Neurophysiology of PTSD
Last week's BMJ had a review on recent advances in psychiatry with some interesting stuff on the neurobiology of PTSD - it is associated with increased secretion of corticotropin releasing factor (corticotropin is released from the hypothalamus, acts on the pituitary to make it release adrenal corticotropin hormone (ACTH), which in turn stimulates the adrenal glands) - however in PDSD there seems to be a negative feedback, because the hormone levels themselves are down. Functional neuroimaging has also shown activation abnormalities in hippocampus, amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex and parts of prefrontal cortex - areas associated with memory, fear responses and visuospatial processing.
posted by Anonymous at 19:51   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Brain activity and lying
This, from Michael Kesterton's column "Social Studies" in the G&M today - another tit-bit towards our Reetion biopsych probe (although it's nothing like an MRI. Your description of a visitor probe is more MRI like - minus the magnetic fields.)
Lying observed: U.S. scientists say they have spotted a telltale pattern of brain activity that can reveal when someone is lying, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. In their study, researchers used functional magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) to look inside the heads of 18 test subjects who had been asked to cheat during a standard laboratory card game. They discovered that lying is hard work. "When you tell a deliberate lie, you have to be holding in mind the truth," says Daniel Langleben, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist who led the study. "So it stands to reason [lying] should mean more brain activity." He found that lying is marked by increased nerve firing, particularly in a brain region called the "anterior cingulate gyrus," long associated with conflict resolution and response inhibition. The evidence suggests that being truthful is the brain's "default" mode -- not for morality's sake, but because it is less taxing on brain cells.

posted by Anonymous at 19:01   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Listening to CBC Two on the Way to Work
Okay David. I know you read this blog. Here's something I want for a Christmas present. A recording of:

• Giovanni Battista Viotti's Violin Concerto No.22 in a minor
  

You can find the reference on the CBC's Music and Company play list, for Nov 30.

posted by Lynda at 12:01   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Chaos
... And Ameron will take a certain pleasure in pointing out to his son the pacifist how much he has expanded the repertoire of things for Sevolites to fight over, beyond the traditional ones of honour, politics, hot-temper and old grudges.
posted by Anonymous at 15:03   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Chaos
Reading James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science over my morning coffee today, and was delighted with the three-variable Lorenz Attractor. Gleick snuck up on it from the historical perspective, which always makes it more fun to absorb a concept - for me - and there was a nice clear explanation of the mechanical model of the business, known as the Lorenzian Waterwheel Very cool. I feel driven to some chaos based, boyhood discussion between Avatlan and Rovin, maybe with Rovin on the "rah rah" side for the unpredictability, which Erien may have to damp before it becomes ... well, chaotic. :-)
posted by Lynda at 11:30   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Snowing in PG

It is finally snowing. It is cold. It is making up for all the weeks it forgot to be winter in PG. (PS found the image via google search, couldn't spy any prominent "do not use" signs on the page it came from. Hope that means its okay. But FYI it isn't one of my animations. No author I could quickly identify.)
posted by Lynda at 17:40   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Permanent Press
Came across this http://www.ereads.com/ppress.asp while hunting ereads on behalf of a Northern B.C. writer in quest of an electronic outlet, and thought of Marie's Sandinista (1985) in connection with their Second Chance press. But there was no direct link to it. Do you think she might be interested?
By the way, I checked her links on http://www.sff.net/people/asinclair/marie.html that claimed to lead to sources of her previous titles, and both came up "Page Cannot Be Found".
posted by Lynda at 17:34   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
On Drunken Conversations and Metaphors
So we stayed up way too late and this morning my eyeballs didn't just feel as though they'd been rolled in sand, but as though they'd been fried and then screwed back into too small sockets. But that is the price of two writers hanging on the phone until drunk with fatigue (because all that's waiting for them once they let go of the night is sleep and the morning with students/meetings/study reports/children/work etc) talking about, among other things, the metaphors we use for the construction of a novel. At pushing 1 am I was not at all coherent in explaining my feeling-shape idea/sense/image. In the past I have made people laugh with my plaintive "But I'm not really a very verbal writer", but I'm not. I know there are people out there who start with a picture, or with a character, or with - inexplicably - a plot, who just have to listen to some inner play or watch some inner movie. Lucky them! I start with something that is non-verbal, non-visual and pretty much nonsensical, something I have variously described as a tone or a sense-shape. One writer on creativity described this phenomenon as a feeling-tone, as what happened when a writer started with a recollection or an impression that would not reduce to straight narration. I have a very spatial relationship to my work. The real book is a shape in my head. I want the words to make me feel that shape in my head. As it goes up, I feel myself inside it, working to make it the right shape. I once talked to my mother about this, and she recognized exactly what I'm talking about; although not a writer, she conceptualizes in exactly the same way. Lynda's word for what she desires in a scene is "muscular" - something that is doing work. And we both agreed that we also had a symphonic sense or metaphor for the emotional underpinnings to the work, though I think - I am not clear about this - that Lynda's symphonic sense comes as she edits and starts putting dynamic and tempo to the development, and I am aware that I am building symphonically from the start, which probably explains why I write those 200 000 word first drafts with variant chapters peeling off the whole like arbutus bark as I move from - another metaphor, mathematical this time - first order to higher order narrative solutions. First order solutions are those I think anybody could come up with - good generic stuff. By the time I'm into third and fourth order solutions, I'm into the solutions I feel are particular to MY novel, which are made inevitable by the characters and the events I have portrayed. For me writing is like crystal structure refinement - or even more like building a solution from NMR data, rounds and rounds of least squares regression, fitting the words to the model, the shape in the head.
posted by Anonymous at 21:54   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Writing the Red Vrellish
Will be a challenge. Because although they can be childlike, they are not children. It would probably help to dig up an anthropology study written by the kind of anthropologist who can either drop his or her prejudices about civilization and the primitive completely or localize those prejudices so well that the frame of reference is exposed. (A more rigorous intellectual exercise than purely being honest, worthy as honesty is.) Because "primitive" like "childish" comes with centuries of baggage carrying the assumption that these states are developmental stages on the way to something more mature.
posted by Anonymous at 21:31   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
The Warlord of Saturn's Moons
I decided on the way in to work this morning that I was in danger of turning into the central character of Eleanor Arnason's story "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons" - a whimsical/satirical portrait of the SF writer as a reclusive spinster lady with teapot, cats, and a passion for her male lead. I thought (as I tramped past the Parliament buildings): I really ought to get out more.
posted by Anonymous at 21:22   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
My alter ego
I got some e-mail intended for one of the other Alison Sinclairs a while back. She writes on Spanish History and Literature (Dislocations of Desire : Gender, Identity, and Strategy in La Regenta and Valle Inclan's Rudeo Iberico : A Popular View of Revolution). I'm not sure whether she's also responsible for The Deceived Husband : A Kleinian Approach to the Literature of Infidelity. The e-mail, by the way, was in Spanish. After the second such e-mail I cut and pasted it over into one of the on-line translators and decyphered the resulting pigin sufficiently to work out that it was she and not I he wished to contact, so I e-mailed him (in English) to advise him so. Never heard back. Theres also a UK molecular biologist by the name of Alison Sinclair. I wonder if either of those "others" in their respectable academic careers have ever been haunted by the disrespectable spectre of a certain sci-fi writer?
posted by Anonymous at 21:12   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Physics Chanteuse
Got a "thank you" e-mail from someone that was meant, I am quite sure, for the Lynda Williams who is behind the scientainment site at
http://www.scientainment.com/pchant.html. I came across her a couple of times before, when searching
for my own name on the web to see if the ORU was showing up in google. Looks like a very with it lady. :-)

Particularly liked her quote that she and her sister "are dedicated to promoting scientific literacy and a citizen science that is inclusive and socially responsible.

posted by Lynda at 18:32   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Marge Piercy
Nearly finished Woman on the Edge of Time. It's one of those books I wanted to like because of the spirit in which it was recommended. There have been some interesting nuggests. I hadn't seen men breast feeding in a sci fi novel before, for example. You might recall I toyed with the idea for Red Reach males and was startled by my sister, Holly's, shock at the notion and conviction any male that do that wouldn't be at all desirable as a male. Which I thought was quite fascinating. But I find Piercy's utopian society unsatisfying on the whole. She introduces loads of characters with little role apart from being exhibits for the enlightenment of the visitor. Maybe the "Brave New Worlds" 'tour of the facility device' is a bit too naked. Then there is the very blatant and unambiguous portrayal of the psychiatric profession as sadistic egotistical monsters. It might have been more interesting if there was more ambiguity about whether she was mad or not, as well as a gifted with the ability to cross worlds. It's just relentless and worse, unvaried. The protagonist, Connie, is frequently described as good at reaching out to others and yet her character is revealed largely through complaints about her own unhappiness and ill-usage. Then there's the plot. The cover says "only her sacrifice could save the future" but at three quarters of the way though there's been no more to indicate that than a single, vague conversation about her needing to get into social activism. I can't feel the lines of force driving plot and character behavior. The book was critically acclaimed in grand style, to judge by the reviews on the cover, so I'll have to classify this as one of the books I should have liked. However I am going to finish it, and it has got me thinking about the 70s and my reactions to things. Glad to have been introduced to the author in that regard. Don't know why I have to get so uncomfortable about not liking something. Maybe it is concern that I am not on the right wavelength. And I did enjoy some swatches of characterization and dialog. Alice Blue Bottom for example.
posted by Lynda at 21:56   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Getting Throne Price Out There
Pleased about the review, too. Decided to go to that Seattle con. Still interested? I must e-mail them. David M. has decided he'd rather go to Calgary one. It would double the cost for us, for him to come too. Also sent a book and T-Shirt off the ConJose in care of David-Glenn Anderson.

Bit worn out with the excitement of handing books around to possible reviewers and friends in the local press who have agreed to do interviews. (Not to mention broke!) Reactions were so great I think my expectations got a little overblown. I was disappointed (then worried) when the UNBC book store didn't sell out the day it put 10 pre-pub copies on the shelf. Which is silly since it isn't a Sci Fi venue, students are all broke and studying for exams, and most people who knew about TP and wanted a copy had ordered theirs online. Still 8 books left in the store but I'm okay now. :-)

Took me a day to realize my biggest problem was suffering writing withdrawl. Not even having the books on the shelf was as big a pleasure as that. Unfortuantely I was backlogged with work and couldn't get to my den. Party Saturday night, which was great, but I was tired. Had to take the two youngest to Harry Potter Sunday p.m. Then stayed up until 3 a.m. Monday catching up some work at UNBC, my course and one in development, which was also dumb because I crashed in the afternoon the next day and am now home recouperating. Not as young as I was when I could program all night and start over the next day. Or maybe it was just my ID out to make me take an afternoon off despite everything. Trouble is I work really well in the wee-small hours of the morning when there is NO ONE around to interrupt me except the occational security guard. It's a pleasure working on web courses then. Sort of fun even.

Domestic front
It is very cool to watch David M. sitting on the couch caught up in finishing Throne Price. He gets huffy when I stand over him watching him read, or trill at him from a door jam. He looks up as if he was reading any of the books I've seen him bent on finishing despite family distractions, sees me beaming at him, and grumps "oh, that" at me, then reads on. Very pesky thing to have an author underfoot.

The neatest thing, of course, is that he knows the story inside out. He helped proof read it! But he still enjoyed reading it through again, found the end exciting and chuckled over the fountain dunking.
posted by Lynda at 21:18   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
FA Chapter 12
Printed and read it last night. Concerned about the topology of tension around language and grammar matters. For example, Erien addresses them all with a blanket peerage solution - if Horth accepts that it would only be because he had agreed to treat the Reetions as Erien's parents as per the law Erien laid down when he took him outside. But later Lurol addresses him and we are referring to her using 'correct grammar'. Speaking up? How far?

Transitions feel a little bumpy in places. Maybe something that got cut. Or maybe I was too tired.

Musician misunderstanding
I think we have to devote a line at least to why Horth expects female company to be available. We know it is Vrellish culture. But someone, maybe Evert, should politely suggest abstinence as a viable alternative for the few weeks Horth will be staying with them.

arbiters
Any problem with making the aura scale decimal? That is, out of ten not eight? I once toyed with powers of two as meaningful to Reetions given the computing thing, but it doesn't make sense because arbiters are not binary devices. Binary computing is really very primative, because a two state system is info poor. Arbiters use properties of light to record states (hence the twinkling of an active cognitive core beneath the mica-like surface of a crystronics cube) but only when animated, and interconnections are more like organic, threshhold based ones, with direct links to auxiliary non-arbitorial crystronics of a deterministic nature and the ability to re-animate "brain" (cold stores), and isolate processing objectives organized by a short term goal (personas). Mmm. And as personas go, the one that wrote this didn't have very crisp bounding parameters.
posted by Lynda at 21:04   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Centaur is the first of the plauge ship series?
Don't think I've heard you mention a title before. Presuming Creon and Teo are characters in the novel about the ships feeling their way back into territory lost to humankind by a plague outbreak. Correct?
posted by Lynda at 20:48   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
OK, so who's running this show, anyway?
After about 3000 more words added to Centaur this weekend, I have Creon where he wants me. Now have to keep Teo distracted, although I haven't quite figured out whether she's going to realise what he is planning in time - or not. Dramatically it would work better if it were NOT, but whether it would make my long term plans for the gang difficult, or just make the relationships more gritty and interesting ... hmm.

In FA I do know what is going to make Erien stick his head in the Reetion psych probe - similar logic to his challenging D'Lekker in TP. He wants to take the heat off someone else - in TP it was Ditatt and in FA it's Amel - and he wants to get people to pay attention to him - on Gelion the way to do it was by challenging someone, and on Rire by getting something major into the record.
posted by Anonymous at 13:52   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Reality boxes
Playwright Tom Stoppard explained his approach to drama thus: He has a friend who keeps peacocks, in England, in a not particularly large yard, certainly not a stately home. And one morning when this friend was shaving he looked out the window and saw one fly over the fence. Now, they're valuable birds and on the other side of the fence was a main road, so he downed tools and went to catch his peacock. Picture him, at the side of the road waiting to cross back, in pyjamas, shaving foam on face, peacock under his arm. He knows how he got there. But to the guy behind the wheel, setting off for his am commute to the City, it is one bizarre sight. The little reality boxes in which the two of them live have collided. This, the collision of reality boxes, is what Stoppard likes to write about.
posted by Anonymous at 13:38   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
First Review
First review of Throne Price, and it's short, sweet and picked up the nub of the book.

Meanwhile tonight I was editing FA Chapter 13 and nibbling at FA Chapter 14, where Erien has discovered that there is an advantage to answering Amel's mail for him - lets him know what the grownups are thinking. Erien hasn't decided whether it is more ridiculous for him to be considered too young to have a political voice on Rire when he's spearheading a major diplomatic initiative, or spearheading said major diplomatic initiative at the age of 17 with nothing but bloodlines to commend him.
posted by Anonymous at 23:28   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Tolkein's Poisoned Arrow
I have been thinking of Tolkein these past few days - as I make notes which reveal that the novel is not going to go the way I thought it should, but is going to go the way Creon has decided it will go. I remember Tolkein in one of his letters saying something to the effect that Boromir's brother had shown up, and was a very interesting character, but if he went on much longer most of him was going to have to be removed to the appendix. Maybe he did have that poisoned arrow in mind for Faramir right from the start, but I have a feeling that he found himself in a position where he had a plot well on its way and suddenly found himself with a character coming on stage who could have sent it all askew, just by his presence and personality. I'm very fond of Faramir, and always thought that arrow was a dirty trick, but it may have been authorial need!

Probably a corollary for fictional characters, in that, for the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting time". Such as - "May you be the minor character who could have derailed the plot."
- Lynda

posted by Anonymous at 23:17   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Edits
Am I gaining? I thought I was, having brought Far Arena Chapter 12 down from 9323 words to below 8000 - until I looked back at the original wordcount and realised I'd only lost about 700 words net, having put in a big chunk of Erien explaining Reetion inquiries to his mystified and reluctant audience. So that is not the 25% decrease I was aiming for. I think Chapter 14 is going to have to take a considerable hit; at 14K plus words, it's up with Chapter 10 as "The Chapter That Ate Toronto". However, I have dumped 12C in the depot, and consider it, for the time being, done.
posted by Anonymous at 21:50   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Inspiration for Reality Skimming?

Back from a day spent on Northern B.C. roads. Nice scenery but no end to it. Alone. Wanting to get somewhere. Resisting the urge to speed to keep from getting drowsy. Boredom with sudden excitement as another car does something hair raising. Nearly hit a cat. Rock cracked my windshield. Pit stops for coffee and to stretch. Destinations like beads on a rosary.

Picture is from a Smither's tourism page: http://junction.net/~kknoll/smithers.html
posted by Lynda at 09:17   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Cycling
From accounts of addiction - or at least the progress towards addiction - I've read, people do use uppers and downers to counteract each others' effects, often to meet social or work obligations or conceal their drug-taking. Addictions to multiple substances are common, though later in the disease I suspect the behaviour gets disorganized, as people with addictions take mixtures of substances in their efforts to just feel normal. (My addiction lecturer mapped out a continuum whereby people start by taking drugs to get high, and as the disease advances and their brain chemistry alters, began to need them just to feel normal - quite apart from any underlying mood disorder or psychosis.)

I also remember reading that the response to alcohol is culturally determined, and that some rather ugly behaviours we are accustomed to accepting as due to alcohol are not seen in some other cultures. Alcohol decreases judgement, so the people who think they can drive while drunk are wrong. I can't remember the figure for % of road accidents in which alcohol is a factor - but it is greater than 50%. And then 85% of people believe they are better drivers than average.
posted by Anonymous at 07:57   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Klin Addiction
My biopsych class is into addiction now, and naturally I'm wondering about Sevolites. I think we discussed the possibility that highborn Vrellish are prone to getting 'space drunk' because reality skimming is a sort of high after a while. So there I am wondering if the mesotelencephalic dopamine system might vary in a Vrellish sevolite, and whether extremely Golden Demish, on the other hand, might have pronounced pleasure circuits for poetry.

PS Found the text book web site. It has multiple choice questions for each chapter. Sort of fun. Only got 70% on the comprehension test for the chapter I just read, unfortunately. Remarkable stuff, contingent tolerance, but be damned if I can get my head around the difference between it and situationally specific tolerance on a straight run. Let's see. Does "contingent" require the drug be in the system during the behavior of interest, in order for the subject to show tolerance under the influence. Mmm. What does that say about drunk drivers who claim they can drive okay. Maybe they are more tolerant than a novice drinker would be, provided they have driven home drunk before. Situational response is a 'pre-drug' thing. The body clues in (conditional Pavlovian stimulus=situation) and primes itself to counter-act the anticipated dose, in advance. I think that's got it. Sort of. I remember something from lecture about the situational response being "John Belushi" syndrome, meaning that addicts sometimes O.D. in novel settings on the same dose they would tolerate in a familiar one. Most amazing all around, in any case. Both of them. Contingent and situational.

None of which is getting to what I logged onto the blog to say, which is: according to Pinel drug withdrawl tends to manifest opposite symptoms to the drug. So a klin addict deprived of klin might be hyperactive?

Wonder if the withdrawl business bodes ill for the "sish-klin cycling" syndrome I've floated here and there. The notion is akin to "boose to get to sleep, coffee to wake up" syndrome with a Luverthanian kick to it. But if at least one of sish and klin is addictive (probably both I guess), would alternating between them cut it for an addict? Psychologically, I've always thought of klin as having like a mild, mellow sort of feel to it rather than any big buzz. Sish is more like amphetamines. Any opinions, on the medical side of things, to weigh in with?
posted by Lynda at 23:26   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Feel like I'm living in a time warp. Caught up with your message of Nov 10, on e-mail, and there you are saying exactly what I said (sometime later I do believe) on the Blog about Chapter 11. At least that proves we are in creative sync. :-) Probably, somewhere in my e-mail, is your reply to my query re: whether I got Erien right in my Chapter 11 revisions after accepting your previous batch.
posted by Lynda at 19:07   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
My office - after one day's worth of tidying. You should have seen it before! Scantron machines and old printers stacked up on the desk. Boxes overflowing with assignments that should have been shredded years ago. The Web Development Lab is entertaining. Student staff stepping over boxes and monitors trying to get machines back up to work on.

Stuck at work until I get some homework done. Better go get some supper and get on with it.

posted by Lynda at 18:15   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Searching the web for Derryl Murphy bio, to hand on to Dennis Macknak re: our Wells creative writing course idea, and came across an entry for you, as well, on
Canadian Science Fiction home page. Alison Sinclair on Canadian Science Fiction site.
posted by Lynda at 18:11   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
No writing. The dishes remain unwashed. I pinned a cardboard box to the wall and beat on it for a while with a practice foil, to the Gladiator soundtrack played loudly. I went out for a run in the rain, though my "I sneer at inclement weather" expression was more a squint through fogged and dropletted spectacles. I have sorted the 200 or so of messages accumulated in my inbox since whenever. Listsrvs are an invention of the same devil who thought up aerobics. But I have reduced the messages to one screen, satisfied myself that there is nothing lurking in them, and I trust I finally have worn myself out.
posted by Anonymous at 01:18   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
OK, now I'm calmer! I have poked around and found that the archives are still there, it's the hyperlink off the main page that doesn't seem to be working. I've tried the reset option from the FAQ, no change. Over to you.

Okay. Done. But you won't like it. No style. :-(

posted by Anonymous at 00:23   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Oh, good, you're there - Lynda, what's happened to our archive??

Ah. The archive. Windshield washer syndrome. I put in the wrong slash in the path and a file was created with DOS slashes in its name
instead of a file being created IN the correct directory on the Unix box ORU is on. Tried to fix and get the archive to re-create but not a solved problem, sorry.

posted by Anonymous at 00:09   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
en garde
I remember you trying to get me out on the gym floor once with a foil. Bit like Ditatt working on Amel, I fear. Keep meaning to attend UNBC's Free Blades practices but haven't made it yet. Fewer bruises reading about it. :-)

Nice picture! Remember the one Edge took, soon after we signed the contract? I remember Okal Rel T-Shirts and a lunge, on your part. Probably never made 'the record'.

Finished meddling with Arena11.doc - see stash. You'd done such a lovely job of getting Erien to explain the older, messier rules it was tough doing surgery. See what you think.

We should have a shared picture of the Reetion town house affair Ranar, Lurol and Evert call home. Sketched something in ink but it wouldn't be worth scanning if I had one here to do it with. I see the lounge with the back door to the porch and stage somewhere central with morph seating grouped around; the kitchen' a front entrance; stairs going up to the bedrooms and bathroom. Probably need a visual aid of some description, showing orientation to the central parklike bit of C-block commons as well. Are there any walls on the ground floor? How do you envision that for the breakfast briefing scene?
posted by Lynda at 00:08   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
While I was thinking about fencing I retrieved this from my "memorabilia" box: myself (once upon a time), executing what is probably the least practical parry in the repertoire (prime). Takes a long time to get into, and if you miss the opponent's blade, look at all that lovely target. On the pro side, the riposte is a flick of the wrist to land the tip. Credit to Ron Ross for the photo.
posted by Anonymous at 23:20   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
FA 11 Erien's Briefing
I've changed the ground rules since the original draft. In particular, the privacy level of Ranar's household is no greater than ordinary now, which is as it should be. Makes some of explanation obsolete as is. Here's the gist of the work that needs to be done, IMHO:

Erien: Monitoring is ordinary. Artibers screen. STIs determine what and how much. STI 2 is pretty private.
Amel:the but...?
Erien: Auras. Can pierce and make public.
Amel: Like...?
Erien - sails over that as it is now

And the rest of the business with Horth et al follows, covering routine STI 2 vulnerability to violence and specific threat of lobbies, concluding with assurance a lobby-altered STI would be announced.

I'll take a stab at it tonight as soon as David vacates the PC with WORD on it, and then uploade what I get done before the wine takes effect. As usual, expect you to fix it up again wherever I foul Erien or the flow.

I thought making the alternative accommodation STI 8 would help explain the choice with less fuss, but that's not as crucial to the whole Reetion scheme of things as the STI 2 being normal. Just simpler to explain. I also think it's plausibe. The alternative accommodation is a sort of institutional barracks affair, and I bet UNBC would be happy to have STI 8 applied to student residences. :-)

Eep. Just about to link this to the articles on STIs and realized I haven't put them up in the ORU. Not happening this week I'm afraid! Sigh. If I thought I'd be any good at working, instead of playing, after 8 p.m. I'd be doing that. Mildly panic stricken about my message overflow on three fronts: voice, e-mail and web course. No, four. I still get paper mail. Anything my student assistant isn't catching these days is just sitting. Maybe I'll catch up in December after classes finish.
posted by Lynda at 21:58   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Dishes et al

Wasn't it Count Dracula who solved the dishes problem with the long drop down the castle wall solution. And I thought I was feeling monstrous today.

I think Alivda ought to interrupt Amel and Perry just as they safely overcome an impulse to talk first, and precipitate a bit of a row that wrecks havoc with the mood and drags out all the details much less gracefully than Amel would have liked.

posted by Lynda at 21:29   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Portrait of the Artist in a Bad Mood
I would really like to nail someone with a foil this evening. Preferably several someones. Unfortunately, that gratification must await a new pair of contact lenses. (It will probably also await my recovering enough flexibility to lay out properly in a lunge). I can't even go out and pound pavement. It is - excuse my Yorkshire - pissing it down out there. Drains blocked by leaves, streetlights too dim to see the depth of the puddles. I went ankle deep in one on the way home. All the joys of the West coast monsoon season. I can now reassure my family that I have not succumbed to precipitatus negatus Victoriansis (one of the conditions that should have made it into the Canadian Diagnositic and Nonstatistical Manual of Mental Disorders - compiled by the CMAJ editors last Christmas (PDF only)) symptom, "It hasn't rained all month." In November. I was finally offered an interview for a regulatory job I had applied to in - May. Better pay, better benefits, the possibility of flexitime. Not the right psychological moment when I've battered through a day on a task that should have taken me three hours and still did not get it finished (Sinclair's Law of the Inertia of Messes: If it was a mess before, it will still be a mess, all promises to the contrary notwithstanding) and am facing The Big Meeting on timelines tomorrow. And I'm trying to write an article for Vision on the joys of writing-taken-in-adultery. (Chekov's famous quote, "Literature is my mistress, medicine my wife.") Hey ho, this will pass. I should either go and wash dishes (or put them on the balcony to rinse off or - hey - drop them OFF the balcony into the puddles), finish shooting down that 'plane, or write a scene to bounce off Lynda's beginning of the next book, in which Alidva puts in motion her plan to acquire an empire and dynasty. I could always edit. This is a very, very good editing mood. Grr!
posted by Anonymous at 20:46   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Tossing Their Cookies
We have arrived at an accommodation, the Blogger site and I. It seems that although it will not let me made an accept/reject decision on each cookie, it will let me make an accept/reject decision on the site as a whole. I can live with that. Now to try it on Network54. I have determined my inability to post using Netscape occurs when I have any setting other than "accept all cookies" unconditionally. Without reviewing them first. I gave up using my login to the community boards because one of the cookies contained the e-mail address I had registered with, so much for anonymity, and it wasn't worth it to sort through the barrage of seven to eleven cookies to log in to make sure that one didn't get placed (plus the ones from the advertisers. The ads may be gone, but the cookies continue). I've also wound up replacing my Internet Explorer. Got it - when I signed up with my last ISP. Finally realised that the reason I couldn't get at the cookie file - I knew it was meekly accepting everything because I never had any problems with the cookie pusher sites - was that the option of disabling them had been entirely removed. I'm sure for the convenience of the ISP. And for the people they sell ads to. There are times I have my doubts about encouraging people to use the Internet, since even supposedly respectable institutions exploit their trust and ignorance by leaving security loopholes, never mind the scammers, the spammers and the hackers. [So ends Growl #2 of the day. Growl #1 landed on the Community board, a two-barrel post on book-banning.]

posted by Anonymous at 19:59   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Server Switch

Arg. Sorry. In the midst of an office move at UNBC and my server disappeared. Rotten timing, given your message noting that Holly Lisle had featured it on her site. My server was up - but the IP connection wasn't speaking to it in its new quarters.

In between Strategic Review Meetings here, but I swapped the blog over to the http://www.okalrel.org address where we tried, and failed, to put it initially. Didn't make sense to me that it wouldn't work with the virual path when that works with WS_FTP and indeed, it did. New address of this page should be http://www.okalrel.org/blog/blogger.html.

Stuff

Get my fax last night? Sorry about the hour. Time slipping again. I know I shouldn't be dabbling with Avim's Oath but it just happened. - gad! Late! Late! All the time like the white rabbit!

posted by Lynda at 12:12   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
More about dopamine: The August issue of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) news section had an article on various recent findings about dopamine, cocaine, ritalin and ADHD. Evidently, the target of action of cocaine and ritalin is the same: synaptic dopamine transporters, which recycle released dopamine into the synapse. It blocks them; dopamine action is heightened. The dopaminergic system is the reward and pleasure circuit, but the reason cocaine is highly addictive and ritalin much less so is the kinetics - orally taken, ritalin takes an hour to reach peak concentration in the synapse. Cocaine acts in seconds. (Injected ritalin does produce a high). People with ADHD seemingly have many more dopamine transporters, so dopamine does not stick around in the synapse. Two consequences - normally interesting activities produce fewer rewards, and at the same time, against a subdued signal the "noise" of random neural firing becomes more prominent, interfering with concentration. I seem to remember reading at one point that one of the first correlations of genes and personality traits involved dopamine receptor variants and the personality trait of novelty seeking behaviour - don't know whether preliminary results were borne out.
posted by Anonymous at 22:55   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
It didn't occur to me until I started working my way through it, how long it would take to get that plane shot down. I thought I'd have them in the water by now. Instead, they're running, there's a rescue in the way, and I'm still going to get them ditched and fished out. This might solve a major problem I've had up until now about how my protagonist is going to infiltrate his objective. He's going to get carried in half drowned. Which obviates a lot of sneaking around and might mean that the novel is shorter than The Lord of the Rings. "I may be writing a series but I am not writing a series of trilogies." Repeat, however many times.

However, given that I've been at this 1 1/2 h, am over 1000 words into the scene, and haven't fired the first shot, am I: (a) being faithful to my setting (b) building up suspense really well (c) starting the scene too early in the action or ... (d) being kinda wordy. Um.
posted by Anonymous at 22:43   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
You go away for the day and your server suffers separation anxiety and crashes. Haven't been able to access the Blog since late this morning. Who says it'll be decades before we develop computers with feelings?
posted by Anonymous at 21:14   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Off to socialize with Ian and our two families, in the face of mild anxiety about everything I have to get done; anticipation of a good walk and company; and in the interests of being a balanced human being. :-)
posted by Lynda at 09:02   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Browsers

Yay Opera! I really didn't expect it to be able to deal with bloogger.com given that curious pyra script suggestion in the extension. Should look it up but don't want to crash my old box here by asking too much of it. Wonder if it is means python.

Far Arena Chapter 11

Definitely still speaking to you! Great improvement. Couple of places where I thought even more was needed, a few where the Reetion in me had a quibble but on the whole a lot better. The WORD 97 format with changes marked worked fine on my machine at work.

I want an arbiter icon. Just thinking this bit would look good with a crystronic block for adornment. It's the ed tech pro in me. Course material seems to go down better with a little picture here and there to break it up.

Ranar would not approve.

Marge Piercy

Gee, it's a small world. Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is one of the books I am trying to read at the moment. Claiming I am succeeding in reading anything is dubious. Picking at Chaos and On Spec Fall 2000 and Biology of Violence in between doses of Pinel text for my Pysch course. No idea when I will get an essay written! Anyhow, the Piercy book was recommended to me by the Pscyh TA and belongs to her.

posted by Lynda at 08:49   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Browser Challenges

Trying in Opera. My version of Netscape on my Linux box just went away when I logged in!

posted by Lynda at 08:36   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
So - I can post in Netscape, but I cannot view the Blog in Netscape. I get automatically bumped to our empty archive. I can view the Blog in IE, but I cannot post. I get some unintelligible Windows-associated error message. Is this one of those I don't do Windows things, or is it just one of those computers-are-out-to-drive-us-insane things. Another place where SF speculation got it all wrong, with visions of insane computers taking over the world. All written by someone who had never tried to deal with "mismatched parentheses" in Fortran.

To this hour, I am still at a positive wordcount. The chapter, having started at 8 600 words, is now at 9 300 words, which means I added 1 200 and took out 500. Wordcounts are beginning to seem like an exercise in masochism. Lynda is feeding me summaries of the Reetion legal process, since she invented it, and I am joyously and shamelessly using Erien to info dump them. It's perfectly in keeping with Erien's character that he would attempt to explain to his Gelack countryfolk all the beauties and intricacies of the Reetion system. It's also perfectly in keeping with his audience's characters that they will sabotage his careful explanations by figiting, squirming, looking blank, getting argumentative and sneaking away. So having written the infodump, I shall pass the chapter to Lynda, via our FTP repositry, so she can enlarge on the sabotage. Erien is one of my PCs (player characters) in the universe, and I am inclined to be too soft on him at times.
posted by Anonymous at 12:11   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
In the am, an editorial paring job on Far Arena chapter 11 - taking out nearly 2000 words. I hope you're still talking to me, Lynda. Though with "track changes" you have the option of putting them all back in. Then to the library, and I've come home with "Ornament: an illustrated handbook of motifs", and "Tiles in architecture" and "The Art of Glass: Integrating architecture and glass", all of which will help with building cities. I need to be able to visualize, or I feel as though I'm describing with my specs off. It's all coloured fuzz. I hate coloured fuzz in descriptions. Gorgeous pictures in all of them, a feast for the eyes. I have to remember, though, whose eyes I'm looking through. Those tiles are going to mean something different to everyone.

I was rereading - or reskimming Marge Piercy's "Braided Lives", which is probably my favourite of her mainstream (as opposed to SF or historical) novels. I regret the plot-compulsion of genre at times, since I rather like the Bildungsromane and the social novel (at least the contemporary social novel) as forms. In Piercy's "Small Changes" there's a street party scene, depicting the multiple overlapping threads of various lives; I tried to capture that flavour in the opening section of a never-to-be-finished prequel to Legacies, years ago. That and "Children of Paradise". Never mind romantic triangles, I had at least a pentangle.

Something dawned upon me about my writing a few days ago. I have my sense of drama from a love of drama. And I don't mean film, I mean drama: Shakesphere, Shaw, Bolt, Osborne, Synge, Miller, Williams ... those guys. And from opera. I find argument inherently dramatic. Storytelling is suspenseful. I like speeches and arias. I don't have a modern genre mindset AT ALL. No wonder I'm accused of slow pacing and talkiness. If I didn't love the worldbuilding, the thought experiments and the opportunity to write about politics, morality and creative passion on a large scale, I'd give up SF and take up a form in which the love of drama and argument was an asset rather than a liability.

But then there are nights like tonight when, after I had beat upon the scene futilely (neither sleep nor swimming having inspired), repeating arguments in different voices, realising I'd repeated myself, cutting out the repeats ... My protagonist suddenly obliged me with a great big whopper of a lie! Bless his black heart. So now I'm off to pick up the scene (already mostly written) in which the graveyard gets dug up. The Law of Dramatic Economy demands that there be Consequences to the GBW, and that those arrive at the most inopportune moment. But that shall be relegated to mental composting.
posted by Anonymous at 23:03   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
The night turned out unexpectedly productive, since I sat sulking at the screen about one and a half hours ago wondering what the point was getting into something tonight. But I got a decent 1332 words, with one character unexpectedly revealing his origins, a streak of poetry and a coat of fur (!!). I love it when unexpected things happen! I'm not entirely sure my protagonists are going to get permission for their forensic archaology; the other side are being robustly suspicious. It's the price of me for writing them that way. I will turn it over to the unconscious or whatever higher or lower power operates to get writers out of self-generated fixes, sleep on it overnight, and take it to the pool in the morning.
posted by Anonymous at 23:01   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Take your point about the dropped threads. As we discussed on the phone, we'll need to mention the fate of POV characters from the "perspectives on Amel" side of the narrative. I'll do a better job of that scrap I sent you by e-mail on the Reetion process question. Maybe I'll work it up into something suitable for the ORU website as a reference article. Complete with flash animation of -- well. Maybe not. Day dreaming again. Was a time I wanted to model Reetion voting in a simple program. You know, the kind of diagram that illustrates a single complication's impact on a basic process without really touching the complexity of the beast. Recently bought James Gleick's Chaos because a few copies made it to Books & Company's $10 shelf. But I won't get it read in any timely fashion and I don't view the arbiter net as chaotic, exactly, except in the sense of small changes potentially having large effects. Like weather. Mm. Is that right?

You may be interested to know a google "I Feel Lucky" search for "Throne Price" fetches up your page
http://www.sff.net/people/asinclair/wriprice.html! I know because I tried it out, cold, in lecture this morning as an example of queries on the web and that's what we got. :-) In the regular search mode google also offered up lovely false hits about auction sales of thrones to help me make my point.

posted by Lynda at 17:19   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
As a writer, there are questions I'd love to ask other writers, but don't think I should. I don't want to make them conscious of their unconscious, if it is their unconscious working - in this instance, I'd love to ask Lois McMaster Bujold about the source of the metaphors she uses for the sacred: pouring, filling up, overflowing. It's particularly prominent in the Curse of Chalion, because of the involvement of gods and goddesses but remember at the end of Shards of Honor when Aral likens Cordelia to a fountain, giving out honor (which is his idea of the sacred), and again at the end of Warrior's Apprentice when Miles asks Bothari to spare him some forgiveness, when his cup runs over ... I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere in her works. Presbyterian-raised, I focus on the overflowing cup - the Christian metaphor - but I'm not sure that's it. A cup or chalice is a prominent pagan symbol as well; Marie (Jakober) used it. Bujold's fiction is moral and deist, but not overtly Christian. Love to know.
posted by Anonymous at 20:15   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Having fixed my printer (after 10 days in the shop they gave it back to me with the problem "verified" so I could then go and get the new part and install it myself ...) I have printed out the first eighteen chapters of Far Arena. The total words to date are just shy of 180 000. We need to cut, quite drastically, to bring it down below 150 000 total, because there's missing information needs adding throughout. We need to sort out the progress of the politics. Reetion politics is complex, neat and alien, and it deserves to be foregrounded; it's just difficult to dramatize a political process that is collective and impersonal. Putting human faces on it works dramatically but undermines the idea; it's economical to have the same people show up again and again, but the Reetion process might not necessarily have that so. The roles are the same, the people differ. How to anchor. And there are a number of dropped threads, with the kaleidoscopic points of view (aside from Erien, there are eleven other points of view, maybe 12), characters seen once and not again; they need a mention later, to close their stories.
posted by Anonymous at 20:00   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Nearly lost my grip yesterday. Felt so lousy I went home for a nap about 3 pm and decided, yes, sleep deprivation undermines my motive for living. I can keep going without sleep. I just feel like an overflown pilot.

Went back to work at 5 pm capable of enjoying the experience of meeting an elder from Ft. St. James who drives in to Prince George every Wednesday night to teach the FNST 133 - the Carrier language. We'd set up a WebCT shell for her to use and a student had already sent her an e-mail message. She dictated the response - in Carrier. Many and strange are the challenges of those who work in ed tech. Makes you appreciate the nature and quality of the flip side, though, when she is learning how to use a mouse. Picked it up quickly enough and has a daughter, she told me, who can help her figure out where she might get access to a machine in Ft. St. James.

Got a good night's sleep after some R&R watching Enterprise (The one where the Vulcan monastery turns out to be a major spy installation). Tegan fell asleep cuddled in my lap and I retired with David after plucking Angie off the kitchen chair where she was watching Jenny working on an Xmas present she is crafting and managing to keep her in bed long enough to give sleeping a fair chance by lieing with her. Necessary family contact hours. Guess I know where Amel's need for skin contact comes from. Think I was also book deprived. I felt a bit grumpy about your commentaries because I wasn't reading anything! Well, I read a couple of stories in the Fall 2000 issues of On Spec. Derryl Murphy's Last Call was an admirable example of short length, big impact. One idea clothed in characters, but they felt alive.

posted by Lynda at 10:08   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Now, this gives me a perfect forum for book-notes, of which I have quite a few fragments on my hard drive, plus others rattling around in my head. Currently, Hellspark, by the wonderful Janet Kagan who does not write enough. What in particular struck me on reading Hellspark was what a great namer she is. Her ill-assorted survey team have names as diverse as the cultures they represent: Swift-Kalat twis Jalakat, Oloitokitok, layli layli calulan (which is not a name, but a title), Timosie Megeve, Ruurd van Zoveel, Tinling Alfvaen, Buntecrieh, Rav Kejesli, Om im Chdeayne, John the Smith and Edge-of-Dark. They're barely functioning as a team because they're constantly putting each other's backs up with inadvertant (or not so inadvertent) obscenities, unintended aggressions and discourtesies, and it isn't until they learn to see each other as "civilized people" that they are able to perceive the sentience of one of the native species (another marvellous name) the sprookjes.The Hellspark trader who is drawn into the situation is Tocohl Susumo and her ship's "extrapolative computer" is Lord Maggy Lynn. In contrast to the Galactic standard language. Gal'Ling, which seeks to become a common denominator, Hellspark is an all inclusive language; therefore Hellsparks are traders, interpreters, intermediaries and judges. Tocohl has to start by interpreting the team members to each other. There's a mob of characters, a great whirl of manners and linguistics, some wonderful descriptions, and of course the names. The last writer who struck me that way was Orson Scott Card (eg ramen, varelse - for his classes of sentients). In contrast to George Lucas, who has a fabulous visual imagination and a tin ear. Kagan is also the author of Mirabile which is sheer fun for any molecular biologist with its linked stories of a fire-fighting (sometimes literally) geneticist who has inherited someone else's bright idea. And Uhura's Song in which she got the woman who would fascinate Spock just right.
posted by Anonymous at 18:50   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
In the Globe and Mail today, a polished example of medical writing that swept one from the Sorrows of Celebs to the nucleus accumbens in two and a half columns. Go G&M go! The writer was Rebecca Caldwell, and in her two 2/3 pages she managed to summarize current thinking about addiction and dopamine reward pathways, addiction susceptibility, the distinction between addiction and dependence, and current understanding of chronic pain undertreatment and treatment. The article is at the Globe and Mail website (http://www.globeandmail.com - under Health), at least for the next 7 days.

Also in the G&M today was an article on the memorial to Mordecai Richler: he has had a font created for, and named after, him. Henceforth the Giller prize correspondence and announcements will be in "Richler". As his books are re-released, they will be set in his own font. So, the creators hope, will others. I like that idea.
posted by Anonymous at 18:15   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Have singularly failed this AM to leave the SF writer at home. Hence post at the end of a lunch-hour spent (1) trying to find the drug store that was advertising 'flu shots (2) scrawling notes on a scene (3) posting off copies of TP to people I promised them to (4) booking an eye-test. But I have a lot of noise in the mental attic this afternoon. Yesterday's word, by the way, is fretwork. The saw is a fretsaw. And Charous being Charous, I doubt she would let go of pain immunity; it makes the 'relpul scarier and more powerful.
posted by Anonymous at 14:10   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Dredging through the sludge of words which seems to live just below consciousness, looking for the term that describes thin wood with a pattern cut out of it. There's a type of saw specific to the purpose - I even have one, with blades for cutting silver - but I could not find the blasted word. I have quite precise ideas about the decor of this particular civilization, which is a consequence of the environment. But I don't have the terminology. A lunchtime trip might be in order to the library - two blocks away from work - to find a short, economical book on furnishings, decor, etc. Meanwhile my character (non OR universe) is lying in bed planning to take over the world. I gave up on the description of the shutters on his bedroom window and let him have his way. He hasn't yet decided how much of the world he wants to take over, but his aspirations are disconcerting to a novelist who wants to remain in control of her plot.

Response from Lynda

Couldn't find the stencil-like thing in What's What: a glossary of the physical world but discovered ARMATURE - an inner skeleton on which a pliant material is laid as it is being built up. I am sure there have been days I've needed that word.


Ameron will be relieved to know your would be Alexander isn't in the ORU.

posted by Anonymous at 23:27   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
I've just hauled out my Harrison's Internal Medicine to look up "Charcot's joint", which is severe osteoarthritis associated with loss of pain sensation in the joints, or proprioception (sense of position) or both. Lacking pain and position sense, joints get repeatedly traumatized and can be rapidly destroyed (eg weeks to months to a very unstable joint filled with bone fragments). Causes are various - syphilis was one, leprosy, congenital malformations of the spinal cord, and congenital indifference to pain among them. I'd always thought the 'relpul were conditioned at a higher level than the nerve endings, since pain does have a protective function. It is just useful not to be preoccupied with it or terrified by the fear of mutilation. But then the pain training/conscience bonding of 'relpul is another holdover from an earlier stage of evolution. Would we come up with the same idea now?

Response from Lynda

Good point. If and when we get around to the Charous novella dealing with how she became Royal Relpul, we might tackle it in terms of an historical left over. That is, cast the ORU's creative evolution, fictionally, as its historical evolution. There was a time at court when all the best gorarelpul were torture proof. Probably a rather nasty time, like the period in which dresu bondage hardened attitudes. Maybe it even predated the conscience bond. But pain training was never subtracted as a precaution even when no longer meaningful. Tradition. Perhaps one of Charous' issues in the novella will be getting that reviewed.

posted by Anonymous at 23:26   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

By the way ... read a section in my Pinel text for Biopsychology over supper tonight that sparked a thought concerning gorarelpul. It was the bit about the emotional response to pain being localized in - I think it was in an anterior bit of the parietal lobe? A bit that tended to get trashed in slap dab prefrontal lobotomies anyway. The point of interest was that sensory awareness of pain need not be removed by pain training in order to mute or nix the emotional reaction to it in a non-regenerative commoner. I suppose that begs the question, though, of whether awareness or emotional reaction is the thing with the survival value. The text cites a case history of a Canadian university student who had no pain of any sort and died of it. Not immediately, but by about 30 years of age. I always thought there would be risks - remember our bits and pieces in which Shatenous has acid burns on his hands? - but hadn't thought of the one that the text cited. Apparently she suffered terribly from skeleto-muscular problems because she did not shift while sleeping to get comfortable, switch legs when standing, etc. Never felt discomfort.

Speaking of that class I am taking - do you dream in multiple personalities? Glenda (instructor) was doing sleep today, including dreaming. Occurred to me, listening, that while I am not sure it is lucid dreaming in the sense the Pinel text intended, I used to very clearly be aware of / remember dreams in which I might not be able to control everything but felt I should be able to, and most definitely switched characters in the the dream - usually 3 or more times. Wonder if those sort of habits are to blame for the difficulty I have maintaining a single POV while writing.

posted by Lynda at 22:10   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Be careful. Or you'll find you've volunteered to rebuild the whole sprawling cabbage patch!
posted by Lynda at 21:43   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Structure?
posted by Anonymous at 21:42   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Ain't it lovely to be young at heart. Speaking of which, I see you've managed to make the style sheet entry for DATE color red. Next contribution to design: where should I link the blog to in the www.okalrel.org site's structure?
posted by Lynda at 21:35   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
And I would have made my night's wordcount, packaged up Throne Price, paid my phone bill, read Locus _and_ gone to bed at a decent hour. So there.
posted by Anonymous at 21:28   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
You realize of course, if you hadn't discovered this blogger thing on Holly Lisle's web portal, I'd have put up the character bios you sent me on the week end. AND be working on the peanut butter scene in Far Arena.
posted by Lynda at 21:15   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Shades of hours spent shoving scrawled on pieces of paper back and forth across cafeteria tables, when the Universe was primordial soup. We're at our respective computers - in the same time zone for a change - on either end of a telephone line. Lynda's working out how to post pictures and I'm just working out how to post. It's that bilingual problem again. Macintosh, unfortunately, does not rule.
posted by Anonymous at 21:05   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
So where did the other one go?
Anyone seen a stray blog?
posted by Anonymous at 20:48   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
A blog is born.

Looks like one can put up pictures using complete URLs in the HTML.

I'll go add it to the Okal Rel Universe web site as ... news? Research and commentary? Mmm.

posted by Lynda at 20:42   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments