Jay Lake: Writer

[conventions] RadCon programming schedule

Here is my RadCon programming schedule, for those of you who might be in the scenic Tri-Cities area this coming weekend. Also, while I normally emcee the Masquerade, I appear to be cross-programmed this year.

Fri Feb 18
2:00 pm	Blogging 101
4:00 pm	The Urban Monster
Sat Feb 19
9:00 am	The Healthy Hero
11:00 am	Lunch as Book Signing
2:00 pm	Drawing the Body Cancer
6:00 pm	What Makes a Successful Critique Group?
8:00 pm	Masquerade Emcee
Sun Feb 20
10:00 am	The Formidable Woman
11:00 am	Pitching Workshop

Tags: Conventions, Personal, Washington

Posted: 6:23 am Wed February 16 2011 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

The Palace of Fine Art, San Francisco. © 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: California, Photos, zen

Posted: 6:12 am Wed February 16 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad files its nails while they’re dragging the lake

Electric Velocipede 21/22 reviewed — Including “In the Beginnings” by calendula_witch and me.

A reader comments on my cancer novella The Specific Gravity of Grief — The resonances for her are unfortunately strong.

Ken Scholes is looking for company in Chicago Thursday evening — If you’re in Chicagoland, say howdy.

Light-Emitting Rubber Could Sense Structural Damage — I so totally misread this headline.

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans — Great article about machine cognition, but I especially like the ‘Paris Hilton problem’. (Via my Dad.)

Reagan and Reality — Two words you don’t often see in the same sentence…

In Haley Barbour’s Mississippi: Civil War Looms Over License Plates — Mmm, classy. Nope, no racism here. Move along, boy, nothing to see.

South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers — And the rational discourse of the American Right takes another step on the road to civility in their obsession with forced pregnancy.

Terrorism and Magical Thinking — Ta-Nehisi Coates with more on the proposed South Dakota abortion law, including a fascinating riff on why the politics of forced pregnancy have been so successful.

Mitch Daniels and the 2012 Field — Some thoughts on 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitch Daniels from conservative commentator Daniel Larison.

?otD: Watching the detectives do what, precisely?

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2/16/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (copy edits on Endurance)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 251.4
Currently reading: Dead Iron by Devon Monk

Tags: Books, Calendula, Chicago, Culture, Funny, Grief, Links, Personal, Politics, reviews, Science, sex, stories, Tech

Posted: 6:10 am Wed February 16 2011 | Comments(0) |

[writing] Working to the plan, planning to be busy

Despite having an intensely busy day yesterday, including a very exciting girls’ basketball game (they lost by two points), I managed an hour and half of copy edits on Endurance. I’m now about halfway through that process. Which is to say, I’ve responded to the queries, reviewed the changes, and am now doing a very tight line read.

This is creating mild cognitive dissonance for me, as not so long ago I drafted Kalimpura, which follows Endurance in the Green sequence. So I keep getting to scenes and thinking, “Wait, she already did this.” It’s an amusing reaction.

Meanwhile, Sunspin continues to cook in my head. In the car coming back from the game yesterday, I talked over a worldbuilding/sociology issue with tillyjane a/k/a my mom. When I’m done with these copy edits, I’ll drag into the second tranche of Calamity of So Long a Life, which should run another 60,000-75,000 words I think.

Writing this book in segments is a new experience for me, and it’s been rather liberating. Stopping to do the Endurance copy edit, for example, isn’t leaving me with a bad case of bookus interruptus. Likewise, about the time I finish Calamity of So Long A Life it will be time to revise Kalimpura. And conveniently the two universes of Green and Sunspin are so different from one another that I’m not really getting any cross-talk in my brain.

To be specific for those just tuning in, Green is secondary world fantasy told in tight first person. Sunspin is medium-future space opera told with a wide cast in moderately loose first person. They really don’t overlap much at the structural, thematic, genre or craft levels. Well, except that I keep wanting to name starships in Sunspin after characters in Green.

Going forward, my work plan, presuming continued good health, is as follows:

• Complete Endurance (Green book two) copy edit, February 2011
• Complete first draft of Calamity of So Long A Life (Sunspin book one), April, 2011
• Complete revisions to Kalimpura (Green book three), turn in to casacorona, June, 2011
• Complete first draft of The Whips and Scorns of Time (Sunspin book two), September, 2011
• Complete first draft of Be All Our Sins Remembered (Sunspin book three), December, 2011
• Begin working on Original Destiny, Manifest Sin (epic historical fantasy in the American West), January, 2012

As all such plans, this is subject to the vagaries of life, or people throwing money at me to work in a different order. And I have hopes of some of those steps happening sooner/faster, but I’m trying to be realistic. As it is, I’m setting myself to 600,000 words of first draft plus some major revision work in this calendar year.

Ah, ambition.

Do you have a work plan for the year? What are your big projects?

Tags: Books, Calamity, Child, Endurance, family, Green, Kalimpura, Personal, Process, Sins, Sunspin, Whips, Writing

Posted: 6:22 am Tue February 15 2011 | Comments(2) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

The Palace of Fine Art, San Francisco. © 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: California, flowers, Photos

Posted: 6:04 am Tue February 15 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad cries more, more, more

If all stories were written like science fiction stories — Hahaha. Very bad science fiction stories, admittedly. (Via David Goldman.)

First Measurement of ‘Wordquakes’ Shaking the Blogosphere — Certain words disrupt the blogosphere in the same way that earthquakes shake the planet. And that makes them ripe for an earthquake-like magnitude rating.

A Year in the Slow Lane in a ’30 Ford — That be some dedication.

Back to the Future — An amazing photo re-creation project. (Thanks to willyumtx.)

Shipping cupcakes down the thermal exhaust port — A video of the unboxing of an entry in the cupcake shipping challenge. Color me impressed. (Via scarlettina.)

Australians hit by Cyclone Yasi warned to stay away from deadly giant birds — Now that is a headline. (Thanks to danjite.)

Up telescope! Search begins for giant new planet — Tyche may be bigger than Jupiter and orbit at the outer edge of the solar system. (\Bad Astronomy responds.

Evidence of a Spurious Origin — Ta-Nehisi Coates on nineteenth century scientific racism. Both interesting and depressing.

The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters — Glenn Greenwald on Wikileaks and his own targeting in response. No matter what your politics, this will likely strike you as appalling.

Selection Bias? PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats — Or possibly just the Palin effect.

House GOPer against big government health care enjoys taxpayer-funded state government insurance — Further evidence that the core tenet of contemporary conservatism is ‘right for me but not for thee.’ See the only moral abortion is my abortion for a much larger, more devastating example of this.

Be Nice To Bigots: Republican leaders tiptoe around the smear campaign against Obama’s faith and citizenship. — That’s four straight interviews in which the country’s three top Republicans—the speaker of the House and the GOP leaders in each chamber—have refused to condemn the spreading of lies about Obama’s faith and citizenship. [...] Why can’t Boehner, Cantor, or McConnell speak that bluntly? Why won’t they call a lie a lie? If they want to be leaders, it’s time to lead. Your Republican party: proudly standing up for what’s right and true in America. (Except when it pisses off their base, of course.)

?otD: What happened in the midnight hour?

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2/15/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (copy edits on Endurance)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 5.75 hours (solid)
Weight: 252.0
Currently reading: Between books

Tags: Australia, Cool, Culture, Food, Funny, Language, Links, media, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, race, Science, Videos, weird, words

Posted: 6:01 am Tue February 15 2011 | Comments(1) |

[personal] Happy Valentine’s Day

Wherever your heart is, whomever you hold dear, love yourself and them a little bit extra today.

Tags: Personal

Posted: 6:29 am Mon February 14 2011 | Comments(1) |

[cancer] Coping with the future

I haven’t said very much about the cancer lately. I haven’t needed to. Healthwise, other than some weight control issues apparently due to chemo-induced shifts in my metabolism, for the moment I’m fine. Just had a general physical wherein my fasting glucose measured very well, my mediocre cholesterol levels were improved, thyroid function checked out good, blood pressure was quite reasonable, and so forth. The forthcoming scans in April are entirely a game of probabilities, as with so much of oncology. The odds there are slightly in my favor, and almost entirely out of my control.

All I can do is live my life.

And so I have been doing so. I’ve really emphasized spending time with old friends and new, and have been getting out more in multiple senses of that term. It’s been a lot of fun. “Fun” being a commodity much absent from my life last year.

But my view of the future is very distorted in some unhealthy ways. I continue to wrestle with a failure to effectively cope with my cancer fears.

The ground state of my personality is a somewhat buoyant optimism. On a day to day basis, I have almost entirely recovered that. But at the moment, I have a bad case of short-timer attitude regarding my future. I feel overwhelmed by the possibility of going through another round of surgery and chemo. I feel overwhelmed by my long-term survival statistics. It’s not the sharp end of the medical stick that’s bothering me, it’s the cloud of probabilities at the other end of that stick.

Like many people and most writers, I have an objective observer in my head. It often manifests as something approaching a literal narrative voiceover. Sometimes I feel like I’m in my own private fanfic of Wild Kingdom. “The common or garden variety American science fiction writer approaches the potentially receptive female. Notice the courting display of aloha shirt and witty remarks, designed to catch her attention long enough to overcome the initial evaluation of ‘badly-dressed middle-aged fat guy.’”

On the cancer stuff, my objective observer is not the least bit confused. I’m quite clear that while I need to live in the moment — don’t we all? — I also need to keep a weather eye on the future. Everything in my life, from parenting to my books to my professional existence to my social interactions, extends indefinitely into that future. There’s nothing magic about April and the scans, it’s just a thing I will do. Whatever the results are, I will process them and take the appropriate measures.

My objective observer is having a heck of a time telling that to my emotional self. I’m living with the mild cognitive dissonance of simultaneous clear-eyed acceptance and controlled panic.

Of course I am finding my way through. That day to day optimism is seeping downward like an oil spill into groundwater. I am tired of this difficult emotional space, even bored with it — a very good sign, I know from experience. And I resent the power I have granted cancer over my life in allowing it to dominate my thinking.

Taking that power back is not as simple as deciding to take it back. Yet, in the end, it is.

Cancer is not for sissies. Also, I don’t recommend it as a hobby.

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal, work, Writing

Posted: 6:21 am Mon February 14 2011 | Comments(2) |

[photos] Your Monday moment of zen

Your Monday moment of zen.

Flower, San Francisco. © 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: California, flowers, Photos, zen

Posted: 6:02 am Mon February 14 2011 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad has a lust for life

The trade paperback edition of my novel Green goes on sale this week — Maybe time for some book love?

Marissa Lingen comments on Green — Including, unusually, critiquing the dedication. Also, the comments section is interesting.

Anyone Home? — Salom Futura on last-man-on-earth stories, including my own Sunspin short “A Long Walk Home“. I find her comment about female protagonists in this subsubsubgenre mildly ironic given the prevalence of female protagonists in the Sunspin universe as a whole, albeit as she correctly points out, absent in this particular story.

Experts determine age of book ‘nobody can read’ — More fun with the Voynich manuscript. Personally, I suspect Jeff VanderMeer and a time machine.

Dunbar’s Number — How many people can you be connected to? I suspect my Dunbar’s Number is unusually high. How’s yours looking? (Via willyumtx.)

Watching a Video Shot in 2,564 Frames per Second is Mind Numbingly Amazing — This is some intensely cool, strange stuff.

Gene tests inadvertently exposing cases of incest — Sad and strange. The sociology of medical progress.

Do Anonymous Leaks Have a Future? — Successors to WikiLeaks are springing up, but they face a range of obstacles.

Doonesbury on gun violence — Um, yes. Common sense, where have you gone? (Via markbourne.)

Communique No. 5 Suspends Constitution, Prorogues Parliament — Juan Cole on current events in Egypt, also providing me with a new vocabulary word.

What’s good for CEOs isn’t good for America — Mitt Romney says the United States needs a president with private-sector street cred. Here’s why he’s wrong. Wasn’t part of the GOP sell job on Bush 43 that he was going to be a ‘CEO president’? Look how well that worked out. (Snurched from Dispatches From the Culture Wars.)

?otD: Ever hypnotized a chicken?

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2/14/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (copy edits on Endurance)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 254.2 (waaaay too good a time this weekend, not enough exercise)
Currently reading: Between books

Tags: Books, Cool, Culture, Egypt, Green, guns, healthcare, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, reviews, stories, Tech, Videos, weird

Posted: 6:01 am Mon February 14 2011 | Comments(0) |