Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad can dance if it wants to

Special Needs in Strange Worlds | Jay Lake – Cancer and Writing — A weekend reacharound repost, because I think this is important. In which I guest blog at Bookworm Blues.

Behind Every Great Novelist — Oh, how true… (Thanks to goulo.)

Fantasy Philately: Collecting Stamps from Tatooine and Alderaan? — (Thanks to scarlettina.)

Women are better than men — Roger Ebert is, as usual, interesting.

Radioactive man? Milford resident pulled over by state police — Weird. (Thanks to my Aunt M.)

Human-Caused Lunar Methane — Hahahaha. (Via threeoutside.)

It’s Not So Lonely at the Top: Ecosystems Thrive High in the Sky — The Amazon tepuis. I would love to go see these. (Via my Dad.)

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths — More on the psychopath ratio on Wall Street. Language Log injects a note of reality into the discussion.

“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” — Pharygula takes issue with Obama’s comments on gay marriage.

Top GOP Pollster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues — I’d love to see this happen, but it isn’t going to. The GOP is enslaved to its base, which continues to slaver for an ever more closed and intolerant society. And a lot of Republican figures would have to eat a hell of a lot of crow to walk back their stance on gay marriage. (Via my Aunt M.)

Evangelicals Unhappy With GOP’s Gay Marriage Strategy — Huh. Whaddaya know?

U.S. Ranks as 25th Best Country to Be a Mother — A woman in the United States is more than seven times as likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause in her lifetime than a woman in Italy or Ireland. Gee, I wonder which political movement in this country is dedicated to undermining women’s health at every turn, and fiercely opposed to ay efforts to rationalize and improve the healthcare system. We’re number 25! Thanks, conservative America.

Romney, bullying, and me [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] — Another weekend reacharound repost, because I think this is important, and the comments I got on both sides of the blog are also important.

Republicans only interfere with morals — Republicans claim to be the party of small government, but the reality is that they’re the party of using government when they see fit. When dealing with religious beliefs, Republicans talk about government staying out of the way. When it comes to personal choices dealing with relationships, what religion others follow, or choices about a women’s body, small government rhetoric is pushed aside and intrusive government arrives with a vengeance.

Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia — Unfortunately, here at home we will never see any review of the Bush administration’s conduct concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As any conservative can tell you, blow jobs are much more important than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people on knowingly false premises. So is Kenyan Muslim socialism. (Via danjite.)

?otd: Can you leave your friends behind? (Note the importance of proper apostrophe placement, or lack thereof, in that question.)

5/14/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
Weight: 244.4 (!!!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

Tags: Cancer, Christianism, Cool, Culture, economy, Funny, gay, gender, health, healthcare, interviews, Iraq, Links, nature, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, weird, Writing

Posted: 4:51 am Mon May 14 2012 | Comments(0) |

[personal|photos] This, that and the other thing; with bonus ranting about architecture

Some generally unrelated squibs for your amusement…

Writing

In between bouts of napping in a Lorazepam-induced haze, I got through about a quarter of the Kalimpura copy edit on the plane yesterday. So far it seems to be a pretty clean manuscript. There’s a little mental game I play with myself on copy edits, which is to count how many pages I get without a single markup. Those pages are the ones I “won”. So far, in 104 pages processed, exactly two have been clean.

This isn’t as bad as it might sound, as many of the CEM markups are typesetting notes and whatnot, so for example, every manuscript page with a scene break on it has markup. Likewise some basic usage stuff which doesn’t reflect errors on my part or copy editors queries, but rather conformance to Tor’s house style. However, for my little mental game, only clean pages count, regardless of the reason for the markups. 2/100 is about average for me, I think.

Go, me!

Weight

I hate part of this monster for dinner last night:

Terminator sandwich from the Rock House Grill at Cartlandia.

This may have something to do with me weighing in this morning at the highest weight I’ve been at in several years. So, time to get very serious about diet and exercise. The frustrating thing is that chemo has apparently changed my metabolism. (Again.) Despite yesterday’s sandwich, I’ve been eating and exercising at levels consistent with my behaviors prior to this last round of cancer, which were sufficient to keep my weight down in the 220s. That same level of diet and exercise now seems to peg me around 240. So I’m going to have to work more and eat less to maintain where I used to be. Which is both irritating and discouraging, to say the least.

Architecture

So my hotel bathroom in Columbus, OH had apparently been designed by an architect who’d never actually shut a bathroom door, or taken a shower. This was a nice, upscale business class hotel, where I wouldn’t expect such weirdness.

The bathroom was sort of triangular in shape. I’m not sure why, as the building itself was a pretty standard 15- or 20-story box like most hotels of its class. Because of the triangular shape, the bathroom door was hinged down the middle, as well as being hung from the doorframe in the usual fashion. Sort of like one of those bifold closet doors gone freelancing. So you pushed open the door and folded it at the same time.

The bathroom door

However, that is a solid core door. It’s fairly heavy, and only made heavier by all the hardware. Not so hard to open from the outside, but if you’re inside the bathroom and have managed to close the door, in order to open it again, you have to do a little dance around the vanity and the toilet. There’s simply no place to stand when the door is swinging open or shut. And if there’s a bathmat on the floor in the usual place one might put a bathmat, just outside the shower, it’s pretty much impossible to open the door again because it snags on the bathmat. God help you if you’ve dropped a towel on the floor.

The pièce de résistance, however was the shower.

It’s quite elegant looking. That’s a long shower pan on the floor, with a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass blocking the water splash in lieu of a shower curtain. However, in order to turn the shower on, you have to step into the enclosure and reach forward to the water controls. This results in an unavoidable blast of water in the face, as there’s no other way to approach them. In an unfamiliar hotel, you have no idea how hot it’s going to be on any given setting. In my case, nearly scalding water nailed me in the face, which I then had to reach through, twice, to adjust to a tolerable temperature.

There’s no damned way to control the water except by standing in it, thanks to that pane of glass.

Not to mention which, once you insert your corpus delecti in the shower stream, all the water splashing off your body goes right out the step-in opening and soaks the bathmat.

Which makes the damned door that much harder to open.

I’m sure someone thought they were very clever when they designed this bathroom, but I have to say, the architects were idiots, as were the hotel execs who approved this design. People who design this stuff ought to be forced to use it before it can be foisted on an unsuspecting public.

That’s all the ranty I got this morning.

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.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Food, Funny, health, Kalimpura, Photos, Process, Travel, Writing

Posted: 6:47 am Sun May 13 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad celebrates its moms

You don’t have to read my books — Justine Larbalestier explains this very well. I take a nearly identical position. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Absolutely worth the drive — John Booth on Friday night’s open dinner in Columbus, OH.

Langweil’s model of Prague — This is cool. Of course, as a writer, I know nothing whatsoever about obsessive creative behavior.

Searching for meaning in distant solar systems — Is it better for a science writer to be technically correct or understood? These questions apply to SF writers as well, albeit with a slightly different slant.

Weird deep sea creatures — Art guru James Gurney with some bizarre images. In case you needed to write about aliens today.

New Study On Manta Rays Reveals Their Hidden Life

We’re all mutants now — There are a lot of us now, and most of us are a little bit off The headline is hilarious if slightly misleading.

Off the Charts: Shrinking Government — As Andrew Wheeler says, “[G]overnment spending has dropped substantially under Obama, while the private sector has surged. But you know what they say about facts’ obvious liberal bias.”

Many blacks shrug off Obama’s new view on gays — I have always been baffled by this intersection of racial issues and gay issues.

Sen. Rand Paul: Didn’t think Obama’s view ‘could get any gayer’ — Stay classy, conservative America. It’s what you do best.

An open letter to the right wing in the wake of the passage of Amendment One in North Carolina — As usual, the people who most need to read this never will, and if somehow they do, they will reject it out of hand. (Snurched from Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

Bullying and Business — Scrivener’s Error with more on Romney and bullying from a business analysis perspective. Dovetails nicely with my post of yesterday [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] on Romney and bullying.

Mean Boys — While I have real reservations about holding senior citizens to account for what they did as seniors in high school, I have no reservations about expecting presidential candidates to know how to properly address the mistakes they once made. More on Romney in the New York Times.

In address at Christian university, Romney to urge graduates to honor commitments to family — It’s not like I was going to vote for Romney anyway, but lending his name to the educational and intellectual fraud that is an Evangelical institution like Liberty University does not improve my opinion of the man one whit.

Romney’s Anachronism Problem — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison remarks on how Mittens is running against a now-distant past.

?otd: How’s your mother?

5/13/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 (solid, plus 4.0 hours of fitful airplane napping)
Weight: 244.6 (!!!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

Tags: Art, Books, business, Christianism, Cool, Food, Funny, gay, Language, Links, nature, Ohio, Personal, Politics, Process, race, Religion, Science, Travel, Videos, Writing

Posted: 6:15 am Sun May 13 2012 | Comments(0) |

[writing|process] And then I passed the top step…

I finished the first draft of Their Currents Turn Awry this past Monday. Ever since then my brain has been nagging me. “Why aren’t we writing? Why aren’t we writing?”

It’s like running up the stairs and stepping wrong because you tried to keep going upward past the top step.

This almost always happens to me after I finish drafting a novel. For some reason, the sensation has been very strong this week. I know from experience that it’s a bad idea to view this phenomenon as a form of momentum and try to keep writing. The writer brain must be allowed to reset and recalibrate.

Still, why aren’t we writing?

Tags: Currents, Process, Writing

Posted: 4:54 am Thu May 10 2012 | Comments(1) |

[process] Do we need Sauron and Voldemort?

A day or two ago, I asked the question on this blog, “Do we need Sauron and Voldemort”? By which I meant, do we as writers need strong antagonists to make a story compelling?

Obviously, that’s a storytelling modality that works very well. One can hardly argue with the commercial success of either Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Either of those series probably moves more books in any given month than I’ll sell in my entire publishing life.

Humans, or at least humans living in the storytelling and cultural traditions of the West, have a strong affinity for dualism. Perhaps we’re all birthright Manichaeans. The simplicity of moral contrast, of a binary choice, appeals strongly to us. Many people distrust nuance in ethics, in morality, in politics, in law. There’s something very comforting about a simplistic good-vs-evil dynamic. You know who the “us” are, and you know who the “them” are. And certainly in both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, that is unambiguous on the page.

Yet there’s a gentleman down in New Mexico who’s shifted more than a few million books writing about a world where the good guys aren’t very good, and most of the bad guys have mixed or even noble motives. Kind of like real life, where everyone is a protagonist, a hero of their own story. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has proven in a big, big way that you don’t need stark moral dualism to sell well. Damned near everything in those books is ambiguous. There is still a decidedly strong moral dimension. It’s just ambiguous and complex to the point of being non-Euclidean.

So I think about my own work in this context. Most of my books don’t have clear-cut, central antagonists. (Well, maybe none of them do.) My plots tend toward one of two models — the hero(es) opposed by a shifting collage of shadowy forces; or a set of interlocking protagonists with conflicting goals. I like what I write. Bluntly, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t write it. But I don’t write like Tolkien or Rowling. Or Martin, for that matter.

I write like Jay Lake. And Jay Lake is a guy who sees the world as complex and nuanced, and largely filled with people who think they’re trying to do the right thing, even if too many of us cannot see the consequences of our own actions and beliefs for what they really are. (Yes, that’s a not-very-veiled reference to contemporary American politics, but it also really is how I see the world in general.) So I write fiction where the world is complex and nuanced. I don’t think I could write a Sauron or a Voldemort. I just don’t believe in pure evil for evil’s sake, any more than I believe in pure good for good’s sake.

So, no towering antagonists for me. Which makes me wonder about Sunspin, which is decidedly in the vein of interlocking protagonists. Much as the precursor novel Death of a Starship was. It also makes me wonder about my sales figures. Am I really writing stories people want to read? Or am I doing it wrong?

What do you think? Do we need Sauron and Voldemort? Or does George R.R. Martin have the right of it? Where do you fall as a reader? Where do you fall as a writer?

Tags: Books, Culture, Politics, Process, Starship, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 5:54 am Wed May 09 2012 | Comments(11) |

[writing] Their Currents Turn Awry is complete in first draft

Yesterday I finished the first draft of Sunspin book two, Their Currents Turn Awry. This wrapped at 149,100 words, which represents 82,500 new words since April 1st, working from an existing stub of 66,600 words.

I wrote those 82,500 words over 37 elapsed days, with 10 of those days off from writing, mostly due to cancer stress. That’s an average of 2,200 words per elapsed day, 3,100 words per writing day. Given that my minimum target for myself on novel production is 2,500 words per writing day, five days per week, I met my productivity goals in that sense.

The book has a couple of problems I’m aware of, mostly around the way the scenes are structured. Writing a dozen POV characters is kind of different for me. Not to mention the whole interlocking-protagonist-so-there-is-no-antagonist thing. No Evil Overlords here, sorry. Just people with conflicting agendas working toward differing ends. Kind of like real life, except I worry that there won’t be a sufficiently satisfying moral dimension for reader cookies.

(And therein lies another essay, about whether or not we need Voldemort and Sauron, but that’s not in the scope of this blog post.)

So I’m pretty happy. I gave myself to the end of May to get this done. I’m going to take a few days, possibly this entire week, for a brain break, then I’m on to the copy edits of Kalimpura, which in a fit of nearly stunning irony arrived in my inbox a few hours after I finished Their Currents Turn Awry. After that, I’ll be working some more on the book proposal for Going to Extremes.

Tags: Books, Currents, Extremes, Kalimpura, Process, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 5:36 am Tue May 08 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad only let them go so wrong out of kindness, I suppose

Panel Discussion Moderated by Terry Bisson and Interviews with Rudy Rucker, K. W. Jeter, and Jay Lake — Rick Kleffel with a podcast of some of us Being Smart at SF in SF last February.

The Cultivation of Imagination — Art writing guru James Gurney with some interesting thoughts.

Emotion — xkcd on cancer.

Monsanto Blamed For Bee Population Collapse, So It Buys Bee Research Firm — (Via danjite.)

Pacific reef shark populations ‘plummeting,’ study says

Space shuttle with horse and rider — I find this photograph striking.

Big Bang Machine Discovers Brand New Particle

Asteroids Could Be Mined for Fuel, Says Company — Orbiting spacecraft could be refueled with water taken from planetoids—but some experts doubt the economics.

Explaining the CISPA Cybersecurity Bill, the Latest Threat to your Privacy — Hoo boy.

White Privilege — Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about privilege.

Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay — Why are political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights so often implicated in sexual encounters with same-sex partners? Because water is wet. Typical conservative hypocrisy, in the same vein as “The only moral abortion is my own.”

Legal discrimination, but no name-calling, please — …a desire to avoid being labeled a bigot while defending legal discrimination Hello, Christian Right. Also, this: Christian petition affirms same-sex relationships.

The Public Doesn’t Share Romney’s Cold War Mentality on Russia — Ya think. Confidential to the Romney campaign: The Soviet Union hasn’t existed for over twenty years. And they’re really not a threat to Czechoslovakia, which hasn’t existed for almost twenty years. Confidential to the rest of America: Tell me again why these GOP morons should be in charge?

John Boehner’s poker face — In January, John Boehner couldn’t have been more confident about the state of the GOP majority. It was “nearly impossible” that Democrats might win the House back in 2012. In fact, the Speaker said, Republicans were well positioned to hold the House for the next decade. Ah, for the heady days of the Permanent Majority, when the GOP turned a budget surplus into a frightening deficit, reversed our paydown on the national debt, and launched a reckless trillion dollar war of choice. All of which is now Obama’s fault, of course. Just ask any Tea Partier. No wonder people want the Republicans back in power.

?otd: Where did Lefty get the bread to go?

4/28/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bicycle ride
Hours slept: 8.75 (solid)
Weight: 242.4 (!)
Currently reading: A Game of Thrones (graphic novel), George R.R. Martin with Daniel Abraham and Tommy Patterson

Tags: Art, Cancer, Christianists, Cool, gay, healthcare, Links, nature, Personal, Photos, podcasts, Politics, Process, race, Religion, Science, Tech, Writing

Posted: 6:50 am Sat April 28 2012 | Comments(1) |

[cancer] Having the port taken out today

I’m off in a couple of hours to the clinic to have my chest port removed, for the second time. It’s a very minor outpatient procedure lasting less than an hour under local anaesthetic only. Which involves a doctor and a nurse digging about in my chest for most of that time, via an entry wound just close enough to my right clavicle that I can’t actually see what they’re doing. Fairly twitchy about that, even though I’ve had this exact procedure before. The last time, I was so nervous that I took two Lorazepam before I went in. By the time I got to the clinic, I could barely walk, I was so looped.

I think I’ll stick to one Lorazepam this time.

Of course, after mentioning last night to mlerules how well I sleep and how consistently I sleep well, I had a terrible night’s sleep. Though I wasn’t consciously worrying about the procedure today, I rather assume that medical stress played its part.

I’ve lunch with a friend from high school today, and I’m due at the Ooligan Press social tonight with lizzyshannon and the_child, otherwise I’d be tempted to pop two Lorazepam, call in a sick day, and sleep off the stress post-procedure.

So, yeah. Yesterday’s no writing was due to schedule whackiness (of the good kind, a nice potluck dinner, among other things) and me wanting a day of brain break between sections of Their Currents Turn Awry. It’s quite possible today will be no writing as well due to me being in a drug-induced haze and medically stressed out. Or not. We shall see.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Child, Conventions, Currents, friends, health, Personal, Process, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 5:40 am Fri April 27 2012 | Comments(5) |

[links] Link salad skids into Friday

Everything You Need to Know about the Hugo Award — In one handy chart. (Snurched from Andrew Wheeler.)

Sticking With Dropbox — A cursory but alarming analysis of Google Drive’s terms of service. Short form: if you’re producing copyrighted material for which you wish to protect first rights (i.e., if you’re a working or aspiring professional author), for the love of God, don’t use Google Drive. More comments on this from the same source, indicating this might not be such a big deal after all. I remain dubious. (Via danjite.)

Dogfights on Your iPhone — This is cool. I want one. (Thanks to Dad.)

Descriptive Camera, 2012 — This is also very weirdly cool. A text-based camera. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

‘GPS brain cells’ seen in pigeons — Researchers have spotted a group of 53 cells within pigeons’ brains that respond to the direction and strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Jupiter and the Moons of Earth — APOD again. Though I have to wonder why the phrase “Earth’s largest natural satellite” was used to describe the moon in this photo’s cutline. Did we really need the adjective “natural” for clarity there?

What are Those Weird Spirals on Mars’ Surface? — The giant coils suggest a mysterious network of valleys on the Martian surface were formed through volcanic activity.

Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs Mole: A Real-Life Ronald Searle Love Story — A lovely piece about coping with cancer through art. (Courtesy of fjm.)

More debunking of the ex-NASA 49 climate change deniers — Remember that embarrassingly bad letter written by 49 ex-NASA employees saying that global warming is a fraud and that NASA shouldn’t support it? Not that the people who need to read this piece will do so, and even if they do, they’ll just dismiss it as part of the hoax. Sorry, climate change denialists, but the facts are seriously biased against you.

Women’s Prayer Group Praying That the Women at MRFF All Get Incurable Breast Cancer — As the hymn goes, “They will know that we are Christians by our love.” And people wonder why I am an atheist.

Study of the Day: Even the Religious Lose Faith When They Think Critically — New research in Science shows that, unlike intuitive thinking, activating the analytical cognitive system promotes religious skepticism. Which dovetails nicely with the GOP’s decades long effort to tear down education in this country.

Satanazis III: Night of the Satanazis — Maybe you’re thinking this is just a snarky post, mocking a bunch of fringe characters for their over-the-top rhetoric and their literal demonization of their political opponents. But these aren’t just fringe characters telling us that liberals are Nazis who murder babies and love the Satan whom they serve. These are Roman Catholic bishops, state governors, influential clergy and elected officials saying this. The great legacy of conservatism of this era will be how it legitimized absolute lunacy.

Using U.S. Dollars, Zimbabwe Finds a Problem: No Change — (Thanks to Dad.)

The Children of Fallujah – Sayef’s story — The phosphorus shells that devastated this city were fired in 2004. But are the victims of America’s dirty war still being born?

GOP Sets Up A Showdown On Violence Against Women Act — “Unfortunately in Congress, there are some who’d like to make this a political play. They’d like to make cheap shots and try to politicize it in an election year,” said Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD). Right. Because no Republican ever has done anything like this, especially not to President Obama. We all know how principled the GOP is, after all.

We Are Not Stupid — Romney is still Romney and he’s still running as the head of a party that has spent the last few years pursuing a profoundly regressive agenda. Last few years? Try my entire lifetime.

?otd: Where did your week go?

4/27/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hour (WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bicycle ride
Hours slept: 6.0 (fitful)
Weight: 241.4 (!)
Currently reading: A Game of Thrones (graphic novel), George R.R. Martin with Daniel Abraham and Tommy Patterson

Tags: Art, Awards, Cancer, Christianists, Cool, education, Funny, gender, healthcare, Iraq, Links, nature, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, Religion, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:29 am Fri April 27 2012 | Comments(0) |

[writing] Another small milestone on Their Currents Turn Awry

Yesterday I finished the latest chunk of Their Currents Turn Awry, Sunspin volume 2. The manuscript now stands at 119,200 words, and I figure on adding about 30,000 more words with the last chunk. I’m definitely wrestling with some plot timing and sequencing issues, but that’s absolutely a problem for revision. I am also emerging from the natural self-doubt of the eternal muddle in the middle, at least for this book.

It’s nice to see it flowing. I expect 10-12 more days of writing time before I’m done with this draft altogether. It’s a first draft, of course, so this won’t be going out to first readers or anyone else (unless someone really insists, I suppose). Rather, it will be going into the drawer until about August. I have other fish to fry in the mean time, including working on the Going to Extremes proposal and possibly first draft, Kalimpura copy edits, a rewrite on Little Dog: Son of a Bitch once bravado111 has drafted it, some short fiction projects including at least one novella, and maybe a run at the first part of The Whips and Scorns of Time, Sunspin volume 3.

Plus some other cool stuff in the works which I can’t quite talk about yet. But trust me, it’s cool.

Busy, busy.

Tags: Books, Currents, Extremes, Kalimpura, Little Dog, Process, Sunspin, Whips, Writing

Posted: 5:42 am Thu April 26 2012 | Comments(0) |