2009 - 11/2009 Meeting

Page Created: 09/16/10. Last Updated: 11/01/10. Last Google Group Page Update: 02/04/10.

ELIZABETH BEAR

Hugo Award Winner:

.....Tideline (Short Story, 2008)

.....Shoggoths in Bloom (Novelette, 2009)

Novels:

A Companion to Wolves (with Sarah Monette)

All the Windwracked Stars (C)

Blood and Iron (B)

By the Mountain Bound (C)

Carnival

Dust

Hammered (A)

Hell and Earth (B)

Ink and Steel (B)

New Amsterdam (D)

Scardown (A)

Seven for a Secret (D)

Undertow

Whiskey and Water (B)

Worldwired (A)

(A).....Jenny Casey Series

(B).....Promethian Age Series

(C).....Edda of Burdens Series

(D).....New Amsterdam Series

The Author's Official Site is: http://www.elizabethbear.com/index.html

MEETING SUMMARY:

Meeting Date: November 14, 2009.

Meeting Site: Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Official Attendance: 19.

Meeting Program: Talk by SF/Fantasy Writer.

Notes:

Meeting Memories:

Newsletter Account:

The November 14, 2009 meeting of the Association was held at the Saddle River Valley Cultural Center in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Those attending were greeted by a high end Porto San set up just outside the front entrance as the basement rest rooms of the Cultural Center were out of commission. Every month is a new adventure.

Award winning author Elizabeth Bear was the featured speaker. Ms Bear is a third generation fan who grew up loving both traditional girls books like THE BLACK STALLION and fantasy novels like Zelazny's Amber series. Although she had wanted to be a writer since the first grade, she also thought that it would be cool to be a jockey astrophysicist.

A learning disability got in her way. While at the University of Connecticut where she studied anthropology and English without completing a degree, she was diagnosed with dyscalculia, which is like dyslexia, except with numbers instead of letters, thus she sees 2 X 6 = 8. (A Live Journal entry goes into this in a lot more detail.)

After leaving UC (where they teach the only college level classes in puppetry in North America), Ms Bear failed at a variety of careers

including customer service, inside sales, office manager, technical writing. She was working in Las Vegas for a video clipping and summery service, editing and shortening news items for busy executives when September 11 caused the bottom to fall out of the city's economy.

Our guest had been intermittently writing and submitting for years, but a series of changes--loss of job, break up of marriage, return to Connecticut--and the discovery of the On Line Writers Workshop sharpened her focus and her tool set.

Elizabeth Bear's first professional sale was to the Lovecraft / Holmes original anthology, SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET. The

military/cyberpunk trilogy which began with HAMMERED followed soon after.

The author has produced quite a few novels in a relatively short span. She has a reputation as a fast writer which she feels in undeserved. She does admit, however, to being "very dogged."

She describes herself as a binge writer. She can take some time off, but becomes very unpleasant to be around if she goes too long without writing. "It's like being constipated." She compared writing the end of a book as being like stage three labor. "I can't think of anything else. I just have to get the damned thing out!"

Elizabeth Bear loves to blend and subvert the cliches of the genre. She describes DUST, for example, as "Amber is to Gormeghast as Upstairs is to Downstairs, IN SPACE!" Another series explores the underside of the "furry animal brother" trope, while a different novel can be reduced to "I was a teenaged werewolf for the S.S."

She said that people have different reasons for reading. Some want to confirm their prejudices. Others want to challenge their preconceptions. Some want the writer to construct a platform upon which the reader to project themselves. Others are looking for simple escapism.

Ms Bear usually putters around on several different books at a time, but gets serious when the deadline approaches.