Jay Lake: Writer

[personal] Editorial process on Link Salad

For no particular reason, here is an explanation of my editorial process on the daily Link Salad posts.

I scan 46 Web sites every morning, clustered in bookmark groups I refer to as “Science”, “WritingArts”, CultPol” and “Ego”. I also go through my Google News main page, from which I exclude sports and minimize regional coverage in favor of top stories, international news, and science news. Curious headlines, interesting stories, or anything that falls within a specific range of my interests generally get posted into Link Salad.

As the day goes by, I have a bookmark group called “Reloads” which I check every few hours that I happen to be near a keyboard, time permitting. That’s weighted towards politics, where the breaking stories I’m most interested in, tend to happen, but it also picks up some writer and automotive blogs.

People also send me links on a fairly regular basis. I don’t always use them, for any number of reasons, but often as not I do.

When assembling Link Salad, I put them together in a loose order. The political stories, including my ranty comments, appear at the bottom. This is so people skimming for writing or science or other news don’t have to read them if they don’t want to. (Not everyone shares my political views, obviously.) Personal news about writing, awards and cancer go at the top. Everything else spreads in between, usually but not always science, then culture, with miscellaneous stuff inserted where it makes a sort of thematic sense.

I never, ever use stories from FOX News or its affiliates. Anything with the FOX brand. I’m not averse to conservative sources, but FOX’s long record of knowing distortion of the truth is extremely well-documented, as is the singularly ill-informed nature of their viewership. I simply assume anything on “fair and balanced” FOX is wingnut propaganda. (I have been known to see a FOX headline and invest some effort in finding the same story from a reliable source.) I very rarely cite The Wall Street Journal for much the same reason. Unlike FOX’s nonstop drivel, their reporting actually can be excellent, but their editorial page and policies are the country club version of FOX’s trailer park wingnuttia, which renders even good reporting useless. WSJ is FOX’s paranoid bigotry and counterfactual fantasies in a nicer suit, basically.

Beyond that, stuff I note or that falls out of the sky on me winds up in Link Salad. If you see something interesting, tip me. I’ll credit and link to the first person who sends me something.

Tags: media, Personal, Politics

Posted: 5:21 am Wed May 15 2013 | Comments(3) |

[personal|writing] Being busy

I am busy these days. Working under a mortal deadline is wonderfully clarifying to the mind. Even if I am wrong about the immediate future, I am not wrong about the general trend of my disease, so the things I am trying to do right now apply regardless.

As mentioned recently, I have temporarily suspended work on Original Destiny, Manifest Sin to grod around closely inside of METAtropolis: Green Space. In the past three or four days I have done a close read on stories by Karl Schroeder and Elizabeth Bear. Today I’ll dive back into Ken Scholes‘ story. Editorial work is very different from writing a first draft, but they come out of the same general space in my brain. Each has its joys. I’m committing a minimum of one hour per day to this task.

There is also an ongoing project to simplify the holdings here at Nuevo Rancho Lake. Hence the recent Basement Party, and future such in late May and through June, most likely. I have committed at least half an hour per day (though yesterday it wound up being more like two hours) to advancing that ball. Lately that has been a lot of sorting through receipts, files and paperwork to determine what needs to kept for tax purposes, and what can be disposed of. Also, walking through my large and essentially random pile of CDs, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to make sure whatever is on them has been captured either into iTunes or into my photo files as appropriate. Later there will be larger scale decisions about the disposition of books, clothing, furniture, art, et cetera. I’d rather I do these things now than someone else have to puzzle through them after I’m gone.

Plus Day Jobbery, parenting, relationship time with Lisa Costello, keeping up with friends and family, forthcoming travel, and so forth. So, yes, I am being busy.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Child, Family, friends, health, META3, ODMS, Original Destiny, Personal, radiantlisa, Writing

Posted: 5:49 am Tue April 30 2013 | Comments(16) |

[personal] A quick followup on the state of my foot

It’s been eleven days since I hurt my foot. I am still walking with a cane when I go out or use the stairs, though I don’t need it at home. This has to do with the fact that injury is almost entirely on the top of my foot, and so if I am barefoot or in stocking feet, I don’t have much issue (other than stairs) at this point; but if I am wearing shoes, the pressure of the shoe on the bruise is difficult to manage. I tried exercising last week as is my wont, but that turned out to aggravate the injury, so I have been off the bike. And walking any distance is right out still.

My toe, nine days after the incident

I have to say that the social impact of walking slowly with a cane is interesting. You become both visible and invisible in certain very specific ways. Combine this with my need to cover my face and all exposed skin when out of doors, and people are not reacting to me at all like I am accustomed to. It’s also hard to be a flirt when you look like a disabled bank robber.

Mostly, though, this is still very annoying. Both the stupid clumsiness that caused the problem [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] and the pain and inconvenience of living with the healing process. As I said before, definitely adding injury to insult.

Ouch.

Photo © 2013, 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.

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My toe, nine days after the incident

I have to say that the social impact of walking slowly with a cane is interesting. You become both visible and invisible in certain very specific ways. Combine this with my need to cover my face and all exposed skin when out of doors, and people are not reacting to me at all like I am accustomed to. It’s also hard to be a flirt when you look like a disabled bank robber.

Mostly, though, this is still very annoying. Both the stupid clumsiness that caused the problem [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] and the pain and inconvenience of living with the healing process. As I said before, definitely adding injury to insult.

Ouch.

Photo © 2013, 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: Culture, health, Personal, Photos

Posted: 5:13 am Mon April 29 2013 | Comments(4) |

[cancer|personal] Digital ghosts and virtual me

Yesterday I saw my therapist. We talked about a number of issues. My life moves very fast these days in more than one sense. One subject was the whole question of me having both a documentarist and an archivist. As I said to them, this is the water I swim in. I don’t think about it much. But those are in fact both very weird things.

That got us onto the question of digital archiving, pace rarelylynne (the aforementioned archivist). I was explaining to my therapist that Lynne and I were talking through a number of issues around post-mortem disposition of my social media and other online assets. Which led in turn to the concept of being a digital ghost.

Years after I am gone, I will still be receiving emails for everything from breast enlargement to tech upgrades. This is especially true if my heirs, my literary trust or the archives maintain my email address on an active basis. (Right now I have no idea what direction this will go in, that being one of many outstanding issues.) My blogging, my Facebook and Twitter posts, the references to me on review sites and SF news sites and so on — it will all persist. Trailing off to a long tail of course, but I suspect even decades after my death you will still find traces of me in whatever future equivalent we have to the online world.

Which is both kind of cool and kind of weird.

At that point, my therapist commented that there is enough of me recorded electronically that someone could re-create me someday. I pointed out to them that my entire genome exists in data form now and I could be recreated in more than one sense. In point of fact, I am in discussions with my computational biologist friends about publishing my entire genome as open source data. Why not? Human genome data isn’t terribly easy to come by still, and it might do some good, especially for small dollar and hobbyist researchers. And, well, it’s another form of digital immortality, right? I could be the electronic equivalent of Henrietta Lacks. And my open source genome helps lead to any kind of useful discoveries, then my cancer and your fundraising generosity will simply have done a little more good in the world. It’s already been done here, so I have a template from which to model this effort.

The conversation also made me think about my digital corpus. I am an incredibly well documented person at this point. I have approximately 3,000,000 words of published fiction. My blogging and other public comments (interviews and whatnot) amount to at least that many words again, possibly more. Call it 6,000,000 words available from publicly accessible sources. (And I suspect that number is conservative.) Tap the past almost twenty years of my email archives and that amount goes up by another 50-100%. One could get really crazy and dive into my 6,000 pages of medical records and Waterloo Productions‘ hundreds of hours of film for additional resources.

That’s a hell of a lot of words. I can imagine a coding project to create virtual Jay — vJay? — a version of ELIZA who would converse in my words and with (some of) my thoughts after I am gone.

I wish I knew someone who had the right skills and resources to take that on, so I could collaborate to whatever degree possible before cancer claims my life. I think it would be intensely cool. Combine a vJay with open sourcing my genome and I would indeed be a digital ghost.

Would you support a vJay project? How would you go about getting it done?

And what do you think of my genome being open source?

Tags: Cancer, Cool, health, Personal, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:33 am Thu April 25 2013 | Comments(40) |

[personal] Blowing the lint out of the pockets of memory

Yesterday Team E— came over and worked with me and Lisa Costello to make some more progress on sorting my basement. We got through a number of boxes of files and receipts and whatnot. This included sorting a fair amount of material to my archive at NIU. Likewise uncovering artifacts such as the wedding album from my first marriage (1987-1990), healthcare paperwork from my teen years, my great-grandfather’s pocket watches, and other entertainment both high and low.

Our system is to divide things into boxes. So far, we’ve come up with the following categories:

• Current and recent paperwork to be dealt with (i.e., 2012 and 2013 taxes, etc.)
• Older paperwork to be held on to (i.e., pre-2012 but still recent taxes, etc.)
• Items to go to archive
• Interesting things to give away at JayCon or some such
• Items to go to the_child
• Items to go to Mother of the Child
• Items to go to my parents
• Old audio and video tapes to have digitally converted

Probably plus a few more I forgot. (Which reminds me, if anyone knows of a good, cheap analog-to-digital conversion service for audio cassettes and 8mm video cassettes, please turn me on.)

All of this was somewhat limited by the rather unfortunate state of my right foot. The third little toe (the ring toe?) is very big and purple, and there’s an interesting purplish-green bruise all across the top of my foot at the base of my toes. I can walk with minimal pain now, and in another day or two will probably be able to drive again. But ouch.

So I sat on the bed in the basement and sorted file boxes while we spread dust and mold everywhere. Some of those boxes haven’t been opened since I moved from Texas in 2000. It’s amazing, the crannies a life gets crammed into.

I am just a voyager on the seas of recollection.

Tags: Family, friends, Funny, Personal, radiantlisa, weird

Posted: 5:11 am Mon April 22 2013 | Comments(14) |

[personal] I hurt myself yesterday

As if it’s not enough around here dealing with cancer and all the complexities and pain arising therefrom, yesterday I succeeded in hurting myself rather badly. This adding injury to insult, given yesterday’s new about the Whole Genome Sequencing.

I had gone out briefly by car to pick tillyjane (a/k/a my mom) up at the bus stop. Walking back into the house, I caught the tip of my right shoe on the lip of the door sill.

The door is a step up from the tiny little porch that itself is a step up from the walkway through the yard. My shoe was a Birkenstock sandal, and so is open-toed. The tip of the sole caught on the bottom of the door sill as I was stepping into the house. My momentum propelled me forward, tripping me as I crushed two of my toes between the sole of the shoe and the bottom of the door sill. I caught myself on the doorframe to keep from falling, but the pain. Oh the pain. I roared in shocked, pained surprise.

Smashing my toes with a hammer would have been kinder and less painful. I mean this literally.

My third right toe is swollen to almost double its size. I can barely stand or walk, cannot imagine driving a car right now. The steps from the front of the house down to the driveway are a major obstacle. If I am sitting still with my leg elevated, it doesn’t bother me much, but any movement is intensely painful.

So, yes, injury added to insult. I suppose this is ultimately a cancer issue. Peripheral neuropathy means I don’t get good kinesthetic or location feedback from my hands and feet. If I am not actually looking at my feet, I don’t really know where they are. So this door, which I have passed through thousands of times in the last 5 and half years since moving into Nuevo Rancho Lake, was able to catch me and hurt me.

In any case, it hurts like hell, and will be impacting my personal and social plans for the next few days.

Tags: Cancer, Family, health, Personal

Posted: 5:30 am Fri April 19 2013 | Comments(20) |

[personal] Home, tired

It took me a long time to get home yesterday from Paradise Lost. I got in later than planned. Today I am underslept and busy. So light blogging today, with usual wit and erudition resuming tomorrow. Meanwhile, I shall leave you with this picture of our crew:

Photo © 2013 Waterloo Productions, reproduced with permission.

Tags: Conventions, events, Personal, Photos, Travel

Posted: 6:34 am Mon April 15 2013 | Comments(10) |

[personal|cancer] This and that

Here at Nuevo Rancho Lake, we have been enjoying a delightful visit from the effervescent Crystal Black. Sizzle Pie, Deschutes Brew Pub and Voodoo Doughnuts have been involved. Mmm mmm mmm.

Meanwhile, the_child goes back to school this morning from her two-week spring break. This is perhaps less delightful, at least from her perspective. To make up for it, she has an out-of-town friend coming to visit later this week. And she’s done some pretty spiffy growing up just lately.

I have session three of series four of my chemotherapy today. This will be my thirty-third infusion in the past 39 months. As regular readers of this blog know, I am on Vectibix now by infusion, plus Celebrex orally twice a day. I refer to this combination as the “light artillery” chemotherapy. It only tires me modestly, doesn’t seriously disrupt my GI function, and has no obvious cognitive effects. I merely suffer from a basket of interesting and unfortunate skin conditions, plus severe photosensitivity. On the grand scale of Unfortunate Chemo Side Effects, this really isn’t much.

And the book is moving now. I may have to take a bye today, as I am going straight to chemo from Day Jobbery this afternoon, and I seriously doubt that even on this much lighter chemo my head will be straight to write afterwards. If nothing else, there’s some pretty serious emotional backwash that always hits me from going into the infusion center.

Finally, I am off to San Antonio on Wednesday for Paradise Lost. Which will be a lot of fun.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Child, Conventions, events, Family, friends, health, ODMS, Original Destiny, Personal, Texas, Travel, Writing

Posted: 5:20 am Mon April 08 2013 | Comments(8) |

[personal|travel] Heading home, itchy

Well, that was ICFA. A lot of fun, to say the least. Old friends and new.

Now I’m heading home quite shortly. I’m exhausted, in part due to staying up past midnight partying, and in part because my entire body was giant itch last night from the Vectibix, and I had a great deal of trouble sleeping.

And guess what? More Vectibix tomorrow, as I have chemotherapy session two of series four after work.

Meanwhile, I travel.

Tags: Cancer, Conventions, health, Personal, Travel

Posted: 6:28 am Sun March 24 2013 | Comments(5) |

[personal] Still on vacation

Chest cold is a bit better, but I’m dealing. ICFA is fun. Hanging out a lot with Crystal Black. Attended the Guest of Honor luncheon yesterday and heard Neil Gaiman talk. Had a very nice dinner yesterday with Austin Sirkin, Jed Berry and Embley Houk. Much hanging out with old friends and new. I’m very glad I came.

Tags: Conventions, Florida, friends, Personal

Posted: 5:25 am Fri March 22 2013 | Comments(8) |