Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad curses your sudden but inevitable betrayal

Reading in Public: Advice from the Pros — Alex Bledsoe collects some commentary in mini-interviews.

A baby sea-serpent no more: reinterpreting Hagelund’s juvenile Cadborosaurus — Some biology and cryptozoology neepery for you.

Space station dweller shares orbital views

Saudi women to be given right to vote and stand for election in four years — It would be very easy for me to be sarcastic about this in comparison to the deeply retrograde ambitions of the American Taliban within the GOP, but honestly, this is something to celebrate. Juan Cole comments further on this.

Presidential Candidates’ Positions on Gay Rights — A handy and interesting chart. No real surprises.

Our budget problem in two charts (and one issue) — (Thanks to danjite.)

Fla. GOP sweats over Social Security — Is it possible that for once the GOP’s nutball rhetoric might actually have consequences? Normally they have a permanent “get out of jail free” card from Your Liberal Media and the voters at large for their bizarre crap.

DNC Chair: All GOP candidates are “the same” — “It doesn’t much matter which one of the Republicans gets nominated because they’re all the same,” the Florida Democrat said. “They are all embracing and bear-hugging the Tea Party. Moving to the right – they can’t move to the right far enough.”

Birther Civil War Breaks Out Over Marco Rubio — Extremist idiocy breeds extremist idiots.

Obama says Republicans would ‘cripple’ America — Well, yeah. Look what they did to the country the last time they were in power. Why anybody who cares a whit about our future as a country would vote Republican is beyond me, on the simple face of the recent historical evidence.

?otD: Feeling the serenity?

9/26/2011
Writing time yesterday: 5.0 hours (novel outlining and short story revision, WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 hours (solid)
Weight: 222.2
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Tags: Africa, business, gay, guns, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Science, sex, Writing

Posted: 5:22 am Mon September 26 2011 | Comments(0) |

[books] Healing Waves: “A Charity Anthology for Japan…”

For information and signal boost…

You can find a new story by me in Sky Warrior Books’ charity anthology, Healing Waves, edited by Phyl Radford. This is a digital anthology, and all proceeds from the purchase of the eBook go to help the victims of the devastating quake/tsunami earlier this year.

There are stories by David Lee Summers, Lawrence Dagstine, Sara Mueller, Indra Chopra, Barton Paul Levenson, Patricia Correll, Maggie Bonham, Carol Hightshoe, and more, including yours truly. Please consider purchasing a copy. It’s available for your Amazon Kindle and through outlets such as Smashwords.

Tags: Books, Japan, stories

Posted: 7:54 am Sun September 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[writing|movies] Must keep moving, or critics will eat me

My list from yesterday, annotated for achievement:

• Transmit Kalimpura to my editor for formal turn-in
• Respond to an email interview
• Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
• Participate in a podcast interview
• Revise and submit a short story currently in draft
• Write a committed short story I haven’t yet been able to focus on
• Doing some editorial work on an anthology proposal
• Make initial notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts

Plus I drafted the blog post on cancer, coping and terminal diagnoses, which I’ll run tomorrow morning when more than three of you are reading.

The revised to-do list looks something like this:

• Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
• Participate in a podcast interview
• Await reader comments then submit a short story currently in draft
• Write a committed short story I haven’t yet been able to focus on
• Do a bit more editorial work on an anthology proposal based on feedback received
• Make further notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts based on feedback received
• Review Sunspin feedback from one of my readers
• Begin process of collating my last 3.5 years of cancer blogging into a book proposal

As I remain the boy in the bubble for a few days yet, thanks to my immune system doing a scarper, I have plentiful time today. It’s more a question of mental energy and focus, which despite yesterday’s productivity is still a bit iffy.

Also, watched two movies with the_child and mlerules yesterday.

One was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [ imdb ], a movie that needs no introduction for anyone between the ages of 40 and 50something. This is one of the truly great movies of its decade, alongside The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and a few others, and deeply funny in a way that holds up well today. I’d forgotten Charlie Sheen was in it. Also, it was interesting to see how much the entire plot as-written would collapse once cell phones and caller ID were introduced. Many of the shenanigans in the early part of the film involved playing games with phones that would make no sense today, and most of the film’s plausibility (such as it was) revolved around people simply being out of touch and unable to contact one another. These were things I had to explain to the_child. In a weird way, this makes Ferris Bueller a historical. As always, very highly recommended for a re-watch or for showing for the first time to your younger friends.

The other movie we watched was the recent release Hanna [ imdb ]. That is a damned good movie that I don’t think anyone ever heard of. Spy thriller involving a teen-aged girl, so vaguely connected to La Femme Nikita and films of that ilk. It was taut, very true to the title character’s deeply warped perspectives, much more emotional than such movies usually are, and exciting as hell. As the_child pointed out, Hanna and Green are basically the same character. The movie also did a lot of really good stuff at the layer of production values, camera work and sound design. Frankly, I’d like to see it up for an Oscar for sound design and scoring, it was that good. And if you’re fan of Cate Blanchett, this was a strange and fascinating role for her as well. Very highly recommended.

And now I’m curious. What’s your favorite ’80′s movies?

Tags: Cancer, Child, Movies, Personal, reviews, Writing

Posted: 7:51 am Sun September 25 2011 | Comments(3) |

[photos] Your Sunday moment of zen

Your Sunday moment of zen.

Dried starfish detail. © 2011 criada

Tags: Photos, zen

Posted: 7:29 am Sun September 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad reads the wires

Roger Ebert on Writing: 15 Reflections From ‘Life Itself’

The science behind pleasure-seeking

Small Factories Take Root in Africa

Washington state gunman shot dead after firing near school field — Nope. No connections between guns and violence. I’m sure it says that in the Second Amendment somewhere. This poor fellow was just defending his essential civil liberties from the menace of middle school children. Move along, citizen, nothing to see here but liberal propaganda.

Are Both Political Parties Science Skeptics? — Sociological Images addresses this false equivalency. Topics such as evolution and climate change are subject to overwhelming scientific consensus. These aren’t “reasonable people can disagree” topics like tax rates or foreign policy. These are “the wilfully ignorant being exploited for political gain” topics.

Santorum asks Google to clean up search results for his name — Good luck with that, Senator Frothy Mixture of Lube and Feces Resulting From Anal Sex. This couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow. Well, okay, I can think of a few.

Texas GOP Rep On Cuts To Family Planning: ‘Of Course This Is A War On Birth Control’ — This should be a surprise to no one, of course. Are you proud of your Republican party?

Mitt Romney wins Michigan straw poll, Rick Perry a distant second — I really don’t have a dog in the Republican primary fight. I think they’re basically all nuts except maybe Huntsman, who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance. Romney, however, is marginally less nuts than the rest of that pack of baying fools. And I’m not one of those liberal-progressives cheering for the greatest nut to win the GOP nod so we can defeat them more easily. Fundamentally, that’s how we got George W. Bush, who came into office in an era of (relative) peace and (significant) prosperity, and a balanced budget, and brought us the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, the worst erosion of civil liberties since McCarthyism, a trillion dollar war of choice launched on false premises, and the deepest deficit in American history. (All of which is retroactively Obama’s fault according to the Tea Party, of course.) Not to mention the national embarassment of having an incurious fool for a leader for eight long, miserable years.

Rick Perry: The HP of Presidential Candidates — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison with more on Perry and especially (despite the headline) on Romney.

?otD: The New York Times or the Daily News?

9/25/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (novel outlining and short story revision, and WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 222.2
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Tags: Africa, business, gay, guns, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Science, sex, Writing

Posted: 7:27 am Sun September 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[personal|writing] Getting back on the horse

It’s been a rough week. Began with the horrendous lower GI problems. That segued into difficult therapist conversations. Then the immune system crash and the postponed chemotherapy session. The the CEA levels thing. Really, I feel like cancer has been banging my skull against pavement all week, trying to shake the loose change out of my ears.

I’m out of pennies, dude. And parasites that kill their hosts are not evolutionarily successful.

In the middle of all this I got Kalimpura finished, but since then, a combination of post-novel ennui and cancer stress has kept me away from the keyboard. Today my plan is to work on one or more of a list of smaller projects I have committed to. In no particular order, these are:

• Transmit Kalimpura to my editor for formal turn-in
• Respond to an email interview
• Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
• Participate in a podcast interview
• Revise and submit a short story currently in draft
• Write a committed short story I haven’t yet been able to focus on
• Doing some editorial work on an anthology proposal
• Make initial notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts

Besides all that, I have some Sunspin feedback to review, I want to start working on collating my last 3.5 years of cancer blogging into a book proposal, and I have a difficult blog post to draft on cancer, coping and terminal diagnoses. (No, that’s not code for something bad I haven’t admitted to yet. Don’t worry.)

Not that all or even most of this will happen today. It’s just the landscape immediately before me, at least pending feedback from la agente on Calamity of So Long a Life and what we need to do to finalize that book to market.

Also, if you’re expecting something from me and don’t recognize your project/commitment/whatever on the above list, this might be a terrific time to write and remind me. My attention to detail isn’t quite what it could be these days, thanks to chemo brain, and I expect to completely run out of capability and attention span sometime in the next 3-5 weeks as my chemo fog deepens.

Tags: Books, Calamity, Cancer, health, Kalimpura, Personal, stories, Writing

Posted: 6:44 am Sat September 24 2011 | Comments(0) |

[cancer] And yet another potential problem rears its ugly head

Yesterday I got my CEA (carcinoembryonic antigen) results from Thursday’s bloodwork. They are 1.9 ng/mL (on a scale of roughly 0-10). A month ago, at my first post-op assessment, they were 0.5. That’s a quadrupling of the value in four weeks. CEAs are a protein marker that can indicate the presence of active tumors given my kind of cancer.

The level itself is not too alarming in principle, as anything below 3.1 is considered within normal range. There are non-cancer processes, including inflammatory bowel problems, that can produce measurable CEA levels. The trend, however, concerns me a great deal. And historically, my personal non-cancer baseline values are down around 0.2 or 0.3, so even in an absolute sense these numbers are a potential issue despite the clinical guidance.

Here are some graphics that may help visualize this.

This one shows the trend line since my pre-op blood test in July. You can see the recent uptick. The pink line at the top of the chart was superimposed by me to show the 3.1 cutoff.

This graphic shows the trend line since last November. You can see the appearance of the tumor, the drop-off once chemo starts, the drop-off from surgery. I’ve annotated it in orange to show some of those points, and again included the pink reference line for the 3.1 cutoff.

One potentially benign explanation is measurement error and/or normal fluctuation, which I find unlikely given a swing of 1.4 points on a 10 point scale. Another potentially benign explanation is a CEA spike based on my recent lower GI problems. That’s a bit more likely, though I’m unsure of the mechanism. However, given my history, you can imagine my mental and emotional state right now.

My oncologist tells me that as my levels are still within normal ranges, she is not concerned. We’re going to wait until November for the next planned CT scan. I am not especially reassured as (a) I can read a trend line and (b) the current values are high compared to my historical values, regardless of the clinical cutoff for normal range. Obviously the next couple of blood tests will tell us a lot.

In any case, even if this entire business is a false alarm, this is just another reminder of my essential helplessness in the face of this disease. Coming hard on the heels of recent events, I’ve been taking this one pretty tough.

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal

Posted: 6:31 am Sat September 24 2011 | Comments(8) |

[photos] Your Saturday moment of zen

Your Saturday moment of zen.

National Park Service fire truck, Alcatraz. © 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, zen

Posted: 6:26 am Sat September 24 2011 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad is spreadable

Keffy Kehrli Talks About Gender on Writing Excuses

Vocabulary Lesson — Madeleine Robins is smart about word choice in fiction. For example, I refuse to use “ok” or “okay” in any setting where the United States through the late 19th century is not part of the background. Ie, never in secondary world fantasy, for example, or much alternate history. It absolutely throws me out of a story when a character in a fantasy uses that word.

The Children’s Authors Who Broke the Rules

When a Dictionary Could Outrage — Ah, prescriptivism.

USB Typewriters — This is made of awesome. Brazil, anyone? (Snurched from @neilhimself.)

Yesterday’s xkcd on the CERN speed of light thing — I love his mouseover.

Colbert Super Mac — Now this is the screaming hamburger of death.

The Politics of Yellow: Butter vs. Margarine

Loud Sex Is A Billion Dollar Problem

It’s not ‘class warfare,’ it’s Christianity — We need to understand the so-called “Christian” underpinnings of the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-the-poor, “let him die” approach to economics and public policy today as completely un-Christian, as well as un-American. Good luck with that. Conservative America ain’t listening.

The Social Contract — Paul Krugman on class warfare. And tell me again why ordinary Republican voters are fighting so hard to protect the wealth of the top 1%?

‘The last thing I’d do is condemn you — Slacktivist Fred Clark on the empathy of Pat Robertson. Which is, admittedly, a bit like writing about Palin’s spirit of public service or Bush’s keen intellect.

Becky Fischer of ‘Jesus Camp’ Infamy Teaches Kids To ‘Raise The Dead’ — Disgusting. One of the many reasons I’m an atheist is Christians like this woman, and Pat Robertson.

The Power of Flat Out Lies — But generally speaking, [liberal] opinion leaders don’t go on national TV, look straight into the camera, and just outright lie about stuff. [Conservatives] do. Welcome to FOX News America, where the “true facts” come out despite reality. (Snurched from @lilithsaintcrow.)

‘Unfortunate’: Condemnation Of Gay Soldier Boos In Post-Debate Spin Room — Why on earth are the GOP candidates surprised? This is the party voting base they and their strategists have sent years very deliberately creating and carefully nurturing. Hateful, exclusionary, paranoid, irrational. And very specificially, deeply anti-gay. Read your own platforms, guys. Gay hate is right out front.

?otD: Butter, margarine or olive oil?

9/24/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (cancer stress/post-novel ennui)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 hours (solid)
Weight: 222.4
Currently reading: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

Tags: Cool, Food, gay, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, sex, Tech, Writing

Posted: 6:25 am Sat September 24 2011 | Comments(1) |

[personal] Dream log again

Last night I dreamt that seanan_mcguire and I had a little girl together. The dream largely consisted of ordinary life images — me taking our daughter to the park, the three of us making lunch, being inside Seanan’s palatial and baroque apartments getting ready to go to a party.

(Note: Although Seanan is a dear friend IRL, I have never been to her home, and have no idea how palatial and baroque her residence is. My house definitely is of the suburbia variety, right down to the brown curtains and wall-to-wall carpeting, neither palatial nor baroque. [Well, except for the human body parts leftover from my surgeries and the oddball antiques like my Dahomean tribal throne in the basement.])

Symbolism? Not much beyond the very obvious. Anxiety cues? None whatsoever. Entertaining? Absolutely.

Sometimes a dream is just a dream. And sometimes Seanan McGuire is just Seanan McGuire.

Tags: dreams, Funny, Personal

Posted: 5:38 am Fri September 23 2011 | Comments(0) |