatsoever. It was weird. It's like nobody had ever explained to her what writing an essay entailed.

I doubt that Q. R. Markham could even try to make the same claim in regards to his debut novel, Assassin of Secrets. Have you heard about this? The book was just published by Little Brown - a publisher I respect a lot - as part of a two-book deal. It entered the world with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, and was set to hit foreign markets too. Heralded as some awesome reboot of the spy/espionage genre, a "dazzling, deftly controlled debut that moves through familiar territory with wry sophistication."- (Kirkus)

Sounds good, yes? Only problem is that it appears to be a cut and paste job of massive proportions. Here's the Guardian's version of how it's unraveled. And here's a blog post that has side by side examples of texts from Markham's book and from the various originals. Take a look.

I don't take any pleasure in posting about this. I just find it so strange, so hard to understand, so inevitably headed for exposure and life-changing failure. Weird. Very weird. People seem to be rushing to buy his book on Amazon right now, even as the publisher pulls it and tries to get copies back. Was Markham caught making an awful mistake? Or is this the revelation of a hoax perpetrated on the publishing industry? I would say "on readers" as well, accept that it seems like in this case it's readers that caught the fraud.

What do you make of it?

An Autumn Morning

Alone at Upper Park this week. Gudrun and the kids are up in Shetland for the first week of the school holidays. I stayed on the farm to get some work done. I have a little set of stories to write for George RR Martin. The deadline is looming! So it's work for me.

I don't much like being without my family, but this was a lovely morning. It began with a little bit of fun with the dog and cat. When we feed Saba (the dog) we always make him sit on his mat until the food is measured out and ready for him, and then we put it down and release him to Hoover it up.

This morning, I put him in stay and had just about finished preparing his bowl when the phone rang. I set the bowl down on the counter and answered it. As I walked around the house speaking with the lady that lives down the hill about construction that was going to block access to the house that morning, Saba began to whine and jitter and sound terribly distressed. I chalked it up to impatience and finished the phone call in the other room.

When I walked back into the kitchen Saba was on his mat, looking desperately at me. Eighty-five pounds of shivering distress. On the counter... the cat was casually feasting from his massive bowl of food. Oops. My bad. Good dog, though. Good dog.

I made it up to him with a great walk up the hill. It was clear and bright, with a nip of autumn in the air. Beautiful views before my eyes, lots of stories rolling through my head. A good morning.

This photo is my wife's, from a few days ago when one of the hills across from us was snow covered. So, not actually, today, but a similar view to what I had this morning...


Now, to work!

True Knowledge?

My Google alert brought me this yesterday: an answer to a terribly important question at True Knowledge.com.

Happy Holidays!!!!

This was our family Holiday postcard this year - a Maya Calypso Durham design, of course. If you're reading this, consider yourself a recipient of the card and of our best wishes for the Holidays and the New Year!

Ah Well, It Wasn't All Bad...

This morning started off so nicely. I had such plans. A few student stories to read, an interview for Amazon to finish up, a bit of time working with Maya on decimals, maybe even some time writing fiction: that sort of stuff. We Durham's took an early morning walk down to the lake, feeling all crisp and fall-like, getting into a routine, you know?

Came back to the house, gave one of the cats a quick bath. (Fleas, you see.) Gudrun and the kids got set up at the big table in the living room for a homeschooling morning, and I headed to the office to be productive. For about ten minutes, all was good.

And then a sudden burst of Scottish-inflected profanity came roaring through the wall. I jumped up, thinking something small might have broken, assuming an overreaction was quite possibly in play. What did I find? Well, it was a small thing. It was the combination of a glass of water and the backside of a pretty darn new MacBook. It was fizzing and popping sounds, and then loss of power to said MacBook. Gudrun had been working along with the kids when one of them (perhaps better left unnamed) brushed the glass over with a careless arm. And that was that.

New direction to the entire day. You may know that among other things Gudrun is a knitwear designer and blogger - see The Shetland Trader. Her computer is very important to her, full of patterns finished and in the works, photographs, all sorts of other stuff. We got right on the phone to the Apple Store and the whole family was in the car ten minutes later, driving the 45 mins down to Holyoke for help.

And help we got. The folks at the Apple Store were very nice, even as they told us that the computer was completely and righteously screwed. They ran all sorts of tests, and even sent us home with our soggy harddrive in the care of one of their machines, trying to see if anything could be salvaged from it. This actually took the entire day, and by the time we arrived home we learned the final news. No. Nothing. The harddrive was damaged enough that it's not worth it trying to get anything off it. So that's that.

I know in the grand scheme of things it's no big deal, but it's still one of those moments when one second things are fine, the next the smallest little action has changed things quite a bit. How did we deal with it? Well, with swift action that leaves me scratching my head just as much as the time four months ago when we bought two computers, two iPod Touches and Nintendo Wii in the same day.

1) We bought a new MacBook. Exactly like the old one, just without all that pesky personal data and hard work on it. (We actually did this while still at the store, knowing that the computer itself was dead, but that maybe we'd be able to salvage the harddrive and connect it to the new computer. No, we didn't just have $1,000 sitting around.)

2) We got beer, some clams and a lobster. (And no, we never get lobster. So why choose to do it when we've just spent $1,000 that wasn't sitting around? Maybe one thing leads to the other...)

3) We clicked over to John Scalzi's WHATEVER and checked out the post featuring The Other Lands (Acacia, Book 2) and me in The Big Idea Series. Please see for yourself HERE.

And with that the day drew to a close.

Ah well, it wasn't all bad...