Jay Lake: Writer

[personal] Slipping through the week

Workie bits yesterday, and a day off from writing. I read some of more of J.A. Pitts’ Honeyed Words, did a bunch of homework supervision and assistance with the_child, and had a social evening.

Today it’s more Day Jobbery, lunch with my parents, another hospital visit, more homework, and a bit more socializing. Plus I’ll jimmy in an hour or so of writing/WRPA.

The weekend will be full. I’m involved with the_child all day Saturday, including the first lacrosse game of the season. Sunday I’m off to Omaha, where, weather permitting, there will be hot air ballooning late Sunday afternoon or possibly a day or two later. Thursday I head from Omaha to Austin for Paradise Lost, then home the following Sunday night.

Also, it’s just about last call for questions to be included in the reader interview with me [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. I’ll be answering them over the weekend.

Got plans?

Tags: Austin, Books, Child, Conventions, family, interviews, Omaha, Personal, Travel, work

Posted: 5:21 am Thu March 31 2011 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Thursday moment of zen

Your Thursday moment of zen.

Pacific coast, Marin County, 2007. © 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: 5:10 am Thu March 31 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad wanders into Thursday

Hard SF and Soft, or Girls v. Boys — Nicola Griffith on genre privilege and gender.

Image of the Day: Sci-fi growth chart measures your geekiness — (Thanks to my brother.)

A quintessence of dust — Roger Ebert muses on the vastness of space and the nature of life.

Secret Space Plane Can’t Hide From Amateur Sleuths — The X-37B in orbit.

Nissan’s Cartoon Cars, Once So Hip — This is pretty interesting, if you’re into design or into things automotive.

Google’s recipe for recipes — Hmm. Interesting. (Via @simonowens.)

Monuments to Clan Life Are Losing Their Appeal — [T]he thousands of “earthen buildings” here, built by the ethnic Hakka and Minnan people of rural Fujian Province, are the ultimate architectural expression of clan existence in China. (Thanks to Dad.)

Let There Be Light Bulbs — In this time of war and rampant unemployment, it’s very reassuring to see our conservative thought leaders focusing on issues of critical national importance.

?otD: Thursday Next?

---

3/31/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (took the day off)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 248.6
Currently reading: A Bard’s Eye View, ed. Michael A. Ventrella; Honeyed Words by J.A. Pitts

Tags: China, Cool, Culture, Food, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, scince, Tech

Posted: 5:07 am Thu March 31 2011 | Comments(0) |

[writing|process] Sunspin milestones and metrics

Yesterday afternoon, I finished the light revision pass of section two of Calamity of So Long A Life, which is book one of Sunspin. The further adventures of the Before Michaela Cannon and her crew of antagonists and allies is off to first readers.

For this tranche, I wrote and lightly revised 72,800 words in the course of 52.5 hours. That’s over 36 calendar days, of which I worked 31 days. Time expended included a nontrivial amount of effort revising and poking at the outline, as well as the revision effort itself (approximately 6.75 hours). The total word count, 2/3 of the way through the draft, stands at 133,000 words, which jibes nicely with my estimate 180-200,000 words. My throughput in this revised process is 1,400 words per hour, which means that when I start working again on this project I can expect another 50 or so hours of effort to wrap this first draft.

I know some people are pretty critical of me reporting these numbers. A few people have been critical of me even tracking them.

Tracking these statistics just part of my process. By evaluating my throughput, I can size future work efforts and plan my time. This is how I know it will take me 5-7 more working months to finish this project in first draft. That’s not a guess or a hope, it’s a projection drawn from existing baseline data. As a working professional, it’s crucial for me to know what dates I’m going to hit.

Reporting these statistics is perhaps a more arguable act. The arguments I get run along the lines of “You’re intimidating other writers” or “You’re misleading other writers into thinking this is how it should be done”. Really, this is my accountability to myself. If I report in public every day on the state of my work, I have a strong incentive to keep working.

With rare exceptions, everything I say about writing is descriptive rather than prescriptive. When I talk about my productivity and my work, that’s all I’m talking about. My productivity, my work. I would hope that anyone paying sufficient attention to my blog to know what I have written and how I’ve been writing it would be inspired rather than intimidated or misled. This is how I inspire myself.

Meanwhile, Sunspin marches on. As previously mentioned, I’m laying the project aside for several weeks to knock out some short fiction efforts and then revise Kalimpura, which I owe to casacorona by June. So my poor characters shall wait within their wells of tension until I return with my bucket of words to once more draw them out into the light of story.

Tags: Books, Calamity, Kalimpura, Process, Publishing, stories, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 5:09 am Wed March 30 2011 | Comments(6) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

Mailboxes, Marin County, 2007. © 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: 5:06 am Wed March 30 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad wraps the draft

A review of Visitants, ed. Stephen Jones — Including favorable mentions of my little collection of linked tales therein.

MIND MELD: How Important is Plausible Science In Science Fiction? — Another squib from SF Signal and assorted authors.

Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time — The true secret of captchas. Fascinating stuff about extremely distributed computing. (Thanks to Dad.)

Complaining About the Smartphone: a Lesson in Diminishing Returns

Changing corporate gender: a case study — No Fear of the Future with a fascinating essay on high risk occupations.

How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick — Comparing local combat casualties Afghanistan with U.S. and Canadian casualties.

Using Heat to Cool Buildings — Novel materials could make practical air conditioners and refrigerators that use little or no electricity. Some cool materials science here.

Quadrocopter Ball Juggling — This video is pretty bizarre. (Thanks to willyumtx.)

First Image of Mercury From Orbit — I think I’ve seen that face before…

Asteroid Mining: A Marker for SETI?

Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters — Pseudographia and faith.

Bryan Fischer is a Dolt (Constitution for Me but Not for Thee Edition) — Words from the Founders on religious freedom and Constitutional protections. Oddly, the original Originalists don’t conform to the modern conservative position. Rush Limbaugh can surely explain this away.

Top Fox News Executive Admits Lying On-Air About Obama — Fox News knowingly lying. Who knew? Also, who knew water was wet? They distort, you decide.

?otD: What did you finish yesterday?

---

3/30/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hours (revisions on Sunspin, net 200 word gain to manuscript; plus extensive WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 248.8
Currently reading: A Bard’s Eye View, ed. Michael A. Ventrella; Honeyed Words by J.A. Pitts

Tags: Cool, Culture, Food, healthcare, Links, media, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Science, stories, Tech, Videos, weird

Posted: 5:06 am Wed March 30 2011 | Comments(2) |

[personal|cancer] This and that and Edith Throckmorton

First, a note on my recently posted travel schedule [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. I accidentally omitted my presence as an instructor at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference 10/21-10/23. I’m very pleased to be a part of their program!

Also, don’t forget the reader interview with me is still open [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. Toss me a question or two if you’d like, I’ll be answering them sometime in the next few days.

In the writing world, I’m nearly finished with my light revision pass of the first draft of the current tranche of Sunspin. That would be the middle third of Calamity of So Long a Life. Probably that will go out to my first readers sometime this afternoon. Upcoming, a handful of short story commitments and a deep revision pass on Kalimpura. I’ll be back on Sunspin in about a month, once I have those other projects dealt with. If you’re an editor pining for a new short story from me, now would be a good time to mention it.

Today I’m over to the hospital again for visitation. My friend in the oncology ward is up and down. I continue to be sobered by his experience in a deeply personal way. I also recognize that his approach to his illness is very different than mine. While his story is not mine to tell here, in my case, I fought every inch and step of the way that I humanly could. This I learned from my late friend Edith Throckmorton, who lived into her eighties with injuries and health problems that probably should have laid her under decades earlier.

tillyjane, a/k/a my mom, provided most of Edith’s late-life medical advocacy and personal support, acting as a surrogate daughter. That’s how I knew Edith — the two of them were church friends, originally.

Edith never gave an inch. Frankly, sharp and witty and kind as she was, Edith was also a dreadful old bat. I know she would have smiled to hear me say that. Because being a dreadful old bat is what kept her going years past the point when any reasonable person would have laid down their burdens. She knew that every surrender was permanent, and was quite vocal about her convictions. Chemo was kind of like eldering, except reversible. Everything I gave up, I lost until well after I was done with the process. I’m still getting things back now, nine months after finishing chemo.

Edith was and is an inspiration to me, even when people around me were telling me that I was fighting it too hard, that I should accept the process.

Never fucking accept anything about cancer.

Three weeks from now, I’ll know what it is I have to fight next. If I’m lucky, nothing but fear of the future. If I’m unlucky, then, well, I get to spend another 15-18 months being inspired by Edith on my next journey through hell.

I am afraid.

Tags: Books, Calamity, Cancer, Conventions, family, health, interviews, Personal, Sunspin, Travel, Writing

Posted: 5:15 am Tue March 29 2011 | Comments(4) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

Entrance to San Francisco bay, 2007. © 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: 4:55 am Tue March 29 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad thinks about maps

Video: SWITL magic goop scoop — Weird robotics. (Thanks to danjite.)

Spaceflight: Risky Business — From the blog Vintage Space. (Via Centauri Dreams.)

Geopolitics in First-Person Shooter Video Games — Weird and interesting squib from Sociological Images.

Radiation Dosage Chart — Information Is Beautiful with a visualization of dosage levels and consequences.

Libya and the Conservative Conundrum — A fair percentage of [conservatives] reject the president’s policy of bombing Libya while being in favor of bombing Libya.

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here) — An essay from embattled historian William Cronon. The GOP may have bitten off more than they can chew in trying to intimidate this guy. (Thanks to shsilver.)

Haley Barbour Comes Out Against Slavery — Nice to see the leading lights of the GOP catching up on current events. Also some interesting historical counterfactuals in this piece.

Gingrich fears ‘atheist country … dominated by radical Islamists’ — Hours after declaring Sunday that he expects to be running for president within a month, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he’s worried the United States could be “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists,” in the foreseeable future, according to Politico. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Are conservatives really this stupid? This is nothing but scare word bingo. In what conceivable universe are radical Islamists also secular atheists? (Via Pharyngula.)

?otD: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

---

3/29/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.25 hours (revisions on Sunspin, net 600 word gain to manuscript)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 249.6
Currently reading: A Bard’s Eye View, ed. Michael A. Ventrella; Honeyed Words by J.A. Pitts

Tags: Cool, games, Japan, labor, Libya, Links, Personal, Politics, Religion, Science, Tech, Videos, weird

Posted: 4:53 am Tue March 29 2011 | Comments(0) |

[cancer] More visits to the hospital

I’ve been back twice more to visit my friend who is ill with cancer. He’s dealing with distinct and separate complications from his tumors and from his chemo. Things are intersecting poorly, but he is on the mend.

With my scans coming up in three weeks, this holds a lot of resonances for me. I am very sorry to see him in distress. I am very glad to see him improving. At a gut level, I get this experience of his.

As I said before, this is my cancer path and my treatment course. This could be me.

It’s not, but it could be.

So much to think about.

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal

Posted: 5:28 am Mon March 28 2011 | Comments(1) |