Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad on the final day of chemo

A catalog of digital thoughts: Escapement — A reader reacts to my second clock punk novel, Escapement.

20 awesome gingerbread creations inspired by sci-fi films and TV — A gingerbread AT-AT? (Via my mom.)

As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks — I don’t know why scientists are wasting money gathering realworld data when GOP ideology has already told us the Truth.

Hints of Higgs from the Large Hadron Collider — APOD with a mighty cool photo of the LHC.

Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works — SOPA and you. (Via danjite.)

They Call It the Reverse Gender Gap — And so…?

The Ghosts of Watergate — Ah, the politics of resentment.

Iowa newspaper backs Mitt Romney? Weird GOP race gets a little weirder. — The Des Moines Register endorsing Mitt Romney even though Romney has essentially ignored the state? It’s just the latest line in a bizarre GOP presidential primary season. I can sure see why conservative voters unhappy with Obama long for a return to Bush-era runaway expansion of Federal powers, massively costly foreign wars and record-setting deficits, but I can only laugh at their inability to find a sufficiently lunatic savior from among their pool of candidates.

?otd: Would you recommend cancer as a hobby?

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12/18/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Body movement: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Hours slept: 10.5 (fitful)
Weight: n/a
Currently (re)reading: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

Tags: Books, climate, Culture, Escapement, Food, gender, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, reviews, Science

Posted: 8:35 am Sun December 18 2011 | Comments(3) |

[publishing] Out of contract blues

Now I’m going to complain about something that will probably irk some of the aspiring writers who read this blog. It’s one of those established writer problems that can look ridiculous from the outside, but is perfectly real and serious from the inside.

I’m out of a trade publishing contract for the first time since 2006. And it feels very weird to me.

Mainspring was originally contracted by Tor in 2006 for a 2007 release, along with a second book to be named later, which was eventually Escapement. Near the end of that contract cycle, Green and Pinion were contracted. Near the end of that contract cycle, Endurance and Kalimpura were contracted.

Well, now it’s 2011 and I’ve delivered Kalimpura for 2012 publication and, well, here we are. It’s not that Tor and I have parted ways. It’s not that we haven’t parted ways. We simply haven’t had the discussions, nor have I entered into discussions with any other trade publishers.

Some of this is my own doing, as I decided to write the Sunspin series as spec books rather than proposing them to Tor. Some of this is the cancer, which has stolen half my writing time in past two years, slowing down my ability to deliver a spec book in time to propose it to Tor, or anyone else, within my usual contract cycle. Longtime readers may recall that had I not experienced another metastasis this year, I had planned to write all three volumes of Sunspin by this fall. The book package would have been ready to go to market last summer, except for cancer.

And now, thanks to the travails of chemo and my resulting inability to execute on important revisions recommended by la agente, Sunspin‘s first volume won’t be ready to go to market before next February or March at the earliest. So I’m going to stay out of contract for quite some time to come, unless we take the rather unusual step of trying to sell on proposal plus unrevised draft.

All of which makes me feel very weird and insecure about my career. I’m in danger of missing the 2013 publishing cycle. I’m going to take a financial hit, to boot, simply because of delayed contract and payment timelines. But mostly, I worry about simply disappearing from view.

So I’ve got the out of contract blues, magnified by my cancer woes. And it doesn’t make me very happy. Another penalty of cancer, another thing being taken from me by this disease.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Endurance, Escapement, Green, health, Kalimpura, Mainspring, Pinion, Publishing, Sunspin

Posted: 5:53 am Thu October 27 2011 | Comments(2) |

[books|writing] Keeping score on my novels

Not that anybody was asking, but in an attempt to corral my own thoughts, here’s a list of all the novels I’ve ever written/co-written or am committed to writing, time and my health permitting. I make this seventeen completed manuscripts, two in-progress manuscripts, and six on the table to be written. In addition to all of the below, kenscholes and I have discussed doing a YA gonzo SF trilogy together, once he’s done with the Psalms of Isaac.

Who has time for cancer?

Written but unpublished

The January Machine (time travel/millenial SF, project abandoned)
Rocket Science (zero draft)
Death of a Starship (zero draft)
The Murasaki Doctrine (space opera/military SF, could not sell)
The Heart of the Beast (with Jeff VanderMeer, project abandoned)
Our Lady of the Islands (with Shannon Page, at my agent)
Other Me (YA lost colony/identity paranoia SF, awaiting rewrite)

Written, in progress or planned

Rocket Science

Death of a Starship

Mainspring
Escapement
Pinion

Green
Endurance (forthcoming)
Kalimpura (forthcoming)

Trial of Flowers
Madness of Flowers
Reign of Flowers (not a committed project)

Calamity of So Long a Life (in progress)
The Whips and Scorns of Time (to be drafted in 2012)
Be All Our Sins Remembered (to be drafted in 2012)

Original Destiny, Manifest Sin (American Old West fantasy/AH, to be drafted in 2012 or 2013)

Black Tulip (Dutch historial thriller/mystery, to be drafted in 2013)

The Rockefeller Plot (1970s diplomatic thriller with Ambassador Joseph Lake, in progress)
[untitled Biafran war novel] (1960s diplomatic thriller with Ambassador Joseph Lake)

Tags: Books, Calamity, Endurance, Escapement, Green, Kalimpura, Madness, Mainspring, ODMS, Pinion, Publishing, Sins, Sunspin, Trial, Whips, Writing

Posted: 10:35 am Sun September 04 2011 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad is indolent

A review of Escapement

Pregnancy Porn: Alien Impregnation In Science Fiction

Wittertainment’s code of conduct — For cinemas, where apparently the New Rude is asking other people to stop being rude. goulo once got a Coke dumped on him for repeatedly asking two people behind him to stop talking. See also this hilarious bit from Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX. (Thanks to lil_shepherd.)

Steve Buchheit responds to my post yesterday on cancer with some thoughts drawn from his family’s experience

Useless Studies, Real Harm — On marketing-driven drug trials.

Weird Moon Crater May Be Crash Site of Old NASA Spacecraft

Russian Nuclear Icebreakers: to the North Pole! — Dark Roasted Blend with a photo essay on Russian nuclear ice breakers. Cool stuff.

Killer Cars: An Extra 1,000 Pounds Increases Crash Fatalities by 47% — SUVs are an excellent example of risk transfer. Anyone who drives one in order to feel safer is explicitly choosing to make me more unsafe in exchange.

No, new data does not “blow a gaping hole in global warming alarmism” — There goes that reality with its liberal bias again. Which, as I’ve pointed out before, is only a liberal bias because of conservative dedication to counterfactuals in the face of overwhelming evidence. Their cynical empowerment of evolution denialism in pursuit of low-information voters has opened the door to legitimizing much wider intellectual dysfunction by privileging opinion over evidence.

European Extremism Scares Arabs

Apple has more cash than the U.S. Treasury — Thank you, GOP. So where’s all that prosperity those Bush tax cuts were supposed to bring? Seems to me we did a lot better under Clinton.

Jon Stewart on the conservative obsession with victimization — In case you missed it. “…some of the most free-range, organically grown, disingenous, ideologically marinated, un-self-awareness I’ve ever seen in the wild.”

?otD: What question would you put here?

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7/30/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (post-op recovery)
Body movement: 30 minutes stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.75 hours (solid)
Weight: 225.2
Currently reading: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Tags: Books, Cancer, Cool, Culture, Escapement, health, healthcare, Links, Movies, Personal, Photos, Politics, reviews, Science, Videos

Posted: 8:54 am Sat July 30 2011 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad wishes Omaha had better weather

…Jennifer McGee…365 project… — Wow. Someone is using my book Escapement as the basis of an art project. Wow.

Nothing happens over 4th of July weekend, except this year — Some significant publishing tidbits. (Thanks to danjite.)

Forget Diet Coke and Mentos: Singing Bowls Excite Droplet Fountains [Video] — (Thanks to David Goldman.)

The colorectal surgeon song — Hey, mine saved my life. (Snurched from @willshetterly.)

Spacetime Beyond the Planck Scale — For your morning pleasure.

The Soviet Superplane Program That Rattled Area 51 — One of my old favorites. (Reminder courtesy of Chris W. Johnson.)

B-36 engines (1955)

Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive — (Thanks to Dad.)

No ‘him’ or ‘her’; preschool fights gender bias — Hmmm. (Via willyumtx.)

10 Ways Arab Democracies Can Avoid American Mistakes — Juan Cole is fascinating.

Mormonism and 2012 — Specifically, Romney and Huntsman. Mormonism suffers from the same problem Scientology does; neither is any more or less silly than any other religion at the root, but neither has been around long enough for the faith-based narrative of the religion’s founding to fully obscure the far grubbier objective reality of its founding.

Republicans Falsely Claim Obama Advisers Burying Data ‘Proving’ Stimulus Is Hurting Economy — I find it inconceivable that those sterling ethicists on the American Right could lie about anything. Why, when have they ever– Never mind.

The Mother of All No-Brainers — The now-infamous David Brooks column on GOP intransigence, in case you missed it.

?otD: What the hail?

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7/6/2011
Writing time yesterday: 60 minutes (short fiction and WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 9.0 hours (interrupted)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Tags: Art, Books, Cool, Culture, Escapement, Funny, gender, healthcare, Links, music, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, Religion, Science, Tech, Videos

Posted: 5:13 am Wed July 06 2011 | Comments(0) |

[sale] German rights to several novels

Through my agent Jennifer Jackson of Donald Maass Literary Agency, I have accepted an offer from my German publisher, Bastei Lübbe, for print, ebook and audio rights to Escapement, Pinion and Green. I am quite pleased.

Tags: Books, Escapement, Green, Pinion, Publishing, Sale

Posted: 5:38 am Wed May 25 2011 | Comments(6) |

[links] Link salad dreams of flying over the ice

A reader reacts to Escapement — They liked it, quite a bit.

How to Hang Out in the Bar with Writers at a Convention — cathshaffer with some advice. Me, I just show and talk to whoever’s there (quite probably including you), but then I’m a pathological extrovert who has nothing to prove.

Automated Selectivity — Art Guru James Gurney on a fairly interesting development in the cognitive psychology of visual art. (I think I’ve got that right.) I will point out that as his commentary so often does, this piece has a strong analog in written fiction. We writers talk about the ‘telling detail’ as having much the same impact as visual selectivity.

Stop Organizing Your E-mail, Says Study — People who put incoming e-mails in folders are no better at finding them than those who simply use search. I adopted precisely this strategy when I moved to Gmail as my primary reader some years ago. It works beautifully.

Soviet flying boat MBR-2 over the ice fields. Northern theater of operations. — I absolutely love this photograph, but then I’m a complete sucker for flying boats. I do have to wonder how well they operate on ice, though.

Is Google Motors the new GM? — Cloud control to Major Tom.

Progress Toward the Dream of Space Drives and Stargates — Centauri Dreams on a topic near and dear to us skiffy types.

Existential angst about the bigger picture — Ben Goldacre on, well, rationalism.

Katyal Speaks of SG ‘Mistakes’ in Japanese Internment Cases — No one could possibly have imagined that the government would lie about evidence in a National Security matter. Look! Muslims! (Via Scrivener’s Error.)

Focus on the Family Head: “We’ve Probably Lost” on Gay Marriage — Looks like the bottom’s fallen out of part of the hate market. I’m surprised, it’s hard to go wrong betting on the bigotry of the righteously intolerant. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of Christianist assholes.

ACLU Debunks Creeping Sharia Delusion — ‘Creeping Sharia’ is another one of those conservatives causes (or maybe memes?) like Birtherism that makes it real hard to take Republicans seriously even on stuff they’re still rational about. Basically, anyone who can believe this stuff is self-evidently nuts; so even other-wise useful things they say are highly suspect. This is what happens when you build your political fortunes on enraging and terrifying your voting base.

Enemy at gate? Not in this case — In a one-sided standoff, a fugitive has holed up on his land for 11 years — but lawmen don’t seem to care. That’s the way you handle lunatics. Instead of, for example, electing them on Tea Party platforms.

Fantasy Island: Are Republicans losing their grip on reality? — One party, the Democrats, suffers from the usual range of institutional blind spots, historical foibles, and constituency-driven evasions. The other, the Republicans, has moved to a mental Shangri-La, where unwanted problems (climate change, the need to pay the costs of running the government) can be wished away, prejudice trumps fact (Obama might just be Kenyan-born or a Muslim), expertise is evidence of error, and reality itself comes to be regarded as some kind of elitist plot.

“The Tea Party Itch Has Not Been Scratched” — Some political ‘inside baseball’ on the Republicans and Medicare. And the dangers of placing ideology over governance, as if that hadn’t been amply demonstrated over the past decade.

?otD: What did you dream last night?

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5/24/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (spent hours dealing with some technical issues on my writing laptop)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (fitful)
Weight: 233.2
Currently (re)reading: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Tags: Books, Conventions, Cool, Escapement, gay, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, race, Religion, reviews, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:42 am Tue May 24 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad goes wild

A reader reacts to Escapement — Quite positively so.

Archaïsmes désuets — The French blog Anniceris on zeppelins in steampunk.

The High Water Mark of American Science — Inside the old SSCL site in Texas. This came up over the weekend at Norwescon. (Snurched from Dark Roasted Blend.)

The Really Smart Phone — Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views.

Casio Watches an Arresting Offense in Afghanistan: Wikileaks on Guantanamo — It’s always nice to see America’s reputation for justice being substantiated.

Of Donald, Dunces and Dogma — [Trump's candidacy] further exacerbates a corrosive culture on the right that now celebrates the Cult of Idiocy — from Glenn Beck to Michele Bachmann — where riling liberals is more valuable than reason and logic, and where intellectualism and even basic learnedness are viewed with suspicion and contempt. Yeah, that’s the modern Republican party in a nutshell.

Wounded Elephant Screechings — Republicans and the budget. More on the justly famed principled intellectual consistency of our friends on the Right.

?otD: Have you ever ridden an elephant?

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4/25/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (convention day)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 246.0
Currently reading: Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea

Tags: Books, Culture, Escapement, Iraq, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, reviews, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:16 am Mon April 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad takes out its guitar and plays

A reader reacts to Escapement — And Pinion.

Adam Engst on iPad and ereaders — Interesting thoughts on the ebooks publishing process. (Via a mailing list I’m on.)

Language nudges Art — Language Log on linguistic gender and cheese. Mmm.

Similar quake due to hit Northwest — Home, sweet home.

A false color map of the Honshu earthquake’s tsunami wave height — One of the more frightening images I’ve ever seen, in a weird way. (Via Bad Astronomy.)

Japanese official says pumping system caused nuclear plant blast — I really feel for Japan already, but this is a twist that cuts deeply into a unique scar on their cultural psyche.

How Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami Warning Systems Work — The world’s only earthquake warning system likely helped limit damage and loss of life. Government spending in action.

Coase Goes to War — Bribery as a precision guided munition.

New FAA Rule Turns Airplane Lavatories Into Deadly Traps — To quote danjite “Number of terrorist attacks on US planes per year, average: 0 Number of legitimate deployments of oxygen masks per year: 40-50. FAA: Remove oxygen from toilets to prevent terrorism!”

pecunium on how government regulation saves lives

Dumbing Deficits Down — Paul Krugman on deficits, healthcare and the disingenuousness of politicians.

?otD: Heavy metal or easy listening?

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3/12/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.75 hours (2,800 words on Sunspin, much WRPA)
Body movement: Urban hiking to come
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (interrupted)
Weight: n/a (forgot)
Currently reading: Esprit de Corps by Lawrence Durrell

Tags: Art, Books, Cheese, ebooks, Escapement, healthcare, Japan, Language, Links, Northwest, Personal, Pinion, Politics, Publishing, reviews, Science, Travel

Posted: 8:03 am Sat March 12 2011 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad loiters in LAX

A reader reacts to Escapement — Ambiguous with the liking.

The Oregon: 1898 — A portion of this battleship’s superstructure sits today in Tom McCall Waterfront Park in downtown Portland.

Why Spacetime on the Tiniest Scale May Be Two-Dimensional — The latest thinking about quantum gravity suggests that spacetime is two-dimensional on the smallest scale. And there may be a way to prove it. Edwin Abbott was right?

ExoClimes 2010: Exoplanetary Atmospheres — Mmm, crunchy.

They used to Burn Catholic Churches, now they Burn Mosques — A little bit of history for the hysterics currently dominating the American political narrative.

?otD: How lax can an airport be?

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9/9/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (travel)
Body movement: airport walking
Hours slept: 6.0 (interrupted)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

Tags: Books, Cool, Escapement, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Portland, Religion, reviews, Science

Posted: 8:57 am Thu September 09 2010 | Comments(0) |