My works eligible for awards for 2024

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

If you or someone you know can nominate or vote for writing awards, please consider these works by me that were published last year:

Usurpation: final novel in a trilogy (novel or series) Semiosis. The first novel in the series, Semiosis, is one of the top ten genre books of the first quarter of the millennium, according to Joe Walton.

AI is fueling a science fiction scam: magazine article (related work)

“The Coffee Machine”: translation from Spanish of a work by Celia Corral-Vázquez (short story or translation)

When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: essay about first contact (related work)

Eligible in Spain:

Semiosis: novela extranjera

¿Quién ganó la batalla de Arsia Mons?: novela corta extranjera

Not eligible for a prize, but you might enjoy it:

“Life from the Sky”: republished novelette

Spain’s word of the year, which you weren’t taught in school: dana

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Photo of a street filled with cars washed up and destroyed in a flood.

English-language dictionaries and various wordniks have picked their words of 2024, including demure, kakistocracy, enshittification, brat, brain rot, Colesworth, manifest, and polarization.

In Spain, the Fundación del Español Urgente (Foundation for Urgent Spanish) was created by the Spanish Royal Academy and EFE, a news agency, to provide guidance for terminology used in the news media that might pose problems in grammar, meaning, or spelling. It also chooses a word of the year. This year the word is: dana.

Even if you know Spanish, you may have never heard of this word. It’s fairly new, formed by the acronym for depresión aislada in niveles altos (isolated depression at high levels). The World Meteorological Organization explains that it “often occurs during the autumn season because the remaining warm surface heat from summer meets a sudden cold invasion aloft from the polar regions. This leads to what meteorologists used to call ‘a cut-off system’ with low-pressure values that persist over a few days and rotating over the concerned region.” Warm air saturated with moisture meets cold air and becomes an intense, long-lasting storm.

In Valencia at the end of October, the result was devastating rainfall and horrific flash floods. More than 200 people died amid massive damage. There were big political consequences. Dana is Spain’s word of the year because of its importance.

Other candidates for Spain’s word of the year can tell us more about the year that was in that corner of the globe:

Fango (mud or slime): what the victims of the dana had to clean up — and what they hurled at politicians.

Inquiokupa: renters of apartments or homes who stop paying the rent intentionally and refuse to move out. Spain has a housing crisis, too. This, like dana, is a neologism.

Micropiso (micro-apartment): another newish housing-crisis word.

Mena: an acronym for menores extranjeros no acompañados (unaccompanied foreign minors), a newish term because Spain has immigration issues, too.

Narcolancha (narco-speedboat): a newish word invented because Spain has a drug-smuggling problem, too.

Pellet (pellet, also called nurdle in English): a word imported from English to describe the millions of tiny balls of raw-material plastic that washed up on Spain’s west coast in January.

Alucinación (hallucination): errors invented by AIs; as in English, a new meaning has been attached to an existing term.

Gordofobia (fat-fobia): a newish word for a world-wide phenomenon.

Reduflación (shrinkflation): another new word for what happens when the price stays the same but the product becomes smaller, another world-wide phenomenon.

Turistificación (touristification): a problem in many places, including Spain, especially Barcelona.

Woke (woke): another word imported from English, but it’s pronounced with two syllables, WOH-kay.

The best Christmas tree ever

/ Sue Burke / 2 Comments

My sister, Beth, died in January 2014 of cancer. Her last Christmas was one of her happiest.

In December, Beth’s son and his wife came to visit, and they set up and decorated the tree. Beth had inherited the Christmas tree ornaments from my parents and grandparents, and although she was too ill to do more than watch them work, she was entranced. It was, my sister said, the best tree ever.

She described it to me over the phone (I had visited at Thanksgiving), and I could see it as she spoke because I knew so many of the ornaments.

Photo: The four Burke kids on Christmas Eve, captured from one of our grandfather’s home movies. Beth is the blond. I’m wearing green. Lou is the baby. Mike is in back.

My mother had made a canvas-work embroidery angel for the top of the tree. In keeping with family tradition, a little electric candle had been placed in her hands.

Some old, fancy glass ornaments had originally been bought by my grandparents, lovingly cared for by my parents and then by Beth. They were fragile and worn but exceptionally ornate. One had gold stripes edged with glitter and little holiday scenes hand-painted between the stripes.

My sister especially loved the ornament her son had made in grade school, a white paper bird with a long tinsel tail. There was also my ornament from kindergarten, green and red metallic disks glued together around a length of yarn. Other children’s artwork was hung up, too, chronicling a family that grew larger, and boys and girls who grew up. Some ornaments were gifts or careful purchases — each color, each sparkle, each light a story.

“It’s beautiful,” she told me. “I can stare at it for hours.”

It held happy memories from her whole life, as merry as a Christmas tree could be — the best gift, the best tree ever.

The killers will thank you for it

/ Sue Burke / 2 Comments

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship of words and sentences to the environment in which they occur. We might also call this context. Machines can’t grasp pragmatics and context — not Google Translate, not ChatGPT, or anything like them. Machines and artificial intelligences don’t interact with the real world. Nothing means anything to them.

I recently made the mistake of reading the text on a sprayer bottle as I was misting a few of my house plants. The text came in English and Spanish. I understand both languages, and I saw errors. Worst of all, this error, which no human would make:

Weed Killers (Deshierbe a Asesinos)

The Spanish version does, in fact, mean “Weed Killers” in the sense of “Go weed the killers” or “You must pull out the weeds on assassins.”

It should say:

Weed Killers (Herbicidas)

As a human being, I can only laugh. Or weep. When the robots take over, they’re going to make so many mistakes…

Using all the senses in writing

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

Using sensory details makes writing more vivid so that readers can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what’s happening in a story.

Naturally, it’s a little more complicated than that.

First of all, we have more than five senses. Vestibular sense involves movement and balance. Proprioception is also called body awareness and tells us where our body parts are in relation to each other and how to do things, like pick up a heavy rock or delicate egg. Chronoception lets us sense the passage of time. We can also sense temperature and pain.

This article at John Hopkins University Press says there are nine senses. An article at the University of Utah Genetics Science Learning Center says there are twenty, but it counts some senses in other animals. That might be useful if we’re writing about non-humans.

The things that we sense are interpreted through our thoughts and emotions, too.

As writers, how do we use these senses in a story? The correct answer to this and many other questions is: It depends. What’s the story you want to tell? What matters to the characters in it? What is the pace you want? Romance novels tend to be lush, and a mystery might be spare, and in either case, the senses that you evoke will guide the attention of the reader to what matters. An intriguing whiff of perfume at a party with contrasting notes of candy-like violets and earthy sandalwood might signal the start of an affair. A barking dog might make Sherlock Holmes deduce.

When we write, it’s best to go directly to the sensation. A bad example: Becky smelled acrid smoke and knew it would be toxic. Instead, this: The smoke reeked of acrid toxins. The reader will know that Becky was smelling it and recognized the smell. Fewer words are always better than more words, too.

Next, why do these particular sensory details matter? An article by Donald Maass, “Moving Along” at Writer Unboxed, shows how to use sensory details to evoke emotion. I’m going to disagree with him, though. He says the final example is “focusing not on visualizing, sensory details,” but I say it is. Count the colors mentioned. Note the things we could taste and feel, especially the dryness. Consider the snippets of conversation we hear. It gives us the full picture with plenty of vivid sensory details in an unselfconscious way by showing us how these things matter.

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(Art: stick figure by Core5ivpro.)