[photos] January snow
As usual, more at the Flickr set. Note these were shot with my new camera. Still learning my way around the Canon EOS Rebel XS.
Posted: 8:31 am Sun January 25 2009 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad has stacks of green paper in its red right hand
A reader reacts, unenthusiastically, to Escapement [ Powell's | Amazon
How many rejections have you had? [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] — Comments thread of people talking about their fiction submission histories, and the relationship between rejections and sales.
How Old Are You — An age rating guessing game. (Thanks to Bryant.)
9 Ways NASA Can Tackle Climate Change — Cool stuff. Nice to see our government willing to do something besides obstruct, destroy and stand athwart calling, “Halt!” (Thanks to
Aeolus Airship — Ooooohhh… (Thanks to
The Scunthrope Problem — An oldie but a goodie.
APOD with an awesome photo of an annular eclipse
The New York Times on liberalism — A plausible minimum list of ingredients for 21st century liberalism would include liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism, and some notion of human equality, reason and progress. My very original definition of liberalism and conservatism, arrived at by observation when I was about 11, was that conservatives are people who know the other guy is wrong, and liberals are people who think the other guy might have a point, too. That definition has never fully broken down for me. (Note that by this definition, many Democrats are not liberals. Duh.)
Illinois moment of silence ruled unconstitutional — Good. Speaking as someone who was coerced with religion as a child, back in the days when that was not only allowed but encouraged, I favor very strong limits on religion in the public square and especially in the public schools. That’s one of those little Constitutional details the strict constructionists on the Right dislike as much as the Left dislikes gun rights.
Pope readmits Holocaust-denying priest to the church — Vatican lifts excommunication on renegade British bishop who declared: ‘There were no gas chambers’ Classy, very classy. Tell me again why American voters should be listening to this guy?
Obama swiftly lays Bush era to rest — At a crossroads, at midnight, with a stake through its heart, I should hope. This nation is already coming to look back on Bush the way it looks back on Nixon and McCarthy — a source of pride to some crazed dead-enders, but national shame to the rest of us. Ironic that being the only American president appointed to the office by judicial fiat may turn out as his greatest claim to historical significance. The sad part is that I don’t see how Bush in his profound incuriosity and impermeable disinformation bubble will ever come to any understanding of the damage he has done.
?otD: Which way to the aggress?
1/25/2009
Body movement: 40 minute ride on the stationary bike
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (got distracted again and forgot to weigh)
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville
Posted: 6:17 am Sun January 25 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Update on The Heart of the Beast
10,700 words on The Heart of the Beast today, to 24,300. That’s about six hours’ work, 90% of it revisions. By the end of my work session tomorrow I’ll be breaking into the portions of the book where I have outline and notes, but only fragments of complete text to work with. At that point this effort will shift from an odd form of revision to something of a pastiche of my core process and Jeff’s.
What I’ll do then is build the outline into the working file. I’ll be combing back through the notes to capture layered versions from his original palimpsest, and drop in scenes transcribed from the handwritten or printed out material. After that, I’ll be straight drafting, essentially, albeit with a very different source and scaffold than is my wont. Still having a lot of fun here.
As usual,
Around them lay the Mansions of the Moon, in their shattered state following death of the Beast. It was something of a magical world, for all the forlorn emptiness.
A half-moon shone through the broken roof, the sky around it spackled with stars scattered across the blackness. By this light, the floor — a ballroom once, or so she believed — spread before them, the walls and ceiling having broken long ago to leave behind mere props, impotent columns to hold up the sky. The floor was warped, crumpled inward at the center and curled upward at the edges, to accommodate the rocky hill beneath it that had shifted upon the Beast’s death. The tile of the floor was laid in a mosaic of an enormous toad, counterpart to the emblem on the trapdoor in the Can Man’s courtyard. The first time Moot had seen it, she had laughed — and fallen silent immediately because the acoustics so utterly smothered the sound once it had left her lips.
This trapdoor had been cut from the eye of the toad, and stood in a relatively sheltered corner of the floor. Directly ahead, at the opposite corner, floor and hill alike both ended abruptly in a ravine.
Posted: 5:56 pm Sat January 24 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] How many rejections have you had?
Pursuant to a discussion on Twitter right now, I’ll mention here that I had about 150 rejections before I made my first pro sale, and currently have had over 1,200 in my career. (1,225 as of this week.) By contrast, I personally know at least two writers who made a pro sale with their first ever submittal.
If you’ve sold a pro story, how many rejections did you receive before that point?
If you haven’t sold a pro story yet, how many rejections have you received so far in your quest?
How many career rejections total?
I’m curious as to people’s experiences and views on this.
Posted: 12:03 pm Sat January 24 2009 | Comments(28) |
[personal|writing] On being a public person
One of my most deeply held beliefs has been severely challenged in the past couple of weeks. As regulars of this blog know, I have a strong conviction that the story belongs to the reader. This statement could be generalized to “the words belong the reader”, in the sense of blog posts, articles and any other public statements I make.
The recent cultural appropriation furor in the blogosphere has been identified by some observers as originating with this post of mine: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. Since the discussion started, one of the nicer things I’ve seen said about myself is that I am a “denier of white privilege.” I’m not going to bother to link, they’re quite easy to find if you want to read them.
On the face of it, suggestions that I am denying white privilege are directly contrary to my plain reading of my own words, as well as to the intentions behind them. But that doesn’t matter. Because my words mean what they mean to the reader, with whatever context the reader brings to them.
This is a difficult post to write. I’m trying not to defend myself, for example, from judgments about at me quite at odds with a lifetime of behavior and a published paper trail running toward a million words. Because the people who read that post don’t know me, don’t know my fiction, haven’t been following my blog for years.
All they can judge me by is the words they see.
And that is the peril of being a public person. My words speak for themselves. If I craft them ineffectively, or they fail in context for a reader, that is the risk the words take, and that is the risk I take through the words.
What I’ve learned these past two weeks is that I’ve never much minded being taken to task for my fiction, but being taken to task for my personal beliefs can be very painful indeed. What I’ve also realized, again, is that such criticism cannot be allowed to stop me.
Posted: 7:58 am Sat January 24 2009 | Comments(4) |
[contests] We have a winner in the caption contest
The recent caption contest voting poll has been concluded. The winner of an ARC of Green is
Posted: 7:21 am Sat January 24 2009 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad has breakfast in America
The Throw Down in Squid Town — Evil Monkey has a book throwdown. My poor Green is in there. Good thing she’s a highly-trained assassin! Go vote!
How novels help drive social evolution — Analysis correlating literary protagonists with hunter-gatherer archetypes. A weird intersection of literary criticism and anthropology. (Thanks to John Burridge, via mailing list.)
The Klingon Keyboard — For
Steam Robot Design Game — (Thanks to
Early Green Giant — The Green Man by way of Ray Harryhausen. Except I always thought he looked like Peter Pan after the H-bombs had fallen on Neverland. From Drawn!, the illustration and cartooning blog.
Arabic Logos — From Drawn!, the illustration and cartooning blog. I find myself following more visual arts blogs. This seems to help me in my writing.
World’s Most Curious Ephemera, Part 2 — More mad genius from Dark Roasted Blend.
The Edge of the American West on media coverage of the Boxer Rebellion
Alternative Currency — A phenomenon of which I have been well-aware, but I never knew the proper nomenclature. Interesting stuff if you’re writing about underground economies, for example.
Squid Teeth Inspire Handy Material — The circular teeth squid use to snag and handle prey could lead to strong but lightweight, environmentally friendly composite materials, according to new research. Hmmm…
A Workable Fusion Starship — Centauri Dreams with more on practical interstellar transportation. This is basically Project Orion with semiconductors. I’d sooner carry John Carter‘s radium rifle around than ride in either one of those things, but it’s cool thinking.
Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics? — All together now: “You cannae break the laws of physics, Jim.” (Thanks to
Gecko Tape That Lets Go —Technology Review on new generations of adhesives. The article points out an obvious problem I’d never considered, which is how you control when (or whether) an adhesive lets go. Which of course is right up there with “How do they get teflon to stick to the pan?”
?otD: Could we have kippers for breakfast, mummy dear, mummy dear?
1/24/2009
Body movement: 40 minute ride on the stationary bike
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (got distracted and forgot to weigh)
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville
Posted: 7:14 am Sat January 24 2009 | Comments(1) |
[writing] Working on the Beast
As of this evening, I’ve put roughly 16 hours into my joint project with Jeff VanderMeer, The Heart of the Beast, and the revised manuscript stands at 13,600 words. This is deceptive accounting, in the sense that I didn’t write 13,600 words in 16 hours. Rather, the first 10 hours was spent inside the material Jeff sent me, the next 6 largely revising, with less than 2,000 words of new prose. This will shift as the project goes on, because after certain point I’ll be working far more from outline than from established text.
By the necessities of this project, I find myself with a far more detailed outline that I ever would have crafted for myself, down to almost the scene-by-scene level. (It actually tracks POV changes, roughly speaking, or major events, but a given POV may have multiple scenes which don’t register on the outline.) This is going to produce an interesting effect as I go along. I continue excited and interested by the unusual process.
In terms of the story itself, I’ve made several major amendments to the outline Jeff originally provided, and emphasized some pivotal events which make the book hang together effectively in my judgment. As I write, that will change — experience suggests that no outline ever survives contact with the manuscript.
To the west: the desert in the first rush of spring, traces of the late snow still spread like dust on a baker’s belly as the earliest flowers blush rare color on the unending palette of obsidian and ochre and dust-gray. The harsh smoke of the glassmakers’ kilns coils close in black ribbons to write empty glyphs upon the morning air. Far beyond them, the distant saltwater with its unknowable depths. He knows this to be fitting; the desert is little more than the bones of the ocean, and the unthinking sea lies everywhere.
Posted: 7:54 pm Fri January 23 2009 | Comments(1) |
[personal] Home
Home. Still sick, not dreadful. Got a fair amount done on The Heart of the Beast on the plane. Also, email appears to be highly wonky, so if you’re expecting to hear from me and don’t, maybe retry tomorrow.
Posted: 2:14 pm Fri January 23 2009 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad leaves on a jet plane
A Swedish review of Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb
A best of 2008 list recommends Escapement [ Powell's | Amazon
Jeff VanderMeer responds to my post about our collaborative novel [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
James Gurney on hand-painted signs — An interesting intersection between text and the visual arts.
Trees in Western U.S. Forests Dying Due to Climate Change — I didn’t realize that our very trees were lying liberal global warming conspiracists. Rush Limbaugh to the woods, stat! The hemlocks are going Socialist!
Quake triggered collapse of an ancient Peru society, scientists say — This was the end of the world as they knew it. Contemporary conservatives are said to have blamed the earthquake on liberal propaganda. (Thanks to
New York Attorney General Cuomo Said to Probe Merrill Bonuses — Classy. Very classy. Glad to see the Bush administration upheld the public trust to the bitter end in managing the TARP funds. As for Wall Street, you guys can go crawl up inside Cheney’s undisclosed location.
?otD: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
1/23/2009
Body movement: n/a (airport walking)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville
Posted: 1:50 am Fri January 23 2009 | Comments(0) |