Jay Lake: Writer

[cancer] Off to see the lizard

Heading over to the infusion center this morning to have my port accessed. That’s the bit where I sit in a big chair and a nice chemo nurse slides a three-quarter-inch-long needle through the skin of my chest and into my Harkonnen heart plug. It’s very entertaining, I can assure you.

Once we’ve got me accessed, they’ll pull the blood work to make sure I can receive tomorrow’s infusion. As recently noted, it’s possible to fail this blood test. The most common failure point is immune system collapse, as happened to me back at the beginning of June. In my case, having received the Neulasta injection, we don’t expect to see that. There are some less likely failure points around organ function, but I’m relatively young and healthy and we don’t expect to see that, either. Nonetheless, we have to expect.

And speaking of Neulasta, that shit’s a bitch, if you’ll pardon my English. I had intermittent bone and muscle aches, some of which were just bizarre. This is a known and expected side effect. The weirdest one was the day where every time I strained at stool (as they say in the lower GI business), my spine and ribs would flare with pain.

Anyway, starting tomorrow morning I’ll be a drooling fool through sometime Sunday. Watch this space for dribbles.

Cancer: a never-ending adventure. If you’re considering it for yourself, I can recommend better hobbies.

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal

Posted: 5:22 am Thu June 30 2011 | Comments(0) |

[process] Working in different modes

So I’m still working on the Hugo award script with kenscholes. We’re in divide-and-conquer mode right now, direction settled and under way.

It’s an interesting process, to be working in a different mode than usual. I’ve written speeches before, and outlined less formal presentations. In my Day Jobbe, I’ve prepared hundreds of presentations over the years. And I can’t count the number of live performances I’ve done as an emcee, a toastmaster, an improv player, a reader, a panelist, a charity auctioneer, a masquerade host, etc. But I’ve never written a live performance script before. Everything I do is extemporaneous. Give me a live mike and a couple of talking points and I can entertain an audience for an hour. I’ve never needed to write a live performance script before. Probably the closest I’ve come is doing detailed interview prep when interviewing famously laconic and short-spoken subjects. (To that end, I once interviewed Howard Waldrop for an hour at an ArmadilloCon (or maybe it was a Westercon, I forget) with a three-question prep, and we never got to question two. By contrast, I did a very good one-hour interview with Larry Niven at RadCon one year that involved five pages of researched questions on my part, and I ran out of prep partway through and had to finish on followup notes taken on the fly.)

The demands of the form are simply different. Because there are two of us, and we’re working with a lot of others as well, in doing the initial draft I had to include timings and blocking information. I’m having to really drill down into the requirements and limitations of each point in the ceremony. And I have to provide the ceremony managers with a lot of detail for their own technical prep. It’s a lot more than words on the page, and it’s really stretching my brain in some very good ways.

The reality of course is that we’re going to get up there and go off-script in about the first ninety seconds. Ken and I are both extemporaneous players at heart. But the script will still anchor us to the flow of the event and the key points, most especially the timings.

But the writing of this… oh, what a workout.

Meanwhile, yesterday evening I completed and turned in an initial draft of the Sekrit Projekt. All I will say is that it, too, was in a form I don’t normally work in. Not a piece of narrative fiction in my usual mode. And much like the Hugo script project, the Sekrit Projekt stretched my brain in some very good ways.

All of which is making me think that maybe I need to dedicate more time to trying my hand at things other than narrative fiction. Maybe a graphic novel script, or a television treatment, or a gaming treatment. A one-act play. Or, God forbid, a movie script. Because this kind of stretching feels like it’s really very good for me.

How often do you write outside your accustomed modes? Is it worth the effort?

Tags: Awards, Conventions, Process, Writing

Posted: 5:15 am Thu June 30 2011 | Comments(3) |

[photos] Your Thursday moment of zen

Your Thursday moment of zen.

Car, Grand Coulee, WA. © 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: cars, Photos, zen

Posted: 4:59 am Thu June 30 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad eats badly, lives to regret it

Spam for sale — Ah, the magic of self-published ebooks.

Apple vs. the world: App Store showdown looms — Ebooks and more.

What we believe in — Language Log on the linguistics of belief. Or, as I say from time to time, just because you believe it doesn’t mean it’s true.

Civil War submarine rotated to upright position

Nighttime or violent TV tied to tots’ sleep woes — Science fiction’s very own Miki Garrison is the author of this study. Cool.

Why I’m raising my son to be a nerd — (Snurched from Scrivener’s Error.)

The Hajnal Line — Fascinating bit of sociology.

Fossilized eyes reveal a predator’s sharp vision — 515 million-year-old shrimplike beast with compound eyes just discovered.

Awesomely weird expanding halo of light seen from Hawaii

Tom Petty’s War On Michele Bachmann

Constantine is dead — Slacktivist Fred Clark on Evangelical Christian morality. A bit inside baseball for this atheist, but still pretty interesting. And a real strong commentary on the Christianist minority who dominate politics on the American Right.

While Fighting To Block SEC Investigation Of Goldman Sachs, Rep. Darrell Issa Bought Goldman Sachs Bonds — All my life I’ve heard that conservatives vote Republican because of ethics and family values, that godless liberals and unprincipled Democrats can’t be trusted. If this is Republican trustworthiness, y’all are fucking idiots. (Snurched from @twilight2000.)

U.S. foreign policy: War fever subsides — Remember the period of time where if you opposed the Iraq War, you were “objectively pro-Saddam.” US war hawks on both sides of the aisle have a hell of a lot to answer for. What most Americans have never understood is that the Iraq War especially was a creation of Republican think tanks for political gain. Despite the vicious faux-patriotic rhetoric, the real, underlying logic for attacking Iraq was never about national defense or 9-11, it was about GOP electoral gains and affirming the conservative worldview. Google “Project for a New American Century”, or “Iraq Study Group” if you don’t believe me. Thanks, GOP. Besides a second term for George W. Bush, what did we get for our $4 trillion and our thousands of dead and the hundreds of thousands of civilian dead?

?otD: Chocolate or bacon?

---

6/30/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (Sekrit Projekt)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (solid)
Weight: 230.4
Currently (re)reading: A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

Tags: Cool, Culture, ebooks, history, Language, Links, music, Personal, Photos, Politics, Religion, Science, Tech

Posted: 4:56 am Thu June 30 2011 | Comments(2) |

[writing] A bit of this, a bit of that

kenscholes and I continued our excellent Hugo adventures over a nice Italian dinner at DeNicola’s yesterday. Suffice to say we have our schtick. More work to be done there, but I’m going to let the anticipation be.

I also worked on the current Sekrit Projekt yesterday. Interestingly, like the Hugo script, in this case I’m also writing outside my normal form. That’s an unusual and entertaining challenge for me. It also means all my metrics of throughput and productivity are invalid, so I really can’t predict how long this will take me. (I almost always know with a high degree of accuracy how long it will take me to write a short story or a novel. That’s part of how I manage my own schedule so well even in the teeth of cancer treatments.) It’s kind of like starting over.

Also of potential note, I had a very pleasant lunch a couple of day ago with Jonathan Alexander, a professor at UC Irvine. It was something between a conversation and an interview, but it’s always a real pleasure to delve into the art and craft of science fiction with someone who knows way more than I do. I think he was disappointed that I wasn’t wearing an aloha shirt.

My main goal for this week are to get this iteration of the Sekrit Projekt done before I slip back into chemo on Friday. Cancer fun really starts tomorrow, as I’ll have my port accessed (ie, the needle installed for the weekend) and my blood counts checked in the morning; and tomorrow evening I start on the lovely Zyprexa/Lorazepam combination.

What are you writing this week?

Tags: Awards, Cancer, Conventions, health, interviews, Process, Writing

Posted: 5:14 am Wed June 29 2011 | Comments(1) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

Car, Grand Coulee, WA. © 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: cars, Photos, zen

Posted: 4:53 am Wed June 29 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad for yet another hump day

TOC: The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, ed Sean Wallace — Kinda cool.

Lynchburg writer fakes kidnapping to promote new book — Huh? Um… (Snurched from @lilithsaintcrow.)

Surveying eBooks — Andrew Wheeler on some new numbers.

One Math Museum, Many Variables

Walrus and Elephant — This might be my favorite flying boat photo, ever.

Between Grief and Gratitude — A very to-the-point commentary about how people respond to cancer in others. (Via joycemocha.)

Rinderpest, Scourge of Cattle, Is Vanquished — If you’re a humanitarian, read this for the victory. If you’re a writer, read this for the world building details. (Via David Goldman.)

Nebraska nuclear power plant beset by floodwaters — Hey… Guess where I’m going to be next week.

I’m a Climate Scientist — Science fights back. In rap. Hilariously fun. (Thanks to Scrivener’s Error.)

‘Go The F*** To Sleep’ Not Funny — I really have a problem with this commentary. The author is saying, in effect, “this isn’t funny because other people have worse problems.” By that logic, nothing is ever funny, because someone always has a worse problem. It’s similar to the ‘First World problems’ meme, which I detest. Life is not a race to the bottom. We don’t need to apologize for our difficulties. (See my recent ‘Theory of Problems’ post [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ].) Finding humor, or difficulty, in our own lives isn’t invalidated simply because our situations are better off than others’. Can I not laugh at my cancer because someone else’s cancer is worse?

I was wrong about same-sex marriage — A conservative observes that gay marriage alarmism has absolutely failed to come true. Too bad that’s just reality’s liberal bias showing through again.

To Know Us Is to Let Us Love — Who knew that gay people were normal?

Heresy at the National Review Online — Another conservative sees people as people instead of Other, writing about New York’s gay marriage law. Kudos to him.

‘I decided I was going to be the mayor for everybody’ — Slacktivist with another story of what happens when you begin to see people as, well, people, instead of Other. Confidential to conservative America: you really ought to try this sometime.

?otD: Why can’t we spell Wednesday?

---

6/29/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (Sekrit Projekt, Hugo script draft)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 229.2
Currently (re)reading: A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

Tags: Books, Cancer, Cool, Culture, ebooks, Funny, gay, healthcare, Links, Omaha, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, Science, Videos, weird

Posted: 4:52 am Wed June 29 2011 | Comments(1) |

[writing|process] Scripting the Hugos

I won’t say much about this on the blog because, hey, really you need to turn up in Reno for the big show, or at least catch us on streaming video (I think we’re going to be streamed), but yesterday I had the great pleasure of working on the script for this year’s Hugo Awards ceremony. And it’s making me think a bit.

This is a weird project. I am at the most one of many co-authors, given that my co-host kenscholes is taking as big or bigger a role than I, and the fine folks on the Renovation committee will be providing much input and material. Yet I’m the one that got to sit down with a blank page and think it out. Structurally, thematically. From a humor perspective. Because, yes, while this will come as a shock to many of you, I hope to be funny up on stage.

That’s weird, too. I’m not a comic writer. I can be funny, intensely funny (at least to myself) when I’m really ‘on’, but my humor is normally extemporaneous. I’m an improv guy, not a scripted guy. Yet I can hardly get up in front of a couple of thousand people who are expecting all the pomp and majesty of the Hugo Awards and riff for twenty or thirty minutes on whatever pops into my head. Or more to the point, I could do exactly that, but it wouldn’t be the Hugo Awards ceremony, it would be the Jay Lake comedy hour. Meanwhile, poor Ken would be standing there in his plaid muumuu with his electric ukelele wondering what the heck happened, and the Renovation people would be gathering pitchforks and torches backstage. Not to mention the Hugo nominees…

My point being that I’m writing to a market. A very specific market, with very specific requirements and expectations. Being funny is definitely part of the job. Really, why else would you ask me and Ken to co-host something? But a much bigger part of the job is respecting the traditions of the awards, honoring the nominees, meeting the requirements of the convention, and giving the audience the show they came for.

Doing all that and being funny at the same time, now that’s hard. Doing in writing two months in advance…? Speaking as a cancer patient in his fourth year of treatments, dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

See you all there. We’ll have a hell of a show.

Tags: Awards, Conventions, Process, Writing

Posted: 5:10 am Tue June 28 2011 | Comments(3) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

Cars, Grand Coulee, WA. © 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: cars, Photos, zen

Posted: 4:57 am Tue June 28 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad legs it on into the week

A view of the USS Oregon

DDT is good for me-e-e — This just creeps me out.

Detailed Views of Erupting Nabro Volcano — This Earth Observatory image from NASA is pretty darned intense.

NRC and Industry Rewrite Nuke History — I feel much safer now.

Can one idea be energy’s holy grail? — Speaking of nukes.

Confessions of a Gay Christian Country Singer

Betty Bowers explains traditional marriage using Biblical sources — One man, one woman, my ass. Funny as hell. (Thanks to martang.)

San Francisco considers banning the sale of all pets — Umm. I’m pretty far to the left (by American standards, at least), but this is the kind of thing that looks like liberal self-parody and, much like evolution denial on the right, makes it easier for opponents to dismiss all liberal-progressive positions by ridiculing specific examples.

Republican self-referentiality — The ‘first person singular pronoun’ meme is rapidly becoming one my favorite conservative delusions, in part because its counterfactuality is so patently and simply demonstrable. (So is evolution denial, but Creationism bears the imprimatur of faith, which confuses the issue for unclear thinkers.) That they fixate on it says so much about the quality of their thinking on other issues.

In Response To Prosser Choking Allegations, Fox’s Van Susteren Calls On Female Chief Justice To Resign — Ah, the sterling ethics and impeccable logic of American conservatism.

Michele Bachmann zeroes in on Iowa — It says a great deal about the decay of the American political system that someone like Bachmann could be a serious presidential contender. Even by conservative standards, she’s radical and bizarre.

?otD: Is it a major award, Swede?

---

6/28/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Hugo script draft)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (fitful)
Weight: 229.0
Currently (re)reading: A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Tags: Culture, gay, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Religion, Tech, weird

Posted: 4:56 am Tue June 28 2011 | Comments(2) |