Hi all. Just a quick heads-up for a couple of events — I will be on #sffwrtcht with the very kind @BryanThomasS tonight at 6pm PST/9pm EST. All you have to do is load up the #sffwrtcht hashtag on twitter.com to tune in! You have many screens to choose from, but I’ll be pleased if you pick this one. The chats are a lot of fun, so stop by on a future Wednesday evening if you can’t make this one.

And if you’ll be in the bay area on Saturday evening, I will be reading alongside Marie Brennan and Ysabeau Wilce at SFinSF. Full details are here, and the short and sweet is:

Saturday, May 19th

Join us for an evening with Ysabeau Wilce, Marie Brennan & Erin Hoffman

6:00PM – doors and cash bar open
7:00PM – event starts
$5-$10 donation at the door benefits Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California – to date, we’ve helped raise over $30,000 for the kids in our community! Learn more here!

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor — entrance between Quiznos and Citibank
582 Market Street @ 2nd and Montgomery
San Francisco, CA 94104

Don’t Drive — BART/MUNI Montgomery Street station is right at our front door, and parking in San Francisco sucks!!! Street parking ($3.50 per hour) is metered M-Sat., til 6PM; find a parking garage here.

Hope to see you there!

The dedication on Lance of Earth and Sky reads:

for my grandparents–
epic heroes
from an epic time

“At the Foot of the Lighthouse (Todai Moto Kurashi)” is, in part, an illustration of what I meant with that phrase.

I’ve written before about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and Go for Broke!; those posts may provide context to this one. It is my greatest hope that this story might inspire some people to learn about the 442 in particular. But the very short contextual recap is that, as some of you know already, my grandfather, great-grandmother, and two great-uncles were interned with 17,000 other Japanese Americans from 1942-1944 in the Poston War Relocation Camp, an event that naturally thereafter shaped my family’s identity and I am sure will continue to influence it in generations after mine. Those who have read the story may also be interested to know that I have a third cousin who was killed at Hiroshima, for which there is also a family story.

This story is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I don’t say that to lay any kind of claim to quality, only to say that this story was unique in my work for how it was chiseled sentence by sentence, interspersed with long nights poring through war diaries, legal transcripts, historical websites. Many times I would lay down a handful of words and have to get up and physically leave the screen because I was overcome by grief, bewilderment, anguish. This story was reaching for catharsis.

I’d like to talk about the story in total here, and in particular its ending, so this is a spoiler warning of sorts and a chance to stop reading now. I hope that if you read it you’ll do me the favor of reading the story first, because it is that kind of ending. So here’s the link again, last chance!

There is a documentary called Beyond Barbed Wire that I highly, highly recommend if you want an overview of the internment and the culture in which it occurred. It comes paired with the truly remarkable 1951 Academy Award Nominated Go for Broke! and is a heck of a deal. At one point during Beyond Barbed Wire you will see a man whose father was interned talking about how hard it is for him even today to comprehend what happened. His voice breaks, he weeps, not even recalling specific memories but just the simple concept that our own government tagged his father like an animal before loading him onto a train bound for the desert so that, while he was gone, his house could be looted, vandalized, and seized. All of this for racism and for no other reason, as a report filed in 1983 would finally admit, that thousands of lives were destroyed, many were killed or committed suicide, hundreds of millions of dollars of property was virtually stolen, when not one single instance of espionage or treason would ever be connected to a Japanese American.

It is wrenching and incomprehensible. So too is the persistence of the amazing loyalty expressed by Japanese Americans at this time, and continuing today. They say shikata ga nai — it cannot be helped, better to accept the way things are and keep a positive attitude. This same attitude has been admired recently in Japanese culture in response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

But those of us descended from nisei (which means “second generation” — my mother is sansei, third generation, and I am yonsei, fourth generation) are — at least I am — more American than we are Japanese American, and our grasp on this attitude is not nearly as intuitive. You can hear that in the cracking voices as they describe their disbelief at what happened, and that it happened to people we love. It is one that I share and struggle with. Right now I fight against that swell of emotion to write this, and I can’t speak about it at all without dissolving into tears. It is part anguish, part pride, part horror, part rage — and that is what is in this story.

I’ve known for years that I would write something like this, though I didn’t know when. The opportunity presented itself when Jay and I signed up for Gary Braunbeck‘s fiction masterclass at Context 21 in 2008. If you know Gary’s work (and if you don’t, I highly recommend it), you know that he seems to have an internal radar for the most difficult things in his life to mine for stories, and that what he emerges with is transformative, terrifying, soul-wringing; that when you finish a Braunbeck story, you feel exhausted, human, and real. Jay introduced me to Gary’s work in 2005, and I knew that if anyone could mentor this kind of story, it would be him.

So, months before the workshop, I set out to write the story, which at first involved a lot of reading. If you are interested in this subject, and in authenticity, you may be interested in the work of Hisaye Yamamoto, who was interned at Poston also. As I said, the process of writing “Lighthouse” was unusual (I usually am a thorough outliner; I did not outline this story), and it surprised me many times — particularly when I saw where it was going. And it did just that; I saw the ending coming, and I stopped writing. I asked many of the questions I’m sure will be asked publicly and privately about the story. How could it end this way?

I reached a breakthrough of sorts when I realized that although this was a story about the internment, it was not their story: it was mine. Someday I hope to tell their story, but I had to get through this first. And what I had, beneath the bewilderment, beneath aspiring to shikata ga nai, was rage.

That is the legacy left to those of us descended from interned Japanese. A kind of rage perhaps even denied the first generation, for the most part (though there were resistors). But what I felt from connecting with the third and fourth generation experience was that our anger is greater in part because we didn’t have to undergo this ourselves — because it was inflicted upon our loved ones, and because it went so long unaddressed, decades before there was so much as an apology. Because there are millions of Americans today who don’t even know that it happened, and others (thankfully fewer), who will say that it was justified.

And I wondered what it would mean if that feeling had a literal power. In a way, I wondered if this wasn’t what speculative fiction was for: the literalization of the subjective. I wondered what would happen if that anguish and disbelief and rage could do in the physical world what it seemed to be doing inside of me.

It was inevitable then to ask the question — one of the most difficult questions in American history — that the story’s protagonist is asked at the end. And so inevitable, too, was her answer.

When I submitted the story to the masterclass, it was with great trepidation and self-consciousness. I still have those feelings about its reception. But I also know that, at least for me, the story could not be or end any other way. And among the many things we discussed at that workshop, Gary’s last comment about the story was: whatever you do, don’t change the ending. And I didn’t.

I sent the story to Patrick Nielsen-Hayden at Tor.com, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, the wonderful Liz Gorinsky pulled it out of the slush. About a year and half after I sent it, Liz had stepped up to a full editor position, and offered to buy it. At the time the title was “A Single Small Globe Against the Stars”, in reference to the Arthur C. Clarke quote, which is in full “It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.” The one that we eventually landed on is much better, and the story is much improved thanks to Liz’s thorough editorial eye. I was thrilled also when I saw Scott Bakal‘s amazing illustration, selected by Irene Gallo. You can read a cool process post about the illustration’s creation on Scott’s drawger site. I am incredibly grateful that this story was handled by such a crack team, and also, as I said, to Gary, his masterclass, and to Jay, who championed this story in particular through many narrow moments when I threatened to not write it.

It is a story that, to me, requires context, and I honestly don’t know if that’s an indication of its weakness. I know what I wanted to evoke, and from the reactions of readers I believe that, at least for some, I achieved it. If you read the story, and/or read this far, I sincerely thank you for your attention. For me, at its core, it is a kind of awed terror — and a nihilist tragedy — at the lesson that we purchased with their sacrifice.

Whew. Back in SF today, successfully having survived another book signing! Thank you very much to those of you who made it, and those who didn’t, we missed you!

I often receive emails or facebook messages asking where signed copies of Sword or Lance can be obtained. If you can’t make it to an event (say, SFinSF on May 19th?), the very fine folk at Mysterious Galaxy have several copies on-hand in San Diego, freshly signed from this weekend.

I’ve gushed about Mysterious Galaxy before and will add only that every visit reinforces their awesomeness. Great conversation with all who turned out on subjects ranging from paranormal romance to Philip K. Dick to game designing a fantasy world and more. I try to pick up works by authors I haven’t heard of before while I’m there, and left with three.

There were also gryphon cookies! As you can see. I made the cookie cutter using a “kit” — really a long strip of aluminum and some adhesive to bind the ends together — and a later post will document the creation of the exceedingly rare gryphon sugar cookie. You’d think someone would have cornered the gryphon cookie cutter market by now! Also featured was interactive frosting, meaning that we were letting the cookies cool and wanted to test the artistic ability of attendees — Bill is shown here frosting his, and the results were so spectacular they defied photography.

Lastly, Pyr is running a 50% off coupon along with a brief interview in the most recent edition of their newsletter! Head over here to sign up and get your coupon. You can also like the Pyr Page on Facebook, where there’s a direct link to the newsletter and coupon.

And now, a picture of Isis, my family’s cat — rescued from the humane society in San Diego waaaay back in 1994, and still going strong:

More soon!

Today is Lance of Earth and Sky’s birthday!

To celebrate the launch, one of these little gryphons will be released into the wild with a signed copy of Lance:

Stop by the Andovar World Facebook Page to vote on the giveaway type (random draw? art contest? haiku contest?), or leave a comment here. The gryphons were created by Becca Gollins of DragonsAndBeasties, and if you can’t wait for the draw, you can order your own tiny gryphon from her on Etsy.
I will be signing at Mysterious Galaxy this Saturday at 2pm in San Diego! The good folk at MG were kind enough to host a book launch for Sword of Fire and Sea last year, and Lance will officially launch there again this year.

You can RSVP on Facebook here, check out the event page here, or just stop by if you’re in the area! If you can’t make the event, there will be signed copies in the store after. Mysterious Galaxy is over eighteen years old and is a bastion of independent genre book love in southern CA.

And if you’re in northern California, I’ll be reading at SFinSF with Ysabeau Wilce and Marie Brennan on May 19th! SFinSF is sponsored by the wonderful Tachyon Publications (publishers of a great deal of Peter Beagle’s work, amongst other things), with books provided at the event by the equally amazing Borderlands Books, another amazing independent haven for genre fiction (with a super delicious cafe joined to it to boot).

Hope to see you if you can manage to be in either area! My head is deeply buried in SHIELD and the Work Game, thus the blog sparsity, but my plan for both of these is to be manifestly present. Possibly with cookies. Stay tuned for another post next week about Lance‘s dedication, some family history, and my short story “At the Foot of the Lighthouse: Todai Moto Kurashi”, appearing at Tor.com in May. My cup runneth over.

Jay and I are here at FogCon (FogCon through tomorrow! Come and say hi if you’re in the area!

Friday    8:00 p.m.   
 The Redefined Body   
Up to now, science has mostly focused on repairing our existing bodies. What happens when our technology is good enough to let us change our bodies, or control other things as if they were parts of our bodies? How might technology let us go beyond keeping healthy and into changing our physical selves? What fiction or nonfiction books do the best job painting the upcoming possibilities?   
Salon B/C   
 Moderator: Alan Bostick    
 Emily Jiang    
 Eva Folsom    
Erin Hoffman    

Friday 9:30pm
BroadUniverse Rapid Fire Reading
Santa Rosa

Http://BroadUniverse.org

                                
Saturday    10:30 a.m.   
 Gray Is the New Purple   
 Aging isn’t for the weak of heart. What sf/f works deal with the topic of aging, either positively or negatively? Who gets it right and who should do some homework?   
 Salon B/C   
 Moderator: Madeleine Robins  
Phyllis Holliday    
 Oyceter    
 Erin Hoffman    

 Sunday    1:00 p.m.   
Let’s Design Some Aliens   
The audience will design three separate alien species, with gentle guidance from the panelists to help keep them semi-plausible.    
 Salon B/C   
 Moderator: Vylar Kaftan       
 Erin Hoffman    
 Juliette Wade    
 Phyllis Holliday    

Happy First Day of Spring, everybody. In January I was contacted by Erin Palmer from the US News University Directory about a guest appearance here. After some discussion and review of their directory, I asked if she might be interested in coordinating a guest post about finding a game design school that specializes or allows for a focus in Games for Health or other “social mission”-oriented game design. Rather to my (happy) surprise, I’m often contacted by students asking where and what they should study if they’re specifically interested in designing games that have an educational or social mission. This seems to be a growing specialization desire for students going into college, and it’s pretty terrific. So here’s the guest post they came up with. –Erin

The Importance of Ethical Video Game Design

Video games have grown up. No longer are games designed for entertainment purposes only or just for gaming enthusiasts. The U.S. military uses video games for training. Through video games, Fortune 500 companies sell products and charities raise awareness. Schools use them to teach logic and problem-solving skills.

As video games’ reach and use extends across broad segments of society, they are increasingly being held up as models of ethical and social inquiry. That focus is spilling over to the curriculum in game design schools, as well.

Students in game design school take courses like animation, special effects and graphic design, and 2D and 3D modeling. They’ll expect to learn how to create a game from concept to launch – but they should also be expected to dig deeper into social theories and impacts, as well as ethical questions of game design.

Game Design Ethics Are a Hot Topic 

The debate over violence in video games has always been lively, involving everyone from game producers to parents, educators to criminal justice professionals. Lately, designers and critics alike are increasingly calling for games to help solve social problems, contribute to ethical inquiry, improve social discourse and help users examine their own views on issues.

It’s clear that games can be used for more than just escape and entertainment. Some experts say they can – and should – help solve global issues like climate change, poverty and hunger; or individual challenges, like obesity and depression. It sounds like the future could be in the hands of those who play and design video games – and it’s imperative that game design schools focus on both ethics and entertainment.

Ethical Questions for Video Game Design Educators and Students to Ponder 

The video game field can lead in countless directions, from design and development to production and project management. Regardless of the focus, students of game design should be encouraged to ask how they can use the profession for the greater good:

• How can we leverage the power of video games to deliver education to more people?
• How do games influence users’ choices regarding social and environmental issues?
• How can video games make a positive contribution to society?
• What is the role of video games in ethical discussions?
• Can games promote certain ethical positions while entertaining? Should they?

It’s important to learn how games influence and affect not only the players, but society as a whole. It is possible to create video games that advance moral and ethical education.

Incorporating Ethics into Video Game Design Programs

Whether single-player or MMOG, video games can teach basic skills like math and spelling; moral lessons like integrity and accountability; and life lessons that come from inhabiting another world with a different personality. They offer ways to explore philosophical and ethical ideas that are not otherwise readily available to most people. Where else can a player make the choice to be a hero or a villain, to invade a village or rescue it, or to keep a found treasure or share it with others? Where else can players learn the consequences of their choices, with the ability to try again, and hope for a better outcome?

Video game designers are being encouraged to think about games in a different way; to create games that are fun and have a positive message; and to help young people navigate through life with a better understanding of themselves and their choices. More game designers are seeking out ethical game companies. As demand grows, educational opportunities should expand as well. More students pursuing video game design careers will be seeking out design programs that include an ethical component, or that focus on educational, social or environmental issues. Together, game design educators and students can help make the world a better place, one game at a time!

Guest post provided by U.S News University Directory a leading resource for locating online computer degrees and IT certification programs from accredited colleges, as well as, a growing collection of education articles and career information.  For more information please visit http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com.

We’re sliding into the holidays, and there is prettiness to share! Behold, Dehong’s latest lovely creation:

(Click the image to open a larger version.)

You can now preorder Lance of Earth and Sky on Amazon also.

It’s truly an honor to have another cover from Dehong. I understand he’s been very busy with Time Voyager (and their MMO coincidentally titled Chaos Gate!), so it’s especially fortunate that he was able to make some time for Andovar.

Also, you can now pick up Clockwork Phoenix on Kindle for $3.99! The anthology was critically acclaimed and has some great stories in it from Laird Barron, Leah Bobet, Michael J. DeLuca, and others — including my fableish thing “Root and Vein”, which got a nice call out from this recent review at Dark Cargo.

Reviews continue to come in for Sword of Fire and Sea and I have been inexcusably lax in getting them all compiled onto my website. But That Bookish Girl says “Sword of Fire and Sea by Erin Hoffman was an incredibly exciting and compelling read.” — and SFFWorld.com weighs in on gryphons and more: “Through her characters, Hoffman imbues the Gryphons with a true sense of awe, and an initial feeling of them being the Other.”

I hope you are all winding toward a great holiday season, and an even better 2012.

The little gryphons and I are at World Fantasy today! Amazing to see so many awesome people in my hometown. Hope you’ll say hello if you’re in the area!

2:00 PM

Pacific 1: The Successful Misfit as a Theme in Fantasy

Is Schmendrick the Magician endearing because he’s a lovable loser, or is there something else going on? Nerds, geeks, and absent-minded professors abound in the pages of genre literature. What is it about the social misfit that attracts readers and makes them empathize with the protagonist? Are authors and readers self-identifying?

Peter S. Beagle, Deborah Biancotti, Erin Hoffman, R. L. LaFevers, Mark L. Van Name (M)