Also, I'm a little curious why 16 of the first 20 5-star reviews are from people who've never reviewed anything else.

This is a train wreck of a book.

Could this, perchance, indicate an answer to the greying of Worldcon?

1) Every con man and snake-oil seller in America is salivating. Talk about the perfect mark!

2) She is a would-be snake-oil seller whose business plan is "those people will buy anything", and is hoping to laugh all the way to the bank.

I think the first option is several orders of magnitude more likely than the second, but there is always that faint possibility.

Lift your game, Guardian!

I'm also curious whether she underwent the circumcision which is, based on an hour of research, necessary for becoming a warrior in that culture. (Women are also circumsized -- or should one say mutilated -- as a rite of passage. This led to a rather depressing quarter hour of reading about FGM in Africa generally.) I suspect the reviews would have mentioned it...

The jokes just write themselves.

Dang. Would have been so much funnier if it had meant "idiot."

But this gives me a great idea for how al Qaeda can raise funds: Open the terrorist training camps to rich, bored young Americans. Pay fifty thousand bucks (plus air fare). Get three months doing PT in Afghanistan, sleeping in tents, and shooting AKs, and at the end you get a nice certificate (suitable for framing) indicating that you are now an International Terrorist with the rank of Top Leader. You can go back home and tell everyone how you got the Taliban to accept women. With the deluxe package, for just ten thousand more, a genuine imam will visit and explain the Way of the Prophet to you, and you will actually learn to say a prayer!

use that round flying killing thing

Unlikely. She probably also doesn't have the spunky best friend/traveling companion with subtext becoming almost text.

(Now XENA I could actually see being genuinely accepted as a Maasai warrior in only three months.)

Booklist reviews are always positive, or at worst mixed. They have a deliberate policy not to print negative reviews; if their reviewer hated the book, they'll just skip over it and go on to the next one.

Perhaps Budgor would have self-published her short-attention-span memoir if a publisher hadn't decided there was a profit to be made from her unreflective recounting, but we can't know that. As Teresa's final paragraph notes, Budgor either pays the price of ongoing stupidity or the recurring cost of regret, if she becomes more self-aware.

Globe Pequot, meanwhile, can be sneering all the way to the bank.

Surely not! She's American, Latin is obviously the language of Latin America -- it's what Latinos speak -- so how hard can it be? She's got a natural affinity for it!

Because becoming a US Navy SEAL is genuinely hard to do, and requires a lot of dedication over a long time. Plus, the process isn't mysterious at all. Any recruiter can tell you in detail all the steps.

As to Globe Pequot, the reason any publisher publishes any book is because they think they can make money on it. "Non-fiction" isn't a promise by the publisher that the book is good, useful, or true. It's just a shelving category.

I would agree, except that I'm about 90% sure they found a way to part her from (some of) her money along the way in exchange for letting her feed her ego, which makes this oddly win-win.

the Maasai are actually a group famed specifically for resisting cultural changes

So it's not exactly a coincidence that they're desperately poor by the standards of almost everyone else in the world, then. As ye scorn sowing as an upstart invention of effete city-dwellers, so shall ye have nothing to reap?

Seems kind of a raw deal to the *individuals* born into that society, though. Probably especially the ones not well equipped for personal violence.

Maasai warrior princess...notice that she claims to have been drinking goat's blood. The Maasai drink the blood of their cattle, I believe. Their precious, precious, cattle.

The photo of the Warrior Princess among the Maasai women--her beaming away like a special snowflake, and the women around her looking totally unengaged and a little peevish--more or less says it all. While she was all busy being war-like, did she actually manage to "build schools and hospitals," or did she miss that drudgery by playing make believe?

'One Man's Quest To...' appears as a subtitle to far too many books of this sort. Do something 'wacky' for a year and write a book about it. Ho hum. Some of these are good (I enjoyed Robert Twigger's Angry White Pyjamas—Englishman in Japan does intensive aikido) but, umm, it's a crowded field now.

(Wilson is also known as a writer of comics and graphic novels, and her first prose novel, Alif the Unseen, is a World Fantasy Award finalist this year.)

Are there any stories (any medium, and true or false) about people joining an interesting culture and ending up taking a usual amount of time to become competent but not extraordinary member of that culture?

In the real world, I know that Mormon missionaries sent to preach to the Navajo used to say that they were just getting to the point of being able to speak the language when their two years were up. I expect it would take years longer for them to achieve minimal competence at dryland farming, raising sheep, or making and selling traditional art.

===

Some daft billionaire ought to sponsor scholarships for curious Masai and Amazonians who want to study the rich spiritual traditions of Ozarks auto mechanics, or take part in the initiation rites of Dakota wheat farmers.

I see only 2 possible options here:

1) Every con man and snake-oil seller in America is salivating. Talk about the perfect mark!

2) She is a would-be snake-oil seller whose business plan is "those people will buy anything", and is hoping to laugh all the way to the bank.

I sometimes wonder whether 50 or 100 years from now, we'll look as reality-deprived as the Ancien Régime.

If she'd wanted to become the world's first female Dominican priest she'd have needed more than three months just to learn Latin.

But this gives me a great idea for how al Qaeda can raise funds ...

Then I realized I had just reinvented the MFA program in Publishing or Creative Writing.

Some daft billionaire ought to sponsor scholarships for curious Masai and Amazonians who want to study the rich spiritual traditions of Ozarks auto mechanics, or take part in the initiation rites of Dakota wheat farmers.

I would welcome that. Instead, the Walton family spends a lot of money on international scholarships to small, very conservative Arkansas colleges. I try to view that in the best possible light. Those fuckers.

&@ 44:

I sometimes wonder whether 50 or 100 years from now, we'll look as reality-deprived as the Ancien Régime.

Years?

One I know of is Claude Njiké-Bergeret, a French woman born in Cameroon as daughter of missionaries, educated in France, who then came back to Cameroon in the 1970s to be a teacher, and immersed herself in the traditional way of life of the local people. Most notably, she married a traditional chief who already had 25 or 30 wives and lived as one of them, practicing agriculture and raising children. She had two children with this man, and after his death stayed in Cameroon, where she still lives. Of course, as both a white woman and the wife (then widow) of a prominent man, she enjoyed from the start a celebrity status in her region, and part of her life was and still is mediating between local people and Europeans. She wrote several books in French about her experience, but I don't think they've been translated.

Back to topic: Who is that woman with the book series on how she is initiated into some large number of spiritual traditions? Or has that become a genre at this point?

Has everyone already forgotten "Mutant Message Down Under?" I suspect that Mindy read it some time ago, and understood the One True Lesson of that fabulous tome, which is that White People will buy anything!

Charlie @ 22

You're about 20 years late with that joke, which originated, quite sadly for American prestige, with Dan Quayle sometime between 1988 and 1992. (Even back then the joke wasn't funny, at least if you were American.) By today's standards, and compared to the average Teabagger, Quayle comes off as a very advanced intellect.

This reminds me of when 'Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom' came out and someone suggested Indian cinema ought to respond with 'India Jones' about an intrepid archaeologist who ventures into darkest America to battle a Presbyterian death cult.

Teresa, #44: As I see it, your #3 is fungible with my #1. Or, perhaps better phrased, your #3 is the cause, and my #1 is the effect.

About the five-star reviews: I was remarking to my friend Lenore this morning that I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already implemented software that watches a product on Amazon, and every time a 3-or-fewer-star review is posted, autogenerates two five-star reviews to compensate.

Rob 52: Shortly after those movies came out I was participating in the lettercol of a Christian fanzine called Radio Free Thulcandra, and they were whining about the bad theology in the third movie. I explained that the theology of the second movie wasn't exactly accurate either (for a parallel, imagine Saint Monica cutting her son's fingers off one by one until he agrees to convert). They weren't at all interested; they were (mostly) of the type of Christian who thinks insulting, degrading, and lying about other people's religion is perfectly all right because who cares, right? Those people are wrong anyway.

Fortunately IJ&tToD is also a pretty bad movie, so it doesn't get shown much except in marathons.

I imagine theologically-savvy horror fans have to watch through their fingers as their palms are permanently affixed to their faces. Usually it's the Revelation of Saint John being abused there.

Let's see if the gnomes accept this posting :-)

I'm suddenly reminded here of George Plimpton's _Paper Lion_. Not quite what you're referring to, but Plimpton was a writer (with no special athletic experience or expertise) who did a couple of tryout and exhibition stints with a couple of NFL teams. He even got a memento engraved "To the best rookie football player in Detroit Lions history," according to a Sports Illustrated article.

Of course, in this case it was clear to everyone involved that the engraving was tongue-in-cheek. In the excerpt of his I read from _Paper Lion_ (or perhaps one of his later football works) one of the main themes was that it was so much harder than an average person might think to even hold it together playing at the NFL level, much less play well. No heat-and-eat Maasai experience here, or claims of one. He did get to have some immersive experiences *with* NFL players, but it was quickly manifestly clear to all involved that he couldn't be one himself.

One result of the long history of colonialism was the presence of non-white ancestry in the upper classes of the colonial powers. The best-known case is that of Lord Liverpool, prime minister of the United Kingdom in the 19th century, who was of Indian descent.

Alex sighs, thinking of comment # 50. What a waste it was to post my thoughts. I guess I'll just go stab a water buffalo or something...

During Colonial times, it wasn't that uncommon for folks to run away to join the Indians. Seems that the Indians didn't have to work as hard and were a lot more tolerant than the Colonials ...

It is a really lovely book. It's a real person, who did odd and interesting things, talking about her life, often with surprising amounts of poetry. It is lacking in many of our modern sensibilities about race, class, gender, conservation, and colonialism. For all of that, it is an incredibly human story. She is a woman of her time and place, but she is not blind, stupid, or cruel. She lived a real life in a real place, something Mindy Budgor seems not to have done, yet.

Arguably, that's what the typical Bildungsroman is about.

I'm not even gonna' wait. For just 199.99 bucks I will make a true Slavic voi, ready to fight the Rus, Avar and Frank! For only 99.99 more, I will also induct you into the mysteries of Svetovid, Peryn and Triglav, making you the heritor of ancient zhertsas. Order both NOW to receive a free gift of your choice: a ready to khram set to make your own backyard temple or a sacred grove sapling to compliment your garden. Slawa!

Lee, #53: There's Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels...

http://africasacountry.com/two-responses-to-mindy-budgor-maasai-warrior-princess/

Beryl Markham writes about hunting with the Naandi tribe. Per a search the name of the tribe is "Nandi," though for some reason my brain is insisting that she spelled it "Naandi."

Of course, Markham didn't claim to be an official warrior, and she certainly didn't "save" the Nandi women from anything. Unlike Mindy, Markham was the Real Thing, tougher than a box of nails and smart as hell.

On the other hand, her book doesn't talk about her three marriages, her romance with the Duke of Gloucester, or her son, who she may have more-or-less abandoned, (or at least sent off to live with her family in Europe, and visited infrequently.) Her book may have been ghost-written (or very heavily edited) but regardless, it is a wonderful thing to read. All this is not meant to be unkind; Markham had the vices of her virtues.

If you haven't read the book, it's a wonderful read and well worth the couple bucks it would take to order a used copy.

That aspect of it I don't know about, but for what it's worth I do remember an interview with somebody involved with the also-infamous banquet scene from the same movie ("Chilled monkey brains!") who said that the intent there was that the Indian host of the banquet was surreptitiously mocking all his foreign guests by serving them weird stuff that he knew they'd accept as What Indians Eat because none of them had bothered to actually learn anything about his culture.

(Sort of like the sheep's-eyeball scene in Jingo, only without a Vimes to point out what was going on. Which unfortunately meant that it wasn't clear to the audience what was going on either.)

...which I've just discovered is online. The Temple of Doom interviews are here, including the bit I remembered about the banquet scene.

(Nothing helpful to Jenny Islander's question, though, at least on a quick skim.)

I'ma keep this uninteresting, so you can replace it with the postscript and not interrupt the flow.

Anyone else having difficulty parsing this sentence and understanding how it can make sense anywhere outside of Athos (either the mountain or the planet)?

I was feeling particularly cruddy last night - not the fault of anyone here...

The trick I use to make sure that doesn't happen if I'm in a hurry and can't read all the posts is to open the "Edit" menu and search for likely words and phrases, such as (in this particular case) "Mutant Message."

Paddled.

*Outliers, unless they restricted their gender transgressions to a small social circle of people who liked them, were celebrities, eccentrics, or deviants.

The Galactic Federation makes contact. As part of their getting-to-know-you arrangement for new barbarian planets, they hand out about 500 tickets so that random representative humans can go forth and explore the galaxy, on the GF's tab, then recount their experiences when they get home after a year or so.

$PROTAG does the Mindy Budgor thing, only with aliens, and doesn't understand that she's barbarian (everyone else is too polite to point and mock). Hilarity ensues, with planetary-destiny-shaping consequences.

Anybody feel like writing it? (I can't: I owe David Hartwell a trilogy.)

You asked: "Anyone else having difficulty parsing this sentence and understanding how it can make sense anywhere outside of Athos (either the mountain or the planet)?"

Um, yeah, that sentence needs a serious overhaul. Sorry. What I meant was that at the time she was a bush pilot, there weren't many pilots, period, and very, very few of those were women. Moreover, I think I was also thinking that at the time in which she was doing all this, women did not have active, public lives in the same way that men did. They were more typically hidden behind husband and family, or otherwise attached to some institution. There are, of course, lots of exceptions, but they were exceptions. Markham was a rule unto herself.

I recall the last time I taught a writing class. One of the students came up with a really nice idea - you know, the bones of a plot device, like that one. Not a plot, no characters, action and resolution, but a great idea. I said it was a great idea, and that I'd like to use it myself.

My God. You should have seen them bristle! I had just become an obvious thief, a plagiarist of the deepest dye.

And here you are, offering a great idea around for free.

Le Chevalier St-George (1745-99) became rather extraordinarily competent as a French aristocrat.

_West with the Night_ is a memoir, not an autobiography. I think that she wrote about the things that held her imagination. In trying to understand her, I suspect it very telling that she didn't have anything noteworthy to say about her marriages, affairs, or child. Possibly she was just preserving her privacy, but I suspect they just didn't really hold her attention the way flying and Africa did. In an odd sense, I never really got the feeling that she was writing about herself. It didn't seem like a book about self-reflection and revelation. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't find her omitting those pieces of her life to make it a weaker book.

Some years ago I skimmed through Wild Wales by George Borrow, an entertaining Victorian travelogue that I'd never have touched if Brian Aldiss's volumes of autobiography hadn't put me onto it. If you're fond of first-person narrators who unknowingly give themselves away in funny ways all the time, it's the book for you. Borrow travels around Wales apparently for the sole purpose of astonishing natives with his command of the Welsh language, and other languages, and generally being a smartarse. (He was a talented linguist, but probably not as good as he made out.)

Professionals value execution.

That idea took me a minute of noodling to come up with after reading the comments on a blog entry. Turning it into a novel would take between 20 and 200 days of hard bum-in-chair work. Maybe longer.

I agree with you completely, having read the book many, many times. It's a beautiful book; intelligent, poetic, and very strong, not to mention the very best first paragraph ever, "...I would like to begin patiently, like the weaver at his loom..."

But I wouldn't want anyone to think the book comes close to telling her whole story.

Also, IMHO, it's too bad she didn't marry the Duke of Gloucester; she would have been an amazing princess. (There's an alternate history novel for anyone who's interested: Celebrated bush pilot Beryl Markham marries into the House of Windsor just before World War II begins...)

Beryl, Air Warrior Princess! The pulpish purple prose practically writes itself!

Well, actually, it doesn't. There's that whole "execution/bum-in-chair" thing Mr. Stross mentioned somewhere upthread. Nevertheless, the Air Warrior Princess is likely to amuse me for a day or two...

"There's that whole "execution/bum-in-chair" thing..."

I've already got a couple of those; a website I'm working on (still much code to write alongside my day job) and a script for the Elf/Orc Buddy Movie.

Now: At one point, while poor little Caroline was being shown off like a two-headed calf (pay extra and get to pick her up), a little girl about her own age was brought to see her. That was Princess Victoria.

What if Victoria had kicked up a fuss and demanded that the poor little "fairy" be taken out of the freak show? For all I know, she did; what if somebody listened? And what if Caroline, given a new lease on life by being installed at the royal family's seaside residence in peace and quiet, experienced spontaneous remission?

This started as my earnest wish for a happier ending for Caroline and her grieving parents, but the life of a little person at a court that was supposed to be beyond the keeping of court dwarfs, Caroline's alternating status as the disregarded oddity in the room and the (possibly reluctant) celebrity, perhaps her musical aspirations, even her unrecorded intervention in a major historical event . . . I hereby set this plot bunny free, because somebody else could do something good with it.

If they did the mormons then the bad guy could be Mitt Romney http://hesaidshesaidmovies.tripod.com/img/posters/templeofdoom2.jpg

NaNoWriMo looms: the challenge to write 50,000 words in November.

Even within the select group of fluorospherians, I hesitate to suggest that anyone can hit the target, or write anything worth reading. But I reckon it's worth trying. For me, it maybe got me over the last vestiges of uncertainty, which go back to my schooldays and the attitudes of my teachers.

"Be vewy quiet, I'm hunting plot-wabbits." (Makes note to avoid Caerbannog...)

Here's what happened ...

I went on a bunch of travel in the first half of this year, culminating in a literary festival in Estonia from which I came home with Bell's Palsy. When one of your eyes begins to water after less than five minutes unless you forcibly close both eyes for thirty seconds, you can't write. Or read effectively. This lasted for nearly three weeks, after five weeks of non-writing due to travel (I can't write effectively on the road). Then it wore off over the course of about three days, and I abruptly recovered the ability to read and write after two months of forcible withdrawal.

So I woke up at 12:04am one Saturday morning, mind churning, and succumbed to a fit of hypergraphia the like of which I have never experienced before and hope never to experience again. Hypergraphia is acutely disturbing, physically draining, and quite unpleasant. It's not a normal writing process, it's a deranged compulsion. You're not writing because you want to write, you're writing because you can't stop. It's the sort of condition normal people seek medical help for. Unfortunately, I'm not normal. Result: 51,000 words in 166 hours, i.e. 2% over NaNoWriMo's monthly target in two hours less than one week. Then 35,000 words the next week. Finally, I was able to write THE END on the 18th day ... 109,000 words later.

So yes, I beat NaNoWriMo in a week and went on to write an entire first-draft novel in 18 days. Yay, me. Except it was the wrong book.

At the time this happened, I was under contract to deliver a trilogy. But I was about a quarter of the way into the first book, and I was blocked -- I had a bad structural problem and needed to take time out to think my way past it. So the crazy fit of hypergraphia burned itself out and left me with the first draft of an entirely different novel, written in an altered state, which for contractual reasons I can't sell until I deliver the trilogy. Which is mortifying, unprofessional, and one hell of an incentive to get moving and finish the official contracted project on time ...

Luckily I worked out what was wrong with the official project while I was bouncing off the walls and ceiling, and it is now back on course. The 18 day fit of insanity didn't bite too much time out of the 18-month project, so there is no cause for alarm: the first book in the new Merchant Princes trilogy is done, the second is under way, and I expect to have the third finished on schedule.

But I can't help thinking that if I'd been able to point the hypergraphia engine at the right target, I'd be delivering it nine months ahead of schedule.

I now finally have a referrent for J. Michael Straczynski's assertion, "Don't try to be a professional writer unless you cannot not write."

I have been wondering about some of my favorite characters fates for quite a while. I confess, I have been worried.

(Note to self, assemble older books for re-read.)

Thank you very much.

Three months later and a few thousand credits poorer, our tourist is a black belt in karate, an ordained Catholic priest, and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

Is the 18-day book saleable, or did your fit of unprofessional hypergraphia kick out something that not only took away from time writing your contracted work, but can't be recouped later anyway?

Two Sides of the Planet: Kenya, California, and the Wild World of Ecotourism by Lemuanik Ole Sabore and Mindy Budgor

The engrossing account of two ecotourism entrepreneurs who changed places for a year. Ole Sabore and Budgor, who first met online, clicked immediately, bonding over the astonishing similarities among their clientele and the culture of ecotourism in their two countries. With the bemused acquiescence of their business partners, they decided to conduct a cultural exchange. For one year, Budgor would lead safaris in the Maasai Mara while Ole Sabore ran a charter fishing operation off the Channel Islands. What they learned makes for a story that is hilarious, enraging, and thought-provoking. You won't be able to put it down. This year's best read!

This particular instance was stupid on my part, certainly: if I'd been thinking, I'd have said to myself "Charlie@140 wrote quite a bit, but didn't give the book's title or any information about it; maybe he doesn't want that known." In hindsight, that's obvious. All I can say now (other than that I've emailed moderators asking for an edit) is that I'm sorry for overstepping.

Annoyingly I can't remember title or author, but it seems oddly relevant here.

I can be reached at abi at this blog's domain dot com.

Cassy, I'll email you, but do note that it's half past twelve where I am, and I'm not likely to be able to do anything till morning at the earliest. It may be later, since I'm also single parent at the moment, and have three people to launch tomorrow morning.

Faster service may be obtained by emailing pnh at panix dot com, since he's in a more suitable time zone.

The story you want may be "A World by the Tale".

Charlie, it seems to me that you've designed an extremely fun shared universe. Tor should have someone design the shared background then recruit a bunch of writers to create stories.

IMHO Eric Flint would do a wonderful job on one of these. (I don't mean the Eric Flint who's writing Great Big Books these days, but the Eric Flint who wrote The Philosophical Strangler, which is extremely funny!)

It's a great idea. And oh, how I faunch to be able to write SF again!

"Jewish Princess", in which Grzztblat spends three weeks being initiated into the esoteric traditions of the Jewish tribe of Beverly Hills, eventually becoming their first thirdgendered rabbi, while teaching them that Hebrew is an unnecessary and outdated language, and that male circumcision really isn't needed.

The Mormons were exotic enough for a Sherlock Holmes novel, at the time...

And there's a Project Gutenberg edition.