First off, Steel has been named to the 2012 Amelia Bloomer List for “the best books with significant feminist content that will appeal to young readers.”  It’s very gratifying, to set out to write a girl-oriented adventure story with a grounding in feminism, and then have a respected organization say, “Yes, this is feminist.”  I’m honored.

My 2012 list of publications begins with a short story, “Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil,” which will be online at Lightspeed in February.  But the e-book version of the issue is available now.  This is one of two stories about Harry and Marlowe coming out this year, and the first look at the steampunk world I’ve been working on.  Yes, after talking about steampunk for years, I’m finally publishing some of it.  It was inevitable.  (Although, if I had to get technical, it’s not really steampunk but raygun punk, since the technology isn’t steam-driven, but sort of extraterrestrial-green-glowy-thing driven…  Just read it, you’ll see what I mean…)

I find I’ve been inadvertently confusing people, because with the release of Kitty’s Greatest Hits, there are actually 10 Kitty books on the shelves. However, 9 of them are novels, and Greatest Hits isn’t (it’s a different format and everything).  So I haven’t been counting Greatest Hits in the sequence when I number off the novels, because it includes work written over the last ten years, and its continuity is all over the map, from 500 years before the novels take place on up to the recent ones.

So, when I talk about Kitty #10, I’m not talking about Greatest Hits (even though, technically, it’s the tenth Kitty book).  I’m talking about the tenth novel, which is Kitty Steals the Show, which is coming out this summer (woot!).  #11 is the novel after that:  Kitty Rocks the House, which I have just turned in and will probably come out in about a year or so.  And I’ve just started work on the one after that, which is #12.

I hope this makes sense.

But a lot of times when I talk about “kick-ass heroines,” I mean the phrase figuratively — it means, simply, that she is awesome.  She stands up for herself.  She’s smart, capable, motivated.  She stands out in a crowd, for whatever reason.  She makes me pump my fist and say, “Yeeha!”  (Hillary Clinton and Queen Elizabeth (I and II) kick serious ass, figuratively.  People tremble when they walk into rooms, you know?  Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion kicked so much figurative ass I still weep thinking of it.)

Essentially, when judging whether or not a woman character is strong, her combat skills should be irrelevant.  This is going to sound counterintuitive to some people.  But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  strength and the ability to inflict physical violence are not equivalent.  Nor should they be.  In many cases, inflicting physical violence doesn’t make one strong — it makes one a bully.  There are so many ways to show strength:  standing up for yourself and your beliefs, pursuing goals and dreams, finding alternatives to violence, overcoming adversity.  Being independent can be a sign of strength, and so can building a family and circle of friends.  Survival can be an act of profound strength.  There are so many different kinds of strength, defining a “strong character” by only one of them seems terribly limiting.

I think I would like to see more figurative kick-assery, especially in urban fantasy.

And then the father and his bomber disappear over the English Channel.  And I turned to my friends and said, “You know, he isn’t really dead.  Because even though in real life if your plane disappeared over the English Channel you were really really dead, in stories if your plane disappears over the English Channel it means you’re going to miraculously find your way home at the last minute and everyone will cry and be happy.”

And I was right.

After doing this sort of thing a few times this week, I’m starting to think I’m too hard on stories.  But I don’t know how to turn that off — and I don’t want to, because it’s that same instinct that helps me make sure my own stories aren’t boring and predictable.  I mean, I like writing stories set during World War II — lots of us do, which is why there are so many of them — so I have to constantly ask myself how to make my stories new and different and interesting.  (I’ve done this by having my stories feature women pilots and that sort of thing that you don’t see very often.)  But right now I’m grappling with the very fine line between “trope” and “cliche.”  Can a trope be predictable and still be satisfying, storywise?  How do you do that?

And I’m still not a fan of Matt Smith.

I also turned in the revised draft of Kitty #11:  Kitty Rocks the House.  That may be another reason I’m feeling blah.  Floundering between projects is always kind of a rough time.  How about some random distracting links?

This mirrors exactly my experience watching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:  In five minutes.

Here’s one of my favorite pieces of classical music:  Prokofiev’s “The Battle on the Ice.”

After the Golden Age will be out in mass market paperback in a couple of weeks.  Woo!

My brother is posting pictures of my niece, baby Emmy, on his blog.  Since people will ask:  yes, she is a huge baby.  9 lbs 14 oz, 21 inches at birth.  Rob and were both 10 lbs + at birth, so this didn’t really come as a surprise.

And now, I leave you with a quote from Lord Byron:  “Who would write, who had anything better to do?”

If you don’t love and believe in what you’re writing, you’re not going to be able to do this.

(I’m almost done with the latest round of revisions on Kitty 11.  I’ve read it through twice this round.)

The Adventures of Tintin

Competent, but not exciting, alas.  I fell victim to the wobbly motion-capture animation:  half the faces were hyper-realistic, half were cartoons, and I never found my balance.  It annoyed me mightily.  It’s been interesting talking to people and finding out who’s heard of the Tintin comics, who’s actually read them, who knows how immensely popular they are in other countries, and who’s never heard of them at all. I know of them, know how popular they are, but have never read them, and I wonder if I would have liked the movie better if I had.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

This is a portrait of a Cold War spy agency in the process of eating its own tail, and one of its great spymasters is set to investigating his own.  It’s brilliant.  A spy thriller with no car chases or explosions, with all those great British actors who are in everything.  Gary Oldman especially is very, very good.  I had the feeling I was watching an excellent stage play, the kind where two intensely charismatic actors are alone on stage, exchanging simple lines of dialog that have about five different levels of meaning, and my heart’s in my throat waiting for everything to hit the fan.  Oh, the dialog.  I swooned.  But my friend pointed out during the closing credits that this is not a film for everyone — as the loud snoring from elsewhere in the theater during the climactic scene demonstrated.  This is a movie for people who love films like Good Night, and Good Luck, which I did, so there.

While I have a travel bucket list — all the places I want to visit someday — it keeps changing, because new opportunities present themselves.  Like Croatia — it wasn’t on my list, but I’m not going to pass up a chance to see the country with local guides and attend my first overseas science fiction convention.  Like Belize a few years ago — also not on my list, but the dive shop had organized the trip, I needed to finish my certification, so why not?

So my travel bucket list isn’t so much a list of specific destinations.  It’s more like a single idea:  see new places, as many as I can.

How about you?  Do you have a travel bucket list?  What’s on it?

Hoping to talk to my brother soon to get the whole story.

I almost didn’t write about this at all because I fear my reaction to it is idiosyncratic and unhelpful.  It tripped a few too many of my narrative cliche/kick-ass heroine pet peeves.  For example, a half hour into the film:

**Spoiler**

Mikael:  How did Harriet die?

Henrik:  Oh, the body was never found.

Me:  Then she’s not dead and she’ll turn up alive by the end of the movie.

*two hours later*

Mikael:  Harriet?

Harriet:  OMG how did you find me!

Me:  Wow, this is a long movie.

(As an aside, this plot twist is predictable enough that I’ve seen a few TV mysteries rig it so that the cops may not find a body, but they find enough of the victim’s blood that “she couldn’t possibly have survived.”  When in fact the “victim” saved many pints of her blood to leave at the scene of her disappearance so no one would look for her.  This, too, has become cliche.)

**End Spoiler**

Many people like this movie.  There’s a nice mystery/thriller tucked inside it somewhere.  But I spent most of its nearly three hours (!) rewriting it in my head.  I’m curious about the book now, if it maybe handles some of this a bit more deftly.

Oh, and then we get to the end credits, which feature a goth/industrial remake of Bryan Ferry’s “Is Your Love Strong Enough,” that originally appeared on the soundtrack to Legend.  Dear reader, I laughed.  I wondered if this was some sort of statement, like “Let’s take this song from a 30 year old fantasy movie about how innocence and light face darkness and evil and redo it for this movie about confronting human depravity, to suggest that innocence simply isn’t that powerful.”  Like, maybe there’s some deeper meaning I’m supposed to be getting.  Or, as my friend suggested, maybe they just figured nobody would remember that song existed.  Nobody but me, that is.

(P.S.:  I should also mention, this film is not for the squeamish.)