See some, all or none of you there.

I want to write a fairly surreal piece of short fiction, something on the far tilted end of New Weird. And I’d like to publish it by having it tattooed as a full sleeve on someone’s arm. I envision the words spiraling down from the shoulder to the elbow to the wrist.

The really hard part is I’d like to encode something a lot shorter by having every 7th or 10th or 14th word be red in the tattoo, and have the red words constitute a micro fiction embedded within the main story.

I don’t know if I could get anyone to commit to this — that’s a lot of needle time, and a lot of spend with the tattoo artist, which I can’t afford to underwrite these days — but I think it would be cooler than hell.

San Francisco fire hydrant. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

The current photo series is from my ‘favorites’ file, hence the dates jumping about

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Brit Lit Map — A cartographic Wordle.

Online map calculates travel times in Ancient Rome — Cool! (Via a mailing list I’m on.)

The Liberating Embrace Of Uncertainty — I don’t agree with everything in this piece, as the writer buys a little too much into the woo side of things, and deliberately conflates empirical truth and spiritual truth, but it’s still pretty interesting.

A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity — Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. I could have told them that.

Humanoid Robot Swarm Synchronised Using Quorum Sensing — Proof-of-principle experiment shows how humanoid robots can co-operate on a large scale by copying the behaviour of social insects and bacterial colonies. The article is basically talking about SkyNet, but the accompanying photo is hilariously cute.

Cambrian shutter of doom becomes sucker of worms — This photo is the opposite of cute.

Researchers generate electricity from viruses — Imagine charging your phone as you walk, thanks to a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. This futuristic scenario is now a little closer to reality. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived — The Oatmeal goes to town on Tesla and Edison.

A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College

6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America — This topic is treated in great detail in the book 1491. (Thanks to Melissa Shaw.)

The Right’s Righteous Frauds — With a headline like that, this piece could refer to almost any leader in the conservative movement.

Wrong man was executed in Texas, probe says — Because capital punishment makes us all safer.

‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the Climate Threat — Gee, maybe they’ve been quiet because of savage, fact-free attacks from certain ideological sectors. Whaddaya think?

Is world outpacing U.S. on health care? — Nothing to see here, citizens. Move along. We don’t want any of that Kenyan Muslim socialist HCR that was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation and promoted by the GOP.

How Economics Explains The Rising Support for Gay Marriage — Interesting thesis. My own experiences certainly dovetail into this discussion.

Gun Rights — From the Mitt Romney campaign Web site: Mitt will work to expand and enhance access and opportunities for Americans to hunt, shoot, and protect their families. Wow, the things conservatives get up to in their free time. (Via danjite.)

Who Really Caused The Deficit? — Under Obama’s watch the national debt has risen from roughly $10 trillion to $15 trillion, a record high. But to what extent are his decisions while in office to blame? The answer: very little. The vast bulk of the debt is the result of policies enacted during the Bush administration coupled with automatic increases in federal spending and decreases in tax revenue triggered by the economic downturn. Those are economic facts of life known to experts but that often gets lost in the political debate (and which Obama’s opponents are willing to obscure). That’s the Tea Party message in a nutshell: Mad about the deficit? Blame Obama and vote for the guys who created it!

?otd: Austin or San Antonio?

5/16/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: n/a (airport walking to come)
Hours slept: 6.0 (fitful)
Weight: 241.6 (!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

calendula_witch

However, one thing that has always baffled me is why fiction publishers use manuals of style for copy editing manuscripts. In my case, per the abbreviated notation in the style sheet that accompanied my copy edit, M-W 11th, Chicago 15th, Words into Type, and Garner’s Modern American Usage.

I do understand why some aspects of house style are important, such as getting the ellipses and em dashes correct. That’s a book design and typesetting thing. For example, the style sheet says the following:

em-dashes:
“Use this form—” When an action. “—interrupts the speech.”
“Use this form”—when an action occurs simultaneous to speech—“without interrupting it.”

Okay. Fine with me. This is how Tor wants their books to look. Hooray! I’m not a book designer, and I certainly didn’t embed any punctuation geekery in the manuscript I turned into them.

But on usage and spelling…? Fiction is in one important sense all about voice. And there’s a lot of changes that get made in the copy edit that I have to stet. There are certain archaic or non-standard spellings I favor. “Storey” for “story” when describing buildings. “Dreamt” instead of “dreamed”. “Til” instead of “till”. All of which get carefully amended to the current standard written usage, and all of which I just as carefully stet back to my original.

Don’t even get me started on the that/which distinction. The rule about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses is a piece of prescriptivism demonstrably at odds with the way people actually use those words, and I personally will deliberately stray from the rule for the sake of smoothness of the reading. (i.e., not creating a clunky string of serial uses of “that” or “which”)

Likewise “who” and “whom”. I know the difference perfectly well, thank you. But almost no one uses “whom” in casual speech, so in dialog my characters don’t, unless they’re the sort of personality who would be either that formal or that persnickety. Also, “they/their” for third person gender indeterminate is a very common usage dating back hundreds of years in English, and really doesn’t need to be corrected.

Oh, and comma splices, I loves me some comma splices when I’m writing fiction. So what? It’s my voice.

Fiction isn’t formally correct, and it shouldn’t be. It should reflect the author’s voice. I can write very formally when I need to. I do it all the time for business writing in the Day Jobbe (though that has its own usages and quirks). I also do some legal writing in the Day Jobbe (disclaimer: I am not an attorney and I do not practice law, I do, however, routinely draft certain contract provisions for our Legal department to review), as well as some technical writing that is distinct from my business writing. I even occasionally do marketing writing there, though less often than I used to. Each of those forms has their distinct speech register, expected norms of usage, and formalisms.

The really great thing about fiction is that you get to craft your own speech registers, your own norms of usage, and your own formalisms. While I definitely need to be internally consistent in style and usage within the text (though I can readily imagine exceptions even to that statement), I don’t need to be consistent to formal usage, so long as I remain clear and comprehensible.

So I’m always puzzled about why publishers instruct copy editors to round off all the interesting bits.

Self portrait

Cityscape

Also, she designed the backdrop for the set of the eighth grade play, a stage adaptation of Momo by Michael Ende [ Powells | BN ]. (She is playing the title role as well.) The high school is planning to repurpose the backdrop for their own play.

the_child her own self on the set

Art © 2012 B. Lake, all rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

Photo © 2012, 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.

Calla lily. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

The current photo series is from my ‘favorites’ file, hence the dates jumping about

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Superheroes and cringe comedy: Why women aren’t allowed — Pandagon on The Avengers, and specifically, the Black Widow character.

5 Transformative Uses for Disney’s Touch-Sensitive Technology

Legalize Pot, Save Public Education, and end Student Indebtedness

Report: Global biodiversity down 30 percent in 40 years — Freshwater tropical species hardest hit, says World Wildlife Fund. The human race is an Extinction-Level Event.

All the Water on Planet Earth — Interesting visual illustration of the volume of the hydrosphere. However, look closely at Greenland on the ‘dry’ globe. Pretty sure that’s an ice sheet showing there.

Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe — One of the ironies here is that, even though the global temperatures are fairly typical of the last decade, the unusual spring warmth might have an outsized effect on public opinion. People in the US seem to rely on their personal experience (along with the economy) when they formulate their opinion on climate change. Right. Because what does the data count against staving off the evil liberals?

Prosecutorial Discretion And Child Sexual Abuse — Ta-Nehisi Coates commenting on a New York Times report on the sexual abuse of children among ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn. This is precisely why we don’t need religious “morality” in our laws and social norms. Are Christianist congregations any better about this?

Another “Hot Text” For the War on Women: Rosemary’s Baby — Interesting. (Via scarlettina.)

Equality is bigger than the president — Barack Obama and gay marriage. If school desegregation amendments had been placed on state ballots in the 1950s, “separate but equal” might still be the law of the land in the South. Fortunately, state-sponsored segregation was not put to a popular vote. The “will of the people” isn’t always right. That’s the error of majoritarianism.

Why We Regulate — But regulations are evil! Ask any conservative. (Apparently conservatives don’t drink air, breathe water, take medicine or expect a stable economy.)

What Eduardo Saverin Owes America (Hint: Nearly Everything)

Austerity geniuses — Hullabaloo on the magic of Republican economics, as practiced by (among others) Democrats.

?otd: Will the tune come to you at last?

5/15/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 (solid)
Weight: 242.2 (!!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

One of the signature fillips in the original Star Trek was the doors on the starship Enterprise. It’s hard to remember this now, but when Star Trek went on the air in 1966, those automatic doors we’re all so used to at every grocery store and whatnot basically didn’t exist. The bridge doors sliding open and shut with a “schmuck” sound behind Shatner’s every entrance were very, very strange. Different. A simple signifier of a bold, new world. (We saw an attempt to recapture that sensibility in Deep Space Nine with those weird rolling cogwheel doors.)

Different.

In a similar vein, a very common narrative trope in science fiction is that future spaceship operations will have their roots in naval tradition. So, for example, almost all spaceship or starship crews seem to follow naval or merchant marine ranks. Ships have “hatches” instead of “doors”, “decks” instead of “floors”, which is often reflected in science fiction usage. Less often but still common are usages such as “overhead” for “ceiling”, “bulkhead” for “wall” and “passageway” for “hallway” or “corridor”. This is both part of how we’ve been trained to think about spaceships in our narratives, and part of making things in the narrative feel just a little different, an echo of the frisson we got from the original Star Trek‘s bridge design.

Lately I’ve been doing a fair amount of workshop critique reading for various events, and as happens anytime one reads a number of manuscripts, certain coincidental trends emerge. In this case, it’s writers setting stories on space stations or spaceships where the interior fittings are described with common architectural terminology. This bothers me vaguely based on my lifelong training as a genre reader, as well as the sensibilities I’ve evolved as a genre writer these past two decades and more.

I really can argue this both ways quite readily. Part of the challenge of making the unfamiliar feel real in fiction is leaving in enough bits of naturalistic reality that the reader can follow along with the adjustments in reality that the story offers. (Oddly, the_child and I were discussing precisely this point a day or two ago in a slightly different context.) This is the source of that piece of genre writerly folk wisdom that says you get to do one impossible thing for free in your story. If you change everything at once, the story becomes incomprehensible.

In other words, having people on spaceships live in rooms and open doors and walk down halls and stare at the ceilings keeps the reader from being distracted by wondering what the hell an “overhead” is, when that’s not the point of the story. At the same time, people who live in rooms and open doors and walk down halls and stare at the ceilings may as well be hanging around in my house. It doesn’t feel different.

And different is what science fiction is all about.

Still, I can forgive this in pursuit of the story. Every writer has their own vision of how the narrative should flow. Every writer’s vision evolves.

But I really, truly draw the line at slamming the doors on your spaceship. That whole concept is so predicated on contemporary Western interior design, and echoes strongly of teen tantrums and relationship spats. It makes all the sense in the world in a romance novel taking place in a naturalistic contemporary setting for the protagonist to slam a door. That’s an emotional signifier and a familiar action. But damn it, I want my spaceship doors to go “schmuck”, or dilate, or hiss gently into the walls, or dematerialize, or at the least clang ponderously. I don’t want them to be slammed.

There’s a fine line between the familiar and the banal. For good science fiction to work, you really need to keep on the right side of it. Otherwise you’re missing the whole point of the genre, methinks.

Do the doors slam on your spaceship?

lillypond

tillyjane

Yesterday midday, lillypond and I took our stepmother and dad to the Chart House for lunch. Again, I did my best to eat lightly and careful in the face of some very good food.

Yesterday afternoon, the_child and I attended the Engstrom-Rees smoked meat cookout chez Engstrom.

The pork butt broke down my resolve.

Those bastards.

Meat slingers Jacob Engstrom and Ed Rees

It was too damned good.

The implement of my destruction

They actually laid on quite a selection of smoked meats, including beef brisket, a whole duck, lamb and the aforementioned pork butt.

The brisket lurks at the top of the photo, clad in foil and awaiting its turn, while Ed slices the pork butt

The duck coming off the smoker

My downfall, the pork butt

Gourds on the smoker, for that pseudo-healthy rationalization

Suckling long pig, a/k/a Ed’s daughter

I never got around to the duck or the squash. The lamb had a nice flavor, with a terrific rub, but was a tad tough. The brisket had a good flavor as well, nice bark on it, tasty and a bit chewy, but really needed an hour or two more on the smoker, as it hadn’t gone fork-soft yet.

The pork butt, however, was a sin against man and nature. The meat divine, as it were. Pig perfection. Ed had made a very nice, savory mustard BBQ sauce to go with it, more or less North Carolina style, but that was gilding the lily of the well-seasoned, tender meat.

That is what cracked my resolve. I am a weak, weak man. But a well-fed one.

Photos 2012, 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.