Jay Lake: Writer

[travel] Off today to the antipodes, forward all my mail to the South Seas

This afternoon calendula_witch and I are off to New Zealand. Portland to Los Angeles to Sydney to Wellington, a ridiculous amount of flight hours and transit time. Longest flight I’ve ever taken before is San Francisco to Hong Kong. The LA-Sydney hop on this flight will be even mightier. Thank Ghu for business class seats. danjite and khaybee will meet us at the other end, pour us into their state limo, and see us to their home. Next week we’ll all four pop over to Melbourne.

Expect unknown amounts of blogging at unknown times. I will probably take a metric frak-ton of photos, of course, on account of because that’s what I do in furrin parts. Of course, those crazy Kiwis don’t know that they’re the furriners.

I won’t be answering my phone much, but I will keep an eyeball on email. Write if you need me.

calendula_witch and I are back on Thursday, September 9th. Surgery festivities the following week, in which I expect to be in the hospital from September 16th to September 20th. (I didn’t really need my liver anyway, did I?) It is my plan to spend as little as possible of the next two weeks thinking about that.

And, oddly, one thing I’m really looking forward to is the night sky. It will be like going to a different planet.

Tags: Australia, Calendula, Cancer, Conventions, health, New Zealand, Personal, Photos, Travel

Posted: 5:12 am Wed August 25 2010 | Comments(2) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

Caldwell County courthouse, Lockhart, TX. You’ve seen this building in a lot of movies, including Waiting for Guffman and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Movies, Photos, Texas, zen

Posted: 5:00 am Wed August 25 2010 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad has one foot on the platform, the other on the train

My semiautobiographical novelette, “Dream of the Arrow”, is up at Subterranean — A difficult story about my high school experiences, somewhat fictionalized. One of my regular readers here on LJ is a friend from those days, and is actually a character in this.

Editorial Evaluations, Moms and Pedatic Purple Prose — shadowhelm on critique. (Via lt260.)

Molybdomancy — Art haruspication guru James Gurney with a new one on me.

A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future — A Yahoo Research tool mines news archives for meaning–illuminating past, present, and even future events.

Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claims — Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution. Oooh! Oooh! Somebody call the Discovery Institute!

Dattoos: Body Art Melds DNA, Computing — Very, very strange. (Via e_bourne.)

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus — A detailed take on GOP shenanigans in the faked-up Park51 controversy, a/k/a “Ground Zero Mosque”. (Via shsilver.)

?otD: Was your mother a tailor? Did she sew your new blue jeans?

8/25/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura outline)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 244.2
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Pretender by C.J. Cherryh

Tags: Cool, Fiction, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, stories, Tech, Writing

Posted: 4:56 am Wed August 25 2010 | Comments(1) |

[photos] What I did today

© 2010 JH. Used with permission.

Tags: audio, Personal, Photos

Posted: 3:30 pm Tue August 24 2010 | Comments(1) |

[personal] Fatherhood in the time of cancer

Driving home last night from dinner, I was listening to NPR. Terri Gross was interviewing Scott Simon about his book on adoption, Baby We Were Meant For Each Other. Simon was talking about the mechanics of the adoption process in China, which are very familiar to me as that is how the_child joined our family. Then he started talking about child abandonment and orphanage life in China, which saddened me. Those are realities with which I am reasonably conversant, in the context of being a complete outsider, and they are certainly the realities of my daughter’s early life.

What really broke me was when he then started talking about being an older parent (Simon was 50 when he and his wife adopted their first daughter), and what it would mean when he passed away and left his children behind.

When you peel back all the prognoses and tests and procedures and psychotherapy and family support and love, underneath it all, I truly no longer expect to live to be old. This conviction didn’t emerge until the first metastasis in my lung. The second metastasis which I’m currently dealing with in my liver has only deepened my sense of fatalism. These days, I define a successful life as one in which I survive in reasonable health long enough to see the_child graduate from high school. She’s about to start seventh grade, which means I need to hang in for six more years. Or, given the current metrics, through six more recurrences of my cancer.

None of this is logical. It’s probably not even all that mentally healthy. On a day to day basis, I work at being positive, and I believe I largely succeed at it. (Though calendula_witch might beg to disagree.) But when I’m being honest down to the bone, I don’t see a long future for myself.

That just is. And in some ways, I think I’ve accepted my sense of mortality. I will fight for every inch, all the way to full cure or to the end, whichever comes first. If it does come as I fear, I will have many regrets — books unwritten, places unvisited, people not yet loved, the grief and loss of my parents. But what I want the most is to see the_child into adulthood in good order. What I fear the most is never being able to do that.

Sometimes love is a bitter cup.

Tags: Books, Calendula, Cancer, Child, family, health, Personal, Writing

Posted: 5:28 am Tue August 24 2010 | Comments(7) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

Central square, Lockhart, TX. From the “Wizard of Oz” school of architecture. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Photos, Texas, zen

Posted: 5:12 am Tue August 24 2010 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad eyes the fall publishing schedule

A rather nice review of Pinion in Analog

io9.com includes my forthcoming collection The Sky That Wraps in their list of “All the books you’ll be lusting for this fall season”

Never Wake Up: The Meaning and Secret of Inception — Some interesting analysis here. Partially dovetails with the take that calendula_witch and I are developing. (Thanks to goulo.)

Pulsar Timing: An Outer System Tool — This is some seriously weird science. And cool as all get-out.

The End of Management — Corporate bureaucracy is becoming obsolete. Why managers should act like venture capitalists.

Why do pundits think Bush regularly attended church? — He didn’t. Neither did that conservative saint, Ronald Reagan. Obviously Reagan was a secret Muslim!

Stewart: Fox Smears Owner Alwaleed bin Talal! — Hah!

Covert Operations — The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. And the Right gets its panties in a wad over George Soros… (Via danjite.)

What are the Republicans trying to hide behind the Ground Zero Mosque? — Not sure I buy this, but it’s an interesting argument, and not the least bit out of character for the party of Atwater, Ailes and Rove.

The GOP and the “Ground Zero” Mosque — The Cato Institute weighs on rank political opportunism by Republicans. See Competing Perspectives on the Mosque Controversy for more.

The GOP’s Long, Hot, Racist Summer — Ah yes, nothing like standing on your principles to make your point.

?otD: What forthcoming books are you lusting for?

8/24/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.75 hours (WRPA, Kalimpura outline)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 (interrupted)
This morning’s weigh-in: 244.2
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Destroyer by C.J. Cherryh

Tags: Books, Culture, Links, Movies, Personal, Pinion, Politics, Religion, reviews, Science, Sky

Posted: 5:09 am Tue August 24 2010 | Comments(1) |

[conventions|travel] Au Contraire and AussieCon 4

So, who among you is going to be at Au Contraire (Wellington, NZ, next weekend) and/or AussieCon 4 (Melbourne, Australia, the following weekend)? I’d love to know who we’re going to bump into, new friends and old.

Tags: Australia, Conventions, New Zealand, Travel

Posted: 5:02 am Mon August 23 2010 | Comments(3) |

[contests] Results of the steampunk caption contest voting poll

I have now closed the steampunk caption contest voting poll, which has celebrated the release of my steampunk minim opus, The Baby Killers. The contest was for a caption to best fit the following photo:

Pipe, Lime, OR. © 2002, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

First prize is an inscribed copy of The Baby Killers, going to madrobins for:

“I admit to its utility,” said Miss Penderghast. “But the steam-powered corset-laundry will not catch on until it can be rendered small enough for the ordinary household.” with 15% of the polling, or 12 Votes.

Runners up are:

shelly_rae: Fortunately the colonoscopy scope has improved in the modern era and no longer requires a team of horses. It just feels that way. (11%, 9 Votes)

cjmarsicano: The Lime Observatory apologizes for the embarrassment caused by an intern pointing our telescope at the nudist beach in the next county. (10%, 8 Votes)

madrobins and cjmarsicano, please contact me with your postal addresses. (I already have shelly_rae’s.) Everyone else, go check out the other contestants if you haven’t done so already. Some funny stuff there!

Tags: Books, Contests, Funny, Polls

Posted: 4:50 am Mon August 23 2010 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Monday moment of zen

Your Monday moment of zen.

Ornate detail on very old semitrailer, Mustang Ridge, TX. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: cars, Photos, Texas, zen

Posted: 4:42 am Mon August 23 2010 | Comments(0) |