PNWA Conference 2025

I attended this year’s Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference, organized by hard-working volunteers to help aspiring writers. Instead of a typical picture of the hotel, here is the pool I had no intention of taking the time to use.

Before the serious stuff, here is the omelet I ordered. It had cheese, mushrooms, bacon and pineapple. Yes, that’s right. The waitress laughed at my asking for pineapple.

The main conference room. Right now, tables are designated to discuss mystery, fantasy, science fiction, romance, etc.

These three writers have all had books turned into movie or TV scripts. (Sorry, I no longer have access to the conference guide, so I don’t have their names.) Once the contract is signed and the writer is paid, the writer no longer has any control of the story. The woman on the left was distressed when the main character in her novel was killed in the movie version.

The main events for many writers were the pitch sessions. Editors and agents sit along one side of a series of long tables. Writers stand in line for the desired professional. At the sound of a bell, the person at the head of a line has four minutes to walk forward, sit down, and pitch a manuscript. The usual advice is to summarize one’s novel in thirty seconds. I took forty-five, since I had to describe the science fictional setting. The rest of the time is spent answering questions from the professional.

This is half of the long conference room

I had an advantage, in that I could say that two developmental editors had looked over my manuscript. This showed I was serious about becoming a writer (it cost over three thousand dollars), and that I was willing to make changes (I deleted three scenes).

Here are the two agents I pitched to, Katie Reed and Lydia Caudill.

One of them requested I send pages to her. Which one? That would be telling.

I recommend going to conferences where one can pitch. It can be nerve-wracking, but since I had done this before, it wasn’t bad at all.

Book Review: Oshi No Ko Volume 5

I don’t think I’ve reviewed a manga before. I became interested in this one because the blurb said it was about a manga author who becomes horrified about how it is being adapted for a play. Looking inside, at one point she says, “This script … is full of characters saying things they’d never say.” (p. 82).  

This was intriguing, but I didn’t buy it for months, because I try to avoid impulse buying. I’ve bought only two other manga in the past, and after some months ended up selling them to a used bookstore.

So by the time I decided to buy it, the series had finished with Volume 24. I was warned on a book site that other readers had ordered this past issue, and they had received what were obviously used books, though they had been advertised as new. One buyer said his copy was damaged.

I took the risk, and received a copy in new condition.

Oshi No Ko Volume 5 by Aka Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari is quite engaging, because it goes surprisingly deep into the nature of acting and having one’s writing adapted.

The main character is actually Akane, a seventeen-year-old actress. (She’s the one on the cover.) She reveals that actors for plays get about a month to rehearse. “We meet at noon, rehearse for six or seven hours, then go home at night.” (p. 43).

Her conflict comes from the direction and the script. She is told to be intense, like the other actors. She knows the character in the manga is quiet and has a lot of inner conflict. But the script changes her to a bold, unsubtle character (which explains the direction she was given). She concludes, “He’s flattened her character into a plot device.” (p. 56).

A friend encourages her to speak to the script writer. Surprisingly, Akane says, “We can’t break the chain of command.” (p. 65). She explains that if the cast gets instructions from more than one person, they become confused.

Akane gets an opportunity to speak to the script writer and the director together. The script writer says it is hard to portray a character’s feelings without a lot of acting, so he had to simplify this complex story. But he is open to fix things to help Akane.

The director cuts this short, saying, “Don’t spoil the cast.” (p. 69). He tells Akane her role is to be a “persuasive stage device.” (p. 70). Akane accepts this.

The author of the original manga becomes a main character for a while. But she is so anti-social and eventually so angry, she is hard to sympathize with. She is so upset with the play adaptation, she wants the script writer fired.

 Akane, who now sympathizes with the script writer, tries to prevent him from getting fired. Does she succeed? Take a risk and buy a copy.

Book Review: Susan, You’re the Chosen One

Susan, You’re the Chosen One by Lauretta Hignett

Susan Moore is a middle-aged woman going through a difficult menopause. She used to live an opulent life, but her ex-husband Vincent divorced her and is now living with an intern less than half her age. Susan’s meager existence is crammed into a half-studio apartment next to her building’s roof access. One night she sees four young people standing on the ledge. They look like Lord of the Rings elven warrior cosplayers. She tells them to get down.

 Later, they come a knocking. Cress, who looks like she’s just past her teens, assumes Susan is the Chosen One. Susan sends them off. When they return, the oldest, Prince Donovan (whom Susan thinks is hot, though he is in his late twenties), takes the lead. Connor simply makes her apartment door disappear.

Susan assumes this is another hallucination. And this is one of number of things that makes Susan so interesting. At first, we were very sympathetic to her, and ready to hate her ex-husband Vincent. But we learn more about her in dribs and drabs. Susan suffers from “Menopause-induced paranoid schizophrenia, intermittent explosive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, acute psychosis, and rage.” (p. 19). Concerning the divorce, she thinks “I’d lost him, and it was all my fault.” (p. 22).  Even more disturbingly, “I’d hurt him. I’d almost killed him.” (p. 23).

At one point, Seraphina visits, the intern-turned-fiancée. A delicate young woman, she says she and Vincent were concerned about her and just wanted her to get better. Susan becomes so hostile, Seraphina “flinched, like a beautiful doe in a meadow startled by a loud noise.” (p. 147).

So this is not the average urban fantasy. Usually, we would expect the protagonist to look like the young Fae girl Cress, complete with a long sword strapped to her back and a dagger at her hip. After all, who doesn’t enjoy reading about some Buffy beating down some creature? But she and the Fae Prince Donovan and their two companions are supporting characters. Or, the protagonist could be more like Seraphina, who would eventually become bolder. But she’s not it, either.

How many urban fantasy novels have a middle-aged woman as the main character?

But is our protagonist good? Yes—mostly. Her ambiguous nature due to her past keeps us curious. And what hallucinations did she have? When the supporting characters tell her she is the Chosen One—among other things, that means she has inherited the bloodlines of all the species, including fae, humans, and mermaids—she thinks she is having an interesting episode.

When Susan is forced underwater, she finds she can breathe because she is part mermaid. She even talks a sea witch into revealing her spark stone. But all the time she thinks she is having a long hallucination. It’s not until halfway through the novel, when her two fae companions visit her office and talk to humans there, that she realizes all this is real.

As far as the plot is concerned, Donovan’s younger brother needs to be stopped. He wants to swallow all the spark stones—yes, swallow—and that would be bad. But the plot hardly matters. What matters are the funny interactions between Susan and her new companions.

 Cress describes one of the spark stones, saying, “It is a light blue, clear, like your mortal sky on a cloudless day.” After searching for a while on her phone, Susan waves an image of it at them. When asked where she found it, she replies, “On eBay.” (p. 44).

Donovan wants to steal this spark stone, instead of buying it. Susan knows the owner and warns he has a rottweiler as a guard dog. She tries to describe it, and Donovan concludes it is one of the “hell-hound familiars” that guard some of the fae. (pp. 48-49).

At Susan’s workplace, a sleezy guy knows about her mental issues. He threatens to use that to get the promotion she deserves. She calls him a “Loki wannabe.” And so, “Loki?” Cress gasped. “He is here? In the human realm?” (p. 62).

When going to lunch, Donovan says, “Make haste, woman. Gather your things.” (p. 86.) I’m sure all women like to be talked to that way.

Astute readers will notice these amusing quotations are from the first hundred pages of the book. But these moments don’t stop there. It simply becomes harder to come up with a pithy quotation without giving much more context.

For something less amusing, there is the moment Donovan confronts the jerk who is trying to steal Susan’s promotion. Donovan grabs him by the throat in the classic way, then says, “From this day forth, you will never look directly at the woman you call Susan Moore. You will not make eye contact.” (p. 128). The sleazy guy is so terrified, he does not contact human resources.  

Overall, Susan, You’re the Chosen One by Lauretta Hignett is a fun read with an unusual protagonist. Susan does use foul language, which her four companions do not, which is a disadvantage. But all the fish out of water experiences—on both sides—are constantly amusing.

Happy 4th of July

 Bellevue Square

Reprise of "Jury Duty – A nun, a security guard, and a writer walk into a jury room"

I'm going to write a detailed book review that I'll try to submit to a magazine. In the meanwhile, here is a reprise of a previous post. The only thing that needs correcting is that the underground tunnel no longer has buses go through, only light rail. 

NZ if you're out there, if you find the web version of this, you'll see a contact form on the right. 

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So I was on jury duty for the past two days. Here’s a hint: bring plenty to read and/or a laptop. It mainly consists of sitting around, waiting to see if you’ll be called in to be part of a jury pool. But first, let’s look at the scenery. First a friendly picture, then a scary one.

The tunnel also handles light rail

which accounts for the tracks

A Metro bus went from near my home all the way into the Seattle underground bus tunnel, where there was a stop right below the courthouse. After climbing the stairs (or using the elevator) one emerged with the King County Courthouse less than half a block away. That was handy today, since it was raining.

Now look at the structure below. Does it look like a huge rectangular block is connecting two tall buildings? You’re right. It’s a skybridge, but with no windows. It goes from the courthouse on the right, beyond the building on the left, and ends at the County Jail one building beyond. This is like Con Air, but without the planes. Prisoners can be frogmarched back and forth without using squad cars. This saves time, since downtown traffic can be bad, but it also prevents the prisoners from escaping during laborious loading and unloading from vehicles. If something bad happens in the skybridge, massive steel doors can be slammed shut, trapping the prisoner inside.

Why so serious?

If this doesn’t make you imagine interesting scenes, maybe you shouldn’t try being a writer.

Here’s Seattle City Hall, about a block from the Courthouse. It really looks beautiful during sunny weather, and sometimes they have people selling fresh produce—an offshoot of the famous Pike’s Place Market. Alas, it’s December, so the only noteworthy thing was me taking pictures.

Just beyond it is the Columbia Tower. It’s the tallest building in the state of Washington. It has numerous little restaurants on the first floor, so if you do jury duty in Seattle, I highly recommend it for a fast lunch. I had a nice turkey pot pie at JJ’s Gourmet Burgers.

I call it the Dark Tower

Guess why

So on to jury duty itself. Something like a hundred and forty of us waited around to see if we would be called to a jury pool. The waiting can take hours at a time, so I got a start on a new novel on my laptop (I won’t reveal the title yet). Then forty of us get called in to a jury pool. The lawyers take turns asking us questions to see if we’re biased.

On the way in, the potential juror in front of me recognized someone who happened to be sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. They were so jovial about being in the Courthouse I thought, “Oh great, they’re fellow criminals.” But after he sat down to the right of me in the jury pool, it turned out he was a security guard. They can be asked in a lot to be witnesses to altercations, so his friend waiting outside the court was probably also in security. I felt better.

As the lawyers tried to weed out biased people, they asked questions that didn’t apply to me, such as whether any of us had ever been shot at, would we use a gun in self defense, whether we had bad experiences with police officers. You can probably guess at some of the arguments they were preparing for trial by these questions.

A woman behind me said in a soft voice that she could not imagine using a gun under any circumstances, even if someone was shooting at her. Based on short bios we had filled out on ourselves, the defense lawyer asked her if she was a nun. I wondered what he meant, then he went on to say that he had trouble recognizing her as a nun, since she wasn’t wearing a habit. This was somewhat ironic, since I had watched the stage musical version of The Sound of Music last week and had just ordered the soundtrack.

Based on the answers to the questions, each attorney is allowed to excuse a certain amount of jurors, each hoping to end up with a jury beneficial to his side of the case. Enough people before me were excused that I ended up in the top twelve. Then, even though I replied to none of these general questions, the prosecuting attorney decided to excuse me from jury duty. That puzzled me until I guessed that he wanted the security guard to be on the jury, thinking he would be more likely to convict the defendant. I didn’t see him afterwards in the jury waiting room, so I think he stayed on and became part of the jury for the trial. 

As a last note, in the waiting room for potential jurors, I saw what I thought was a whiteboard for people to write on. It turned out to be some sort of art. If you see some rectangles on the lower left and some blotches of color in the upper right, you’re correct.

I still don’t see why I can’t write on it

There was another piece of art that was simply a photo of a door slightly ajar. Really, that was all there was to it. I wanted to take a picture of it, but since it’s near the entrance to the ladies’ room, I thought would get accused of being a pervert trying to take pictures of women inside. In that case I would have stayed longer in the King County Courthouse, but not as a juror. 

Analog Review

 The March/April 2025 issue of Analog had a number of mystery stories.

The novella “Murder on the Eris Express” by Beth Goder was a somewhat gruesome murder mystery with incredible comic relief by a couple of bots. The captain turns off his ship’s AI, then is found dead a few hours later. The AI, named Mo, is upset at the death and its own lack of memory. The grooves around the captain’s neck will be the key to solving the murder. Meanwhile, Cleaning Bot 444 is disgusted at all the blood and other human debris in the captain’s quarters. He vacuums it all up and disposes of it.

“Mr. Palomar goes to Space” is a funny short story by Hayden Trenholm. Mr. Palomar likes to fill out surveys. Then he is whisked off to Cape Canaveral. He is disappointed to find out he was chosen to go to space as an experiment, because he is very average. At one point he is taped to the wall of a space station to make sure he does not interfere with the professionals.

Kate MacLeod’s novelette “Heat Death” is a vividly written mystery. Although the murder victim is from Mars, this is not really science fiction. He could simply have been from a distant place on Earth. 

The most immersive novella is “The Return of Tom Dillon” by Harry Lang. A colony on Mars has entire cities under pressurized domes. The body of a woman is found frozen and buried from the waist down outside the domes. Detective Hector Kovack has his own stressors, since his brother murdered their mother, and Kovack had to kill him in a shootout. He drinks too much. But he is a dogged investigator, asking questions others don’t, and discarding false leads. He ends up acting more like a private investigator, disregarding rules in his search for the truth.

It's easy to blame a small terrorist group that has been operating on Mars, but Kovack points out the MO doesn’t match the terrorists. Despite the terrorists, Mars has had a low murder rate. A funny moment in this grim story is when a detective from Earth named McGill asks if this could be a copycat killing. The Mars detectives haven’t heard that term before. After the Earth detective explains, Kovack thinks, “What kind of asylum did McGill come from?”

So overall, if you like mysteries, either buy this on a newsstand or find it in a library.

Princess Mononoke

I recently saw Princess Mononoke in a theater. It was a treat to see it on a big screen. I will not  try to summarize the plot, which concerns nature gods in Japan. But for those who have seen it, consider these themes:

The gods are cruel. I know the movie tried hard to make a distinction between a god in its natural state and a god who has turned into a demon. But such a being can arbitrarily decide to wipe out an entire village. When one goes beyond bowdlerized versions of myths and legends for boys and girls, it becomes clear the ancients and the Japanese until relatively recently characterized the gods as cruel.

Mononoke is an allegory. As human civilization advances, especially with the smelting of iron, the gods become weaker and withdraw. This fast-paced drama in its own way shows that as civilization advances, belief in the old gods fades and eventually dies out.

At the same time, the gods are real. Even though this story is an allegory, at the same time it portrays the gods as real. If one offends or even attacks the gods, they react with terrifying fury. Though some movies in the West do the same sort of parallel messaging, Mononoke is non-Western storytelling.

We have seen these characters before. I will go out on a limb and say Prince Ashitaka is the real main character. While on a quest, villagers who did not know him before sense he is a natural leader and are willing to follow his orders. Contrary to some previews, Lady Eboshi of Irontown is not an evil character. She is quite civil and represents scientific and technological advancement. Princess Mononoke is led by her emotions. She helps in healing Prince Ashitaka and is constantly hostile towards Lady Eboshi.

These are archetypal characters that can be found in Medieval morality plays. We have them in Star Trek: The Original Series as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

Blossoms

 

Did a 360

An alert light showed on my dashboard earlier this week. (It turned out to be no big deal.) Then I had a bad dream that I was measuring the air in my tires, and a front tire was ten pounds lower than a rear tire.

I think I know the cause of that dream. So here is a reprise of my post from a previous year.

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It was rainy today, and I slowed down to what I thought was a safe speed to go from I-405 south to the ramp for NE 8th, to get to Bellevue Square. There is some familiar metal plate in the ramp that is for access to the storm drains or something. I did a slight jink to the right to avoid it.

My car went into a spin to the right. I couldn’t believe it. I turned the steering wheel into the spin, but it went out of control. I admit I kept my foot on the brake instead of pumping it, but the car has anti-lock brakes. Anyway, as the car did a full 180 and I saw other cars on the ramp avoiding me, stepping on the gas pedal might have been inadvisable.

After another 90 degrees, I might have tried the gas a little, I don’t remember. But I felt the back of the car scrape the concrete barrier on the right of the ramp. That’s probably what slowed the spin. I managed to stop the spin at about 360 degrees, but because of the curve of the ramp, the car was still angled a little into traffic. I immediately put the flashers on, restarted the engine (it had probably stopped in the 180 position, so it didn’t matter if I had tried the gas), and moved it a little farther so other drivers would have time to see me as they came onto the ramp.

My immediate thoughts were on how much it would cost to get a rental car as my car was being fixed. 

I got out into the rain to see what I expected to be the mangled rear bumper. I was astonished to not see any damage. Closer inspection showed a scrape about the size of the palm of my hand, revealing tiny specks of paint had come off, showing the primer underneath. Further inspection showed no other damage.

It drives straight, and nothing odd happens when I take my hands off the steering wheel to brake on level pavement. My view is the scrape against the barrier was providential, since otherwise I could have gone beyond 360 and had the right front end of the car hit, and that would have been bad.

At the Bellevue Square parking lot, I found the right front tire had ten pounds lower pressure than the others. This confirmed my suspicion it has a slow leak, losing ten pounds in somewhat over a month.

Oddly enough, this incident didn’t really bother me the rest of the day. What bothered me was going to the Panda Express at Bellevue Square, having to find a place to sit in the lower part of the mall, realizing I hadn’t gotten a fork, then packing my lunch up to go back up the elevator to get one.