Okay, I have not even begun to settle back in from Launchpad, where I spent a week learning about space with some unspeakably awesome people, but I have a lot of updates and not enough time to write thoughtful intros for them (or for anything, ever). So, we’ll do this list-style and then I promise to bore you sometime later this week with the awesome details about making s’mores with people using only starlight for heat and marshmallows we harvested ourselves.

(This did not happen. Wyoming has no marshmallow trees, as they only thrive in the Pacific Northwest.)

1. First, fiction news! My short story “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” is up at Lightspeed Magazine!

2. I saw Inception opening weekend. I had to wait until I was in New York to do it – I dropped my suitcase at my apartment and went straight from there to the theatre – but I saw it. I will be writing more (a lot more) about this movie later, but for now, my SPOILERY review is up at Tor.com. SPOILERS. It says so in the cut-tag, but I’m direct-linking, so SPOILERS. SO MANY SPOILERS. THE TITANIC SINKS. DARTH IS LUKE’S DAD. SO MANY SPOILERS.

3. Launchpad was great. I wrote up an intro post here, with some handy links, and followed it up with Four Fun Things About the Universe, for values of “fun” that include the knowledge that if you get close to a black hole you’ll be torn to shreds by gravity. Whee!

Tomorrow I should be caught up and ready to blog again. I hope. (I might just go home and sleep 12 hours. It’s reverse altitude sickness!)

Writing news! My story “Take Four” is in issue 9 of Kaleidotrope, alongside awesome people like Jason Heller and Rachel Swirsky. You can check out the full TOC and purchase info here.

Quick excerpt:

Marissa’s walkie-talkie hissed to life. “They know the gate’s sealed. Watch for them.”
The city was more than two miles across, but mobs always moved faster than you thought they would, and Greg barely had time to order the second-unit to film the rising dust before the townspeople burst out of the main square in the center of the city and barreled towards the gate.

Now, back to work. There’s a lot to do today before I hit the line for Eclipse. (More about this later…if I make it that long.)

Please note, I apparently don’t have time to write about anything in depth, but plenty of time to make graphics about what I’m doing. Mmm, logic!

1. Reference image for a story I’m working on; originally was used for a story I just finished, but this image had another purpose. (It’s a worker.)

2. If I am not writing a story about someone in a coat of some kind, then I am writing a story about a post-human singularity…in which robots wear coats.

3. This looks like a still from a fantastic movie. It is, in fact, a still from One Night with the King, which is an absolutely terrible movie you will be seeing more of shortly.

4. Ditto. This is from Bathory. Not pictured: Hans Matheson painting a portrait of a baby that’s been stored inside the block of ice. (Oh, it happens.)

5. This is a picture of a juggler. Technically, he’s from an Anthropologie catalog, and he’s probably just a juggler because Hans Matheson found another stand-in. In my imagination, he’s my imaginary circus boyfriend. His name is Ben. You will probably see him again.

6. The novel currently with my agent takes place in a river city. This picture was from , and the time between me seeing it and me right-click-saving cannot be measured with modern instruments.

7. My next novel is set in the 1920s. Researching dance crazes of the time is repellent, grueling work that I absolutely do not enjoy whatsoever, but it has to be done.

8. Because it’s never the wrong time to watch Gleaming the Cube.

9. Inception. I have a piece about this movie lined up for Tor.com; in the meantime, just know that Joseph Gordon-Levitt must have signed an extra wire-work clause or something.

So, I promise I have a Cookson and everything lined up for next week, but this week I am slammed with work on all fronts and my blog posts look like a Tumblr. I know! I’m sorry!

Two things.

1. Pre-emptive apology: If this CSI Miami intro-pun thing is not funny anymore and I am totally behind the times, somebody should tell me, because I laugh every time I run across it, no matter what. I feel suspiciously like I am that person who was the VERY LAST PERSON to give up laughing at the “WAZZZAAAAP” beer commercial.

(Note: I never actually laughed at that, because I hated it and everyone in it, but I am always wary of being the last person in the room to be like, “Have I got an amazing cutting-edge cultural reference!” and then I do a Fonzie impression and everyone’s quiet for three thousand years until the building crumbles because of tectonic plate shift and I fall gratefully into an abyss.*)

via Disney Princesses

2. Speaking of really dark fairy tales that can easily become more horrifying, this week I wrote up a steampunk remake of Hansel and Gretel that’s in the works for next year.

In theory, I approve (steampunk and dark fairy tales and incesty overtones, what’s not to like?). However, the news that they’re trolling the cast of Twilight like a suspicious old man at a Kinder Kare has me worried, because I don’t know if you have noticed this, but that crew is not necessarily made up of the best actors in the world. (Or in their fifty-foot radius.) I know that movie is popular, and I understand that casting Jackson Rathbone sounds like a wise move, but I urge you to actually watch one of those movies and re-evaulate, because for real.

My Fantasy Magazine article for this week is What YA Fantasy Means for Movies. Technically this could be summed up with a single dollar sign (or, really, three: $$$ looks greedier!), but I tried to actually write a little about patterns and trends and look slightly less cynical than I am.

A couple of things stood out to me during this, though. One of them is that really solid YA fantasy movies based on novels have been a bit thin on the ground until about ten or fifteen years ago. I mean, in the 90s, a whole year could go by without one. I can’t even imagine that now! (Nor would I want to; the fantasy movies tend to have better costumes. Also other reasons, I’m sure, but let’s keep it real.)

The second thing is that it is really easy for young ladies to get the short end of the stick here (and everywhere else, but that’s a whooole other article). I know on the YA lit front that’s not so much the case, but looking at a movie marquee, you have Ramona and Beezus and a lot of supporting parts in dude stories. I mean, when DISNEY is changing the plot of a DISNEY PRINCESS MOVIE to appeal more to boys, we have a problem, you know? It will be interesting to see how that one pans out; I’d reserve judgment and hope it’s just some minor plot tweaks, but when they’re afraid of calling the movie Rapunzel and change the title, it’s kind of a red flag.

Of all the reasons this bothers and confuses me, it’s most inexplicable because the YA movie franchise right now that is straight-up aimed at teen women is making money so fast they do not even know what to do with themselves except make character lip gloss for characters whose makeup was laugh-out-loud terrible and wait for hundreds of thousands of young women to buy it. I mean, you know they’re out there, you know they have money, and you know they’ll see something more than once. Why do you feel like they’re not a good enough audience for you to court, Disney? Damn.