Tuesday, July 30, 2002
 
Launch Saturday Night
The Throne Price launch is on the schedule for Saturday night, Aug 10, in Calgary. Spotted the peculiarity re: our two title. :-) Con-version schedule can be found at http://www.con-version.org/Schedule7.htm


 
Reconstruction issue on "Science Fiction & Everyday Life
> Everyday life in the modern world has become increasingly science
fictional:
> No longer are cloning, cyberspace, nanomachines, and prostheses simply the
> stuff of imagination. Rather, they have become increasingly integrated
into
> the daily life of the subject under late capitalism. To further
understand
> this phenomenon, we invite submissions for the next themed issue of
> Reconstruction, "Science Fiction & Everyday Life."
>
> Reconstruction is a culture studies journal
> dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and
> their audience, granting them all the opportunity and ability to share
> thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in
> contemporary interdisciplinary studies.
>
> "Science Fiction & Everyday Life" will be published July 21, 2003.
> Submissions should be received no later than May 19, 2003 for
consideration.
>
> Submissions are encouraged from a variety of perspectives, including, but
> not limited to: geography, cultural studies, folklore, architecture,
> history, sociology, psychology, communications, music, political science,
> semiotics, theology, art history, queer theory, literature, criminology,
> urban planning, gender studies, etc. Both theoretical and empirical
> approaches are welcomed.
>
> In matters of citation, it is assumed that the proper MLA format will be
> followed. Other citation formats are acceptable in respect to the
> disciplinary concerns of the author.
>
> All submissions and submission queries should be written care of
> submissions@reconstruction.ws.
>
> Large files, such as Flash movies or essays with many large pictures,
should
> be sent on a zip disk or CD-R to:
>
> Submissions
> Reconstruction
> 104 East Hall
> Bowling Green State University
> Bowling Green, OH 43402
>
> Please visit us at
>
> Davin Heckman & Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Editors
> http://www.reconstruction.ws



 
Candlestick set in a low place...
A quote from Margaret Fuller that deserves a story:
"The candlestick set in a low place has given light as faithfully, where it was needed, as that upon the hill."

- from "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" 1844


 
Arena03 done, my pass
Haven't got to the AS-marked chapters but re: non-ORU-isms, not sure we want to be too strict about that. Every word in the English language is tied, originally, to specific circumstances in the history of the language. Blatant ones, fine. Or ones of recent origin which still evoke same. But how many readers or modern speakers of English think of world war one battlefields when someone is called a 'basket-case'? And denuding our usage of foreign phrases like faux pas will either impoverish our expressiveness or invite the use of yet more Gelack, which readers have limited tolerance for. Not quibbling about the specific decisions--which I haven't reviewed--but wondering aloud about how rigorous we are going to get. Personally, if a term is part of the language I think it is fair game--unless, as mentioned above, it is new enough to strongly invoke specific, modern circumstances that would jar. I do agree that if there is some established or fairly obvious Gelack equivalent we should use that. Instead of 'basket-case' for example, Gelacks would tend to draw on post-flight or dueling analogies in ways that Reetions wouldn't except (in the case of the post-flight variety) in spacer sub-culture.

Concur re: doing an edit for the explicit purpose of reading aloud. That's useful.

Concerned about your eye problems (as related on the phone). That's brutal. Allergies perhaps? Always my first 'culprit' on the list of suspects. :-)


Monday, July 29, 2002
 
Chapter 2 reviewed
Fixed a continuity glitch: do you realise Erien stepped out of the elevator twice? He's too compulsive for us to do that to him! He'd never recover from the embarrassment. Cut a couple more sentences, and realised we probably should excise faux pas as a non-ORU-ism; likewise basket-case. My eyes are too much of a distraction for me to come up with some suitable phrasing. If I read this at ConVersion, I'm going to do a light edit and remove some of the details so as to avoid spoilers for people who have not read TP - aside from the rather big spoiler, I suppose, that they neither come to a bad end nor get all their problems neatly solved.


Sunday, July 28, 2002
 
reference
As usual I haven't explored this link beyond perusal but looks intriguing. Cites itself as a "Resources for Writers" (probably mostly fantasy writers).
http://hobgoblin.net/resources/createlink3.asp


Saturday, July 27, 2002
 
Arena02jul27-LJW.rtf
...is now uploaded. Presume you will rename Arena01jul23-LJW.rtf to Arena01mmmdd-AS.rtf when you've finished your pass through it? (Where mmmdd is the month and day part, natch.)

Confused ...
I need to understand this file name convention thing much better! Do the initials mean "I have had my go", or "over to you"? I thought they mean "over to you". So Arena01jul23-LJW.rtf is intended to be an "over to you." - ALISON


Protocol
I hope I haven't been "changing the rules" on us but can't swear I haven't. My instinct is to assume the initials mean "she who last edited". Either will do, of course, but as you imply we must agree on it. :-) Here's my take on it.

  • Only ONE copy in working directory at any time. This copy is always the most recent copy.

  • Files with initials were last submitted by that person on the date indicated.

  • Before working on a file, copy it into previous directory

  • When completed, rename to reflect new date and your initials. Upload to working directory. Delete copy with older date and other author's initials (there should be a copy in previous if needed.)

  • If you comb through a file with the other author's initials on it, and don't make a single change, rename it with new date and NO initials.


I am to blame for being sloppy and uploading files without initials a few times, then just notifying you on the blog that your input was wanted. And perhaps this is all too elaborate? My thinking was "while it has an initial on it, it is a tacit declaration that the file is the-chapter-according-to-author-N, then when neither of us wants to tinker any more, the file is just the file. I need the dates to change to keep track of what's new and what isn't. I just find it easiest if the date goes right into the name.

I promise to be good and abide by my own protocol in the future if you buy in. Or to abide by your alternative if you prefer.

Here's an example of how I am thinking it would work.


  1. Arena01.rtf (original starting point from first draft)

  2. Arena01jul23-LJW.rtf (Lynda's pass through it, completed jul23 and uploaded for Alison's inspection.)

  3. Arena01jul27-AS.rtf (Alison's pass through, adding new changes, removing some of Lynda's, etc.)

  4. Arena01aug02-LJW.rtf (Lynda's next pass with slight changes driven by style sheet, etc.)

  5. Arena01aug06.rtf (Completed 2nd draft with date left there to distinquish it from original first draft, peg progress and clue us in as to which files in previous to resort to if editor re-writes call for restoring some material or using alternative we already have in previous.)



- LYNDA


 
Brianna
Also met a bright young writer yesterday, who is a friend of Jennifer's. Haven't seen her for a couple years, I guess. She is home schooled. We know the family a little. Neat people. When her mother came to pick her up, she mentioned Brianna is writing a novel with a pen-pal. Guess how? Alternating chapter, communicating by e-mail, with long phone calls some weekends. :-) Sound familiar?


 
Re: Fencing Again
The pain is worth it. (Well, your pain is worth it for me, to be honest here. :-) Spoke with Joe T. last night, an acqauintance in PG who works with David on and off on the computer front. Joe does point of sales systems, assembles and sells computers. Very good with hardware in particular and close to the hardware apps like POS. He became home to one of our pre-pub copies of Throne Price months ago. [I think I was up there visiting when you dropped it off ... I remember an excursion to a computer store to drop a book off to someone who was not there, in the bleak midwinter ... ALISON] I had not expected him to like it. Maybe I'm a little too "I know this isn't everyone's taste" about the book these days. But he seriously DID like it. He called last night and we talked about it for a half an hour. He was particularly impressed with the fight scenes which is to your credit. He did not like Amel, although found him a good vehicle for moving the plot and thinks he has potential to straighten out and stop being a door mat. :-) He did like Erien. Joe is a "guy's guy" who has done "a lot of sports" in his own words, so given responses to date I'd have put him down for not liking Amel. He surprised me with the insight that "Maybe it's because a guy doesn't like to think of a guy" getting into messes like that. Being a victim. He found it a little hard slogging to start but worth the effort, which is optimum reaction to date, barring a few of the initiated. And he's willing to write us a review for Amazon when that's meaningful! I have urged the usual T-Shirt upon him as a consequence and resolved to "beta test" scenes of violence in that quarter. The best thing he said was that he wished the book had been longer. Either that or guestimating that Throne Price fell within his current "top twenty" books of all time. Definitely a morale booster. But with enough thoughtful criticism to make it believable. One thing that surprised me, which I'll have to think about a bit more, is that he felt D'Therd "changed" towards the end. That to start he was a straight up "I'm taking over this hill" type, playing by the rules, but that he became more akin to Ev'rel and D'Lekker in the unsavory sense by the end. Would that be a straight function of his behavior as portrayed in the text? Or is it a product of reader-identification. That is, does D'Therd become unsavory by assocation once the reader's mind is firmly made up about which side is right, or are their D'Therd-specific reasons for it? Thanks to Kyle M.'s ideas about moral attitudes being subject to study, post reading (a new take on "novel study" ?) I am also day-dreaming of a survey instrument to identify like-dislike response to main characters (say, Amel, Erien, Ev'rel?) interleaved with tools to peg "why".

Also enc


Thursday, July 25, 2002
 
2 or 1, 1 or 2
Reading your edits so far on Chapter 2, I wondered if 2 mightn't be a better one to read at the ConVersion launch, because for the people who have read TP (albeit who may not be as numerous as in PG!), it's dealing with two familiar people, and it does set up the conflicts in Far Arena.

What'ja'think?

Yep. Sounds good.


Wednesday, July 24, 2002
 
Arena02Jul24.rtf
Trimmed 400 words. Not through it by any means. Uploaded.


Tuesday, July 23, 2002
 
Lumps, bumps and bruises
I picked up a foil with serious intent for the first time in 13 years yesterday. I'm almost incapable of moving my right leg - getting out of bed tomorrow is going to be interesting - and I have about 8 different bruises on my right thigh, but I haven't entirely forgotten all my old tricks. And enjoyed myself immensely - downright hyper, in fact. Totally confused by the new way of hooking up the scoring equipment, so that the lights go on beside the fencer who scored the touche rather than the one who received - seems that was changed for the Olympics, because the non-fencing audience was confused. And was told that my style was "very classical". Good grief, it's only been 13 years, not 200!

Chuckle
Lynda


 
Evening's work
Undoing some of yours! I took what should be my final pre editorial input pass through Chapter 1 - though I do plan to try it on my fellow Victoria writers next month (Actually, it occurs to me I may be trying it on the ConVersion audience before then!). I couldn't swallow that first chunk of explanation about relationships, and got ornery and decided the reader could survive waiting a couple of pages for the definition of mekan'stan. I also didn't think that Perry would refer to Ayrium - her fellow leader - as "headstrong" in that particular situation. They're both at work in a crisis. I managed to trim the description of Amel's room and I noticed a spot where the same information seemed to be given twice, in slightly different ways, so that was another excision. Thanks for all the places you unstarched the prose by a simple rearrangement of a few words. The effect is quite noticable.

Welcome back
Lynda.


 
Merman's Children / Poul Anderson
Finished The Merman's Children by Poul Anderson, which I picked up at White Dwarf on holidays. Good read. Painful portrayal of the doom of faerie with the spread of Christendom. Wondered what Marie would make of it. I found the end satisfying, which I do appreciate. Published in 1979.

PS I'll be in Vancouver again tomorrow night. Work. Probably "away from the forge".

PPS Wonderful and unexpected connection with our new dean of graduate studies today! Came to talk shop and ranged all over from Plato to Fractals. No sooner does one settle into complacent cynicism than one discovers proof that some, real intellectuals do wind up in post-secondary careers. :-) Long ago bored of the average faculty huddle over coffee that fixates on bashing, budgets or comparing restaurants and such. But this is all to the good. Cynicism has never been motivating for me.


 
www.bookcrossing.com
E-mailed you also, Alison, but thought I should blog about this discovery. A web place where people report their encounters with books released into "the wild" to be picked up by fellow book lovers, unknown, and passed along in turn.

And did you see that there's a wild copy of Legacies out there?
We'll have to set a copy of TP free, once we get it - AS.


 
Arena01Jul23.rtf
... now up. Finished it off myself. Check it out and accept or reject revisions? Think I managed to bring the word count down a little! Older version now in previous. I'll start in on Arena02 tomorrow morning.


Monday, July 22, 2002
 
Back from Holidays
As promised last night on the phone, I have retrieved not one but two versions of Amel's recall of his last meeting with Di Mon. They are called DIMON.rtf (Ranar POV) and xmonarb.rtf (Amel POV, older, less fleshed out version), and reside in the pending directory for Far Arena. I also found and deposited there: needkill.rtf (Horth's infamous "Some people need killing, Erien" scene), talk.rtf, fixdreams.rtf (old lead up to Amel agreeing) and postswear.rtf. Came across bits in them that prompted me to stick them in the Far Arena raw material category. Not sure whether we've covered off, dropped, etc. or not in each case.

Read the Challenging Destiny interview, thanks. And appreciated your remark re: "edits, smedits". I suppose that's why The House of Em is happening. The itch to be doing something new. I've also very rarely had a plot structure fall in my lap the way House of Em has. Glad you are okay with my handling of Mira, thus far, in the first person. Our discussions about it on the phone have helped, too. I had just finished Dostoyesky's The Idiot before drafting the scene I last sent you a bit of, in which Mira meets Amel again for the first time :-). Same person but as "Amel" for the first time, that is. I never knew The Idiot existed until finding it in Renaissance Books in New Westminister, despite my fondness for Russian novelists and Dostoyesky in particular. Very spotty education, the self-directed sort. One of the things I found engaging about it was how the usual thing does not happen. That is, Dostoyesky sets up situations in a typical Romantic manner and then does something entirely different. Myshkin's love of the Natashia, for example. We are not party to the scene in which it happens, but we learn eventually that Myshkin believes she is mentally disturbed and does not love her but rather feels a crushing pity for her. One that fulfills the foreshadowing of tragic destiny by destroying him, but does not do so through any typical mechanism of sustained misunderstanding or separation. I've always believed people have enough real, thorny issues to divide them and frustrate love without reducing all to a simple, single trigger. Hence, in the "meeting" scene with Amel and Mira, they get the Big Questions out of the way immediately (You had suggested she would start with "I didn't know you were conscience bonded", which pointed in the right direction). The source of conflict is not any misunderstanding nor false impressions of the past. It is rooted in Mira's cynical, adult outlook on life which is a product of how she survived past events. The fact that Amel's betrayal wasn't voluntary cannot undo its consequences. His unchanged love, although welcome and satisfying in some senses, threatens her hard earned peace and later her place with yet another patron. In this case, Ev'rel. The second half has to be from Mira's point of view, because it is her conflict which is the more interesting one. She tries not to see, or to care, about Amel making sacrifices for her, and when she cannot be indifferent is angry with him for his lack of sensible self-interest. I think it would also be interesting to have his seduction by Ev'rel (with regard to sympathetic feelings) mirror Mira's, but out of different motives. Mira will view her own motives as more mercenary. As things progress both women's engagement with Amel, emotionally, corrodes what is good and healthy in their own relationship. The accusation (perhaps by Kandrol, who must earn Mira's opinion in Throne Price) that Amel is not good for Ev'rel should be a valid one. But I will make that ambiguous also. He could be good for her if she didn't hate and fear the "better" feelings he inspires, taking them for weakness instead of a potential source of strength. I should be able to express, through Ev'rel from Mira's perspective, hard questions about love and need, trust and wisdom. Amel is not as colorlessly meek as Myshkin, in the The Idiot, but like Myshkin he messes up people's peace with themselves because he embodies ideals people do not ordinarily achieve, only aspire to, and is helpless before the potence on his own compassion in close proximity to torment in another. I've done some thinking about "saints" lately, and decided that the point at which they lose all human interest is the point at which I can no longer view them as meaningful. They disappear in a haze of "one with the universe" glory, awe inspiring as a clear blue sky, but no longer huggable. To be one with the universe is to be no one in particular, and that is itself a betrayal of loved ones. If there is anything sacred about being human--or plain sentient since this is a Sci Fi context--, for me it is comradery. The sense of having, and needing, fellow travellers to share the journey. Whether I feel that when I hug my child, kiss my husband, share a thought with you or find my living mind echoing the wonder or cynicism of a writer either dead or never likely to reply to me in person, what is splendid is the the otherness connecting through consciousness. Never been much on "one with the universe". It's just another word for dead or assimilated (think Borg). I will lose my feeling for Amel if he ever gets so sublime he isn't lusting after fresh apples, hot baths and good company given half a chance to be himself and happy.


Wednesday, July 10, 2002
 
In case ...
You're checking in, Lynda. The good news is my Friday afternoon t-con has been cancelled. The bad news is it has been rescheduled for 8 am Monday. And I plan to go swimming beforehand. So I will be out th'door at the crack'o dawn.


Monday, July 08, 2002
 
Interview in Challenging Destiny
Earlier this year I was interviewed by James Schellenberg and Darrell Switzer for Challenging Destiny #14 (small press Canadian magazine). I talked, among other things, about TP, and the interview is on line here. They earned my affection for not publishing James' review of TP in the same issue (he didn't like TP); my previous experience with a small press 'zine included finding one of the most unpleasant reviews I'd ever received pretty much back to back with an interview I'd given considerable time and thought to. And James' one is a fair unfavourable review - there are such things - the other was just plain nasty. NB, this particular consideration came unbidden. I regard an author's attempts to dictate to an editor how they should be editing with about as much favour as I do as a reviewer's attempts to dictate to an author what they should be writing!


Saturday, July 06, 2002
 
Edits, smedits
It is possible for me to have had enough editing. Right now I am working on 2 scientific papers in proof. There's another one that is shortly going to go into proof and it's not ready to do so. At work I have a clinical study report that has come back, Draft 2, with major editorial markup for me to go through. Another report, working from an old report, that is basically an editing job. And then there's Far Arena.

Doesn't anything get FINISHED any more??


Thursday, July 04, 2002
 
Holiday Plans
Turned out I had to be back for July 22 for work reasons so I am heading south this Sunday. That makes the weekend of July 12 top candidate for making contact, live. We had discussed you coming over to Vancouver for one day and us going back on the ferry for a day in Victoria.


Tuesday, July 02, 2002
 
Yukari's Luthan
Wow. Check out Yukari's take on Luthan. It's in color, too. :-)


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