[links] Link salad contemplates space opera
The Rough Guide to Space Opera: Jay Lake — Largely complimentary, but I was amused to be referred to as “an author of no particular popularity”. Sadly, this assessment is borne out by my trade publishing sales figures.
Five Things We Learned At Clarion, Part 1 — Some interesting takes on writing advice.
Was Chopin really epileptic? Or just in the groove? — Interesting article, with some nice comments on the creative process.
Gruesome Soviet Safety Posters — Socialist realism? (Thanks to willyumtx.)
Orion in the Mayan skies
The Fantastical Promise of Reversible Computing — Reversible logic could cut the energy wasted by computers to zero. But significant challenges lie ahead.
My Bigfoot beliefs — tongodeon on belief and evidence. Plus bonus linkback to his excellent, earlier post on consilience.
Ronald Reagan, the anti-Reaganite — 100 years after his birth, Republicans clearly still venerate his memory, but they have moved so far to the right that his actual record wouldn’t live up to their ideals. Like, um, the horrendous deficit spending that Bill Clinton had to clean up? (Which this article certainly does cite.) Reagan apologetics, even slantwise ones like this, always piss me off. For one thing, people don’t seem to want to acknowledge the degree to which is legacy is the Atwater/Ailes/GOPAC style of politics that has brought us Tea Party America and the current generation of vicious polarization. “Fair and Balanced”, anyone? But this article is pretty damned funny in a largely unintentional way.
?otD: Are you of any particular popularity?
1/26/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.5 hours (2,500 new words on
Sunspin book one, plus some WRPA.)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (solid)
Weight: 252.0
Currently reading:
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
Tags: Art, Culture, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, Publishing, reviews, scence, Tech, weird
Posted: 6:43 am Wed January 26 2011 | Comments(0) |
[personal] Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head
Yesterday managed to be action packed. The tall pole was of course my oncology appointment [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. The Day Jobbe managed to be busy as well. My parents took me and the_child out to dinner to celebrate my renewed lease on life (three months, no security deposit!). I spent about an hour and a half working on Calamity of So Long a Life, including some reasonably intense cross-referencing with the short story “Torquing Vacuum“. Plus some critical reading of a friend’s mss, and some review/blurb reading of an ARC.
Whew. Busy much, me?
Life is not for the lazy.
Tags: Books, Calamity, Cancer, Child, family, Personal, stories, Sunspin, work, Writing
Posted: 6:41 am Tue January 25 2011 | Comments(1) |
[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen
Your Tuesday moment of zen.
Buddhist monk at prayer. © 2007, 2011, 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, Religion, zen
Posted: 6:35 am Tue January 25 2011 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad dreams of sleeping
A reader reacts to my Sunspin short story “Torquing Vacuum” — Which is mildly ironic because in yesterday’s writing work session, I was cribbing furiously from the manuscript of “Torquing Vacuum” to get some stuff right in the book.
First RWA meeting, and Suhalia Salimpour — Cassie Alexander on, among other things, seeing yourself as a working author. Good thoughts on the transition from aspiration to pro-dom.
Voyager and the Will to Explore — Centauri Dreams on spacecraft longevity.
Amazing powers of the octopus
Close Encounters of the Buddhist Kind — An exclusive look inside a booming multibillion-dollar, evangelical, global Thai cult. Strange days indeed, but certainly no stranger than American megachurch evangelical Christianity. (Via Freakonomics.)
The Chiltern Hundreds — Ah, the bizarre arcana of British law.
You’re thinking of Jesus… — Hahaha. Hilarious photo of a political sign. (Via @alexirvine.)
Clarence Thomas failed to report wife’s income, watchdog says — Conservatives are against activist judges, but love them unethical judges. So long as they vote right. Hint: What would Your Liberal Media, and the radio/tv talking heads, do with this story if it were the wife of a leading liberal jurist? (Via shsilver.)
?otD: What’s the place you’ve visited most but never lived in?
1/25/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.25 hours (2,700 new words on
Sunspin book one, WRPA.)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 7.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 254.0
Currently reading:
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
Tags: Books, Cool, Culture, healthcare, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, reviews, Science, stories, Sunspin, Videos, Writing
Posted: 6:33 am Tue January 25 2011 | Comments(1) |
[cancer] The oncology follow-up visit
Went alone to my oncology follow-up today. No scan this time, just bloodwork and office chatter with the doctor. As good as could be expected. The oncologist tells me that my 5-year survival odds have improved to 50%, which is excellent news. Her exact words were, “You’re in as good shape as someone with stage IV cancer can be.”
Scans in mid-April, with oncology appointment to follow. All right before Norwescon. So, three more months of being healthy before the next checkpoint.
Tags: Cancer, health, Personal
Posted: 4:32 pm Mon January 24 2011 | Comments(6) |
[interviews] Another reader interview with me
Per my recent call for questions, here’s another reader interview with me. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
djelibeybi_meg: During all your cancer treatment, how did you manage to continue to motivate yourself to write and to keep up your regular blogs? If there were days when you didn’t manage it, what impact did this have upon you?
Jay Lake: The fiction writing eventually fell away, during month four of chemotherapy. That part of my brain essentially went to sleep for about three and a half months. Which was tough, because it’s a huge part of my identity, as well as being a very important activity. The blogging never stopped. In fact, if anything it stepped up. While I was in treatment I seemed to be able to focus on that kind of brief, non-fictional narrative in a way that was very distinct from my fiction.
I never really fell down on the blogging except on infusion days and in the time immediately around my surgeries. I was frankly very depressed and upset about losing the months of fiction writing time.
djelibeybi_meg: Are there particular characters (of yours) which have helped you through the treatment and recovery?
Jay Lake: I don’t suppose I think of it that way, mostly because I don’t think in terms of character so much as I think in terms of story. At one level, the character of Jay Lake in The Specific Gravity of Grief might fill that role. Though in truth I did not expect to become him so much as I have. I’ve also spent a lot of time this last year with Green, of Green, Endurance and Kalimpura, as well as the Before Michaela Cannon of Sunspin. Their stories have been important to me.
djelibeybi_meg: Do you have a favourite book or story to which you return when you need a “comfort blanket”? (Mine is Ringworld by Larry Niven)
Jay Lake: Two series, actually. Discworld by Terry Pratchett, and the Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold. My tolerance for re-reading books is actually fairly low, but I’ve returned to both of those time and again. Plus I discovered while on chemo that I couldn’t process new books mentally, but I could re-read familiar stuff. Which, incidentally, did include Ringworld. But also most definitely Bujold and Pratchett.
eljaydaly: You’ve spoken about how challenging it was to make the shift from short stories to novels (at least, I think you have!), and the difficulty with changing from one span of control to another.
Jay Lake: You are right. I certainly have addressed those issues before. And it was quite an intimidating transition. I ran scared of novels for a long time before I embraced the process and let myself become absorbed in them.
eljaydaly: Speaking as somebody who’s made the difficult transition from writing “voicey” short stories to novels… how did you do that? How did you manage to stretch your thought process (or shrink it) so that muscles that were used to working in short, dense idea-chunks got used to handling a very long span? How did you teach yourself to switch from making a single very dense dish to making a seven-course meal?
Jay Lake: Essentially my early mistake was to assume that short stories and novels were the same craft. For me, at least, they are not. (Note, this is not generic advice, merely my observations concerning my own experiences.) A short story is like a piece of cabinetwork — finely crafted, with many carefully executed details. A novel is like framing a house — lots of big strokes and long runs of heavy, rough material. No matter how carefully one crafts a novel, it’s simply a different animal than the supple twistiness of a short story.
The deceptive aspect, to further abuse my metaphor, is that both crafts use similar or analogous tools. Saws, hammers, braces. They just use them differently.
So the retraining of my thought processes was rather like the retraining of a cabinet maker to become a framing carpenter. I still bring my cabinetry skills into the housebuilding. The lessons learned from housebuilding have improved my cabinet making. But realizing and embracing the notion that short stories and novels are distinct-yet-related arts was a huge step for me.
As to how I taught myself to make the switch… The same way I’ve taught myself everything else I’ve learned in my career. Practice, practice, practice; leavened with editorial feedback, critical commentary from other writers, reader response and plentiful self-examination. But mostly practice. That is to say, writing more. Thinking about what I’ve written. Then more writing more.
eljaydaly: Day to day, how did that process look? How did you manage to wrap your head around it all? Compared with the eleven years it took you to start selling, how long would you say it took you to get a comfortable handle on such a different way of thinking and writing? Or did you actually not find it so very different? (I don’t want to make an inadvertent assumption.)
Jay Lake: Well, it took me eleven years from when I first started writing short stories seriously to when I began to sell them. I wrote my first novel in 1994, The January Machine. Someday I might even produce a Lulu.com/ebook edition of that, just for laughs, but trust me, it’s definitely a first novel. Post-millennial religious terrorism amid the collapse of the Westphalian model of statehood. With rogue AIs, zombies, global warming, and time travel.
Did I mention that it was a first novel?
So figure about ten years from that effort until I sold Rocket Science, my first novel in the independent press. And yes, as discussed above, very different. Along with lots of practice.
Did I mention how important practice is to developing as a writer?
And to be clear, “practice” does not mean polishing your Great American Novel endlessly. It means writing another one, then another one, then another one. Revision is an important skill. Critical, even. But don’t ever neglect drafting.
eljaydaly: I’m not sure that question (er… bunch of questions) even makes sense. But there it is. I’d be interested in your insights, as always.
Jay Lake: Well, I hope I covered what you intended to ask. Certainly the questions made sense to me. Let’s see if the answers make sense to you or any of my other readers.
ruralwriter: You’ve mentioned that you wrote hundreds (or some value of “a lot”) of stories before publishing a pro story; are you ever tempted to return to any of those pieces and revise them? Or do ideas from those stories sometimes reappear in your newer work without your consciously returning to revise those stories?
Jay Lake: Yes.
Oh, wait, you probably wanted more detail than that. Off the top of my head, “The Rose Egg” (Postscripts issue one) was one such story idea pulled from the deep trunk and re-addressed. My short novel Death of a Starship is another. And certainly the old ideas re-appear in the newer work. I am occasionally alarmed at how closely I can unknowingly repeat myself. On the other hand, if I’m repeating myself, that probably means the idea was strong in the first place.
Or possibly I’m just perseverating.
An example of this is my realization about two years ago that cancer has been a long time recurrent theme, albeit on a minor note, within my work. For years before it became a concern in my daily life, in fact. I’m not sure I ever would have noticed the trend if I hadn’t fallen down that particular rabbithole myself.
That was fun. Feel free to ask followup questions in comments here. In a month or so, I’ll probably post another call for new reader interview questions. My thanks to those who participated by asking this time.
Tags: Books, Cancer, Endurance, Green, Grief, health, interviews, January, Kalimpura, Personal, Process, Rocket, Starship, stories, Sunspin, Writing
Posted: 6:30 am Mon January 24 2011 | Comments(3) |
[personal|food] Mmm, chocolate
Yesterday I attended the Portland Chocolate Fest with a small, assorted rogue’s gallery of local high tech ne’er-do-wells. It was quite something. I ate myself very nearly sick on samples, and had a lot of fun.
Highlights including sampling the “Don’t Eat This Chocolate” hot chili chocolate bar, from a chocolatier who told me that adding bacon to his blue cheese truffles was over the top; checking out the truffle woman; and eating some righteous food.
My three favorite samples were the rose caramel from Cocoa Velvet Chocolates, the Thai chocolate truffle (with lemongrass and curry powder) from Snake & Butterfly, and the white chocolate espresso bar from Forte Chocolates. Wow.
The Roy G. Biv all-girl precision team in the lobby
Truffle woman
The chocolate tree
© 2011, 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: Food, Personal, Photos, Portland
Posted: 6:25 am Mon January 24 2011 | Comments(1) |
[photos] Your Monday moment of zen
Your Monday moment of zen.
One more from the garden. © 2007, 2011, 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: flowers, Photos, zen
Posted: 6:20 am Mon January 24 2011 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad has a sugar hangover
A review of “If This Were a Romance” — Short story in Love and Rockets by me and calendula_witch.
A hilarious and decidedly NSFW conversation with the_child: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
alumiere asks how do you know her — Interesting question. How do you know me? Through the blog? Reading my fiction? Have we met in real life? When and how?
Book page origami — Cool art. (Via willyumtx.)
The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art — As featured in Science, Knitting Help, and the National Review. From here in Oregon, no less. (Via MH.)
Former Spy With Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A. — Hmmm. (Thanks to my Dad.)
?otD: Really, why did you eat that?
1/24/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.25 hours (WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 5.75 hours (solid)
Weight: 254.0 (hello, Chocolate Fest)
Currently reading:
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
Tags: Art, Calendula, Child, Cool, Funny, Links, Personal, Politics, reviews, Science, stories
Posted: 6:18 am Mon January 24 2011 | Comments(3) |
[child] A hilarious and decidedly NSFW parent-child conversation
Saturday The Child and I had a hilarious and decidedly NSFW conversation, which she has given me permission to blog.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Child, Funny, sex, Videos
Posted: 8:34 pm Sun January 23 2011 | Comments(9) |
« Older Posts | Newer Posts »