[writing] Endurance progriss riport, day 8
6,900 words in three hours today, to 45,900. Hooray for weekend days!
WIP:
The Dockmarket was busy as ever. Trade might be down, but there were no vacant stalls. Tired old women hawked handfuls of trinkets from the tops of bollards. Fruitiers and greengrocers occupied wide spreads of stalls, their produce ranked in colorful arrays like a kitchen paint box. Thieving children ran through the market clutching half-rotted summer apples and the thin coins stolen from the careless. I smelled machine oil, spices, the acrid scent of blades being sharpened on a grinding wheel, the dung of a dozen kinds of animals. The sounds likewise made such a distraction. The blue-robed memory men squatting on the distorted faces of ancient, fallen idols chanted their histories. Hogs bellowed their fear before the sledge took them in the skull. Chains jingled, babies cried, hammers fell.
This place was as close to the comforting chaos of Kalimpura as I was likely to find in Copper Downs. I let myself slip into it. I found myself falling into the habits of a Blade on a run – my stance, the set of my shoulders, how close I kept my weapons. Realizing this, I forced myself to relax. This was not the place of my enemies. The city of Copper Downs did not oppose me. Only some people in it, most of them foreigners.
I caught myself at that thought. Selistani. My own people were not foreigners. Or were they?
Tags: Books, Endurance, Process, Writing
Posted: 7:03 pm Sun June 21 2009 | Comments(0) |
[cancer] Wonder Twins Power Activate: Form of a Form!
Forms, forms, everywhere there’s forms.
Just spent half an hour tacking pen-and-ink paperwork forms for the second opinion consult on 6/30 down in San Francisco. All of these were topped with a preprinted label containing most of my pertinent identification information, including insurance data. The silliest form was the one with this selfsame label which required me to write out by hand my pertinent identification information, including insurance data.
The medical system: our culture’s expanded version of barbershop mirrors.
Tags: California, Cancer, Funny, health
Posted: 1:24 pm Sun June 21 2009 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad says happy Father’s Day Solstice
Booking the future — One view of the next generation of publishing. (Thanks to .)
The Latke number thread — In case you were wondering about literary collaboration with me.
What Amazon Does Not Want You To Know About The Kindle — More DRM hell. (From a mailing list I’m on.)
The Unevenness of Space-Time Convergence — Strange Maps with a rendering of travel times which is pretty interesting, and also somewhat reminds me of the most famousest New Yorker cover EVAR.
Brute-Force Engineering and Climate — Centauri Dreams with some unsettling speculation. Also more fodder for near term futurism of both the apocalyptic and optimistic flavors.
Sunrise over the Parthenon — More photographic coolness from APOD.
io9.com with a visual gallery on the evolution of spaceships in movies — Cool stuff.
Maytag-Mobile: 1939 — Shorpy with home-made car from the pre-WWII era. I’m fascinated by the tiny wheels. That thing must have ridden like holy hell. And speaking of hell, Shorpy has this bus image, a 1938 Greyhound ready for the Gehenna run for certain.
answers my question from yesterday about the Robert court ruling on DNA testing — Ok, not batshit. Still not happy about it, but I understand the point now. (And wish the reporting on this had done a better job of conveying that point, or that I’d done a better job of reading the reporting, or both.) Thanks, Eric!
?otD: Was it a new day yesterday?
6/21/2009
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride, 10 minutes of stretching and meditation
This morning’s weigh-in: 219.8
Currently reading: n/a (Finished
The Human Disguise by James O’Neil)
Tags: Books, cars, Cool, Culture, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, Science, Writing
Posted: 6:15 am Sun June 21 2009 | Comments(0) |
[personal] Happy Father’s Day
My Father’s Day post from last year is pretty hard to improve upon, so, I say again, to anyone who is a dad, has a dad, or ever had a dad, Happy Father’s Day.
(Photos by , a/k/a my sister.)
Tags: Child, family, Personal, Photos
Posted: 5:51 am Sun June 21 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Endurance progriss riport, day 7
2.5 hours today, 5,700 words, to 39,000 words. Not bad for a week’s work.
WIP:
The councilman took a long, careful sip, then glanced down at where I’d been defacing his table. “That will not so easily be sanded out.”
“Consider it a reminder.” I dropped the knife from a foot above. It landed point first in the wood and stuck upward, vibrating.
“No one is at your beck and call, Green. Especially not this Interim Council.”
“Perhaps I can arrange the bad news to come at your convenience?”
Tags: Books, Endurance, Process, Writing
Posted: 9:42 pm Sat June 20 2009 | Comments(0) |
[personal] Time flies when you got nothing to do
It’s amazing how time flies by when you get up at 3:40 in the morning. And that was me sleeping in… It’s barely past noon and here’s what I’ve accomplished so far today:
- Exercised
- Morning blog roll
- Shower (with hair wash, takes a while)
- Two and half hours on Endurance
- Cooked breakfast for self
- Worked on story critique for two friends
- Had a sweet phone call with
- Submitted the final story for The Sky That Wraps
- Caught up on email
- Went to grocery store
- Did laundry
- Made week’s salad and lemonade/limeade
- Cooked lunch for self, and her friend I—
- Changed clothes for the Scholes baby shower
Shortly, off to the baby shower with and . Dinner with evening with , and a possible sighting. Tomorrow, more Endurance, a Father’s Day Brunch with the usual suspects, some cancer paperwork for my upcoming second opinion appointment, a final pass through Iron Springs critique, draft another Tor.com blog post and read through ‘s Nightcraft Mother dailies to date.
Week to come: Doctor’s appointment Monday. arrives Wednesday. MRI Thursday. Then off to Iron Springs!
Tags: Books, Calendula, Child, Conventions, Endurance, family, Food, Personal, Writing
Posted: 11:39 am Sat June 20 2009 | Comments(4) |
[cancer|writing] Enduring with Endurance
Working on Endurance has done wonders to chase the cancer goblins out of my head. I can’t actually write when I’m in the middle of being pissed off or actively afraid, but with even a little distance from the immediacy of those emotions, the book calls me back.
Likewise, I find myself approaching this book with an intensity that is unusual, even for me. I figure this is Fred burning off nerves in the text. reports that the book continues on target and appropriately smooth and interesting, so I know I’m not just spinning wheels here.
We’re not talking about writing-as-therapy, per se. My issues aren’t being gamed out on the page, at least not consciously or directly. (They can scarcely fail to inform the mood of the book, of course.) More like the act of writing is therapeutic.
I hope this never becomes a struggle for me. Laying down words on a page is such joy, and I need that in my life right now perhaps more than I ever have. It’s an interesting phenomenon, how this all fits together.
PS, for those of you who have not yet read your newly-acquired copies of Green [ Powell's | Amazon
| Barnes & Noble | Borders ], Endurance is named after the ox in Green, with nothing to do with either of my cancer experiences as that book was drafted before the first outbreak. In fact, the ox is named after the cat in Gwyneth Jones’ Divine Endurance, a book I dearly love.
Tags: Calendula, Cancer, Endurance, Personal, Writing
Posted: 9:52 am Sat June 20 2009 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad is working for the weekend
A pair of readers with small love for Green [ Powell's | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Borders ]: here and here — In the second case, at length. I firmly believe the story belongs to the reader, but I do sometimes wonder if readers have the story I wrote in their hands.
A reader objects to one of my blurbs — Heh.
Perso-Arabic and Sinitic Literacy — Some cool stuff on Islam in China and writing systems, including this gem: This information is all the more stunning in light of the fact that Muslims in China developed a system of writing Sinitic languages [...] in Perso-Arabic script.
Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent — A blog post about a recent Supreme Court decision forbidding a convicted felon from paying for his own DNA test to exonerate himself. The Roberts court found that alowing Osburne to prove his potential innocence risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.” Compassionate conservativism my ass. Can someone explain to me why this isn’t pure batshit?
One of the Daily Kos diarists on Coburn and Ensign — This guys puts it in a nutshell: If Ensign and Coburn weren’t such outspoken crusaders for moral rectitude none of this would be anybody’s business except insofar as Ensign’s actions constituted sexual harassment or involved public resources. But both Ensign and Coburn have built a political career on passing moral judgment on others. There’s an expression about stones and glass houses that they might have considered before trying to foist their own hypocritical moral code on the rest of the country. One could ask the same question of the entire conservative movement, of course.
?otD: How easy it is being Green?
6/20/2009
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride, 10 minutes of stretching and meditation
This morning’s weigh-in: 220.2
Currently reading: n/a (Finished
The Human Disguise by James O’Neil yesterday)
Tags: Books, China, Green, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, reviews
Posted: 4:20 am Sat June 20 2009 | Comments(4) |
[writing] Endurance progriss riport, day 6
Two hours, fifteen minutes; 6,600 words. Spread out over two flights. I was deep, deep in the zone, and stopped only because they made me shut down my electronic equipment. liked the dailies a lot.
The WIP:
My feet had led me to the breweries near the docks. Even my wandering mind could not ignore the odor of yeasts and hops and spillage, and the spoilt barrels set out on the loading docks, from which the poor could drink at their own risk for half of a split copper tael or some shred of barter. Horses, too, the district always had that smell of horse, for the sake of the monstrous great beasts that drew the brewery wagons around the city.
Beer I was fine with, horses I mistrusted deeply. The broken screw that had borne me on my fateful trip with Septio, leading to his death and my pregnancy, had been a wicked animal with a special hatred for me in its liquid eyes.
An ox, now, there was an animal with which you always knew your place. No question of standing with an ox. They never got above themselves, and generally were not independent thinkers. No wonder Endurance had manifested as he did. I shuddered to think of the moods of a horse god.
Tags: Books, Calendula, Endurance, Process, Writing
Posted: 7:04 pm Fri June 19 2009 | Comments(1) |
[travel] Home again, somewhat to my surprise
After a day of incipient but unrealized travel fail, I am home. Three segment flight. Slept through one, wrote through the other two. Got 6,600 words knocked out in 2.25 hours on Endurance. I doubt I’ll do more today, but I might be inspired this evening, so I’m not calling that the total yet.
In the Denver airport I spotted a mmpb of Mainspring, which was new from last Monday when the same store had only an mmpb of Escapement. That means the book is still being (re)ordered and (re)stocked fourteen months after its release, in airport bookstores, which are notoriously competitive ecosystems. This one had maybe 300 sf/f titles. I’m proud of my little book.
Also, ran into old friends in the San Francisco airport, coming back to Portland on the last leg of their move-home-from-three-years-living-in-China flight. What is it with me in that airport?
Have a therapist appointment soon, then a dinner with (different) visiting friends, then an early evening of it. and ‘s baby shower tomorrow, to which I am taking and . Looks like a dinner tomorrow night with . And of course, more bookage.
Tags: Books, California, Child, China, Endurance, Escapement, Mainspring, Portland, Travel, Writing
Posted: 2:32 pm Fri June 19 2009 | Comments(0) |
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