Thursday, January 31, 2002
 
Biblio-blog
...sounds like fun. But, do you think you will write fewer reviews? UNBC book sales in the atrium have been increasing the weight of my bag. I bought the Forsythe Saga yesterday and a WW II novel by Eveyln Waugh (sp?)--Officers and Gentlemen? Also a book with a 1950s imprint on the origins of words. Read the first chapter of each (well, first half of the first chapter of the Forsythe Saga, long chapters) on a sanity break at work in the early afternoon when I escaped my office. TVs blaring on either side of me in the pub. Wish I could read in the library, but I need the cup of coffee and possibility of something that a cafe provides. Everyone seems so addicted to noise and changing channels.


 
life, the universe, etc.
I think I miss my den. Construction downstairs. Trying to work on and off, usually too tired, on machine in the living room. No retreat. Radio blaring. Kids at my elbows. David lecturing on domestic misdemeaners. Feeling very gray this morning and overwhelmed by in-baskets. I'll be glad when I can retreat to my linux box, star office and a room with a door that closes. Maybe that's where my unprecidented writer's block is coming from.

The Jane Austen writing in the family parlour mystique has done generations of women writers a disservice. You didn't really think you could get any useful work done on a computer in the living room, did you??? If you're visible, you're available. I'm with Virginia Woolf on this one, and I'm single! Today I was sorely tempted to put a sign on one of the two tables in our meagre hole of a lunch room, "The Diogenes Club Table. Club rules apply." My book or papers are not there as a conversation piece; they're what I want to be doing!

Time for a mental health day. (Alison, Thursday 31 January 7-ish)


Wednesday, January 30, 2002
 
Is this a habit?
I have started another blog. All those comments and opinions on books (non-SF and non-research-related) that I never have the time or energy to turn into proper well turned reviews. Hence Biblio-blog, subtitled "I was a teenage bibliomaniac but I'm all right now ... "

I rather envy Adele Wiseman, for laying claim to "Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood" and Brian Aldiss didn't do badly either for his memoirs: "Bury my heart at WH Smith's."

Oooh that was close ... didn't close quotes again.


 
Good news but I'm trashed
...spent hours tonight rescuing a critical server from bloat by picking things to delete or offload.


 
Fixes in!
... your mailbox. I sent them to Edge and cc'd you. Hope none of them dismay you. I wound up retyping, and things I retype tend to get shorter. I hope I haven't lost Ameron's voice by removing commas. He doesn't strike me as a comma-type person: his lungs are too good.


Tuesday, January 29, 2002
 
Or as Leia put it, Aren't you a little short to be a storm-trooper?

"You're my chance?" the Nesak woman said.

He did not know how to interpret her tone, except that there was nothing positive in it. He said, steadily, "I am Erien, Ward of Monitum and envoy to Leige Nersal."

"Ward of ... Monitum."

He nodded. Her vivid green eyes closed and she shuddered slightly, whispering something he did not catch, a prayer, perhaps.

She braced herself. "What do you want?"

"I am here to take you away, if that is your wish. I have spoken to the Zer-sis; he knows."

Her mouth twisted. "Leave, with you. You are not even Nesak! Monatese! Surely I do not deserve this of him." She wrapped her arms around herself, her eyes glistening. "I have not done anything so very shameful."

He was suddenly afraid he realised what the immediate difficulty was. "I am not here as a mate. I am an envoy acting under Leige Nersal's orders."

She looked at him, warily. "And what about yourself. Will you not want - "

"Rewarded?" Erien picked up, sourly. "Not in the way I think you mean. I am acting under the Leige Admiral's orders."

She frowned. "Are you flawed?"

He felt himself flush, since she was by no means the first woman who had asked that, but was saved from thoroughly embarrassing them both by her abrupt, "You have a - speech impediment."

Not what he was thinking, and so he corrected her ... "No. I lived seven years on Rire. That is an accent."

... maybe unwisely. "Rire!"


 
Glossary?
Still going to put up the long form of the glossary? If so, if you let me know what you'll be using for a template, I could start making pages. We need to start planning to have the website in shape by May.


 
Far too late again
Every morning I wake at some gawdawful hour with my back seized up and promise myself that tonight I will stretch and go to bed early. No such chance again tonight. Sitting up until nearly midnight putting notes into the StorySpace demo on spinal cord injury. I think I have that part of the science sorted out. Just need to stop reading and start writing again. Instead I detoured off to the article I've been writing off and on about poisons for Vision (the eZine produced by the Hollylisle.com community). It's nearly finished: I just have to sort out what I want to summarize about psychoactive poisons. Like distill all of neurochemistry and 5000 years of human self-experimentation into about 4 paragraphs?? It will come clearer when my mind is clearer; I read a lot of this stuff while working on Noon.

Bubble Theory
Incidentally, having come a-cropper once again on The Problem of Exposition, I think I finally have a way to conceptualize it. The Bubble Theory of Exposition. As far as exposition is concerned, every scene lives in its own bubble. It is entirely self contained and should have no more exposition than is necessary for the events in that scene. No expository set up of other scenes. The only set up - the only thing that crosses the bubble boundary - should be dramatic, not expository.

Perhaps. Sounds 'video clip' to me. I think of applying such rules to some of my favorite books and they come out in my head something like "famous speeches translated by a computer". Half presumes a story is a series of short stories doesn't it? Although the principle no doubt has merit. I fear all this stress on cutting, of late, is not good for my productivity. I feel tired before I start typing. And vaguely guilty for every third word. Maybe I am just too, literally, tired. Haven't got more than six hours sleep in a week between one thing and the other, lately.




No, the intention is not that the plot or action be contained, only the exposition be. The story has to cross the boundaries, because otherwise it would only be a collection of short stories. But not information.


Monday, January 28, 2002
 
Enjoyed your phaser essay, including the Reetion vs. Gelack take on design. Looks like a "research and commentary" article, inspired by both your garage door remote and your work on the causes of medical accidents.

I think Sci Fi writers projecting well designed futures should read more history. Maybe especially the history of technology and science. And not overlook the sheer, stubborn persistence of the QWERTY keyboard, the imperial system or weights and measures, and English spelling and grammar, just to name a few examples. Just as Mark Twain's captain remarks on there being "plenty of pain and suffering in heaven", there will be "plenty of bad design and irrationality" in the future, I think.

Bit of a non sequitur but reminds me of a story my Dad told me about "the accidents of war". He never saw action of the movie style sort. Got hit with a bit of schrapnel sitting in the back of a truck being driven away from a skirmish, in Germany, as they were coming along behind the front line of things, tidying up. Apart from that, the only fatal event was getting bombed by the British accidentally. And a story he told about a couple of Canadian soldiers told to lay communication lines "as far as the Black Forest" who never came back. Apparently the line they were laying passed straight through the Black Forest and out the other side, over into territory still held by the Germans. My Dad said they probably didn't grasp that the Black Forest was a forest, not a park. The Black Forest story has the feel to it of the army equivalent of an urban myth. But the bombing accident he experienced, personally. I believe the cook was the only person killed.



 
The Chief Cause of Problems is Solutions
...or unexpected complexity. Any crisis simplifies the world. After it has passed, the underlieing complexity is still there. Complexity prevents any solutions from being optimal from all perspectives. That, to me, is the dazzling challenge of being a moral being. In case you were wondering, that was a belated response to an earlier message of yours that I've just read.


 
I am here, honest
Feeling down after the message re: stem cell research post on RFF from David Brin that I cc'd you on. Re-read a bit of my short story Inheritance which I haven't edited and don't know when I'll ever get to, and felt personally frustrated about it not being "out there" in the fray, somehow, as well as uncomfortable about the hardening of attitudes. Anything to do with either money or reproductive technology seems to make people lose their minds in opposite directions. If money can be gained, no one asks whether the proportion of societal resources bend on the goal is worth it for mankind as a whole. But when improving ourselves is at issue, everything is supposed to be halted cold because any risk is too much risk. Or just plain "sacrilege" in some sense or another. I find the prospect of human research on the human genome scary, too. But I find the prospect of banning it even scarier. And I want a wide open process under which it is conducted. Something downright Reetion. Not illegal and hence by definition inaccessible to public scrutiny.


Sunday, January 27, 2002
 
But I think I have a problem
Not ADD, exactly, but I went to the library to look up two topics, amino acids and spinal injuries. And I came back with papers on:

  • sudden cardiac death
  • mechanisms of implantation of the blastocyst
  • electric fish
  • memory in electrosensory systems
  • a primer on health economics
  • magnetoreception
  • proteonomics
  • demyelinating disease
  • axonal transport
  • gamma-secretase (enzyme involved in generating protein deposited in Alzheimer's Disease
  • astrobiology
  • postmodern health care
  • medicine and SF

And that was me being restrained! All of those have relevance to something I am either actively working on or imminently working on, or are general worldbuildings/lifebuilding references. I could easily have come home with three times that amount. I am an intellectual glutton!


 
Thank you, Dr. Wallsgrove
For saving the sanity of a poor harrassed SF writer. I have spent most of the weekend on line and at the library researching two crucial topics. I wanted to find out about alternative possibilities for proteins, and their compatibility with our form of life. Unfortunately, having a Ph.D. in biochemistry and some years of work in protein structure, and having had the lifelong handicap of not being able to BS my way through things I haven't thought about properly, I have to have worked out whether the biochemistry I'm envisioning is plausible and would have the effect I want it to have - even if it is never talked about in the book. I kept running across references to 150, 300 or 700 non-protein amino acids found in plants, but nothing specific about those amino acids - particularly their effect on our biochemistry. But finally - found a whole book on amino acids in higher plants. Yes!! And some of them have been found hitchhiking on meteorites. They are out there. Before that, while still thrashing, I had a chance to reaquaint myself with the Astrobiology Web and its page on Extremophiles (check out Deinococcus radiodurans - bug with 3000X the radiation resistance of humans; it reassembles its genome from fragments), and with the Astrobiology Institute at NASA, and what's going on with Europa (the IR spectrum of the red streaks on the surface bears an interesting resemblance to the IR spectra of certain extremophiles) and Lake Vostok. I am partial to Lake Vostok (subglacial lake thought to have been isolated by Antarctic ice for millions of years - problem is getting into it without contaminating it).


Saturday, January 26, 2002
 
File naming convention
Since in the main we're not confined to 8-character limits, I propose we incorporate the date into the name of whatever version of the file we're working on, particularly for the ones that are bouncing back and forth.


 
You know you've surfed too much science when
... you see the tabloid headline in the supermarket "Dolly has affair with 15-year-old", and all you can think of is the sheep.


 
Hard Rel
Retrieved your file ... But Lynda, it's only supposed to be a novella.
I've stuck the file of the first scene in the depot.

But subplots are easy to cut. . Besides, you're trying to encourage me to "flow" again, here, right? Cheering to know there's a file for me. Not a productive day, except for getting Tegan to sleep without tears. One has to count such triumphs. Read her nearly two chapters of the Fellowship of the Ring. She likes the songs, and things like Pippin splashing in the bath. It makes me slow down and appreciate the detail.


 
Disintegrated again
Having once again zapped myself, rather than the garage door, with the garage door opener, I have concluded I would not have lasted long in Starfleet. My garage door opener looks very like a traditional phaser,the little flattened box, with no built in indicator as to which is the business end. I would therefore, at some point in my brief and ignominious career, have vanished in an orange matte outline while attempting to zap something that was trying to eat/dissolve/absorb me. No doubt I would be wearing a red shirt.

We SF writers assume that the future will be, if not better managed, better designed. There might be holocaust, dystopia, or global McDonaldization, but at least all the doors which are meant to be pushed will have a flat push plate rather than a pull bar, so you're not yanking on the door with your eyes right level with the little sign saying "push" because the cues contradict each other and the design cue takes precedence over the written one in that small portion of your brain not occupied with working out what kind of envoy mission Horth would send Erien on to get him into trouble. The future should be dramatically interesting - when bad things happen, they should happen for interesting reasons, out of conspiracy, malice, or grand incompetence, rather than lousy interfaces. Then again, the signs are not encouraging. Consider video recorders and mobile phones, both of which are a user-challenge. Both of which have interfaces which are completely unrevealing of function. Certainly mobile phones are still operating with a phone interface laid over functionality that has nothing to do with digit-dialling. That may be why the web has caught people's imagination: web interfaces can be custom designed (within the capricious constraints of browserdom and cross-platform hell) to actually reflect the underlying information structure.

It's a matter of life and death, design. Until anaesthesia equipment was redesigned, there were always a small number of deaths from mix-ups of the oxygen and the nitrous oxide - tubes plugged into the wrong socket. No matter how many times people were reminded, trained, exhorted to vigilance or punished, the error continued to happen. Then the machines were redesigned so that it was not physically possible to hook up the wrong connections, and eliminated deaths from that cause. I've just finished a freelance project on errors concerning medicines administration, and the consensus of people in the field is that the safest possible system is one that is designed on the assumption that humans will make mistakes, so that there are built-in safeguards against human failure, but also one that allows recovery from mistakes, which involves allowing human experts to use their expertise. Overconstraining people may improve safety, but it will not improve safety as much as allowing initiative in recovering from error. It's a delicate balance. The British Medical Journal dedicated a whole issue to Reducing error, improving safety.

So with regard to the disintegrating-Alison problem, the first and most robust solution would be the pistol-phaser: design it so it cannot be pointed at the user. A more sophisticated solution would be design so it detects that it is pointed at the same warm body that is holding the trigger and will not fire. Although in the time taken for that feedback to occur, and the realization to sink in that you need to point the other end at whatever is trying to eat you you already might have got et. And then that depends on the software working 100% of the time. So I'd tend to prefer the pistol-phaser. But make it too cumbersome and I'd leave it at home, or put it in my backpack where it would get buried under notebooks, and while I wouldn't get disintegrated, I'd still get et.

I'm sure the Reetions are superb at designing for safety and interface transparency - Reetion technology that is supposed to operable by children will be operable by children (that said, in the RW isn't it adults who have more trouble with poorly designed interfaces. Kids have no inhibitions: they just push buttons until it works - after all, if they break it they get into trouble but they don't have to pay for it). I'm equally sure the Gelacks are lousy at designing for safety and transparency; in fact the Vrellish would pride themselves in designing interfaces that baffle Demish and vice-versa. The Monatese, who with their nervecloth industry and scholarship understand IT, but are protectionist as all get out, would be the worst of all. They'd know better. Cultural assumptions about what is obvious will hold sway in both cultures; I wonder if Reetion design is as obvious to the Gelacks as the Reetions think it is, or whether using household devices is a challenge. I'd better stop now, or I'll start ruminating about bathroom fixtures, and how one builds in the cues as to the use thereof.


Friday, January 25, 2002
 
The other Rule #1
The one that said "never volunteer".

I broke it again. That's why, on a Friday night, I have outlasted the managers, the cleaning staff and the deadlined CRF group finishing something off that in my early innocence I volunteered for. I now know one crucial question to ask before I get involved in something that's this far behind schedule. "Is the data clean?"

I won't say I'll never volunteer; I probably will, if I haven't learned in all these years. But at least I'll know what awaits me.


 
The only thing worse than having things in SAS Monospace 6 point
Is not having things in SAS Monospace 6 point. My computer was replaced by IT. I'd forgotten I'd had SAS Monospace installed. So now all the listings that were in teeny SAS Monospace 6 point are in even teenier, spindly and malformed Courier 6 point, and since the formatting is entirely by spaces and carriage returns, the pagination is all out of whack, so page 2 starts at the bottom of page 1, page 3 2/3 way down page 2 etc etc, and since I don't have time to twiddle my thumbs waiting for my request to come to the top of IT's queue, I'm goggling at printouts of columns and columns of medications, numbers, and cryptic and mysterious flags meaning that study and other medications were stopped, adjusted or not touched that are even more minute and barely-readable than the ones I was grouching about before.

The Gods are making a point, they are.


Thursday, January 24, 2002
 
Rule #1
Twenty-five-odd years of working with technology and I still forget Is it plugged in?

The modem wasn't. No wonder nothing happened.

Now, a really smart system would tell me. But then a smart piece of greyware wouldn't need to be told.


 
Glossary and Titles
Been trying to FAX, and strange things are happening. I don't know where Word thinks it's sending it, or how, but if I blink I miss it, even the dialling, so it must be some virtual destination by some imaginary means. So I trust you're going to check this thing tonight, Lynda, and therefore find out that I have uploaded my tinkering with the glossary and the chapter titles. Enjoy your binge. I plan to go to bed and listen to the rain bubbling on the roof.


Wednesday, January 23, 2002
 
Cuts
I think my attack on Chapters 11 thru 13 (I haven't meddled with the first part, before rewriting the first scene of Chapter 1) was as much to try and find my way to the core of the conflict as to get the words down. It just didn't have the oomph that the first part of the book does and even if it isn't as raw-action-driven as the first half, the intensity still has to be there. I think we've resolved the problem by making explicit the threat of the Visitor Probe, not just to Amel but to Sevolites as a people. I think we were resisting that (or at least I was), afraid it would seem crude, but all the work we have already done has built up all the psychology and the politics around it. Has to be clear that Reetion and Gelack ideas of "free will" are fundamentally different. Has also to be clear that although Reetion society allows trespass on what we consider as fundamental liberties and rights - ie to privacy - for the good of the greater number, the Reetion "soul" is still in moral danger because they are doing what they do for the wrong reasons. In a way it's a reflection of the question they had to wrestle with in 2C: do the ends justify the means? In this case the underlying question is: if the end is noble, are any means justified? Or if the objective is admirable, does it matter if the motives are craven? One of the themes in the book, if not the series as a whole would be "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Alongside: "The chief cause of problems is solutions."


 
Glossary
... over to you. I have whittled up to the note to that effect in the document. Promised myself I can write the rest of the evenings this week, and not edit, trim and tidy. Intend to have a great, sloppy, creative binge! PS both the .doc and .rtf files are the same vintage.



Go for it! Looking forward to the results. I'll check the FAX paper supply and lay in another roll if need be. Just one request: Not that I want to cramp your style, but try not to start more than one new novel, OK? :-) I already have Perry and Vrenn walking around in my head. Perry saying to Vrenn: "You're what?"



Tuesday, January 22, 2002
 
Blinded by Statistics
Once upon a time, big complicated stats programs put their output out on wide newsprint. (I used to write on it). Time went by and now they put their output out on laser printers, but having been developed for wide newsprint, they won't give up their many many columns, so here's the poor medical writer reading rows and rows of SIX POINT SAS MONOSPACE font. Bah!

Printers are EVIL.



Monday, January 21, 2002
 
2C
Lynda, I'd forgotten until last night that you'd put some of Second Content in the depot. Downloaded it and was snickering over my Alpen in the am as Mon and Ranar discussed their cultural differences over their breakfast. Ranar puts one in mind of the vulcanologist peering into the crater at the rising lava and murmuring, "Oh, that's interesting." And Mon saying "Young, aren't you" - while Ranar would be fully justified in thinking, maybe I am only 21, but you're the one who lifted the table to show off!


Sunday, January 20, 2002
 
Arena01B
As uploaded, now incorporates the first scene I faxed. Some shuffling around early on, with taking out things previously explained while Perry chewed her nails. I'm sure some details are blurry, but I think we're getting closer. Only problem - 9284 words, expanded from 7010, and that was even with me going through with a paring knife (hey, I'm not purely hack and slash - have some smaller sharp instruments). But I'll be maurading with the machete again. But before you lock all our joint files (never alarm a sysop!) maybe we should ask for an Editorial Ruling: what is our absolute, inviolate, never-to-be-breached word limit?


It's not so much cutting, period, as cutting the earlier material before we have the whole first draft done. It's the sense of not knowing what's getting axed because I've been away from it too long. I'm sure I've made you feel the same way, sometimes, when I've been going gang busters and you were tied up in other things. Maybe it's partly that I'd already done a pass through the first 11 chapters and was looking foward not back, at least not yet. So yes, a ball park from Cheyenne would be good, but I'd rather get the whole thing done--especially since we are so close--and then look at it as a whole cloth. Your last fax, for example, indicates a stronger crux towards the end which has emerged from your perusal of my last draft of SC. (I liked it by the way.) How can we be confident about cuts, earlier, when we don't know exactly what they are or aren't supporting downstream? And that goes for the sub plots and character evolution as well. Then there's all the "have we established this" business. When we're pretty sure of the gist we might be able to merge and dispense with things but only when we know what is depending on what and whether it is dealt with elsewhere. So I'm not saying we shouldn't cut, but only that it would be more comfortable working on the least complete sections rather than the most complete (if chubby) ones. IMHO. (lynda)



Having had a wrestle with Perry's earthy tongue, next con I go to, I'm going to propose a panel on "appropriate profanity" - ie appropriate to imagined cultures. I shall research curses. Being a scientist by nature, I shall seek a classification for them. And I shall quote this wonderful passage from H. Beam Piper's Police Operation (his hero has just had to do an ouchsome first-aid job on himself after a run-in with an alien beastie): "He grunted out a string of English oaths and capped them with an obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the Fourth Level inhabitants of his island home of Nerros, to the south, and a thundering curse in the name of Mogga, Fire God of Dool, in a Third-Level tongue. He mentioned Fasif, Great God of Khift, in a manner which would have gotten him an acid-bath if the Khiftan priests had heard him. He alluded to the baroque amatory practices of the Third-Level Illaya people and soothed himself, in the classical Dar-Halma tongue, with one of those rambling genetic insults favoured in the Indo-Turanian Sector of the Fourth Level ... "

Definitely not "Great Balls of Fire" - which should be the title of said panel. I think Rebecca should be able to come up with some curses in the same pan-cultural style.



I like that. I did some thinking about it, as you know, over the "venting" and "gap-damned" terms in TP. I think you should include a biopsych look at nature of swearing. We seem to store cuss words differently. Specific mental disorders fetch them out. If it is that deep seated, it is no wonder that alien cussing seems funny. And that old stand bys like the sh-- and f--- words are so enduring in the language. I think it breaks down into bodily functions (elimination and sex usually) and religious stuff of some description, either profanity or pleas for help.


 
Perry Waiting
Read your fax. Delighted!


 
eliminating

I do believe cutting can be a Good Thing, honest. But I am getting worried. Some non-essential-to-plot moments are what makes the read rewarding. But maybe that's the idea. Frighten me into applying myself again. :-) In my defense, I plea I have been working on TP tidy ups and not entirely lost to late night doodling in Freehand and Photoshop. Last burble: Click here to download "Arbiter Over Rire" Wallpaper



Friday, January 18, 2002
 
The State of Things II

17 Poetic Allusions (Drasous) 3 536 Draft 1, Complete
18 Through the Guard (Erien) 10 583 Incomplete
19 (Bley) ? Incomplete
20 Honour's Fulcrum (Erien) 13 261 Draft 1, Complete
21 (Amel) ? Incomplete
22 Letters from Home (Erien) 1 784 Incomplete
22(Ranar) ?Incomplete


And I even lost a couple of thousand words along the way. I've uploaded the files Arena17C.doc and Arena20B.doc to the usual place.


 
Uh oh!

And that's what happens when you stuff up your HTML. I've managed to inactivate the edit link so I can't fix the last entry. From my first efforts in FORTRAN77 to my latest in CSS, those mismatched parentheses get me every time ... Let's try this again ...

No ... it's not mismatched parentheses. It's my other bad habit: unclosed quotes. The table above should have been below, but I failed to close the quotes on one of my colour specifications.

I wonder if it could be fixed by editing the file produced.


 
Friday night's tinkering

Produced a tidied up Chapter 17 and a spliced together Chapter 20 and 22, as Lynda and I discussed on the phone. The timebomb we'd set ticking in Chapter 17 had been ticking quite long enough by Chapter 20. And we couldn't get clear what we wanted to do in 21. Could we do without that chapter; yes. Therefore it went. Expression of one of the laws of novel construction: eliminate.



Wednesday, January 16, 2002
 
A small triumph
I have finally got Netscape Messenger filing messages in folders.
This means I could go to my other address, the one I use publically and for listsrvs, and download the mail without my mailbox exploding and things being buried I need to deal with. 228 messages, about 2 weeks accumulation. Eventually I will either go through it, or just toss it wholesale. Then I will resent the time and hassle and unsubscribe. Then I will decided I'm missing useful information and resubscribe.
You might call me ambivalent about push technology.


 
The State of Things
I have been counting words and chapters again, and this (Blogger willing) is a snapshot of where we're at in FAR ARENA ...

Erien and Amel have to contend with the consequences of Amel having proven that the unthinkable, ultimate crime against the compucommunist state of Rire is not in fact impossible. The Gelacks want to execute Amel for treason. But what Rire has in mind is even worse ...

17 Poetic Allusions (Drasous) 3 536 Draft 1, Complete
18 Through the Guard (Erien) 10 583 Incomplete
19 (Bley) ? Incomplete
20 Honour's Fulcrum (Erien) 13 261
21 (Amel) ? Incomplete
22 Letters from Home (Erien) 1 784 Incomplete

1

One Pureblood too Many (Perry) 7 010 Draft 1 complete
2 My Brother, My Burden (Erien) 4 413 Draft 1 complete
3 All for Love (And the Revolution) (Sylvie) 5 002 Draft 1 complete
4 First Engagement (Erien) 12 331 Draft 1 complete
5 Revolution Will Not Compute (Hanson) 9 370 Draft 1 complete
6 Bloodied Space (Erien) 7 536 Draft 1 complete
7 With Friends Like These (Ann) 8 451 Draft 1 complete
8 On a Sword's Edge (Erien) 6 241 Draft 1 complete
9 Weighing Souls (Bryllit) 6 686 Draft 1 complete
10 Unlooked-for Companions (Erien) 16 670 (argh!) Draft 1 complete
11 People in Glass Houses (Lurol) 8 643 Revised - AS
12 Cultural Misunderstandings (Erien) 8 610 Revised - AS
13 Sexual Disorientation (Evert) 6 164 Revised - AS
14 Psychological Campaigns (Erien) 14 534 Draft 1, slightly incomplete
15 Whatever Happened to the Boy Next Door? (Alka) 11 006 Draft 1 complete
16 Conversations in the Night (Erien) 6 187 Draft 1 complete
17 Poetic Allusions (Drasous) 3 172 Incomplete
18 Through the Guard (Erien) 10 583 Incomplete
19 (Bley) ? Incomplete
20 (Erien) 3 799 Incomplete
21 (TBA!) ? Unwritten
22 (Erien) 11 157 Draft 1 complete
23 (Amel) ? Incomplete
24 Letters from Home (Erien) 1 784 Incomplete



Tuesday, January 15, 2002
 
Psych Faculty and me
Had a really enjoyable talk today with Kyle Matsuba, a member of UNBC's psychology faculty with an interest in ethics: how we develop them, measuring attitudes, and that kind of thing. We met to explore what if anything I could do to contribute to his new, secondary interest bearing on internet use but spent at least as much time talking about the ethical enactment of modern dilemnas in Sci Fi, children's attraction to Harry Potter, and even the Okal Rel Universe. It's always such a treat when intelligent, thoughtful people show an interest in my heretofore closet existance and resulting ideas. I feel in danger of taking more psychology courses. Maybe a methods course in September. If that's workable, given work, family and writing, I may be at risk. At least I've decided not to take anything else this term. Getting Far Arena done is the priority, and Second Contact too if humanly possible. Feel mildly guilty about playing tonight instead of finishing up the editing for Edge, but can't seem to do anything but creative things in the evening after about 10 p.m. I write drafts, but can't do final proofing; play with photoshop, but can't get myself to to work work; play not-so-creative-games like spider solitaire, Blog, or just read. Otherwise I have trouble getting to sleep.

Recreational Reading

I have a book called The Chess Garden that I got in the $2.99 bin at Book and Company that is a delight. Not sure I am entirely on side with the message regarding the dangers of rationalism but the medium is touching, whimsical and clever. And the cautionary message about reductionist thinking--if that's what it is--doesn't come across too heavy handedly or unqualified to spoil the charm of it. You might enjoy it for the sake of it being based on a series of letters. Also does a an ingenious blending of time, place, fantasy and reality.



 
...Both my heros and villains are out to order the universe better.
Which is why Erien deserves the Vrellish. :-) Just to prevent that being too easy. Although I think during the course of the series, and his own development, he does come to appreciate that the Vrellish lifestyle has its own order to it and its failure to jive with his (originally) Reeion-influenced sense of order shouldn't condemn it even with him. Doubtless helps he gets a serious load of order-for-the-sake-of-order from the Demish during the process. :-)

TP Fixes

Couldn't face 'em again tonight and owed the kids some computing time with mummy. Angie is making bookmarks, scanned out of library book using Photoshop, and Tegan wanted me to explore an animal encyclopedia we got for Xmas with her. I will make the last push and amalgamate your input tomorrow night after work.



braid background


Sort of bumbled into doing a braid doodle after Angie went to bed and put it up on the ORU as the new background for the Gelack clothing article. BTW I noticed a reference, in that article, to Dem'Vrel ship and moon device. I have a feeling we changed that to ship and sun by the time it got into Throne Price, didn't we. Must check that sometime. Easier to change the web site than the book, that's for sure. :-) Works better as a background in full version with 70 percent opacity than as a clip, below, unfortunately.




Monday, January 14, 2002
 
"Making Characters Come Alive"

... was the title of one of the panels I did in Seattle. Here's the list I came up with:


  • Desire - they have to want something and be prepared to go after it. To my mind essential for the central character or "engine" of a story. An inactive central character is a terrible burden for a story. I don't say it can't be done, but it's "advanced writing".
  • A certain amount of unreasonableness. Bloodymindedness, I call it. The disinclination to listen to sensible arguments.
  • Faith. I realised, writing the list, that my characters have some fundamental faith in something, whether deity or equation. They believe the universe is ordered. This probably betrays my Presbyterian origins. The world is ordered. But it could be ordered better. Both my heros and villains are out to order the universe better.
  • Blindspots: imperfect knowledge of themselves or estimation of others. Characters who are decieved by others aren't nearly as interesting as those who at risk of decieving themselves.
  • Appetites. Kind of goes with desires, but not entirely. The example I use was the wonderful bit of characterization of the political officer in Babylon 5, the voracious little blonde who turned up to subvert and seduce John Sheridan. Usually when one has a slim and wicked woman on a TV show, if she eats at all, she sips a drink and nibbles on a salad. But this one noshed! I think she had three meals, and at one point was tucking into what looked like pasta! (Or maybe it was gagh!) That was characterization!
  • An area of mastery. I like writing about characters who are good at something.
  • Weird hobbies. They have to have some area of interest that is completely irrelevant to the story. It may never make it into the novel - they may be running too fast to indulge in it - but I know it's there.
  • A distinctive way of expressing themselves. Ideally, I'd like any sustained bit of dialogue to be immediately identifiable as being theirs.



 
'T'worked
Look left, it says on London streets.


 
Messing around
When I should be eating breakfast and getting ready for work. Trying to put TP picture in left hand margin.


Sunday, January 13, 2002
 
TP Edits
Lynda, I have just e-mailed you the file of edits, with my opinions (where I have opinions) marked in red. I am amused by the idea that Branstatt's swearing in English vernacular is the mark of the Monatese intellectual influence. It also occurs when he wants to express himself aloud in private - or at least as a loyal retainer he wishes to communicate his opinion only to his fellow Monatese and not the world in general. And there is one of Ditatt's speeches where I do think he would say "between me and him" because Ditatt is Royalblood through and through and is the center of his own little universe and there is no way he would put D'Lekker Dem'Vrel ahead of him, even in a sentence! Whereas Erien would get the grammar correct. Characterization through dialogue: this came up in a panel today.


 
Weekend, what weekend?
Back from Seattle, Rustycon. Memos to self: (1) in future take my own name badge, so even if the type on the badges is 14 point, I will be identifiable (2) request a printout of my schedule beforehand so that I can protest 4-panel stretches over lunch in advance of arrival. Sustainance today has consisted of: cinnamon roll and OJ at Barnes and Noble; 2 chocolate chip cookies waiting for the bus at 2 pm; 6 pieces of sushi in Seattle airport at 3:30 pm; one chocolate bar in Vancouver airport at 5:30 pm; 1 glass of rice milk at 9 pm. This was my own fault, for finding airport food and grocery shopping so unappealing. Had the usual mixture of 'why am I DOING this' and 'when's the next one'; found myself decidedly under-dressed for the occasion - though useful when passing for mundane in the hotel restuarant; am beginning to wonder if having Dr. on one's credit card (change having finally stuck with the bank) results in getting better rooms. I don't think I am growing deafer, or more tolerant. Wondered if airport employees are forbidden by contract from discussing public transit - all enquiries as to how to reach hotel led to taxis. Legwork eventually led to bus, with net saving $100+. Memo to self: advance-research public transit. Pretty good panels, although the worldbuilding one concluded in a decidedly licentous vein. But there were some nifty ideas floated, beforehand. And one of my fellow panellists had actually read BLUEHEART. I am still rather grovellingly grateful if someone I do not know has read one of my books!


Saturday, January 12, 2002
 
Observation in Admin Bldg of UNBC on a Saturday
There is a chair
on the top of the reception desk
in the human resources office,
with a note pinned to the back
saying, "Eric,
No one in on Sunday."
Written in pen, with yellow highlighting.

How marvelous.


Friday, January 11, 2002

Thursday, January 10, 2002
 
Grace Notes
One thing that Bernard MacLaverty got right about the creative life - which oddly enough other novels about artists by artists haven't, is the never-not-working-ness of art (also true about science). The constant engagement in the discipline, whether at the forefront of one's awareness and absorbing all one's attention, or while thinking of something entirely different, until some stimulus brings it to the fore. His composer protagonist is constantly becoming aware aware of rhythm, sound, silence and breathing, the elements of her music. Things bring back to her the words of her teachers. Far too many novels about artists miss that sense of the constant presence of the work; it gets tidied away into the office or the studio and out of the novel's consciousness, and the novel is completely bound up with - usually - relationships (sometimes politics), and the works of art are portrayed as arising from a completely autobiographical or self-expressive impulse, with no sense of the constant musing, drafting, sketching and working out required, or, for that matter, the influences. But dearie me, I'd like to read a novel about a modern creative woman that does not feature unplanned motherhood/spousal abuse/depression, any or all of the above. Misery and muddle seem to be obligatory to demonstrate sensitivity.


 
Stakes and Garlic
From GRACE NOTES - an elderly composer speaking to a young one, who is visiting him. She has just played one of her compositions. He says very little, then he asks to hear something she is working on. "Let me hear work in progress. If I hear an opus you think is finished and I say do this and do that - you are unhappy. But if an opus is under construction, if you have problem with it and I say do this and do that - you are happy."

Which pretty much explains our reaction to another round of edits on TP, prior to its formal print-run. I went through this stage with LEGACIES - struggling with BLUEHEART, which was sinking like a stone canoe, and every time I laid LEGACIES to rest, it would arise rise again. At least once it went between covers, that was the end of it; it was finished, Thovalt's magical shirt, Lian's duplicate actions and small medical boner immortalized. But TP, it seems, is not yet finished. More remains to be explained. And so I have sent a bunch of edited-edits back to Lynda, who has borne the brunt of this one with me being (a) in the UK, (b) sick and (c) not cc'd in.



Sent them to me by e-mail, at my work address, I hope. I have booked off tomorrow to marathon the wrap on the edits. Here's hoping all will fit together and be back in EDGE's court by Monday. Looks like the editor accepted my spirited defense of Gelack invective. I was worried for a bit there, that "vent" and "gap damn you" were going to be stumbling blocks. Kept thinking about Rebecca's "pocketing" and "may his bones give forth flowers". I suspect most cuss words new minted for a SF/F world view don't feel adequate to us at first. Mental disorders that cause swear words to spew suggest they are stored in a very particular and deeply rooted way in our brains as they are shaped by our cultural experience. Kept wondering whether I couldn't have come up with something more weighty to the English ear than "vent" or "gap"--or even worse, "blank" as a Reetion expletive. (I did give up "blank" more or less, I think, after someone assumed it meant "censored" and was cutsy, whereas an arbiter--or person--blanking out is the Reetion equivalent of the Gelack horror of being Lost or suffering a Long Night due to gap.) I just don't know. And I wasn't looking forward to trying to wrestle with it, and the masses of rethinking, searching and replacing ... shudder. Just don't want to think about it. On the other hand, I am a lot happier with the quality of the text from the point of view of punctuation, consistency and clarity. Can't believe I never knew before this how to do an em dash properly. :-)





 
Unrequited pessimism
I was convinced today was going to be a bad day for the authorial ego.

I had a teleconference to discuss a "shell" report. "Shells" are when one puts together the report sans data - something I wish I'd known could be done when my PhD committee were after me for lack of data! First time I'd done this, and I'd been in a meeting where the client had dismembered the statistician's document describing the planned stats analysis. So I didn't know what to expect. And then there was the package waiting for me at the post office. Time was when a package was a NICE thing to have waiting. Except there's this novel, which has been at the publisher 8 months, and just before Christmas I wrote a letter saying um, remember me.

Not so bad, after all. No dismemberment, just nip, tuck and some moving around of parts, at least until the first draft of the full report (with data) goes in. And the package was indeed a novel, but NOT MINE. A review copy of VENTUS, which had already passed the Sinclair First Page test in Monroe's bookstore and was going to be acquired soon - when my current attack of fiscal responsibility (as in "I shouldn't buy any more books") wore off. The Sinclair First Page test is (1) do I see a picture (2) is it in colour (3) is the language distinctive? It's not infallible - SHARDS OF HONOR failed it back in 1990 or thereabouts. But it generates more false negatives than false positives, ie, I'm more likely to reject a book I might later read and enjoy than pick up a book I do not enjoy.


I have seen the enemy and she is myself! Would your first three published novels have passed The Sinclair First Page test? Ah me, I know it is all true. But now and then one does feel a little twitchy about how slender the window for catching the attention--even of devoted bibliophiles--really is.





OK Blogger, eat this one.


 
Oops.
Blogger just ate my post!


Sunday, January 06, 2002
 
Impact of Sci Fi
I've always felt Sci Fi has an impact in the best, albeit slowest, of ways. Not by fixing anything immediately but by enriching those who participate in it. First, it stimulates the imagination. The older I get, the more I realize many people just can't imagine the world any way except the way it is known to them on a daily basis. I do believe a great deal of our problems, as a species trying to "grow up" a bit, stems from that failing. Second, Sci Fi of the sort you cite in your previous post, is valuable exactly because it doesn't raise the red flags of recognition instantly. It can separate out the trappings from the features of any problem. Lastly I think it has a "zip zowie" value that isn't entirely despicable. I think people need to exercise their baser selves and project various greeds and thrills onto characters just to get a good look at them and get them out of their systems. Not that I am in favor of unfettered violence and mayhem being portrayed in a positive way. Just that I think we have to own it. But that strays from the point of your commentary. I'll close by confessing I haven't read The Years of Rice and Salt but it sounds like it is very much worth it.


 
Kim Stanley Robinson, heretic
I am not sure whether I want one of my favourite writers to get into trouble. But in a way it would be wonderful if someone actually noticed what he'd done in The Years of Rice and Salt - which I have read a Locus-ful of glowing reviews of. In an era in which the Western World is proclaiming itself as the Defender of Freedom, God Civilization and All Good Things, here's a man who has written a novel that says to Western Civilization "you are quite irrelevant". With the population in Europe obliterated by the Black Death, his world is shaped by China and the Arab nations, by Buddhism and Islam, and is as accomplished, as conflicted, as shot through with light and darkness, as our own. But completely different. I have the same reaction, reading the descriptions of the book, that Marie had to Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy - do "they" possibly know what's being said here. Or is SF/F entirely toothless, and living within its own little bubble.


Saturday, January 05, 2002
 
Picture Sent to NORWESCON
Getting to the place where I can get Photoshop to do things for me, eventually, but never quite sure why. Wonder if that is progress. Bit strange as a program inclusion picture I suppose. We'll see if they take it. E-mailed a copy of the bio blurb I submitted to you, so you can veto, praise or shrug at. I shouldn't do these these things when I'm tired and in escapist mode. I get fanciful.



Friday, January 04, 2002
 
Another Freehand Experiment


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