Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad actually sleeps for the first time in almost a week

Why Even Resolute Dieters Often Fail

Ghost cars of the world

Plant RNAs Found in Mammals — MicroRNAs from plants accumulate in mammalian blood and tissues, where they can regulate gene expression.

The Milky Way from the top of the world — Quite an image.

A Wary Look at Habitable Worlds

Baptistina Asteroid Did Not Cause Dinosaur Extinction — In the Yucatan, with an asteroid…

The Data Buffet Is Open (Grazing Welcome) — On cell phones and data plans.

Italian PM allegedly insulted German chancellor in recorded conversation with newspaper editor — The headline on this is both offensive and NSFW. (The story is even more offensive.) And weird. And this man runs a major Western democracy. (Thanks to danjite.)

Romney: Time in France Molded Life, Business — Republicans hate France. Remember when one of the GOP attacks on Kerry was that he “looked French”? Wonder how much we’ll hear about this.

Santorum’s Lament — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on Santorum on Perry. I loved this comparison of Perry to Bush, and his comment on Dubya: As it turned out, [Bush's] instinctive decision-making and ignorance were not a winning combination.

36% [of South Carolina Republican voters] Say [Obama] Was Definitely or Probably Born in Another Country — And various other blatant counterfactuals so beloved of the conservative mind. This isn’t stuff that’s open to debate, like tax policy. These are flatly untrue ideas directly counter to readily verifiable facts, which have been promoted by GOP leaders, strategists and media mouthpieces. With an entire political party and media apparatus dedicated to creating and sheltering them, we wonder why we have low information voters?

?otD: How’d you sleep?

9/21/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.5 hours (revisions to Kalimpura)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 hours (solid!)
Weight: 219.2
Currently reading: Matter by Iain M. Banks

Tags: cars, Culture, healthcare, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Science, Tech, weird

Posted: 5:22 am Wed September 21 2011 | Comments(0) |

[process] Being smart about yourself and your writing

Yesterday, I posted an impassioned plea for aspiring writers to ignore writing advice. [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] Therefore, being the logically consistent fellow that I am, today I am going to post some more advice for you to ignore.

What I really meant, of course, was that aspiring writers should learn to filter.

And that is a damned hard trick to pull. Right on the level with pulling yourself up in the air by grasping the scruff of your own neck.

Take me, for an example. When I first started trying to write professionally, back around 1990, I was convinced I was hot shit. I figured on being the next genius phenom bestseller as soon as I was discovered. And no one had anything to tell me that I needed to hear.

I exaggerate, but only a little. Obviously, this was before I reached the stage I described yesterday of taking everyone else’s advice too seriously.

While not all writers go through it, this drastic overconfidence is a necessary stage for many of us. (The obverse of deep self-denial and self-deprecation that some people follow is often essentially the same phenomenon filtered through different personalities and life experiences.) It requires a staggering amount of ego to assume anyone wants to read what you have to say, let alone pay money for the privilege. That’s true even as a well-established working professional author, as I am today. It’s far more true of an aspiring writer in their earliest stages.

That ego, that drastic overconfidence, is the match that can set the fire. Because honestly, who would go through all this, the years of unrewarded effort, the endless criticism, the “when are you going to get a real job/do something important” comments from friends and family, just for the opportunity to run around pitching agents and editors in hopes of being that one in a thousand manuscripts that actually makes it onto a bookstore shelf.

If you’re doing it for the money, you might as well play the lottery. If you’re doing it for the love, get a puppy. It’s the burning need, however expressed, that drives so many of us.

But that same burning need, expressed as drastic overconfidence, for many years deafened me to good advice I did need to hear. It kept me from seeing flaws in my craft, in my art, in my professionalism. The same match that lit my fire blinded me to the course I had to follow.

(Parenthetically speaking, I’m awfully glad blogs weren’t the done thing around 1994 or so, when I was suspicious and resentful that the only people who got published were the well-connected. It took me years to understand that the reason authors and editors all know each other is because they work together, not the other way around. Thankfully, all the dumb, self-defending, angry rationalizations I made to my workshop and my writer friends back then about why I wasn’t getting published are not now memorialized forever in the Internet wayback machine.)

My point is this: learning to listen to good advice is the complement of learning to ignore good advice. The trick is learning to filter. And if you’re anything like me, you either have had or currently have a lot of noise in your head that keeps you from doing so. Likewise, if you’re anything like me, you don’t recognize that noise for what it is, so it will keep getting in your way until you do.

The best thing I can say now is slow down and think deeply, especially about the events and comments that annoy you or make you defensive about your writing, your process, your career. And try to do some metathinking about what you’re filtering out, perhaps by recognizing moments in the past when the scales fell from your eyes and you were able to identify a blind spot.

I’m certainly wondering right now what blind spots I have today that I’ll ruefully regret in five or ten years. And the blind spots I have now…? They’ll be in that Internet wayback machine. So I am careful what I say.

And still I write.

Tags: Personal, Process, Writing

Posted: 4:17 pm Tue September 20 2011 | Comments(3) |

[cancer] Another wild night

Here’s the two most cogent things I can say about the last night’s continued lower GI distress:

First, there is nothing about this problem consistent with personal dignity, even when one lives utterly alone.

Second, as of the writing of this blog post, things are quiescent this morning for the first time since midnight this past Thursday night/Friday morning.

The rest under cut for medical and digestive TMI

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal

Posted: 4:16 pm Tue September 20 2011 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

Simran in 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: Photos, zen

Posted: 4:15 pm Tue September 20 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is even more ragged

Próba obrzydliwości — A rather negative Polish review of the translated edition of Trial of Flowers, from a reviewer who also disliked Mainspring.

It Must Follow, as the Night the Day — Madeleine Robins on writers who don’t read. Huh?

Don’t Waste Transportation — New in our gallery and store: From WWII, “War Traffic Must Come First.” Mmm, steam locomotive. Trains. Mmm.

Uh oh! Netflix doesn’t own the @Qwikster Twitter account — Glad to see they’re on top of Marketing 101.

Capitalism, Animals, and the Ownership of Icons — This may be perfectly well within the law, but it’s also nuts.

Is the World Running Out of Oil? — Poo pooing the Peak Oil hypothesis. Again.

Harvesting ‘limitless’ hydrogen from self-powered cells — US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fuelled by bacteria can be “self-powered” and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.

Circumbinary Orbits and Stellar Radii — “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!”

Fighting back against creationism — Hooray for scientists in the UK for having the temerity to fight back against the religious charlatanism of evolution denial.

‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ formally ends — Openly gay people will now be able to serve in the US military after repeal of controversial 18-year-old DADT law. One manifest conservative injustice finally ends, at least. (Yes, I know DADT was a Clinton-era “compromise”, but but it was a concession to rank GOP bigotry.) Watch now for all the alarmist rhetoric from the Right to completely fail to come true. As always.

Study Links Medical Costs and Personal Bankruptcy — Harvard researchers say 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. in 2007 were caused by health problems—and 78% of those filers had insurance. Unpossible! Everyone knows Rush said HCR was a socialist plot! Like I’ve said, in general, the people who oppose HCR are people who’ve never had to deal with the real consequences of serious illness. The conservative failure of empathy and imagination is firmly in play, along with some good old fashioned Calvinist/Christianist vindictiveness. (Thanks to danjite.)

Through The Looking Glass: Bachmann’s Long History Of Strange Statements — The national media is now starting to figure something out: Michele Bachmann says a lot of things that aren’t just kind of crazy, but manifestly false. No wonder the GOP base has been so enthralled with Bachmann. She fits right in with FOX News’ twisted version of America.

Boehner’s ‘Tea Party Challenger’ Really a Randall Terry Plant? — Golly. Imagine that. The Tea Party being used for conservative political ends. No one could have possibly foreseen this.

?otD: I still got nothing.

9/20/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (ill from chemo side effects)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (severely interrupted, plus napping)
Weight: 218.0
Currently reading: Matter by Iain M. Banks

Tags: Art, Books, business, Cool, gay, healthcare, law, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, reviews, Science, trains, Trial

Posted: 4:14 pm Tue September 20 2011 | Comments(0) |

[process] Learning how to write

Barring continued sidelining from the current round of chemo side effects, I’m on the home stretch with Kalimpura revisions. My revision process on this book is something I’m pretty comfortable with. (See here: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] for a discussion of how it works, fundamentally.) I’m at the late stages, having gone through the book a number of times already based on first reader feedback, as well as input from my agent and editor. Saturday I finished a major line read and a minor tweaking pass with some inserted scenes. As soon as I can write again, possibly today, I’ll handle a major inserted scene, and begin addressing the pacing issues in the middle. Not sure how long the pacing adjustments will take. Then, well, a final check for fit, finish and corrosion, and I’m done. Hopefully before I go back for my next chemo session this coming Friday, as previously discussed. (I’m afraid that if I don’t, this will be the session where my writing brain checks out and doesn’t come back for months…)

Kalimpura is the seventeenth novel I’ve written. It’s the tenth novel I’ve brought all the way through the revision process to final draft and commercial production. Along the way, I’ve made numerous adjustments to my process, and a few times major redirections.

Even now, I’m still learning how to write. I could live to be 103, write as many novels as Bob Silverberg or Elizabeth Bear, and I’d still be learning how to write.

The difference between me today revising Kalimpura and me almost twenty years ago working on my first novel effort, The January Machine, is that now I have confidence. I have confidence in my ideas. I have confidence in my craft. I have confidence in my drafting process. I have confidence in my revision process. This is the benefit of having written eighteen first drafts, and (almost) ten final-for-production drafts. I know what I’m good at. (And I know what I’m not good at, which is why I’m still learning.)

However, back when I was a lot newer and didn’t have that confidence, I had a very specific problem.

Which is to say, other people’s advice and comments about the process confused me.

When another writer would tell younger-writer-me that they wrote a detailed outline before they drafted a novel, I would feel guilty that I didn’t do that. I was doing it wrong! When another writer would tell younger-writer-me that they wrote character step-sheets and biographies, I would worry that I didn’t understand my characters well enough. When another writer writer would tell younger-writer-me that they did second, third and fourth drafts of a story or novel, I would fret that I didn’t do enough drafting.

All of this was magnified when the writer offering these pearls of wisdom was published, established, someone with books on the shelf.

One of the things I had to do in learning to write was learn when to ignore advice about how to do it, when that advice seriously conflicted with my own process and outcomes. Basically, on drafting, I make it up as I go along. That’s true even when writing a novel from a detailed outline. I’m still making it up as I go along. I could no more work from a character step-sheet or a scene-by-scene outline than I could write a novel in Sanskrit, and if I tried to do so, I’d wind up in an unhappy hole of unproductivity.

The point being, it took me years to learn to filter advice and commentary so I could grab out the bits that did apply to me, and let go of the bits that didn’t, without having to agonize over why I couldn’t write like author X or workshop member Y.

As a side note, I think the first established author I knew who writes more or less the way I do is Nina Kiriki Hoffman. I’ve since come to know others, but even with our similarities, we’re all different down in the details.

Learning to write, for me, has been a process of two things: practice (“write more!”) and learning who to ignore. Ignoring good advice has turned out to be every bit as important as following it, and probably quite a bit more. The danger of the blogosphere, of course, as opposed to the coal-fired pre-Internet days when I was starting out, is there is an avalanche of advice from well-meaning writers, myself very much included, available to aspiring writers today. Back when I was aspiring, I had to go to considerable effort over the course of months to be as confused as 20 minutes with a Web browser will offer today. Sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

As I’ve said before, the best thing you can possibly do is ignore me and write your own stories in your own way. It’s how I learned.

It’s how I’m still learning.

Tags: Process, Writing

Posted: 5:49 am Mon September 19 2011 | Comments(4) |

[cancer] More on the current bout of side effects

Here’s the most cogent thing I can say about the weekend’s lower GI distress:

I’ve lost five pounds since Friday morning.

I spent yesterday laying low. GI was quieter, but only in a relative sense. By even my ordinary daily standards (still a pretty low bar in this season of chemotherapy) it continued ugly. Just not as overwhelming as the previous two days.

This also seriously interferes with my sleep, as the cramping and frequent need to step into the bathroom wake me up multiple times per night. And I know from long experience that sleep loss is the real danger.

Today I feel battered, worn, and spacey. Also, the cramping and ongoing movements continue so far at the same pace and intensity as yesterday, so it’s not over. On the plus side, even more fervid dreams, including being trapped in an elevator, being at a Christian orgy, and road tripping along the south coast of Australia.

So it’s not all bad.

What I worry about the most, honestly, is losing too much writing time. And I’m very tired of feeling awful.

Tags: Cancer, dreams, health, Personal, Writing

Posted: 5:43 am Mon September 19 2011 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Monday moment of zen

Your Monday moment of zen.

National Park Service Ranger Craig G. in 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: Photos, zen

Posted: 5:36 am Mon September 19 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is ragged

What Makes a Good Review? — Andrew Wheeler on the fine art of reviewing.

Visual aid for the final serial comma — Hilarious. (From Language Log, also tipped to me by corwynofamber.)

Gamers, Not Scientists, Solve AIDS Enzyme Puzzle

Nanotube Cables Hit a Milestone: As Good as Copper — Researchers achieve a goal they’ve been after since the 1980s—the advance could make cars and airplanes lighter, and renewable energy more practical.

Pop Kola, Kolorized: 1939 — An interesting photo, to say the least, from Shorpy.

Paint Creek, the Town Perry Left Behind — The rest of us should be so lucky.

Pennsylvania’s Department of State denies inmate’s request for a copy of the state constitution — Wow. Just wow. Read the article, the reasoning is inane. (Thanks to danjite.)

Sarah Palin, Glen Rice, And The Fleeting “Who Cares?” Standard — I couldn’t care less about Palin’s sexual history as a private person. I care a great deal about her significant political role in a party that makes it a core political objectie to monitor and deny the same right of sexual privacy to her fellow Americans, in the interests of stirring votes among the bigoted and foolish under the pretense of morality. Hypocrisy much?

Let’s Talk About Death — GOP, it’s your brand.

?otD: I got nothing.

9/19/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (ill from chemo side effects)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 9.5 hours (severely interrupted, plus napping)
Weight: 217.6
Currently reading: Matter by Iain M. Banks

Tags: Culture, Language, Links, Personal, photo, Politics, reviews, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:34 am Mon September 19 2011 | Comments(0) |

[cancer] A very bad couple of days

Yesterday and last night were as awful in their way as the violent lower GI disturbances of Friday. Today (Sunday) isn’t promising to be a whole lot better, though things are a bit low key so far, so maybe I am being pessimistic.

On the plus side, H— took me and the_child to the circus yesterday here in town. That was fun, in a sort of cultural-experience-I-don’t-need-to-repeat kind of way. It would have been more fun if I could have teleported from Nuevo Rancho Lake into my seat at Rose Garden and back again, as the logistics of getting in and out with 10,000 of my closest friends and their tiny children were a bit daunting. This was a small touring subset of the big circus, mostly animal acts and acrobats. Always interesting to see people pushing the limits of human achievement. And really, who knew you could train dromedaries so well?

As for the GI stuff, a few details for them what wants it.

Under cut for medical and digestive TMI
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal

Posted: 9:13 am Sun September 18 2011 | Comments(3) |