It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, working on lots of different projects and trying to also make time for hanging out with Rob. I am going to have to find ways to simplify my life. I’ve been right at the edge of the amount of work that I can handle for months now, and it’s catching up with me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved doing the different projects, but I can tell that I’m at the threshold. I actually turned work down the other day. Astonishing, I know.

You know what I want? I want a vacation. I just don’t know how to get one.

In a moment of procrastination, I played Google Imager. One of the images was this one and it had the URL legosteampunk.blogspot.com.

Sure enough, it’s a blog devoted to steampunk legos.

It looks like it hasn’t been updated since last summer, but there’s some darn cool stuff on it.

SFWA is creating a new, updated website for the Nebula Awards and is looking for a SFWA member to partner with the professional web designer they’ve hired to do the heavy lifting.

Estimated Time Required: 10-30 hours per month, (Variable depending on time of year. Heaviest commitment: March, April, and May)

Job Description:
1. Advise the Board on the nebulaawards.com web presence, set priorities for nebulaawards.com consistent with the overall goal of promoting the Nebula and Norton Awards, the nominees, the winners, the Awards weekend, SFWA anthologies, and through them all, the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Assist in recruiting, training, and coordinating volunteers as needed.

2. Review existing Nebula-related and other genre promotional material and its organization to remove extraneous and confusing material and create an organizational map that is easily navigable and makes relevant material easily discoverable.

3. Suggest, gather, organize, and provide content to the Nebula webmaster, including interviews, opinion essays, images, and bios/essays from Nebula and Norton Award winners.

4. Serve as liaison between the sfwa.org webmaster, Nebula webmaster, Bulletin and NAR editors, Executive Director, and SFWA members.

5. Create press releases regarding important Nebula website updates and work with media representatives as necessary to publicize the website.

Benefits: Extensive networking, connection with the redesign of a high-profile website suitable for resume mention, and increased visibility in SFWA.

Skills required: A high level of organization, ability to lead a team, editing and document management experience, experience with content management systems, blogs, and making video/audio material web accessible. Any level of SFWA membership

If you are interested, send a brief introductory letter to sfwavolunteer@gmail.com

While looking for helmets for the Odyssey today, I found one called Imperial Italic Centurion. I think it has a nice serif.

One of the projects I’m working on is the set design for a new play called “Hannah and the Hollow Challah.” It takes place in Hannah’s home and then she is whisked off to Breadland by the opera singing Hollow Challah. Once there, she encounters a bajillion characters and goes to a half-dozen scenic locations.

My challenges:

• Two performers. No stage hands
• A stage with no wings, flyspace or backstage
• Must tour using the subway
• $500 budget, for materials and labor
• No more than twenty minute to setup

I asked for volunteer labor, and have been promised a carpenter and a seamstress, which eases the budget constraints considerably.

¹

You know you’ve read scenes exactly like this which were written in earnest. Cut the repetition and don’t say the obvious.

Unless you are Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, in which case you are fintastically fintastic.

1. Spotted at Genevieve Valentine’s [↩]

They just posted the works whose eligibility for next year’s Nebulas expires at the end of January. I noticed that Cat Rambo’s story, “Foam on Water” published in Strange Horizons, has seven recommendations. I loved this and recommended it a while ago.

The story only lacks three recommendations to be on next year’s preliminary ballot.

May I recommend, especially if you are a SFWA member, that you read it?

This takes the Little Mermaid and makes it look like Hans Christian Andersen was writing stories made of cotton candy.

Last night, Rob told me that the milk carton had sprung a leak and that he’d had to transfer the milk into other containers. So this morning, I got up and poured a milk out of a cocktail shaker. Mmm… milktini’s anyone?

Good heavens. For Solo Cello, op. 12 apparently made the British Science Fiction Association long list for Best Short Story 2007. It did not make it to the short list, but I’m stunned to find my story near the list at all.

Several friends also make an appearance: Ted Kosmatka (who pointed the list out to me), Aliette de Bodard, John Scalzi… Best of all, they link to a lot of the fiction, which means it’s a treasure trove of really good stuff.

For the past several months, I’ve been helping out by recruiting volunteers for SFWA. As I do, it becomes apparent to me that the organization faces several hurdles.

1. It lacks continuity.
2. There are no clear lines of communication
3. The public interface is out-dated.
4. Volunteers’ time is not efficiently managed.

Here is how I would like to tackle those items.

1. When I was the Secretary of UNIMA-USA (The American branch of the International puppetry organization, which is the oldest continually operating arts organization in the world), I was responsible for updating and maintaining an Officer’s Handbook. This contained, not only the minutes and the bylaws, but also a detailed description of the goal of each committee and the semi-annual reports of the committees.

I would like to implement a similar system for SFWA.

2. At the moment, when a committee is created, it exists as an entity of its own, without reporting to a specific member of the board. The problem with this is that when a committee becomes inactive, it can languish in this condition for months or years without anyone noticing. Several times during the past months, I’ve contacted a committee chair, only to have them say, “Oh. Am I still on that committee?”

I would like to re-evaluate the committee structure, and rebuild it using more vertical lines of communication. This will create more accountability and a smoother line of communication. For your interest, I have done a diagram of the current committee structure and a proposed restructuring.

3. We all know the website is outdated. Rather than using a committee to redesign this, because we all know how successful design by committee is, I would like to see SFWA hire an actual web-designer to do a complete revamping of the system, including adding a forum.

In particular, I want to see redundancies removed. For instance, we have a team of extremely hardworking volunteers who update the Nebula Recommendations. It is all hard-coded with HTML in several different places. This is something that cries out for automation, so that the volunteers merely need to moderate it and check for errors.

4. SFWA uses the principle “Want something done, ask the busy person” so that the brunt of the effort comes down on a few people. I want to implement online volunteer management software, which will track availability, hours, and skills. Let’s stop burning out the volunteers.

About me: I have spent most of the past seventeen years working in the non-profit sector. Volunteers are the backbone of non-profits and I’ve managed them on projects ranging from running a week-long festival to getting envelopes stuffed to making a cyclops head. In addition to being a writer, I’m a small business owner and freelancer. I’ve got the publishing credits to be an active SFWA member, but more importantly, I know how to run a non-profit efficiently.

I just found out that the preliminary Stoker Ballot lists Gratia Placenti, edited by Jason Sizemore & Gill Ainsworth (Apex Publications). I’ve got a story in there so I’m tremendously pleased to see the anthology make the list.

When I was in college, we were shown this very early example of animation. Made in 1918, Winsor McCay wanted to show the horror of Lusitania’s sinking. I was talking with a friend about it and she’d never seen it so I hit the wonders of YouTube. Behold! I hadn’t seen this newsreel with making-of footage that goes with it.

Paper Forest, which is fast becoming one of my favorite blogs, linked to this series of photos of Moneygami. You remember doing this, right? Making a frog out of a dollar bill. There’s a whole new level of skill happening with these. In particular, check out the way the graphics on the money gets reinvented in the new creation.

Makes you want to go fold a dollar bill, huh?

Normally I’m all etiquette books and puppets, but there are days when what I really want to see is a movie with things that explode, you know? Today was one of those — don’t ask — and so Rob went out to find something for me. He came back with The Bourne Supremacy, which I saw in Iceland and Charlie’s Angels. Good fluffy explosions and fight sequences. I love wire work and there was plenty of it in this.

The urge to watch this kind of film doesn’t come up that often so I don’t keep up with the good action films out there. I’m looking for suggestions for the next time I need an exploding film nights.

To start you off, here are movies that fit the bill:
Almost anything by Jackie Chan
The Blues Brothers
Spiderman
Indiana Jones
The Bourne Identity
Some Bond, such as Goldfinger
Serenity
Robocop

There’s a tendency for comic book escapism here, you might note. It’s not that they need to be light-hearted it’s just that I don’t handle monsters well.

So… got any suggestions for me?