MarsCon Schedule

Posted on March 3, 2014 by naomikritzer

I’ll be at MarsCon this coming weekend, March 7th – 9th. If you’re hoping to see me there, here’s my schedule:

Getting into the mind of a religious fanatic
Saturday 11:00 a.m., Exec Lounge (Krushenko’s)
Uber villain or bit player, what are they like? Are there any useful generalizations? Are they likely to be suicidal and does that depend on the religion or the person? How can they make for interesting novels and stories without being stereotyped and one dimensional?
With: Naomi Kritzer, mod.; P M F Johnson, Lyda Morehouse, G. David Nordley, David E. Romm, Ozgur K. Sahin

The Press vs. Science
Saturday 1 p.m., Atrium 2 (Re(a)d Mars)
What are some of the greatest howlers in science coverage? What’s the most common kind of reportorial error? What happens when scientists try to write their own press releases? What happens when institutional PR departments do it?
With: Rob Callahan, mod.; Dr. Tom Gardner, Naomi Kritzer, G. David Nordley

Timing and Pacing
Sunday 11 a.m., Exec Lounge (Krushenko’s)
What does timing have to do with writing? How do you know where to put your action/dialogue/sex scene? How can you tell if you have it in the wrong place? How does this differ between novels and shorter works? What horrible things can go wrong? Why do writers’ groups have trouble gauging pacing in novels? Is there such a thing as too fast in pacing?
With: S.N. Arly, mod.; Naomi Kritzer, Lyda Morehouse

Finding the Key to Your Imagination
Sunday 1 p.m., Exec Lounge (Krushenko’s)
What is imagination? Where does it come from? Some of us are blessed (or cursed) with an excess, and others have very little. Most folks think it’s okay for kids to engage in imaginary play and exercise their imaginations, but a lot of folks think it’s odd of grownups to do the same. Does our culture hinder and damage creative impulses? How do you find your imagination if it’s gone missing? How do you keep it engaged and strong? Is it a use it or lose it proposition?
With: Esther Friesner, S.N. Arly, mod.; Haddayr Copley-Woods, Stryder Dancewolffe, Naomi Kritzer

I will also be around, possibly with kids in tow (I apologize in advance if someone wants to chat with me and I get dragged off by a demanding ten-year-old).

An old photo of the girls dressed in costumes.

Stories Published in 2013 (that you can nominate for awards, should you feel moved)

Posted on January 10, 2014 by naomikritzer

This is an Award Awareness Post, where I’m going to tell you, “Here’s what I published last year! In case you want to nominate it for shiny prizes!”) I will note in my defense that when nominating stories, I appreciate being able to find out easily whether things I liked were Short Stories or Novelettes and precisely where they got published in which month (since you always have to write that stuff down). So. In case you think I’m awesome, are nominating for one of the genre awards (or non-genre! heck, feel free to nominate my penis story for the arty-est most thoroughly literary award out there, if you’re on the nominating committee) and want to know what all I published last year so you can nominate for me for ALL THE THINGS… here you go!

Novelette

“Solidarity,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2013. This is a seastead story, with the same setting and characters as “Liberty’s Daughter” and “High Stakes” (which were published in F&SF in May/June 2012 and Nov/Dec 2012.)

Short Story

“The Wall,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2013. This is my time-travel-Berlin-Wall story, in which a college student in 1989 is approached by a woman claiming to be her, from the future, and trying to persuade her to go to Berlin to see the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bits, Clarkesworld, October. This is the penis story. It’s online and it’s free, so you could go read it right now if you haven’t already. I realized the other week that if you look me up on the Internet, it’s currently the third hit. So this means that the lady I was chatting with at the parent coffee at school, who found out I was an author and wrote down my name: if she googled me, she’s probably now read it.

Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

Bits, Clarkesworld, October. There’s an audio version! Read by Kate Baker.

Otherwise, perhaps I can interest you in a lovely picture of one of my cats:

: Blogs are for cat pictures.

Yuletide Fanfic

Posted on January 3, 2014 by naomikritzer

For years, I’ve enjoyed reading Yuletide stories. Yuletide, for those who are not aware of it, is an annual fanfic exchange. When you sign up, you request a story (you actually have to give multiple possible options) and you also offer to write one (ditto). You volunteer and request based on “fandoms,” which in the context of Yuletide can sometimes be as narrow as a single blog post or a TV commercial. Yuletide does require that the fandoms be small, or at least smallish — you can’t request or offer Harry Potter-based stories, Avengers, anything that has a huge amount of fanfic already.

Stories have to be turned in by late Christmas Eve, and everyone gets their story on Christmas Day. Authors remain secret until January 1st. All the stories are in an archive and can be sorted by fandom, so you can poke through and read all the stuff that appeals to you. (A Little Princess? Allstate’s “Mayhem” commercials? Georgette Heyer’s Venetia? They’re all in there.)

This year I decided I wanted to play. I was assigned to write for someone who wanted Code Name Verity fanfic, and wrote a story called Damask Roses (it’s also Rose Under Fire fanfic) and I wrote a Treat (an unassigned story I wrote because I looked at a bunch of prompts and felt inspired) about Disney Princesses at a college called Four Things That Weren’t Adequately Covered in Mulan’s RA Training.

The story I received was Addams Family (the movie) fanfic called College First. It’s perfect — filled with spot-on bits of deadpan dialog.

Lucifer, as depicted in John Milton’s well-known derivative work, “Paradise Lost.”

I’ve written derivative work before — in fact, I’ve sold it, as you can totally do if you’re deriving from something in the public domain. “In the Witch’s Garden” (published in Realms of Fantasy in October 2002, available now in Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories) is loosely based on “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen. “The Golem” (published in Realms of Fantasy in October 2000, available now in Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories) draws on the Jewish legend of the golem created by Rabbi Loew.

I’ve also written straight-up fanfic, but not on AO3 and not in Yuletide, so that was really a new experience.

“Four Things” … was really popular. And here’s the thing about fanfic — no one’s writing it for money, obviously, so there’s this whole culture surrounding it where people are rewarded for their writing and encouraged to write more with compliments. You do get compliments with pro writing; I’ve gotten some really lovely e-mails over the year, and my most recent published story, Bits, has a comments section with eight comments. By contrast, “Four Things” has 353 kudos (basically like a Facebook “like,” only more specifically adulatory) and 40-some comments, all of them saying things like, “you are SO AWESOME.”

You just do not ever get that sort of feedback in pro writing normally. Unless you are so famous that you are also getting stalkers. It’s a funny thing.

And the weird flip side of this is that with pro writing I also always feel slightly embarrassed and awkward about compliments. (I avoid reviews, even good ones; they tend to paralyze me. The bad ones make me think, “oh my god, she’s totally right: I DO suck.” The good ones make me think, “oh my god, I’m totally going to let this person down.” This is totally neurotic, and yet I know a lot of other writers with this same problem — it’s not just me.) Whereas with the fanfic I read every comment and let everyone’s opinion of my brilliance buoy me up. It felt good.

Anyway. Yuletide was fun. Whether I do it next year will once again depend on whether I remember to sign up, though.

Election 2014 already

Posted on December 17, 2013 by naomikritzer

Apparently it’s election season again ALREADY.

Over on my old blog, I conscientiously and obsessively blogged about the Minneapolis mayoral race. (It was an interesting year.) The election came and went, they counted (which took a few days) and I hung up my political-blogging hat thinking, “done with THAT for a while.”

Picture of the Minnesota State Capitol dome.

Minnesota State Capitol. (From http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulad/)

But…it turns out that here in my new district in St. Paul, our State Rep, Michael Paymar, is retiring. (He’s represented this district since 1996. So — for a while, although our State Senator, Dick Cohen, has been representing District 64 since 1986.) The caucuses are in February (February 4th, I think; I wrote it down on the calendar) and the Senate District Convention is in March (late March, thank goodness! it shouldn’t interfere with MarsCon). And if things in this district run like things in my old district, odds are excellent that it’s the Senate District Convention that will effectively pick our next State Rep.

I mean, officially there is a primary, and there’s an election. But the DFL endorsement holds an awful lot of weight in these races, and the DFL-endorsed candidate has a definite edge in the primary. And come the general election, well, I expect that a Republican will run, but I would be pretty shocked if they won.

(DFL = “Democratic-Farmer-Labor.” It’s just the Minnesota name for the Democratic Party.)

Anyway. I feel much less well-informed in St. Paul, mostly because I have less of a sense of who the jerks are. In Minneapolis, there are certain endorsements that people will put in their materials that will cause me to write them off unless they are also endorsed by the people I know I like, to balance them out. I’m sure St. Paul has a similar crowd of People I Would Hate, If I Knew Who They Were, but I don’t know who they are yet. (Does that mean I pay more attention to who you know, than what you believe? Well, not exactly. It’s more that I pay more attention to who your buddies are, than I pay to what you say you believe.)

This is all preamble to note that I got a phone call this evening from Matt Freeman, a candidate to replace Michael Paymar. He gets points for being the first candidate to call me, although mid-December is honestly a point at which even I do not really want to be thinking about elections. We chatted a little (I told him I’d moved last year from Jim Davnie’s district; he wanted to know why I moved, and it wasn’t until I was telling him my answer that it occurred to me that I might be tipping my hand about how best he could craft his pitch. I don’t think he did, though.) I wrote down the caucus date and his name and then told him to go ahead and give me his pitch.

The two big issues he talked about were (1) raising the minimum wage, and (2) improving the opportunity gap with Early Childhood education.

Having listened to that amazing This American Life episode about free universal preschool as well as having read about studies, I’m on board with Early Childhood education funding as a potential panacea for the opportunity gap. I’m also a fan of raising the minimum wage, although I was curious what he wanted to raise it to. Matt said he thought $9.50 was achievable although he would prefer $10.50; he also wants to peg it to inflation and to work for mandatory sick leave and parental leave. (Universal paid sick leave is one of those “everybody wins” sorts of ideas. Totally aside from the fact that letting sick people stay home is the humane and reasonable thing to do, I do not want people with the stomach flu handling my food.)

I asked him about his stance on gun control (which has been one of Michael Paymar’s signature issues, not that he’s had much success with it.) He talked about background checks and mental health screenings, which is actually a huge red flag for me because what exactly does that mean? Does this mean that people who seek help for mental illnesses are going to go into a database accessible to gun salespeople? Because no. I’m a big fan of medical privacy, particularly regarding mental health records. He backpedaled when I asked for details and it was clear he hadn’t thought about this much.

One thing he had thought about was that we needed to work harder to figure out how to sell gun control to outstate Minnesotans. And he’s right about that. Minnesota has a strong hunting culture in the rural parts of the state, and guns just have a different place in people’s lives when they live in the country as opposed to the city.

(My friend Elizabeth, who is a Quaker and a committed pacifist, bought a gun when she moved to the country, because they were raising chickens and were troubled with possums. In the city, if a possum moves into your garage, you can call Animal Control. In the country, you have to deal with this stuff yourself, and that means either owning a gun, or having a neighbor with a gun.)

Anyway. He does not have a smooth, polished political pitch down yet, and I’m wondering now how long he’s been making these calls. You would think people would start with the people who’ve been to caucuses in the past, but we haven’t been to a caucus in this district yet so presumably he got my number off the voter registration records and that suggests he’s cold-calling registered voters. Seems impractical, but what do I know about this stuff? (He was Chris Coleman’s campaign manager so I expect he knows what he’s doing.)

There are currently seven people running for this seat, I think. (All of them Democrats.) In looking for information, I discovered that someone else is already obsessively blogging about this race, relieving me of the responsibility: http://www.theracefor64b.com/ I’ll probably write about it anyway, though.

Same Song, Different Verse

Posted on December 10, 2013 by naomikritzer

There’s an Isaac Bashevis Singer collection for Hanukkah called The Power of Light, which my family owned when I was little. It’s a collection of eight stories for Hanukkah. My favorite was probably the title story, about two Jewish teenagers trapped in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising. Probably the best-known story in there is “A Parakeet Named Dreidel,” in which a parakeet shows up on the windowsill of the narrator’s New York City apartment.

The final story in the volume, “Hanukkah in the Poorhouse,” tells the story of a Jewish man from Belarus who was kidnapped from his family as a child, forced to live with a Russian family, and, on reaching adulthood, drafted into military service. (“I had no choice but to eat unkosher food,” the narrator says. “In the first days I spat out the pig meat, but how long can a boy fast? For hundreds of miles around there was not a single Jew.”)

I looked this up, tonight, thinking about this, because I was curious about the historical context. The boys were called cantonists, and this system (which included some schooling) was originally started out as something for the orphaned sons of soldiers. The kidnapping and forced conscription was something done to Roma and Polish boys as well as Jews.

The news coming out of Russia, about journalist Masha Gessen’s fears for her family, and the very real threats from the Russian government against LGBT families — the threat that they are going to take away the children of loving parents because the parents are gay –this has all reminded me intensely of this story.

And, in fact, pretty much everything happening to gay people in Russia these days probably sounds pretty familiar, if you’re Jewish and grew up with stories about pogroms, ghettos, and Russian persecution of Jews. It’s certainly sounded familiar to me, right down to my recollection of the historical theory that the Czars encouraged pogroms because scapegoating Jews was such an excellent distraction for people with legit grievances against, say, the Czar. (In Jewish children’s lit, at last back in the 1980s, “Cossacks” basically meant “the bad guys.” It turns out that the Cossacks were ALSO an oppressed ethnic minority — or, in some respects, a co-opted one.)

Anyway. I don’t really have a particular point here, other than that people should read Isaac Bashevis Singer (you can also find that story in his Stories for Children collection, although The Power of Light has absolutely stunning, gorgeous illustrations in it), boycott Russian vodka, and support asylum for any GLBTQ Russians who ask for it.

Gift Shopping for People You Hate: the Passive-Aggressive Shopping Guide

Posted on December 8, 2013 by naomikritzer

Those who used to follow my blog over on LiveJournal may remember that for several years now I’ve done a list of suggested gifts you could give to someone you didn’t like very much, but had to buy a gift for anyway. I’ve actually never run into this problem myself, but I know an awful lot of people who seem to have it, and as an unfailingly supportive and sympathetic friend, I wanted to be helpful.

There are a couple of principles that hold true every year.

1. Subtlety! If you want an open declaration of war, or if you want to insult them and have them KNOW they were insulted, that’s easy and you don’t need my help to come up with that one. You want them to feel totally disappointed, but like they still have to say “thank you, it’s lovely.”

2. Cheapness but not OBVIOUS cheapness. For instance, if you want to give someone a bottle of terrible wine, people know that Charles Shaw wine is only $3 (or $2 in California? I’m not sure). The big cheap brands (Koala Ranch, Yellow Tail, Barefoot) are also both too recognizable and too likely to be drinkable. But if you look, you’ll be able to find a $5 bottle that’s from a totally obscure vineyard. To maximize the odds of it being terrible, go to a wine store with a good selection and tell the wineseller that you want a bottle of wine for no more than $5 and that it has to have a cork, not a screw-top, and it has to NOT be from a recognizable cheap brand, and that you REALLY don’t care if it’s drinkable because it’s actually a prop for a play or a video you’re making. (Don’t tell them it’s a gift. There are loads of perfectly drinkable $5 wines out there and they will show you straight to those if they know it’s a gift.) If they think that no one will ACTUALLY be drinking the wine, you’ll probably get a surprised look and then, “Oh, well. If you REALLY don’t care how it tastes, how about…” and they’ll hand you some hideous crime against grapes, hopefully with a unique, attractive label and then just add a wine gift bag and you are SET.

3. Minimal effort. Let’s face it, you probably would like to be able to take care of this while doing your other shopping, right? Which is why gift cards can be ideal, because they have a whole big rack of them at your grocery store, probably. Look for any or all of the following: (a) businesses the recipient doesn’t patronize; (b) that are primarily brick-and-mortar and are in an extremely inconvenient location; (c) that are in denominations too small to be useful (like, a $25 gift card to a store where everything costs $50 or more). For the passive-aggressive gift card grand slam you could also look for (d) the subtle criticism, like a gift card for a yoga class (these totally exist, but you’ll have to look up yoga studios and call; you won’t just find that one in a rack between Best Buy and Kohls.)

So there were three specific options I wanted to highlight for you this year.

1. The Worst of Etsy.

Craft fairs can be a great place to buy terrible, terrible things, but they all happen on Saturdays and Sundays and you know, you may have better uses for your December weekends. Etsy is open 24/7 and with the right search terms you can find some genuinely hideous stuff. Some search terms to get you started:

upcycled. (My friend Etelka has a whole blog of upcycling horror: Wretched Refuse.)
hipster.
one-of-a-kind (ooak).
goth or steampunk.
rustic, primitive, salvaged.

Of course, there’s plenty of upcycled stuff that’s cool. Not everything with “hipster” in its description will be an aesthetic nightmare. And in point of fact I’m a fan of steampunk. But if you search for “upcycled salvaged hipster steampunk” you’ll probably find at least a few items that will make wonder WHY, WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS, WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY THIS except as a gift to their least-favorite relative?

Just don’t overpay. The great thing about gifting a hand-made item — well, the first great thing about gifting a hand-made item is that no one will expect a gift receipt. But the OTHER great thing is that you can give something that’s really cheap but not OBVIOUSLY cheap and they don’t have any good way to figure out what you paid for it.

And yes, I’m wimping out of providing links to hilariously awful stuff on Etsy and I’m using the excuse that it could be gone by the time you go look, but really it’s that I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the craftspeople selling this stuff (and I live in fear of them following the link back and then telling me about how they’re selling these hand-crafted recycled license plate bracelets because they’re trying to keep from losing their house or whatever.) Etelka’s got loads of links and pictures, if you go look at her blog.

I’m much more comfortable linking to stuff on Amazon.

2. The Cheapest of Amazon.

I stumbled across this the other evening and was sort of freaked by it. This stuff is not necessarily BAD for gifting (I linked to it on Facebook and several people immediately followed the links and bought some stocking-stuffers) but it is so disconcertingly cheap it caused me to start plotting a story about the jewelry which, when worn in your ears, makes you extra-vulnerable to the mind-control rays from the planet Vortol or something.

Cute little owl earrings for 62 cents, free shipping.
Cute little seahorse necklaces for 98 cents, free shipping.
Slightly defective Eiffel Tower necklace that says “ARIS” instead of “PARIS,” 93 cents, free shipping.

You’ll need a presentation box if you want it to look like you bought it from a store, which alas will run you more than 62 cents. Well, okay, they’re less than 62 cents EACH but you have to buy 20. Maybe you have one around the house that you could re-purpose.

These honestly are not terrible gifts; according to the reviews, the chains that come with the necklaces are flimsy but mostly they’re cute and look basically as pictured. You could, in fact, order these for someone you liked, if you were on a budget or wanted an inexpensive stocking-stuffer. (Maybe not the “ARIS” Eiffel Tower.) But you could wrap up the box and gloat over the fact that you had spent less than a dollar on their gift.

3. Menards.

I had to go to Menards the other day. Menards is a perfectly fine place to shop for gifts for someone you like, if that person likes tools. It’s also an excellent place to shop for stocking stuffers; there are many aisles filled with things like keychain carabiner flashlights and fold-up miniature pocket multi-tools and so on. (Maybe I’m the only person who craves keychain carabiner flashlights? I bet I’m not.)

But it is also the best one-stop shop for truly godawful Christmas gifts you will ever find. I took photos.

Basically the canned stuff, in a cute jar.

Pie in a Jar. It’s…pie filling. In a jar. Just add a crust, and bake, for bad pie.

There was a whole trend a few years ago in which people made their own mixes (for brownies or whatever), put them in a mason jar, and tied a ribbon around it. I don’t want to criticize this gift too harshly when it’s homemade, because for one thing is it is an extremely CHEAP gift, the sort of thing it takes minimal effort to do, and there are people who are stuck exchanging gifts with a lot of people. They might even be people they like, and they want to give them SOMEthing, and in that case — yeah, mix in a jar? fine.

(Personally, I have never found that mixing together the dry ingredients for cookies was exactly the labor-intensive part. It’s spending 45 minutes moving baking sheets in and out of the oven that’s a pain, but on the upside, fresh delicious cookies. So, you know.)

Anyway. The excellent thing about this gift is that it’s probably going to be genuinely terrible pie but it comes in a cute little jar (I don’t know the term for the sort of jar with the springs in the lid, but they’re definitely in the “cute jar” category) and looks gift-like. Go for it.

Flag neck pillows, because patriotism, I guess.

Neck pillows!

Neck pillows are actually a useful item that lots of people could probably find a use for. In fact, I’m pretty sure my sister once asked specifically for a neck pillow as a gift (I remember hearing about this from my father, who thought it was funny, and told the story to his brother, who said, “WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING, NECK PILLOWS ARE AWESOME.”)

But here’s the thing:

These aren’t just neck pillows, they are FLAG NECK PILLOWS, because apparently everything is better with flag designs. (They did have plain neck pillows in another part of the story but I think they may have actually cost $1 more.)

Molly was looking over my shoulder while I was working on this, and she noticed that in addition to the U.S. flag neck pillows and the Canadia flag neck pillows, there were UK neck pillows down on the bottom. A UK neck pillow seems like a markedly better gift than either a US flag or a Canadian flag neck pillow, probably because I know far more Anglophiles than Yukonphiles (and while I do know people who will sing the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events and fly a flag on flag day, I don’t actually know anyone who thinks the U.S. flag should be on EVERYTHING ALWAYS.)

Penguin, reindeer, and snow man decorative jars.

Generic Christmassia.

Penguin, reindeer, and snowman cocoa jars. I think they actually come with hot chocolate mix in them.

I recognize this design, sort of. There are eight gazillion penguins out there that look kind of like these penguins, all with slightly sketchy features, black beady eyes, and a scarf. You find this guy as a mug for $1 at Walgreens and as a sugar bowl for $10 at Target and as earrings at Dollar General. And now he holds cocoa.

The great thing about this item is that it’s too cute to just throw away, but not actually attractive enough to display. The Cocoa Penguin will lurk on the counter or in the back of the cabinet for years, taking up space, gathering dust, and making the recipient feel vaguely like he or she is being watched by a penguin. Also, they’ll wonder if they’re supposed to refill it…but unless you make your own from cocoa and milk powder and sugar, cocoa comes in a perfectly fine container already, or in envelopes in a little box.

A hot dog steamer.

If you want to give someone you dislike a kitchen gadget for Christmas, the best options are always are either inconveniently large, or irritatingly overspecialized. This item is both.

Admittedly, I don’t eat hot dogs all that often, but when I do, I find it entirely feasible to cook them in a pan on the stove. I can’t recall ever wanting to cook 12 at the same time, but if I did, I still think I could handle it with my larger frying pans or possibly a baking dish in the oven.

It is possible that you could use it to steam other stuff (I haven’t checked) and that someone could find a use for it beyond hot dogs, but it’s also enormous and difficult to store; I would bet money it’s a pain to clean; and it says HOT DOG STEAMER on it, suggesting that the owner is someone who eats so many hot dogs they actually need an appliance to cook a dozen at once.

There probably are people who would find this useful, but even those people will likely find it annoying to store.

Department stores are always filled with weird novelty kitchen appliances this time of year; if a hot dog steamer doesn’t strike your fancy, consider a cupcake lollipop maker or a Hello Kitty waffle iron or a mini donut baker. (Although I think cupcake pops have more enthusiastic fans than hot dogs, and they’re genuinely going to be complicated to make without the specialized device. Unlike hot dogs. Which can be prepared in just about any other existing kitchen appliance you’ve got, including the dishwasher.)

Finally, this one’s kind of cheating, as it’s kind of expensive ($70) and it’s a gift for a child. That’s cheating because it’s too easy. The topic of “how to give a gift to a child that will drive the parents insane” has been covered admirably in the past and it’s understood by nearly everyone that tormenting the parents is the actual purpose of motion-triggered electronic toys with no off-switch, electronic toys that play a recognizable tune slightly out of key, and Moon Sand. (There are also people who make this claim about Legos and Play Doh. But Play Doh is a great toy that kept my children happy for hours — long enough to make the cleanup worthwhile — and it develops motor skills in toddlers, it still smells exactly like it smelled when I was three, and it’s incredibly cheap. And Legos are AWESOME. Awesome awesome awesome.)

This, on the other hand, is horrifying:

A stuffed dog so large it's spilling out of a full-sized chair.

An enormous stuffed dog.

That dog is sitting in a full-sized chair, and spilling out of it. It is too heavy for a child to move easily (I pulled it off a couch, which it was sitting on with a friend, and stuffed it in that chair for the photo). This thing is ghastly. A child will think it’s the coolest thing ever. The parents will hate it. And because it is ENORMOUS, it will never be lost or misplaced; if they get rid of it while their child is at preschool one day, they will either have to fake a burglary or admit they threw the damn thing out.

Menards also had cutesy jars of cookie mix (you could do a gift bag of both cookie mix and pie in a jar!), scented bath products (even people who like scented bath products will probably not like the ones from Menards), and enormous sculptural things you’d put on your lawn (which alas are mostly kind of expensive).

They also have carbon monoxide detectors, which are an excellent gift to anyone who doesn’t already have one but a totally useless gift if someone does. Which is a different sort of win — it’s a gift that says, “I don’t want you to die! I want you to be safe!” but also “…and I think you might be the sort of idiot that doesn’t have one of these already!” (And if you don’t have one, for god’s sake GO OUT TODAY AND GET ONE and install it when you get home. Sheesh. I don’t want you to die! I want you to be safe!)

Past versions, if you’re dissatisfied with your options on this post and want to look back through previous ideas.

2010: Beyond Fruitcake: Gifts for People You Hate
2011: Gifts that say, “I had to get you a gift. So look, a gift!”
2012: Holiday shopping for people you hate

STEM toys for Kids Not Born Holding a Screwdriver

Posted on November 25, 2013 by naomikritzer

So, let’s say you have a kid who doesn’t show all that much interest in playing with building toys. Is this kid doomed to a life in the Humanities or Arts? How do you persuade a kid more interested in crayons or Play-Doh to try out the blocks and Legos?

Your first option is to chill out and let your kid play however he or she wants to play and recognize that this is fine.

But kids do grow and develop; they outgrow one set of toys and pick up another. Sometimes they have a goal with no real sense of the steps to get there (“I want to build an airplane!” …okay, so, the steps to take right now, today, when you’re six, involve building an airplane out of Legos or folding one out of paper. Aircraft engineering classes are way down the road from here.) Sometimes your gut tells you that there is an engineer (or mathematician) inside your kid waiting to come out; other times, you’re legitimately worried that your kid has absorbed, not from you, the idea that girls don’t play with that sort of toy. So where do you start? I’ll tell you where to start.

1. Look at how your kid plays, and seek out toys that work with those patterns.

So let’s say you’ve got a kid who is obsessed with tiny, thumb-sized plastic poodles. He collects them endlessly, they all have names, stories get enacted in which poodles get kidnapped by bad guy poodles (or possibly by the giant evil stuffed cat) and then rescued by good guy poodles.

If you want your kid to play with building toys, look for toys that can be built, and then played with with the poodles. A ferris wheel building set will be vastly more interesting if it can be used to give rides to the poodles. A Lego set will be more interesting if the poodles can live in the Lego building. And so on, and so forth. There are a bunch of itty bitty toys that were popular when Molly was four and are still out there, including Polly Pocket and Littlest Pet Shop, which are scaled very well for Lego buildings and so on.

This ferris wheel seems to come with seats, though I haven’t seen one up close in person so whether they’d be satisfying, I’m less sure. There are Lego tree house sets in both girly and non-girly varieties (and a bunch of other houses, but who doesn’t like a tree house?)

Some kids are really into crafts; building toys are less interesting in part because of their impermanence. There are a whole lot of craft projects that will teach building skills, but I’d suggest looking outside the “craft kit” box. There are some excellent craft kits (everything from Klutz that we’ve tried has been great) but also a lot of terrible ones, as well as craft kits that say they’re for 8-12 year olds that are too complex or fragile for an 8-year-old to actually put together.

One of my favorite crafting media is hot glue; you don’t want to turn a preschooler loose with a glue gun unsupervised, but kids can use the stuff, carefully, at a fairly young age, with you there.

I started buying my kids Sculpey when they were in preschool; I did the baking, obviously. You can also check out things like Sugru and Friendly Plastic and combine them with collected twigs or purchased craft sticks to build log cabins, fairy houses, etc. Pipe cleaners are another structural craft material. And then there’s papier-mache, which is fantastically low-budget but will probably require more help from you (and it can make a fantastic mess.)

2. Provide for empowering role-play.

If you’ve got a kid obsessed with princess stuff, trust that it’ll pass, first of all, but also, assume that the princesses are doing stuff, and provide props along with costumes for princesses who wish to ride out and fight dragons (one of my favorite books of my later childhood was about a princess who would ride out and fight dragons, actually) or go to space or find work as a veterinarian.

Props don’t have to be complicated; large boxes are one of the most basic and timeless toys out there. If you’re going to buy props, though, I would strongly encourage you to look outside the toy aisle. For instance, if you’ve got a kid who wants a doctor kit, you can find a real stethoscope for under $10 that will allow your kid to actually listen to her heart (or yours, or a very cooperative dog’s). You do have to be a little careful: if your kid puts the stethoscope in her ears, and then sticks the end right on a stereo speaker, this can cause hearing damage, so if you’ve got a kid who might do that, I suppose you might want to go with a fake. You can also buy a real but inexpensive otoscope, thermometer, blood pressure cuff, and sling, and pack everything into a satisfyingly plausible black bag. But even if you just grab a real stethoscope to add to the mass-marketed doctor kit, that’ll be vastly more satisfying than the standard fake plastic kind, and allow your child to actually hear heartbeats.

3. Beware of toys when asked for tools.

There are science items you can safely buy in the toys section (like Silly Putty and Slinkies) (I’m sorry, do you not think of those one as science toys?) but others you should avoid. Beware of microscope-shaped objects; too often, the lenses are so badly made you can’t actually bring anything into focus. (In that price range, you can buy a hand-held magnifier with a light that your kid will be able to use for close-up looks at snowflakes.) I’d also be really wary of telescopes (cheap ones are likely to mostly be frustrating). You can, in fact, get decent binoculars for really cheap, but again, not in the toy department. I truly don’t understand the point of toy department walkie-talkies, which never work ever and are only a few dollars cheaper than functional walkie-talkies you can find in electronics.

Basically, if your kid expresses an interest in a scientific tool, it’s worth following up with a few questions so you know what she’s hoping to do with it, and then asking around for recommendations. (Same goes for building tools. If your kid asks for a real hammer, they probably mean this and not one of these.) Obviously, I’m not suggesting you buy anything dangerous to use or seriously expensive for a little kid, but sometimes the real thing is the same price or not significantly more.

4. Don’t overlook games. And look beyond Target’s game aisle.

You guys, there are SO MANY AMAZING GAMES OUT THERE. If you’ve never shopped beyond the game aisle at a toy store, you may have NO IDEA.

Molly was lucky: my sister is a board game geek, and so early on, when Molly got into games, she had access to stuff that was better than Candyland.

A couple of recommendations: to build pattern-finding skills, get Set and Quirkle. Looking for toys to teach physics principles? Jenga and Suspend and similar. Clue is all about basic process-of-elimination logic; if you’ve got an older kid who loved Clue until she outgrew it, get Mystery at the Abbey, which is a much more complex logic puzzle.

If your kid likes games but has issues with losing, try a cooperative game like Forbidden Island. (You can still lose, but you all lose together. Forbidden Island has beautiful art and tremendously appealing props.)

And if you’ve got a kid into games, check out a board game meetup, and maybe visit a game store, source of a 8 million awesome games that Target will never carry. (Settlers of Catan is only the beginning.)

Following a suggestion made by Judith Martin in Miss Manners’ Guide to Raising Perfect Children, when Molly was little, I explained the idea of a handicap, and we used handicapping to even things out in games like Scrabble. (She never needed a handicap in Memory; she could wipe the floor with me when she was three.)

4. There are really good books out there and they may not be the ones you’re thinking of.

Ed was dubious when I ordered a four-book Calvin & Hobbes set from Scholastic for Molly. “Do we really want her reading these?” he said. She had a tendency to imitate book characters. (“Do you remember what a terror Calvin is?”)

Calvin has actually been a great influence: he’s a creative thinker with a million uses for a cardboard box and other simple toys.

Some other awesome books: The Mysterious Benedict Society, in which genius children save the world from a villain brainwashing people through their TVs. (That one is filled with logic puzzles, which kids can solve if they want, or just keep reading to get to the solutions.) The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, which is historical fiction about a twelve-year-old girl growing up in Texas in 1899. (Makes an excellent read-aloud for younger children. I was expecting a depressing ending when I read it, and instead got a totally uplifting one.)

Marilyn Burns is one of the best math writers out there, and if you’ve got a kid who doesn’t like math, get him or her the I Hate Mathematics book. A kid who does like math will love Math for Smarty Pants, which kicked off Molly’s obsession with perfect numbers when she was six.

The Socialization of Mothers (and Fathers)

Posted on November 22, 2013 by naomikritzer

STEM toys — toys that promote the learning and cognitive development that support scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematical thinking and learning — STEM toys are all around us.

When Molly was a preschooler, we taught her the alphabet and we counted stuff for her, just like you’re supposed to, but I was largely oblivious to the many activities I did purely for entertainment purposes that were providing her with cognitive building blocks. Rhymes, for instance. There’s a Raffi song that goes:

Down by the bay / Where the watermelons go /
Back to my home / I dare not go / For if I do / My mother will say:
Did you ever [see a bear] / [Coming his hair] / Down by the bay?

(Replace the bracketed bits with whatever rhyme you like. Did you ever see a swan, mowing the lawn? Did you ever see a moose, drinking some juice? Etc.) I made up my own verses and encouraged the girls to do the same. It turns out that rhymes are an important foundation to reading; that if you understand that “look” and “book” share a sound, that makes it a lot easier to grasp phonemes and start piecing words together.

Just as I tended to think of “letters and reading” as pre-literacy school readiness activities while overlooking the importance of rhymes, I tended to think of “counting and numbers” as pre-math school readiness activities while overlooking patterns, pattern finding, sorting, measuring, and playing with quantities and volume. And I tended to think of “fun experiments with things you can find around the house” as being science learning activities while overlooking throwing, catching, jumping, sliding, and basically all active play.

I am sure there are parenting books out there that talk about this; I didn’t read them or they made no particular impression on me. I just embraced the idea that Play Is Good and took my kids outside a lot because hopefully the novelty of the playground would keep them entertained and out of my hair and I could think my own thoughts for five minutes or possibly even ten.

But here is where I think a lot of little girls are denied some of the really critical early learning activities that boys get as a matter of course: they don’t get to play outside as much, and the grownups around them discourage them from getting dirty.

I have always been a big fan of playgrounds. A few years ago, the girls were playing on the playground after school pickup and Kiera asked me, “Why are there always so many more boys who stay after school to play than there are girls?” I told her that I was pretty sure that this was due to the socialization of mothers. If you are a mother with a little boy, when he becomes mobile your friends with boys will instruct you to get him outside for daily exercise like he’s a golden retriever lest he destroy the house. I have seen mothers of boys give this advice, and I have seen mothers of boys get this advice. Mothers of girls tend not to get this advice even if their daughters are having behavior problems. If a boy’s having trouble in school, one of the first questions you’ll get from your friends and possibly also his teacher is, “How much exercise is he getting?” If it’s a girl, they’ll ask, “Are there problems at home? Is she being teased?”

And since my personal anecdata suggests that under-exercised girls are less likely to destroy the furniture than under-exercised boys (or puppies), there are fewer negative consequences to the parents for not getting girls to the playground. And I think this has consequences. Climbing on the monkey bars is a physics learning activity. A slide is a physics learning activity. Throwing a ball. Shooting a Nerf gun. Filling a bucket with sand to make a sand castle or a “cake” (my kids were obsessed with making birthday cakes, covering them with “candles,” i.e. small twigs, and having me come over to the table to blow them out. Over and over.)

Building a fort out of fallen branches is an engineering activity. Building a dam at the beach or in a pond (that requires careful supervision, obviously, as children should never be left alone around water.) Building a snow man. Building a snow fort.

(All this stuff is also good exercise, which has numerous other benefits to kids.)

Not only are girls taken outside less often, they’re often discouraged from getting dirty once they’re out there, especially if they’re wearing girly clothes that could be “ruined.” There’s an overall attitude that jeans and overalls are for active play and play where you might get dirty, whereas dresses are for sitting around looking decorative. This is an artificial line drawn by grownups; it has to be explicitly taught to little girls, who are, in general, totally willing to dive into the sandbox in fancy dresses.

For a little girl who wants to wear dresses all the time, she might absorb that she’s supposed to sit around looking decorative, or she might absorb the idea that she has to choose between pretty dresses and adventures, between femininity and activity. My parents have a hilarious story about me, at the age of six, asking if I could wear a new dress to school. My mother said I could so long as I wasn’t going to roll in the mud. According to her, my face fell, and I said, “Okay. I won’t wear it, then.”

I’m not saying that every outfit needs to be a “roll around in the mud” outfit but I will say that a Cinderella dress from Halloween should be treated as something that would be enhanced, not ruined, by some streaks of dirt. Disney Princess dresses are inexpensive and sturdy. But even with real clothes, anything you buy for a four-year-old will be outgrown within months anyway. Unless it’s heirloom-quality or sentimental or there’s a sibling you really want to be able to wear it, Christmas dresses might as well be worn to the playground because it’s a sunk cost, anyway.

Molly, playing in mud.

Kiera, playing in mud. In a skirt.

Despite thinking of myself as a feminist parent, I realized when Molly was around seven that I was getting a lot more irritated by her perennial attraction to filth than I would have been if she’d been a boy. I had thoroughly absorbed the idea that boys are little pigs who will wallow in the mud given half a chance, but no one ever said this about girls. You know what? There are kids of BOTH genders who have sensory issues that will keep them out of the mud (or the finger paint) but that doesn’t mean that an average seven-year-old girl will not happily get into the mud if she’s not going to get yelled at for it. And bath tubs, thank goodness, are equal-opportunity facilities.

Girls are also often expected to keep their toys nice, even cheap, disposable toys like Barbies. There’s no reason that Barbie can’t be played with in sand or in a swimming pool. I realized early that one of the advantages of Barbie is that she is cheap and easily replaceable, and let Molly take those dolls anywhere. (It turns out they’re also nearly indestructible! I mean, you can pull Barbie’s head off, but you can also pop it right back on.)

Anyway. My point here is that a lot of this actually comes down to how parents are socialized. It comes down to how the people around us teach us how to parent. We need to recognize that changing how girls are socialized starts at a much more fundamental level than which toys we bring home from the store.

(Let me note for the record that I am advocating here for giving girls the regular opportunity to run around and get dirty. I am NOT suggesting that these opportunities be denied to boys in the name of equality. Educational trends have taken recess away from a whole lot of kids, and advocates for boys will point out that girls can tolerate this sort of BS better than boys can. This is true, but not because it is a trend that is GOOD for girls. ALL kids deserve recess, regardless of their gender. ALL kids deserve to play. ALL kids deserve to get dirty if they like getting dirty. It is good for their minds. And good for their future STEM skills.)

Girl Toys and Girly Play

Posted on November 21, 2013 by naomikritzer

The new Goldie Blox ad has been making the rounds on my Facebook. It features three little girls and a Rube Goldberg device built from tea sets and princess costumes, and it’s a genuinely delightful ad. I showed it to Kiera, who loved the ad and was disappointed when I told her that in fact, Goldie Blox were not a Rube-Goldberg-device building kit.

For reasons that mystify me, Goldie Blox seem to be wildly popular among some of the same parents who despise the Lego Friends line. And yet both toy makers did research. The Goldie Blox founder will tell you in her video that girls read and boys build, therefore she integrated the two of them by writing a story about a builder to get the girls to use the toy. Lego watched girls play and concluded that while boys tended to sit down and build the toy, start to finish, before playing with it, the girls wanted to build for a while, then play for a while, then build some more, so they made the “girl” Legos more modular. They also found that girls disliked the traditional minifigs and wanted more realistic figures, so they added some. Finally, they doused the product in pink and purple so they’d be shelved next to the Polly Pockets instead of off in the Lego aisle. (There was a lot of grumbling about the fact that this implies that the rest of the Legos are “boy toys” as opposed to gender-neutral toys. But, in fact, you’ll often see an entire aisle that’s devoted to Lego stuff; the Lego Friends line was a clever way to extend their placement, grabbing space in the Pink Aisle by the Polly Pockets and the Littlest Pet Shop stuff.)

I have to admit that I’m also bothered by the number of parents who will contemptuously put down princess play. Unless you’re raising your daughter in a box, she’ll probably go through a “princess” phase between about age three and about age five. For an awful lot of little girls, a “princess” is a girl who gets to have adventures while wearing fabulous clothes. Disney Princess costumes tend to be cheap yet indestructible, which is why they are also ubiquitous.

Molly, age three, in a princess dress.

Molly, at three, liked to dress up in pretty dresses and sparkly shoes (the red ones they sell at Target every December) and she would regularly choose things with princesses on them. Ten years later, she does Lego Robotics at her school, she’s in a program at the U of M for gifted math students, she plays roller derby, and she acts like the color pink is kryptonite.

I do think that it matters what toys people buy for their daughters and what activities they encourage. It matters. Girls should have building toys, just as they should have toys and clothes that encourage physical activity and active play (IMO, a Nerf catapult is as much as STEM toy as a set of Goldie Blocks — more on that later), and there are a million and one ways in which girls get the message that math, science, engineering and technology are for boys, not for them. And I’m going to come back with both some specific toy recommendations and some general ideas for what makes something a “STEM toy.”

But I think we need to start from a place where we believe that girly play is valid. If we tell a little girl that she is DOING IT WRONG because she wants to pretend to be a princess — you know what, this is NOT how we get more girls in STEM careers. There is no wrong way to play. Okay, actually, I take that back. Throwing blocks at your sibling is the wrong way to play. But there’s nothing wrong with dressing up in costumes, and we do girls a disservice when we treat their preferred type of play as unacceptable because it is too girly.

The basic problem with blogging

Posted on October 24, 2013 by naomikritzer

For some reason, over on Facebook I feel like I can share any old thought that pops into my head. In the last 24 hours, I’ve linked to a nifty animated gif of a Russian girl who’s a martial arts champion kicking an annoying guy in the nuts; I’ve compared road work to kitchen remodeling and complained that my city is not as expeditious about it as they really ought to be; and I’ve whined about insomnia. None of those things seem sufficiently weighty for an actual BLOG POST.

I also blogged about local politics over on LiveJournal (and linked from my Facebook). I haven’t decided whether I’m going to continue doing my political blogging over on LJ or move it here, after this election. The thing is, local politics is a fandom that’s of interest to a very narrow range of people. Maybe I should just keep that writing separate? I could keep it on LJ, or set up a whole separate WordPress site for my amateur punditry. The problem with that is that I think I may be too lazy to deal with multiple blogs.

Anyway, I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, this site is coming together a little more; the page for my published novels looks great. I need to finish working on the page for my short stories. Anything else people would like to see on here?

(Creative Commons photo of kitchen construction from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dasqfamily/)

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