X-Ray Blues

In which Our Hero writes a screenplay.

2010-10-28T17:31:00.000-04:00

Because why the hell not?

OK, let's backtrack a smidge. Last month I finished Draft 10 of HI and sent it fluttering off through the ether for review. In the meantime, I decided to start a new project.

Then it stalled. I tried another one. That one stalled.

I played Europa Universalis III. It's the year 1730 and the Byzantine Empire stretches from Provence to the Philippines, but nobody wins a Nebula for playing computer games.

Tried another one. Stalled.

I started a new game in Franchise Mode in Madden NFL 2006. In five years, I turned moved the Cardinals to Los Angeles, renamed them the Raptors and gave them spiffy new powder blue and white uniforms, and built a Super Bowl winning team based on hard-nosed running and vicious defense (protip: when you're rebuilding a team, start up front; you can win a lot of games with five Pro-Bowlers on your offensive line).

Nobody wins a Nebula for playing Madden, either, though in 2005, the idea of the Cardinals winning the Super Bowl in any incarnation probably seemed like science fiction.

Tried another one. Didn't even get past the outline before I realized the idea was stupid.

Watched a lot of baseball. That was fun until Cody Fucking Ross came along. (PS: anybody who says they thought the Giants would light up Cliff Lee and chase him in the 5th last night is a stinking, filthy liar).

Funny thing about editing a novel for three years--you get used to having the story already written. Faced with a blank page for the first time in years, I had nothing. I went back to the Voyager project and actually produced some updates, but I have to admit, my heart's not in that one anymore. I want to finish because people I like like it, but that's not going to be the project that gets me moving again.

I don't really know how other people react emotionally to writer's block, but for me, it's equal parts frustration and a vague, terrifying feeling that I'm wasting my talent/career/life, with a dash of suspicion that I only really had one good story in me. Usually, I can break out of it by writing something else--a short scene, a side project, something like that. HI actually started as a block-breaker project that kept going. This time, though, even the block-breakers were blocked. I needed to do something different.

So finally, one night I sat down with a pack of Camels, half a bottle of V.O., and a 5-year old Mac, and Googled "screenplay format".

The first thing I learned was that screenplay format is a pain in the fucking ass. Fiction manuscripts have strict requirements--1 inch margins, .5 inch tabs, left-aligned, double-space 12-point Courier and deviate from that at your own risk. But once you have the manuscript actually set up, you just type the fucking story, and assuming you understand basic mechanics, the only thing you have to worry about is plot, setting, characters, mood, description, theme, dialog, oh god is this any good oh god its terrible oh god oh god oh god. You know, the usual.

For screenplays, however, practically every single element has its own tab settings, capitalization rules, spacing, everything. This would be an unimaginable headache for me on a regular word processor.

Back to the Google. "manuscript software mac free". Emphasis on "free".

And wouldn't you know it, I found one, and it was compatible with older PowerPC Macs (Apple switched to Intel processors years ago). Suddenly I had a program that would handle the formatting bullshit for me and I had no excuse.

I'm not going to pretend to be any kind of expert on screenwriting here, but give me a moment to explain some of the differences between a novel manuscript and a screenplay. Film is a visual medium, but more than that, it's a director's medium. A novelist is responsible for everything in the story: the physical appearance of the characters, settings, and objects, and all the action, on top of the dialog and the character's inner thoughts and any background information you want to tell with the narrative. But in a film, much of that is the director's responsibility, and much of what doesn't fall on the director falls on the actors or cinematographer or set designer (though ultimately the director has a veto over all of them). So a screenplay is largely dialog interspersed with short, bare-bones description, like this.

INT. CONTROL ROOM

CAPTAIN JOHN FITZTHOMAS, 40, sits in USS New Jersey's control room, a circular space crammed with lights, gauges, monitors, and control panels. In the center is a large main viewscreen. We see an oblong brown asteroid, 617 PATROCLUS, with a miniature city on one pole.

     HELMSMAN:
   (o.s.)
     Ten minutes to docking, sir.

     FITZTHOMAS:
     Thank you, crewman.

No physical description of Fitzthomas--that will be determined by whoever plays him. No description of his uniform--that's the costume designer's job. Just a bare sketch of the control room--set designer--and Patroclus--FX guys. The dialog is just the raw lines; it will be up to the actors and director to decide how they're delivered. If you were wondering if a scriptwriter has to deal with things a novelist never does like camera angles, background music, or lighting, you'll notice there's none of that. Directors hate writers who tell them how to do their jobs.

So what you wind up with is something almost like a plot outline with all the dialog fully written. One other thing you can't do in a screenplay is resort to inner monologue or narration to deliver backstory, the character's inner thoughts, et cetera. The story has to be there in the dialog and the bare description. And the story does have to be there. The acting and music and FX will fill it out, but you need a story.

So what am I going to do with a screenplay? Well, the idea right now is to treat it as a plot outline with the dialog fully written. Why? Because I hate writing description and I love writing dialog; screenplay format lets me do a...not exactly a first draft, but maybe a draft 0.5. An alpha build, if you will. If the story comes together, I can fill it out into an actual novel with description and narration and the characters' inner voices. Or hell, maybe it won't work and this is a waste of time, but at least I'm writing, which is more than I was doing last week.

Incidentally, the story? It's set in New Jersey in the late 1990s, and involves cars, teenagers, sex, and chess. No science fiction at all. Maybe I needed a break from the fantastic, too.

Post Script: I know I promised the History of HI; that's still coming. In fact, HI and this story are actually related, in a way.

Post Post Script: The software I'm using is called Celtx. It can be found at this website: http://celtx.com/.

HI Update Time

2010-09-23T18:13:00.000-04:00

Finally finished Draft 10 and sent it away for evaluation. Now it's in limbo for at least a couple weeks, but at least it out of my hair.

In the meantime, I'm now in the very earliest phases of a new novel. Right now, I don't even have a draft started. It's just setting and character notes and, soon, I hope, a plot outline (the idea requires too much political double-crossing for me to just wing it through the first draft, and anyway, I'd like to avoid the structural problems that made HI such a headache). Unfortunately, I can't give any details at the moment, but hopefully once I have a draft, I can open up a little bit more. The most I can say is that it's not set in the HI universe and the setting will not surprise people who know me well.

How to be a Braves troll in these difficult times

2010-09-21T22:57:00.000-04:00

So you're a diehard fan of the Atlanta Braves, and you're looking for a way to express it. You're obviously not doing it by attending the games, so you decide that the best way to do it is to troll sites populated by Phillies fans. Things are going great for a while, but then, oh no! It looks like your beloved Bravos blew a 7-game division lead and now trail the Phillies by 5 in late September. Not only is the division almost certainly out of reach, but there's a significant chance your team won't even make the playoffs as a wild card. What do you do now? Do you slink off into the shadows to lurk until the Braves are good again, whenever that happens to be? Do you sheepishly admit you underestimated the Phillies? Do you angrily rant about Bobby Cox's managing decisions, or a GM who traded away all your good young talent for a bunch of broken-down castoffs?

No, of course not. You keep right on trolling. Who cares if your team shit itself and died? But wait? Don't know how? X-Ray Blues is here to help.

How to make a Braves troll post:

First, select your excuse.

A. Citizen's Bank Park is a bandbox that turns pop flies into home runs
B. The umps were blatantly favoring Halliday
C. Of course they won. They're buying a championship, just like the Yankees.
D. The Braves are taking it easy because they have the wild card locked up.
E. The Braves were still shaken by the fan running on the field last night.

Second, select your rationalization.

A. I don't care because my real passion is the Bulldogs/Falcons/Thrashers/Hawks (ok, I've never seen those last two)
B. I don't care because Atlanta is warm in the winter
C. I don't care because Philadelphia is dirty and has crime
D. I don't care because girls in Atlanta are hot/girls in Philadelphia are ugly/both
E. I don't care because everyone in Philadelphia is a jerk.
F. I don't care because the Braves won a bunch of division titles during the Clinton administration.

Third, select your boast:

A. The Braves will win tomorrow
B. The Braves will win the next series
C. The Braves will beat you in the playoffs
D. The Braves will beat you next year
E. The Braves won a bunch of division titles during the Clinton administration.

Add some convoluted apologetics for the most racist nickname this side of "Redskins":

A. It's actually a gesture of respect
B. It's 100 years old, so it deserves a grandfather clause*
C. I'm 1/128th Native American and I'm fine with it
D. Why are you playing the race card? That's racist against whites.
E. Obama's the real racist

Finally, the grab bag:

A. Chose any one of the above, even if it contradicts one of your other choices, and add it to your post.

Congratulations! Now you're ready to troll Philly.com.

*Get it? Grandfather clause? I slay me.

Hooray

2010-09-10T12:14:00.001-04:00

One of my student loan accounts fell below $10,000 left on the balance today.

Whee.

Why I Write

2010-09-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

I was looking for a better title for this post; maybe one will come to me. The present one is just a little too literal for my tastes.

I have some personal shit bothering me, but since I have a strict policy against telling the Internet about anything non-trivial that's bothering me, I'm going to open up personally about something entirely unrelated.

It's just how I roll.

I told my first story when I was about three. I was going to say I "wrote" it, but I didn't know how to write yet, so I dictated it to my dad. I couldn't begin to tell you what the story was about, save that traffic lights were probably involved somehow. Until age 10 or so, I was obsessed with them. I'm still more interested in them than, I would imagine, nearly the entire rest of the population of Earth, but really, it's not that hard to be interested in something almost everyone else thinks is too obscure, unremarkable, or stupid to pay attention to. He wrote the words in big block letters on sheets of unlined whipe paper. I illustrated, of course. Then we stapled the pages between two sheets of construction paper (in my mind's eye, they were red, but who knows). My mom was my first audience. She raved about it. Moms always do.

In second grade, we had a story project. The teacher gave us a handout with the first paragraph of a story--an astronaut landing on the moon (if I remember right, the astronaut's name was left blank and you had your choice of pronouns, so girls could have girl heroes and boys could have boy heroes). We were supposed to finish the story and, of course, illustrate it. My astronaut was devoured by a moon monster named Doom (spelled "Doum") with fifteen foot teeth; the illustration showed the climactic scene in exceptionally gory detail, for a second grader.

My teacher, to her credit, didn't make me tone down the violence in the picture or change the ending, which I think a lot of teachers would (shit, today I'd probably have been called down to the office for counseling). After she'd collected and graded everyone's assignments, she printed out copies of them and distributed them in a booklet for everyone to read--as near as I can tell, this was my first non-family audience.

I bombed. Part of it was the misspelling of "doom", but--and remember, my memory is pretty hazy about all this--more of it was just that the story was weird or wrong somehow. I think the general idea was stories are supposed to have happy endings; we didn't follow the astronaut all the way to the moon just to see him devoured whole by a space monster with giant teeth.

I guess this is the point in the story where I'm supposed to say, "And from then on, I heard their jeering voices in my head whenever I tried to write. You see, I internalized their criticism and it manifests itself as my self-doubt." But that kinda, uh, didn't happen. I have no idea why--I'm not trying to claim any special moral character here. I just thought my story was good. It had a giant space monster who ate an astronaut! Despite the reception it got, I still remember that assignment fondly.

Incidentally, I told my first "your mom" joke in second grade.

In seventh grade, I got it in my head that I was going to write a novel. In fact, I was going to write it in class, in a notebook, and get it published and be a writer. Writing it in class would be a good way to spend the time I wasn't spending taking notes or paying attention or reading the assignment or doing my problems, which was all of the time because in seventh grade, my academic performance fell off a cliff, giving my mom fits. My school district stopped giving out "F's" on the assumption, I guess, that an F sent too negative a message; the grade scale went A, B, C, D, E instead, and I don't think the "E" was fooling anyone. The problem was one that would dog me pretty much since then: pure dumbfuck laziness. I aced tests, but in classes where homework is worth 50% of the grade, if you ace all your tests and never turn your homework in.... But boredom in a fine motivator, and it motivated me to write. And what I wrote was a novelization of Final Fantasy IV (known in the US as Final Fantasy II at the time), a jrpg I played to death on the Super Nintendo. The plan, I think, was to finish the book and then go to Square with the proposal--a media tie-in novel written on spec, by an American, for a Japanese company, based on the badly translated US localization of the fourth game in a series. Judging by some of the stuff I've seen on SlushPile Hell, this was not the worst plan anyone's ever had for getting published.

I eventually ran out of interest and never finished it (I got pretty far along; for those of you who've played the game, the last scene I wrote was when Cecil returned to Baron and killed the fake king). I wish I still had that book--five or six Mead Neatbooks, completely filled with smeary pencil block letters--but sometime in high school, I loaned them to a friend and they never returned. That I was still willing to show them to other people in high school says something about me and my writing, but I'm not sure what; it could say that my writing was exceptionally good for seventh grade, but more likely it says I still had no idea how bad it was even with a few years to reflect on it. Still, it gave me a taste for big projects. You could tell so much story with a novel.

It was the first time I thought about publishing as a realistic option, too. Now, granted, looking back, it wasn't actually realistic. But still, I was thinking about it.

(Fun aside: I remember, about the same time I was writing that piece, I read something by Arthur C. Clarke about one of his very first short stories, which he claimed was "mercifully lost". At the time, I thought: "Ha. My first novel is great. I guess I'm better than Arthur C. Clarke.")

None of this really answers the question, though. I guess I'm dancing around it because I don't really know myself. I don't actually have many "creative" friends, so I've never had a chance to sit down with a group and ask why they do it, either. I'd say the stories are just in my head and I'm just compelled to write them down, but they're not. There's vague bits in my head; a setting, an important scene maybe, but the rest I have to put together. Stephen King compares it to digging a fossil out of the ground--the story's already there, he just has to dig it up--but while On Writing is probably the best book on, ahem, writing that I know, for me the process is different. For me, putting together a story is a conscious act, like building a shed. The shed doesn't "emerge"; it comes together piece by piece, and every one of those pieces has to be measured, cut, and hammered into place. HI doesn't feel like a fossil that came out of the ground; I don't know how it could, with all the hours I've spent trying to make things work together properly. Every good idea in there only came after laboriously examining, testing, and in several cases, implementing five or ten bad ideas first.

Part of why I write, certainly, is because I enjoy the process. When everything is flowing the act of writing is immensely fun. First drafts are a particular joy because you're not worried about anything. Fuck it! Write it down! Who cares if it sucks? (Answer: you will, when you're trying to fix it next draft). There's a lot of problem-solving to it. "How do I get characters X and Y into location A without it being contrived?" That kind of thing, and there's a thrill when you solve it. I do very little of my problem-solving at the keyboard. When I run into a jam, I can end up thinking about it for days, turning it over and over in my head until I find a way out. Sometimes I have to set it aside entirely and let the subconscious work on it, but in general, I don't trust that process--it's always on its own schedule and who knows what weirdness is floating around down there?

Something I think I write because writing is the only thing I'm really good at.

In the next update: a bit more on how I write, using HI as the example. Will serve as a "history of HI" post for whoever's interested, too.

I love Toothpaste for Dinner

2010-08-08T17:45:00.000-04:00

Toothpaste For Dinner

Stooge Reviews #3: Men in Black

2010-08-02T01:11:00.000-04:00

Men in White was a 1934 melodrama starring Clark Gable as a devoted doctor with a society wife who can't understand his commitment to his patients. The movie caused a stir because Gable has an affair with a nurse, and later there's a scene implying abortion. Later in 1934, the Hays Code would come into effect, and Hollywood would self-censor films like Men in White for the next thirty years.

Meanwhile, though, the Stooges made a parody of it. And it's weird. Details below the jump.

Title: Men in Black
Year: 1934
Stooges: Moe, Larry, Curly
Director: Raymond McCarey

"Men in Black" is easily the strangest Stooge short I've ever seen. It's even stranger than "Woman Haters", and it gets that way without any rhyming dialog gimmicks. In this short, the Stooges are doctors, recently graduated with "the highest temperature in their class", and sworn to devote their lives to "duty and humanity". There is no plot to speak of; rather, the short is a series of sketches tied together by a couple recurring gags.

So what makes this short so weird? Well, try to imagine a short where everybody acts like Curly. That's "Men in Black". The entire film has a surreal, fever-dream feeling; at one point, the Stooges are sent to deal with a mental patient who doesn't actually seem any crazier than anyone else in the hospital. Every sketch is ended by the intercom paging "Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard", a line that would go on to become more famous than both the short and the long-forgotten film "Men in Black" lampoons.

Unfortunately, and despite being the only Stooge short ever nominated for an Academy Award (Best Short: Comedy), "Men in Black" isn't that funny. There are a couple good gags--there always are--but mostly it's just Moe, Larry, and Curly acting ~wacky~ without there being any actual joke. During the Curly years, the Stooges always worked best when everyone was in his element: Moe the boss, Larry the straight man, and Curly on center stage as the manic, childlike genius. In this short, Curly fades into the background. If it wasn't for his trademark sounds, it'd be impossible to distinguish him from Larry, who gets more lines and acts like he's mixed his medication.

What's interesting about "Men in Black" is that, by not succeeding, it teaches us a lot about how the Stooges did succeed. The Stooges might survive cartoonish violence, but their shorts aren't like cartoons; Moe, Larry, and Curly are three idiots bumbling through a believable world, causing havoc. Hence fancy society parties degenerating into pie fights, or a house's plumbing rerouted into the electrical system. "Men in Black" actually seems like it would have worked much better as a Daffy Duck cartoon; the silliness and surrealism of it all is perfectly suited for him, and if there's any character who's believable as a doctor who uses a mallet to anesthetize his patients, it's Daffy.

Bottom line: a weak early offering that ran off the rails. Up next: more familiar circumstances for the boys, and a guest star who would go on to be one of America's greatest comics in her own right.

122,000

2010-07-31T15:35:00.002-04:00

Finally bit the bullet and put together a test draft with the new revisions and did a word count. The rough tally came to 122,000, up nearly 10,000 from the previous draft. Blarg.

Stooge Reviews #2: Punch Drunks

2010-07-31T05:20:00.002-04:00

Even though "Woman Haters" was the first short featuring the Three Stooges, you could say its follow-up, 1936's "Punch Drunks" is the first Three Stooges short. After the experiment with "Musical Novelties", "Punch Drunks" gets back to--creates, in fact--the Stooge formula that would serve the troupe so well for so long.

More after the jump.

Stooge Review #2

Title: "Punch Drunks"
Year: 1934
Stooges: Moe, Larry, Curly (still spelled "Curley", as it will be for several more years)
Directed by: Lou Breslow and Jack Cluett

The first thing to notice about this short comes before the opening credits: the writers are (in order) Jerry Howard, Larry Fine, and Moe Howard. This is the only Columbia short where the Stooges themselves receive a writing credit.

The plot is straightforward, much more so than "Woman Haters". Moe is a failing boxing promoter, Curly is a waiter who meekly takes abuse from his boss and the customers, and Larry is a freelance musician who, judging by his clothing and his willingness to work for soup, isn't doing well either. All three meet by chance in the restaurant where Curly works and Larry is trying to get a gig as a tableside violinist. While Curly is getting insulted and pelted with food by a table of angry customers (including Moe), Larry starts playing "Pop Goes the Weasel", which sends Curly into a violent rage. He KOs two customers and is about to knock Moe into next week when the music stops. Moe realizes he has a natural born champ on his hands and signs him on as a boxer; along the way out, he "hires" Larry by grabbing him by the hair and dragging him along. Moe trains Curly to be a boxer, and with Larry sitting ringside every fight playing "Pop Goes the Weasel", "K.O. Stradivarius" wins fight after fight until it's time to face the champ in the third act. There, predictably, Larry's violin is broken early in the first round, and the rest of the short is divided between Curly getting his ass kicked while Larry runs frantically through town looking for some way to play the music.

"Punch Drunks" feels a lot more like a Stooges short than "Woman Haters". The characters are more like themselves, especially Moe. If anything, Moe has swung too far the other way; he's not only bossy and violent, but he's a skinflint and a genuine prick. Watch the early scenes, where he's eating lunch with a few of his fighters. He comes off quite believably as a callous, small-time boxing promoter; the kind of guy who'd be the villain in a movie about a fading former contender. Curly is essentially playing two roles: the meek, soft-spoken waiter (who speaks and moves without Curly's trademark mannerisms and the Brooklyn accent toned down) and the crazyman going bananas whenever "Pop Goes the Weasel" plays. Larry plays the foil, mostly to Moe; he has far less dialog than he did in "Woman Haters", though he still gets plenty of screen time, especially in the third act, and is in nearly all the funniest gags in the short. He also, incidentally, is actually playing the violin in all his scenes; Larry Fine was a classically trained musician and had a successful vaudeville career as a violinist before joining the Stooges in the 20s.

If "Punch Drunks" has a problem, it's pacing. For most of the third act, Curly is getting beaten up in the ring while Larry runs up and down a dark street. This goes on for about six and a half minutes. There are other gags thrown in (including the best slapstick moment in the film, which I won't give away here), but for the most part, it drags. In the second act, the Stooges encounter a woman (played by Dorothy Granger, who gets billed on the title card) in a stuck car along Curly's training route somewhere in southern California (some pretty open countryside which was probably paved over by 1955) who is intended to be a love interest, but very little is done with her character. Her best moment is probably reacting to Moe's rather slimy come-ons with polite contempt; she only has eyes for Curly, and, anyway, Moe is a prick in this short, even by Moe standards.

Bottom line: They were still working the bugs out at this stage, but this is a fairly good short with its share of laugh-out-loud gags. They still hadn't figured out how to properly use Curly, but Moe and Larry had settled into their roles and it paid off. Definitely worth seeing if only to experience the Stooges' only screenwriting effort; while they undoubtedly contributed to later scripts, and Curly would later be given huge blank blocks of the script in which to improvise, this was the only one that I know of where they were in the lead.

Next up: 1934's "Men in Black", a parody that by now is better remembered than the Clark Gable film it lampooned, if only because of one line.

Stooge Reviews #1: Woman Haters

2010-07-30T02:54:00.002-04:00

So today we're debuting a new feature here on X-Ray Blues--reviews of the 190 Columbia Three Stooges shorts, in order, starting in 1934. This has absolutely fuck-all to do with science fiction, writing, or publishing, but it's my blog, so poop on you if you don't like it. Review begins below the jump.

Stooge Review #1

Title: Woman Haters
Year: 1934
Stooges: Moe, Larry, Curly (spelled "Curley" on the title card)
Directed by: Archie Gottler

"Woman Haters" was the first Columbia short subject featuring the Three Stooges, and the Stooges' first film without Ted Healy. It's the first of 190 Stooges shorts, and the film that kicked off one of Hollywood's longest-running comic acts (the Stooges won't be officially disbanded until Moe Howard's death from lung cancer in 1975).

And it's pretty weird.

For starters, the whole thing is in verse. The short was billed as a "Musical Novelty", and every line rhymes. For the most part, it isn't actually a musical, but the lines are delivered in a kind of sing-song, spoken-word voice set to a swinging background tune.

Second, the plot: the Stooges join the Woman-Haters Club (whose chairman, incidentally, is played by Bud Jamison, who would go on to be a longtime Stooges supporting player; his specialty was accents, especially Irish ones), a social club of fancy gentlemen who have sworn off courting and marriage. Unfortunately, Larry meets a girl, played by Marjorie White, and gets engaged to be married. He promises to break it off, but chickens out and gets married anyhow. Worse, the Stooges are traveling salesmen, and Moe and Curly are booked on Larry's honeymoon train.

If you've ever seen the pilot of a television show, that's the feel this short has. The Stooges' characters are undeveloped even compared to their later 1936 shorts. The seeds are there: Moe is the bossy, abusive leader, Curly is a surreal man-child, and Larry is the straight man, but they're muted compared to the Stooges most people recognize. Larry and Curly even actually slap Moe back. Curly's physical comedy is notably restrained, as well. Many of Curly's barks, woos, and random flailings were improvised in later shorts, often because Curly had forgotten his lines; in "Woman Haters", because of its spoken-verse structure, there's no room for improvisation. Also, how many Stooge shorts had a Larry-centered plot?

"Woman Haters" is a farce that depends more on situations than slapstick for laughs. The slapstick bits, while funny, seem somewhat out-of-place. The first reel exists mostly to set up the second, where Larry is trying to hide his marriage from his friends and his membership in the club from his wife, all on the same train (in fact, they appear to be berthed in the same train car). Marjorie White plays a bigger role than most Stooge co-stars would in later films; at times, frankly, she steals the scene, especially as she winds up orchestrating the entire farce by the middle of the second reel. She has a deft comic touch and would have been fun as a recurring supporting actress. Sadly, this was to be her last role in any film; she was killed in a car wreck in 1935.

Ultimately, while "Woman Haters" is funny on its own merits and definitely a Stooges short (rather than a film where Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard happen to be playing roles--though strangely, Larry is called "Jim" and Curly is called "Jackie" in the film), it's more interesting as a historical oddity than as a film. Columbia, so far as I know, never went back to this format. There were some music-centered Stooges shorts later, but never one where the entire script was in verse. The Stooges' characters would develop remarkably fast; in the very next short, in fact, we'll see Moe, Larry, and Curly acting a lot more like the Stooges we know best.

Writer Beware

2010-07-29T15:30:00.001-04:00

I have added a new link on my front page: SFWA's Writer Beware blog, a comprehensive compendium of shady deals, borderline scams, and outright fraudulent agents and publishers looking to fleece new writers. There's also good information on how to spot a scam on your own. I'll add my own bit of advice here:

1. If the money is flowing from you at any point in the process, it's a scam (legitimate publishers assume all the financial risk publishing a book; legitimate agents are paid only when a client is paid). The only thing you should have to pay for during the publishing process is postage.

2. If an agent or publisher is soliciting submissions through advertisements, it's a scam (agents and publishers are always inundated with more submissions than they could ever accept). The only "advertisement" for publishers and agents that's reliably legitimate is the Writer's Market.

Blog is active again, HI update

2010-07-29T13:48:00.001-04:00

y helo thar

I have a confession. I'm a terrible blogger, I know I'm a terrible blogger, and I always feel a little bit bad every time I restart a blog because I know I'm going to abandon it in, like, a month, and leave my readers hanging. Nevertheless, here I am, restarting a blog. If you don't want to follow it, I wouldn't blame you.

So where have I been lately? On the Intertubes, I've mostly been on Testingstan and EVE Online. Testingstan is a message board where a certain clique of bitter trolls act like idiots all day long, and EVE Online is a sci-fi MMO where thousands of bitter trolls act like jerks all day long. It's pretty fun, to be honest. Unfortunately, EVE is a horrible time-sink. Lately, I haven't been able to play because of computer problems, and honestly, it's probably good for me. I'm paid up on my corp dues and I've got a couple long skills that need training, so it's a good time for me to be offline anyhow.

Ask your mom where I've been in real life.

OK, so, HI update. I've been in contact with a professional agent since the beginning of the year. He's been incredibly helpful, making suggestions to improve the book and correct nagging structural problems. At this point, I've just finished the ninth (!) draft and I'm getting ready to start the tenth.

A brief explanation about how I work: since the third draft or so, I've basically been working with paired drafts. Odd numbered drafts are where large-scale changes are made. Even numbered ones are where I polish out all the new mistakes I introduced in the previous draft. You could probably argue that the even numbered drafts are just proofreading the odd numbered drafts, but it's easier for me to keep things organized if I count them as separate drafts. Once upon a time, I thought I could get this damn book done in three drafts, but, that's not exactly how it worked.

My goal is to finish the 10th draft by Labor Day, a ludicrously soft deadline that even I should be able to meet. Labor Day wasn't an arbitrary choice--before then, the entire publishing industry is on vacation in the Hamptons, so there's no point rushing to get something submitted before then. Of course, I have no idea if #10 is really the final draft (to be honest, I'm not completely happy with how #9 turned out, but I struggled a lot with it and that might just be leftover bad feeling).

I have other books percolating in my head, as well as a novella. I should try to hammer out some short stories, but I just can't seem to make the short story work for me (so much for becoming a television writer). There's also the Voyager Rewrite, which I promise I'll finish soon--I'm almost there anyhow, and it'd be a shame to abandon it. I have some thoughts about Voyager and Trek in general, but I'll save them for another time so I have more material for later.

That's it for now. Incidentally, I went back through my comments and noticed a ridiculous amount of spam. I can't be arsed to delete it all. If it turned out I missed some agent or publishing scam trying to advertise on my blog, let me know and I'll nuke it, but anyone foolish enough to buy Viagra from a link in a blog comment is on his own. I did notice some people asking me about publishing scams, and I'm really sorry for never replying to them. I'll try to make up for it with some posts later.

Philadelphia crowds

2009-12-04T01:55:00.001-05:00

Saw Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm tonight at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia. JoCO and the boys put on a good show, as usual, but there was an annoyingly high number of people in the audience who thought this was some kind of interactive performance, who kept derailing the show by shouting "hilarious" comments and demands for specific songs. It's intensely fucking annoying, as you might imagine--I didn't pay for the tickets and then drop another forty bucks on food and drink in order to hear some drunk douchebag slurring bad jokes at high volume. I live in a college town; I can experience that for the cost of a pint of Yuengling any weekend of the year.

The thing is, I've been to two other shows with these guys (yeah, I know; five more years at this rate and I'll probably be LARPing), one in Alexandria, VA and one in Annapolis, and at neither one, was the audience this disruptive. Meanwhile, at a Lewis Black show I saw in Philadelphia last year, there was the same fucking thing--dipshits in the audience disrupting the show. Not even by heckling, which you at least understand is a possibility at a comedy show. Just trying to participate, like the other three thousand people in the theater paid to hear you and Lewis Black have a fucking conversation.

For that matter, I remember it happening when John Stewart performed at the Tower Theater, in Upper Darby (just over the city line). Though Stewart just talked right over them; in a big venue, the guy with the microphone owns the show (I was a bit annoyed, actually, that Lewis Black responded to the jerkoffs in the audience rather than bulling right over them). So I'm wondering, is this a common thing in Philadelphia? Or am I just unlucky? And if it's common here, is it only common here, or did I just happen to run into unusually well-behaved crowds in Alexandria and Annapolis?

One more, and then I promise I'm done

2009-11-26T00:24:00.000-05:00

As it turns out, Harlequin is not the first publisher to create a vanity imprint with Author Solutions. Thomas Nelson, which is to the Christian market as Harlequin is to romance, had the idea first, with their West Bow Press imprint. It's exactly the same deal as ~~Harlequin Horizons~~ DelleArte Press, except for one little thing:

DelleArte Press's base package costs $599. West Bow's? $999.

Attention, Real True Christians: this is the price you pay for having your own special subculture with your own special "Christian" everything. It's an open invitation to get ripped off...or ripped off more, in this case.

Follow up on Author Solutions

2009-11-22T15:26:00.001-05:00

This is basically a repost from SDN, but I had to add this.

Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I went to Author Solutions's website to find out exactly what Harlequin Horizons will be charging the poor schmucks Harlequin refers to them. It was...well, astonishing, frankly. A sampling after the jump:

Just for fun, I checked to see what an Author Services publicity package looks like. I went to AuthorHouse.com, their largest imprint. You can figure Harlequin Horizons will be basically the same except for more red frilly crap on the website. You know what you actually get if you pay the extra eight hundred dollars it costs for the cheapest package that includes a "marketing kit"? "Personalized bookmarks, business cards, and postcards for your direct marketing efforts!" But don't worry--the "Discovery" package ($1399 USD) also includes:

-Copyright registration (cost if you do it yourself: $35)

-A "personalized back cover" (Lulu.com lets you do this for free)

-A "book buyers' preview"--they'll put chapter samples in the Ingram Title Database (which booksellers will ignore, because the book is from a vanity press)

-Submission to Barnes and Noble.com's See Inside feature (free)

-Submission to Amazon's Search Inside and Google's Book Search (free)

-Up to ten images allowed in the book (how many romance novels have 10 images inside? Other than pornos, and hilariously, that's one of the few things you can't publish with AuthorHouse)

-35 complementary copies (15 paperback, 10 hardback) to guarantee that absolutely everybody who might want to read your book can get a copy for free, saving you the hassle of making back even the tiniest fragment of your investment

Plus the above-mentioned business cards and bookmarks you could print at home for the cost of cardstock ($16.49 at Office Max) and ink. By the way, even the $1999 "Pinnacle" package doesn't include any kind of copy editing. That's going to cost you another $499 for the "basic" edit (the first 2000 words only) or $.029/word for line editing ($1450 for a 50,000 word book). Of course, if you actually want advice beyond "you should have used a comma here", in the form of three opportunities to talk to an "editorial consultant" about "structural ideas, thoughts, and suggestions", that'll run $.089 per word ($4450).

There's more. If you want a website, that's $399 (plus monthly hosting fees). But don't expect an actual web designer--all AuthorHouse provides are the templates.

But that's Web 1.0. If you're hip, you want the Web 2.0, "Social Networking" package. I'm going to let Author Services speak for itself here:

When you purchase our Social Media Setup Service, we will send you a questionnaire to get the latest about you and your book. With that information and any visuals you provide we’ll populate the following:

1. A blog using the wildly popular and easy-to-use WordPress platform.

2. A Facebook profile for your identity as an author.

3. A Facebook page for your book.

4. A MySpace page for your book.

5. A Flickr account that is integrated with your social network.

6. A FeedBurner account to help you deliver your blog to the masses.

7. A Shelfari social book account.

8. A Goodreads social book account.

9. A LibraryThing book-cataloging account.

10. A Twitter micro-blogging account.

Once all of the pages and sites are in place, AuthorHouse will send your log-in information to you, as well as easy instructions on how to update your information.

Price?

Seven hundred and ninety-nine dollars. For a fucking Facebook page! Can you believe this shit?

Oops, sorry. Broke character there for a minute.

For $200 a month, you can be an AuthorHouse front page feature, so other poor gullible schmucks can click past your book on their way to pouring money down the vanity press rathole.

For $500 apiece, they'll send an advance copy of your book to Clarion and Kirkus Reviews, where some poor miserable bastard is actually paid to review books from Author House.

For $750, they'll send a press release through Newswire Plus, who'll fax it to dozens of newspapers all over the country, who will promptly crumple it up and throw it in the garbage, because it says "AuthorHouse" on the letterhead.

For $2500, they'll send 10 million "promotional" emails to whatever nimrods weren't smart enough to uncheck "Check here if you wish to receive periodic email alerts about new products from our partners" the last time they ordered a 20 pound bag of Chicken & Gravy Kibble from Pets.com.

$2,650.00 gets you a 40 word ad in the New York Times Book Review. Hilariously, the sample PDF was blank when I clicked on it.

Uh-oh, AuthorHouse wants the manuscript in PDF format but you have a word file. No worries! AuthorHouse will convert it for you for $29.

Finally, if you're in a hurry, AuthorHouse can rush the formatting and editing process for $500. Because why the fuck not?

That's as far as I got before I got disgusted enough to close the tab. And don't forget, the base price is $599. That gets you basically nothing but a printed book, which you could get from Lulu for the cost of printing (using their cost calculator, HI would cost about $13.50 per copy in trade paperback form at most; likely a lot less, because the manuscript is presently formatted in Courier New, double spaced, huge margins, which is standard manuscript format but obviously nobody prints books like that).

With AuthorHouse, and the rest of Author Solutions' subsidiaries, you can easily run up a five digit number for printing and "services". In fact, I added up the services that a traditional publisher would provide for free, as part of the contract, and I got $9749. That's without the most transcendentally ridiculous ripoffs, like eight hundred bucks to set up a bunch of social networking accounts and linking them to a Wordpress blog. Folks, that's an advance. In fact, for a first novelist, that's a pretty nice advance; I suspect it's a lot more than what Harlequin pays. For that price, you could go to a traditional printing press and run off a substantial print run. You'd end up with a huge pile of books in your garage, but at least you'd have tangible product. The overwhelming majority of the services offered by vanity publishers are worthless. You can't call it fraud, because they deliver the services paid for, but AuthorHouse's website strongly implies that paying for these services will bring commercial success, and it just won't.

By the way, in case anyone thinks I'm trying to shill for Lulu, they offer the exact same overpriced services with the exact same bullshit promises on the rest of their website, so they're hardly saints. But at least the basic product is reasonable.

What a bunch of shit.

Why I love the SFWA

2009-11-20T14:18:00.003-05:00

I love the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Not only do they have one of the best online collections of advice for writers anywhere on the Internet, and not only do they run the indispensable Writer Beware site, but they stick up for authors, even ones outside their genre.

Background: Harlequin, the 900lb gorilla of romance publishing, recently started up a new imprint called Harlequin Horizons. Unfortunately, the new imprint is a joint venture with Author Solutions, Inc., a ~~vanity press~~
print-on-demand publisher which charges $599 to publish an author's books. Note that that's the bare minimum. If you want actual, you know, services like press releases or copies sent to reviewers, you're going to be looking at a four digit number.

Why is this a big deal? Because, if you didn't know, the way publishing works is that the publishing houses pay the writers. When a book is published, the publishing company pays an advance (short for "advance against royalties), usually in the high four-digits/low five-digits range for first-time authors at a big house. Then, if the book sells well, the writer will collect royalties (a small percentage of the cover price). In between, the publishing company gives it a professional edit, designs a layout and a cover, sends advance copies to reviewers, and about a thousand other things which are essential to making a book stand out in a crowd enough to get shelf space at brick-and-mortar bookstores and actually get purchased by someone besides the author's friends and family. At no point in this process does money flow from the author to the publishing company (or the author's agent, for that matter, if he has one). It all goes to the writer. Essentially, the publishing company is making a bet--"We'll pay thousands of dollars to the authors and hundreds of thousands more for a print run and marketing campaign, because we think we can sell enough copies of this book to make up those costs and earn enough profit to satisfy the shareholders on top of it." This is why it's so difficult to get published. If a publishing house makes a bad bet, they'll lose a lot of money. They'll lose even more than most companies with a failed product, in fact, because traditionally, booksellers have the right to return all unsold copies for a refund, meaning that if a book sells badly enough, the publisher could lose virtually every nickel they spent. And huge flops aren't unheard of; I've heard stories about novels which sold less than two hundred books out of a ten-thousand-copy print run. When that happens, the publisher has to eat the losses, not the author (the author is punished in different ways--good luck getting Barnes and Noble to stock anything with your name on it after one or two big flops).

What a vanity press does is the exact opposite--it charges an exorbitant sum of money to the author to publish a book and market it (for a given value of "marketing"; read on). Enough, in fact, to totally cover all costs and make a profit for the company. The implications should be obvious: it doesn't matter worth a damn to a vanity press if a book sells a single copy, because they make all their money up front. And they act like it: vanity presses have very little, if any, editorial controls. Nor do they offer the discounts booksellers expect, and nor do they have the return policy. Many, in fact, simply leave the entire process of marketing up to the author, or if they do offer marketing, it's half-assed, like a press release they know nobody will ever read. As a consequence to all of this, a vanity published book has a snowball's chance in hell of ever seeing shelf space at a bookstore. Which, okay, fine, some books are so niche that they'd never sell in a bookstore anyway (I have a copy of a self-published book called Our Kin, which is a genealogy of my dad's family and of absolutely no interest to anyone else), but vanity presses don't tell authors this. In fact, in my experience, they talk an awful lot about the joy and satisfaction and rewards of getting published, pooh-pooh traditional publishers (with a hint of "those snobs are just trying to freeze out new talent" and a splash of "Tolstoy was rejected hundreds of times before he finally sold a book; who says editors know anything about talent anyway?"), and never mention that you and your mom will probably be the only people who buy a copy of your book.

In the old days, vanity presses had, well, printing presses; huge machines that cost thousands of dollars to run and took lots of time to set up (in the old old days, the type had to be set by hand; now I think they do some kind of arcana to print off some kind of acetate transfer sheet, at least judging from my experience working for a janitorial service which cleaned a print shop once). In order to make any money, even vanity houses had to print hundreds or thousands of copies of a book, and they charged accordingly. Nowadays, there's what's called print-on-demand, where the book is stored electronically and printed one copy at a time as orders come in. For small runs, this is fantastic (it makes them economically possible, frankly), but you lose traditional printing's economies of scale (this is why the big houses don't use it for their major print runs, though I think they might be taking advantage of the technology to produce, say, copies of out-of-print books where there's still some demand but not enough to justify a new print run). Earlier in the decade, there were dozens of POD vanity presses--Barnes and Noble was part-owner of one, in fact--but it seems now that Author Solutions, Inc., has purchased most of them.

Which brings us back to Harlequin. The only possible reason for Harlequin to partner with Author Solutions is to make money off authors who can't get published traditionally or won't try. Harleqin is claiming in their press releases that Horizons will help them identify new writers, but that's bullshit--Harlequin's slush pile could sink an ocean liner. There's a stadium's worth of shitty, desperate wannabe writers in there (and probably more good ones than they could ever make room for). Giving shitty, desperate writers yet another vanity option isn't going to help Harlequin find anyone. If they were serious about finding new talent, the first thing they'd do is put editorial controls on Horizons, to weed out all the crap. The fact that they haven't should tell you all you need to know.

From what I can tell, Author Solutions is doing all the work, and Harlequin is getting a cut in exchange for lending its name. And they're up to all the usual vanity press tricks--offering overpriced marketing solutions that they know full well will be useless, talking a lot of sweet talk about the joys of getting published (with Harlequin's name, no less!), and not mentioning that hell will freeze over before a bookstore will carry any book with the Harlequin Horizon's name on it. Author Solutions' website is full of testimonials from (the tiny handful of) successful independently published authors who went through AS and Harlequin is apparently directing or planning to direct rejected authors to AS (rather than suggest trying another company and politely wishing the author luck, like every other boilerplate form rejection letter).

Anyway, this caused a gigantic stink, with the Romance Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America expressing alarm and dismay, and essentially blacklisting all of Harlequin's imprints. SFWA also got in the act, saying this:

Until such time as Harlequin changes course, and returns to a model of legitimately working with authors instead of charging authors for publishing services, SFWA has no choice but to be absolutely clear that NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA. Further, Harlequin should be on notice that while the rules of our annual Nebula Award do not expressly prohibit self-published titles from winning, it is highly unlikely that our membership would ever nominate or vote for a work that was published in this manner.

Blacklisted. Awesome. Harlequin has responded to the outcry by getting completely butthurt about the whole thing, because they're Harlequin, damn it. In all honestly, they probably don't care about SFWA and MWA, but a romance publisher being called a vanity press by the Romance Writers of America is a Big Fucking Deal, and it apparently rocked them so far back on their heels that they're...changing the name of the imprint so it won't have Harlequin's name on it. Needless to say, nobody's buying it.

John Scalzi, a sci-fi author I happen to enjoy, also talks about this on his blog. Read his post; it's less TL;DR than mine and nicely acerbic.

Incidentally, if you're an aspiring author and you can't wait for traditional publishers, or you've given up, or what you have is so niche you know a traditional house won't buy it, Lulu.com provides POD services for no up-front charge. Author Solutions is a ripoff. Don't ever give them your business.

Astronomy is awesome

2009-11-03T22:49:00.003-05:00

Saw Jupiter and Uranus through my girlfriend's father's telescope tonight. Jupiter was a disk, with faintly visible cloud bands and three of the four Galilean moons visible. Uranus was just barely a disk--more of a dot--but very blue-green.

Yeah. Awesome.

Publishing scam

2009-11-02T01:59:00.004-05:00

Right after I sent an e-query to an agent, an ad for the Whitmore Publishing Company appeared in my Gmail courtesy of Google adsense's witchcraft. Whitmore, it turns out, was soliciting submissions (in all genres, no less). I took a quick look at SFWA's Writer Beware Blog, and lo, my suspicions were correct: Whitmore shows up. A little poking around and it turns out Whitmore is an imprint of Dorrance, a big vanity house.

Just something to keep in mind if anyone who's reading this is a writer: publishers and agents are absolutely swamped, all of the time, and between the Writer's Market and Google, they'll never run out of potential clients. Anyone who's actively soliciting manuscripts is running a business model where they get paid the more books they publish, rather than the more books they sell. This runs the gamut from print-on-demand publishers (who don't generally try to hide what they are) to vanity presses (which from what I've seen, are usually pretty shady operators--they provide services paid for, but they're real cagey about the fact that no bookstore will ever carry a book from a vanity press) to outright scams.

Active again

2009-10-26T16:05:00.001-04:00

The blog is active again.

And the peasants rejoiced.

Chinese ship names

2008-12-09T20:35:00.001-05:00

If you've ever wondered where I found all the Mandarin ship names I used in HI, it's from Rachel Kronick's website, specifically this page. Highly recommended if you're looking for realistic Mandarin ship names. Also, she's friendly and helpful over e-mail. A good resource to bookmark. (Thanks also to Surlethe, who helped me find the proper characters for Taifeng: 台风).

Moderator recommendations

2008-12-08T14:42:00.002-05:00

So I notice there seems to be some movement on expanding the SDN mod staff. I'm still on sabbatical, but I can't let this moment pass without making some recommendations of my own. If any of my regular readers care to repost this to the House of Commons, feel free.

Here we go, forum by forum. Note that unless otherwise noted, forum mods would be in charge of the subforums as well:

SWvST: I think Vympel and Ghost Rider can handle this on their own, seeing as it's so low-traffic. If we want another mod in there, I'd recommend Lonestar.
PSW: Coyote has volunteered for this one, so let him have it as a "second" forum. Otherwise, I don't see much need for new mods.
PST: I'd like to keep this slot. I also think Bounty is perfect for this job--I've read some of his criticism of how PST has been modded (which is obviously directed at me), and I think he's dead-on. I haven't been doing my job well enough there. If a third mod is needed, or if The Powers That Be want me elsewhere, Gandalf is a good #2.
FF: Mayabird has put her name forward, and I think she's a fine choice. Incidentally, why isn't Mayabird a Senator? She's smart, she's got her head screwed on straight, and almost everything she posts is relevant and interesting.
OSF: While NecronLord and Fgalkin are already doing a good job here, if we wanted more people, this would be a good fit for GrandMasterTerwyn. Bounty and Mayabird could also take OSF as a second forum, since PST and FF are so low-traffic.
FAN: LadyTevar seems like a natural choice here, in addition to Ghost Rider and her husband. Also, I'd bring in Lonestar. And this is going to come off as biased, but fuck it, she's a good choice: Metatwaddle. She's smart, level-headed, loves fantasy, and she'd have a good tutor.
Fiction Block Mods: I'm somewhat reluctant to recommend brand new mods to be block mods, so for the time being, I'd let NecronLord and SirNitram handle this.

And on the non-fiction side of the board:
SLAM: Surlethe (duh). Also Publius, if he wants the job, and GrandMasterTerwyn.
OT: OT is a good forum for new mods, because it's active and easy. Havokeff wants this one, and he'd be a good fit. Bounty and Mayabird could take OT as a second if OSF is full. Lonestar, Broomstick, and Hotfoot could also take OT as a second forum.
-History: Stas Bush is a natural choice. I'd add Simplicius as a backup and Coyote as a third, if needed.
AMP: AMP is a quiet, well-behaved forum. The only mod I'd add is Simplicius.
N&P: The local firepit. First off, I want a slot here. I would also add Terwyn, Simplicius, Coyote, and Surlethe, plus Stas Bush if we need more firepower (incidentally, if it were up to me, I would elevate those five to mods immediately, even if I couldn't think of any slots for them).
-Famous Threads: Fgalkin is the Keeper of the Lore, isn't he? Let this be his project.
G&C: I'm surprised not to have seen Ace Pace's name brought up for this slot. I'll correct that oversight--I think he'd do a fine job. This forum polices itself pretty well, so I don't think we need anyone else.
-STGOD: Lonestar would be a good choice. Also, if we need another G&C mod, let him take both.
ARSE: I don't need this one anymore, so I'd give my slot to Broomstick.
Nonfiction Block Mods: Myself, Pablo Sanchez, Edi, and Frank Hipper, to start.

Other forums:
Hall of Shame: I'm going to buck the trend and say I don't see any point to restoring the Horsemen. I'd just go ahead and dissolve the position and leave the HoS in the hands of the supermods directly.
The Imperial Senate: CmdrWilkens (really, did you expect anyone else?). I'd make him chancellor, or, if Mike wants to leave that post for Rob Wilson, Deputy Chancellor in his absence. Also, just by the by, I've read his proposed new Senate rules and I think they're excellent and should be passed as soon as possible. Also, I'd let him have access to the mod forum. He'd be a good voice to have in there.
-House of Commons: Coyote and Hotfoot are doing a fine job here. I'd also give them both access to the mod forum, if they don't already have it.
The Coliseum: Simplicius wants this, Ace Pace has made a lot of good suggestions, and I know Surlethe has been trying mightily to make it work. Note that modding the Coliseum would also include playing the role of MC, and organizing the matches. Frankly, it was a lousy idea to put the Senate in charge of setting up matches. Fuck that shit. If two people want to fight in the Coliseum, let the Coliseum mods decide if the topic is worthy and what the rules will be.
Parting Shots: No mods necessary.
Testing: Testing is mine, bitches.

New chapters finished

2008-11-30T12:14:00.002-05:00

Finally finished the second of the new chapters last night (tentatively titled "Clusterfuck" and "Antimatter Monday"). They both ran longer than I wanted (around 12,000 words each), but I think I can get away with that, though bringing the final draft in at ~100,000 now seems impossible; there's just not that much fat left to trim anywhere else. I'll start editing the last chapters today, though how much work I actually get done is an open question.

A taste of the new material...

2008-11-25T00:36:00.002-05:00

Because battle scenes are so gratifying to write.

And then the shells from Xinjinshan arrived. The battleship was half a million kilometers away, outside of its gun range...for a maneuvering target. Giant asteroids, as a rule, didn’t maneuver. The facing surface of Patroclus exploded with shell hits, spraying shards of rock into space. An evacuation shuttle was caught in the splash and disintegrated like a sparrow in the mouth of a shotgun.

Everything is coming along just fine.

A few changes

2008-11-23T12:52:00.003-05:00

Tweaked the blog's layout a little (you may have noticed it's much bluer), and added a sidebar with links to websites I find valuable or amusing. Commentary or suggestions welcome.

This concludes this public service announcement.

Bambi vs. Godzilla

2008-11-22T10:45:00.002-05:00

Poking around SDN last night after finishing up my HI work, I encountered an absolute gem of a thread. In it, Robo Jesus (who?) presumes to lecture Kuroneko about physics. Hilarity results.

My favorite part:

I'm torn between being in awe of your strawman or the irony of being lectured on arrogance by someone who either doesn't read or doesn't understand his own sources. I explicitly admitted that our knowledge is far from complete, so don't pretend otherwise--it being the only statement in your first post between us that I agreed with. On the other hand, going from that from that to "our understanding of physics absolutely sucks" involves no rational basis, an ignorance of just how well our fundamental laws do work, and, as your next post demonstrated, an ignorance of what our theories are even talking about. As far as I'm concerned, that's the sort of arrogant attitude "that needs to be kicked in the head with steel toed boots."

Someone ought to link this thread to the "being positive" thread in the Senate. You want an example of a devastating smackdown with no naughty words, insults, bullying, or general jackass behavior, this is it.

Hammarskjöld

2008-11-21T13:12:00.003-05:00

Why the hell did I decide to name a major setting in the book "Hammarskjöld"? I don't even have a key to make the "ö". I ought to just do a find-and-replace and rename it "U Thant", but then I'd have to hunt down all those references to "The Hammer" and "Hammer Town" and change them, and "U Thant" doesn't lend itself to snappy nicknames.

o hai guyz

2008-11-19T14:41:00.003-05:00

So hey, I have a blog! How about that, huh? Right after Winchell Chung writes up an entry about me on Atomic Rockets, where he says I never update my blog and can usually be found at SDN, I go on sabbatical from SDN and update my blog. On the upside, without SDN, I get way more work done. If all else fails, I eventually get so bored I edit for lack of anything better to do. Now that's motivation.

I was actually going to go on a vacation from SDN a week ago, but then the fuck-off huge drama storm broke out, and I felt compelled to hang around and dispense my wisdom. I'm sure when I return SDN will have become a beacon of sweet reason, patience, and light. Except for Testing. Fuck those guys.

Alright, so, way-overdue novel update. The first thing I did to the third draft was cut out 50,000 words. Just like that! I accomplished it by taking an ax to an entire subplot consisting of three chapters, two of which I wrote for the second draft and didn't like at all, and one of which had been present from the first draft and I really hated to cut, but sometimes you have to murder your darlings. So the novel went from a bloated 130,000 words to a rushed 80,000. Which is better, but obviously not ideal, so I have to refill it somewhat, by fleshing out and expanding the main plot, with, among other things, another battle. This time with battleships, giving the reader a chance to see those brutes in action up close, something I regretted leaving out of the first and second drafts.

And the new additions have been the problem. I should have had this draft done already, even given distractions, but the writing has been extraordinarily hard going this time, and I'm not sure why. I haven't been writing "downhill" at all this draft--the experience of having the words pour out so fast and I can hardly keep up. When that happens, I can write entire chapters in a few days (as I did with "Last Flight Out", one of my favorites in all three drafts). So it's been a slog. Fortunately, I'm almost finished, and I won't need to move a lot of furniture in the remaining chapters, so I'm on track to be done by Christmas. And then we'll see what's left to be done.

Underway again

2008-03-11T18:29:00.002-04:00

And we're off. While some test readers are still reading, I've begun the first stages of re-editing the novel. For now, all I'm doing it taking a blue pencil to a hard copy of the manuscript and cutting, cutting, cutting. One of my goals for this draft is to tighten the story by 10,000-30,000 words, and that means the merciless slaughter of unnecessary verbiage (especially adverbiage...ha!....I slay me).

No idea when it will be done, but the goal is the beginning of summer. By that point, it will either be done outright, or, more likely, need just a polish. By Christmas, at the absolute latest, I plan to start agent hunting.

Spamcatcher!

2007-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:00

Borrowing an idea from driftglass, this is a dummy post designed to catch spambots.

Check please

2007-12-23T02:04:00.000-05:00

Done.

This concludes this public service announcement.

Home stretch

2007-12-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

In the last two days, I've written just shy of 10,000 words to finally finish off Chapter XI. Earth is fucked, the war is over, our heroes have arrived wherever it is they're going to be for the next decade or so. All that remains is the final chapter, which will be much reduced from the original--the whole stowaway plot is dropped and we're fading to black as soon as Livvy (I changed her name--did I mention that?) counts six stars in Cassiopeia. In a way, I feel bad for cutting a lot of that, especially the flight into Toliman, but the book is over 120,000 words as it is. The story of the Toliman settlers can be saved for another project.

I've settled on a new title for the book. I'm keeping that under wraps for now, however--only the test readers will know. I'm also considering publishing under a pen name (mostly for commercial reasons), but I'm not settled on that and so I'm keeping that under wraps for now, too.

Just a few more days, folks.

Post Script: On 18 December, I'm taking The Humanist Inheritance down from SDN. This is also for commercial reasons. I'm going to actually split off the thread from its opening post and leave the opening post in Fanfics, so any links to the story out on the interwebs will be unbroken, but the story itself will be gone. It's not being deleted, but I'm taking it out of public view indefinitely. It's a first draft anyway. So if you want to read it, do it now.

November HI update

2007-11-10T00:22:00.000-05:00

October was a bad month.

The short version is, I wrote very little and almost every word of it has since been shitcanned (more precisely, cut out of the manuscript and pasted into a file called "Deleted Scenes", where it will languish between times when I loot it for a clever sentence here and there). The long version is, there was simply no way to wrap everything up in one chapter, and even if I could, the pacing problems which plagued the first draft would still be there. Worse, the stuff I was writing was garbage. Dead prose, dull scenes, characters acting like they'd just come down with Idiot Plot. So it got axed.

Where does that leave me now? Well, after about a week scribbling in an old notebook, I worked out a better plan for the last third of the novel. Draft 2 "Sky King Star" remains unchanged, the ending chapter incorporates all of Draft 1 "Fever Dreams" and about half of D1 "Ice and Ashes". A new chapter containing the mutiny (that damn mutiny has been my problem since I first thought of it) will immediately precede Sky King Star.

Also added is a prologue (about half the length of a normal chapter), set in Philadelphia the day the Dominion arrives. I wrote it expressly to tie the main story to the Toliman ending (shh! Don't tell Metatwaddle what that means!). Between that and the Spirit of Halifax plot ending before "Sky King Star", that takes care of my ending problem.

Will I make 23 November? Probably not. I'm aiming for 1 December. There's still an outside chance, but it's already the 10th and I have a lot of work left to do.

Now to respond to a couple comments. First, from Da Rev (the inimitable RevPrez, I presume; just for the record, I was opposed to his banning and remain opposed to it):

BTW, not a bad job on Humanist. Finally finished reading it. A bit heavy-handed and disingenuous about Christian Reconstructionism, but all in all a solid demonstration that hard sf and space opera are not mutually exclusive. I look forward to reading more of your work.

I think you're dead on about the heavy-handedness (also the stuff about how awesome it is, but we'll stick to the criticisms for now). Quite a lot of that ended up getting cut--Alvin's whole walk through Washington, for starters. Besides the fact it was about as subtle as a rain of anvils, it dragged on the plot.

My conception of the Dominion was never intended to be 100% faithful to contemporary Reconstructionsim (though I do think the contemporary version is vile). It began as a thought exercise before I ever conceived of HI--I wondered what an American Khmer Rouge would look like, and got a cross between Fred Phelps, David Duke, and Huey Long. Later when I thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat to write a sci-fi story that tried to stay realistic?", the Dominion idea popped back into my head, and suddenly I had what I thought was a short novella.

Basically, the Dominion is what I think you might get when you plunge the entire south into hopeless poverty for a generation, put almost everyone to work as a sharecropper, add a ten year drought (thanks to Global Warming) which is threatening to tip the entire region into starvation, remove any effective Federal authority, and add a little deranged Christian fundamentalism to taste. A lot of that is only alluded to in HI--Crash and Interregnum will go into quite a bit more detail.

And now, a comment from Surlethe:

Hey, since I don't feel like waiting for the November update: if you're interested I'll have some free time over Christmas break I could use to read over and tear apart Draft II.

Thank you for saving me the trouble of asking. Yes, I'd very much appreciate a few test readers who have the time and inclination to give me comments. Metatwaddle's input has been priceless, but I'd love to hear other perspectives (and, I admit, having spent so much time on this damn thing, I'd like to actually have readers; I miss the instant feedback from the board).

This concludes this public service announcement.

UD ResLife program

2007-11-08T10:45:00.001-05:00

Some of you may have heard about the controversial Residential Life education program at the University of Delaware, where I go to school. According to media accounts, chanel handbags students were made to undergo diversity training sessions - some call it indoctrination; others simply called it education - regarding things like white privilege and heterosexism. There are some articles on the issue here and here. Students were taught about systematic racism, and the

Now, I never had to put up with any of this crap. There have been a few building meetings on my floor, and I haven't gone to any of them, because in RI's words, "Can they do anything to you if you don't go? No? Then it's not actually mandatory."

But it's plain from media accounts that the program was executed in a breathtakingly stupid way.

The trouble with SDN

2007-10-20T18:10:00.000-04:00

For many months, during my self-imposed exile, I've had the feeling that something has gone wrong over at SDN, and furthermore, it went wrong a while ago. My original plan was to stay exiled for 90 days, and come back 1 September. It is the middle of October now and I'm still not back. Admittedly, I haven't finished HI yet, but I hadn't expected to get it done in 90 days, either. I really haven't been in any particular hurry to get back. There just seems to be something off about the place, and I haven't been able to articulate what it is.

Then this morning, I looked in Off Topic, and discovered Kanastrous did it for me.

Hey, fucktard, are y'all such total obnoxious asswipes that your pleasure in life is calling people names when they ask a simple (or what ought to be a simple) question?

Searching a board for the meaning of an acronym is a waste of time, at least, if I'm going out on a limb and thinking that just maybe people around here aren't such a pack of assholes-for-the-sake-of-being-assholes that they can't even bring themselves to answer a pig-fucking simple question.

You must be one incredible fucking coward in real life, if you have to build yourself up and get off on pointless rudeness to total strangers who are too far away to smash your fucking teeth in, just for daring to ask a simple question.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn't your mother pay you enough attention, when you were young?!

The background: Kanastrous asked the meaning of the word "RAR!", assuming it was an acronym. DPDarkPrimus responded "It's a board meme", a magnificently unhelpful response to which Kanastrous replied, "Thanks. That's magnificently unhelpful."

At this point, Fleet Admiral JD replied thusly:

Hey, fucktard, why don't you take a look at previous posts and figure it out? It's not a hard thing to grasp unless your skull is as thick as a frigging tree trunk. Then again, judging by some of your posting behavior, maybe the truth is that simple concepts are beyond your comprehension.

Kanastrous then opened fire with both barrels, which I quoted above.

The thing that has been bothering me (and, I suspect, more than a few other people) is not acrimonious debate. That topic was brought up on the board a little while ago, and while I do believe the issue of civility in debate is not limited to the binary choice of "Miss Manners" or "Everybody is an asshole all the time", I think, in the balance, most people get exactly what they deserve in board debates, and at any rate, I would not trade honesty for civility.

(I do think that a good general rule would be to give any poster at least one civil reply, to see if he's debating honestly; if he's not, then call down the napalm).

But this incident didn't happen in a debate; it was just a question, one that would have been easy to answer. I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Fleet Admiral JD here (I don't hold any grudge, or indeed, much of an opinion at all on him), but he DID act like an asshole and, so far as I can tell, for no better reason than because he could. I suppose you could argue that Kanastrous's snippy reply to DPDarkPrimus warranted a hostile response, but really, DP should have answered the question fully (or not said anything at all), it wasn't DP who responded, and really, JD's response still would have been massive overkill if it had come from DP.

In real life, only an epic prick would act like JD did in the thread, and that epic prick would have to be pretty certain he could win the fight that he'd likely start by acting like that. Yet acting like that has become completely acceptable on SDN (one reply to Kanastrous was "Overreact much?").

Somehow, on SDN, the idea that any level of hostility is acceptable in a debate has mutated into "any level of hostility is acceptable, all the time". Especially, I suspect, when it is directed against newbies or unpopular posters. I'm absolutely positive I'm guilty of this too (I didn't bother doing a search of my own posts, in part because I need to do a Google search to find them, and in part because I really didn't want to see them), but that doesn't mean I was right. Part of why Kanastrous's response resonated with me was because he pinned down some of my own motivations for acting like an asshole in the past. I could try to justify it by saying I have had to sit and take shit from bosses, students, parents, etc. in the real world and so my hostility on SDN is driven by a desire to unload what I can't unload on them, but really, it's not much of an excuse. It's still acting like a giant prick because I'm unafraid of retaliation.

So what to do about this? Well, speaking as a Senator and a member of the administration...not very much. There's no practical way to enforce "Don't be an asshole" without A) forcing moderators to make value judgments on what's "too nasty", which they will undoubtedly get wrong often and will be accused of getting wrong oftener, or B) writing a great hairy clot of rules regulating posting behavior that will annoy everyone, accidentally force people to be nice to dishonest jerkoffs in debates, and allow people to act like pricks anyway once all the loopholes have been found. The best way to change the culture on the board to something more civil, without turning it into Miss Manners, is to do exactly what Kanastrous did: when someone acts like a big dildo because he thinks he can get away with it, flame the living shit out of him.

Combat hostility with hostility. It's the SDN way.

More Southern justice

2007-10-12T15:59:00.000-04:00

From the AP:

Guards Acquitted in Boot Camp Case

By MELISSA NELSON – 1 hour ago

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — Eight former boot camp workers were acquitted of manslaughter Friday in the death of a 14-year-old boy who was videotaped being punched and kicked. The scene sparked outrage and changes in the juvenile system, but it jurors took just 90 minutes to decide it was not a crime.

So:

Southern state? Check.
All-white jury? Check.
Black victim? Check.
White perp? Check (to be fair, some of the guards were black or Asian; the jury probably just couldn't figure out how to convict them but not the white guards)
Incontrovertible evidence? Check.
Acquittal? Check.

The AP article describes the county in which the crime took place as being conservative, with a great respect for law and order, which apparently translates to "Anything any goon in a uniform does to a minority or a poor kid is just aces with us".

I have no doubt when the apologists come crawling out of the woodwork (and they always do), they will claim that since the victim, Martin Lee Anderson, was in the juvenile justice system, he was obviously a troublemaker, was probably mouthing off to the guards, et cetera, and deserved what was coming to him (this same reasoning was used to justify sentencing Mychal Bell to decades in prison for a cafeteria fight, even after the circumstances of the Jena 6 case came to light). Two responses: first, I'm coming around to the idea that "He's a troublemaker/thug/criminal" has become the 21st century equivalent of "He was winking at a white woman". Second, Martin Lee Anderson's heinous crime was...joyriding.

No further comment is necessary, I think.

October HI update and more

2007-10-06T11:47:00.001-04:00

Let's get right down to the meat of this: Chapter IX is finished and Chapter X is underway. X is going to be a little troublesome, because I need to combine elements of old chapters VIII, IX, and X, PLUS add some new material to tie up some loose ends, AND make it all flow so that "Check Please" is the natural last line. On the upside, once this chapter is finished, the main story is finished as well. Halloween is looking unlikely now as a completion date, but I should make 23 November.

Also, Metatwaddle wore Space Shuttle earrings yesterday because she knows I like rockets.

My girlfriend is awesome.

This concludes this public service announcement.

September HI update

2007-09-10T15:47:00.000-04:00

Just a brief update: VI, VII, and VIII are done. At this point, the book is starting to look substantially different from the first draft.

VI, as discussed before, takes place entirely on Earth, with David Bonfante (now a corporal in the Royal Guard) and Adrienne (still a New Orleans...erm, sex worker) as viewpoint characters. Both get to witness major developments in the war that have plot implications later.

VII is old chapter VI (X-Ray Blues) and looks more or less the same (I've changed some of the technobabble and upped the stakes for Pennai--in this version, she outright lies to Allen to buy time to keep conducting the computer simulations).

VIII is a patchwork of new material and the first half of old Chapter XI. A major problem I had with the first draft was that the Battle of Uranus was effectively the book's climax, and then once it was over, I followed it up with a very long chapter on Spirit of Halifax. So that stuff has been split. The mutiny still happens after the battle; I couldn't figure out how to make it happen otherwise, but we go more or less directly from the battle to the mutiny. The events of old Chapter VIII will be split up--it's certain the book will end with "Check please", which if you haven't read the novel makes no sense to you, but trust me: it's the best line of the whole damn book.

Oh, and bonus! The destruction of Mao Station is now experienced through the POV of a viewpoint character.

IX is "Sky King Star" and that's underway now. There are some alterations that have been forced upon it by previous revisions, but it should escape largely unchanged. I now have a tentative date for completing the second draft: Wednesday, November 23.

Why that specific date? I have my reasons.

This concludes this public service announcement.

Dispatches from Gloucester City

2007-08-15T15:56:00.000-04:00

I'm kind of a shitty blogger.

I don't know how the guys who put up good stuff every few days (or even daily) do it. I haven't even managed to change the date on the spamcatcher two weeks into August. I do have a partial excuse: I just moved into a new apartment a week and a half ago, and between the general chaos of moving and the fact the Comcast man installed my Internet only about ten minutes ago, I just haven't had the opportunity to post (this will be of no interest to anyone except me and Metatwaddle, but I also have digital cable now. Woo. Now instead of watching about four channels and ignoring the other 60 or so, I'll be watching five channels and ignoring the other 300. Truly, we live in a golden age.)

(The fifth channel is the Science Channel. I don't know how I lived without Survivorman in my life.)

(Yes, I know Survivorman was also on Discovery, but it was on Friday night at eight, and fuck me if I'm going to watch TV on Friday night at eight.)

Then on top of that, I had to read The Grapple and The World Without Us. The Grapple I sort of endured more than I enjoyed it; Turtledove had to turn backflips to get what should have been a novella's worth of story into a long novel, and the last fifty pages were just excruciating (I might have a full review later). The World Without Us, on the other hand, has been a joy--I recommend it so much, here's the Amazon link.

Now an HI update: IV and V are done. IV went in with just minor tweaks, but V got a more substantial rewrite. I had a few reasons for this, and I think the chapter is markedly improved. The fallball scene got a good working-over to make the action clearer (I had Laney give everyone on the Black Gang short, distinct, insulting nicknames, so instead of "the enlisted engineer who was not the captain and not the lesbian passed the ball to the other enlisted engineer who was not the captain and not the lesbian and not himself, either", I have "Tiny passed the ball to Taint". I think it works better, and I like that Laney has a talent for nicknames now). Then I rewrote much of what came after the battle scene. Laney doesn't forgive Nick so easily, and the idea for the marijuana business becomes hers. Laney's talent for logistics and business is shown in this chapter, rather than told later. And finally, and I believe most important, Laney doesn't end up self-identifying as an engineer (in spirit if not in training), even though the engineers are willing to accept her as an honorary member of the black gang; instead, she points out that the crew and the passengers have been fucked just as hard. This is setting up something later; the mutiny will not be the anemic, engineers-only affair it was in the first draft.

Chapter VI is not the Chapter VI everyone knows and loves (the namesake of this blog). Chapter VI is, instead, all new material, featuring two viewpoint characters, set on Earth. The first viewpoint character is David, fighting on the Baikal Front against the Chinese hordes (somebody tell Darth Raptor he got his wish). The second is Adrienne, back home in New Orleans (there are not, unfortunately, any scenes involving her in her professional capacity). The purpose of adding a new chapter was threefold: first, Chapter XII is going to get pared down to a short epilogue (I don't know what I'm going to do with the original epilogue), and so I felt I needed something to replace it. Oh noes, filler! But it's not! The events of new Chapter VI will directly impact what happens later in the climax. That's the second purpose of the chapter: to take some important events on Earth which had been told in the form of throwaway lines from characters or news broadcasts and show them happening up close. The third purpose is to contrast civilian life in the middle of the war to civilian life at the beginning, using a character the reader has already met in an established setting--hence Adrienne, who incidentally is a TON of fun to write. As you might imagine, it got worse.

I intend to be done VI tonight or tomorrow. VII will take some heavy lifting, and on top of that, I'm going to be out of town all weekend, so I have no idea when that will be done. I hate to say next Friday, but probably next Friday. I might get this done before Christmas, but the end of the summer simply is not happening.

Now, to reply to a comment made by Phongn in my long-ago previous post:

Huh, I had no idea you were blogging again! The news on HI is quite welcome, though. If you publish, any way I can get a signed copy?

I have no idea how many author's copies a first-time novelist gets, but after my family, the people who helped me get this done are on the list to get them--signed by the author, of course (am I getting ahead of myself here or what? It's not as bad as me having practice interviews with myself, though--incidentally, I do a pretty fair impression of Terry Gross's speech, if not her voice). So yes, Phongn, you will get a signed copy. Everyone who helped will also be in the acknowledgments (this includes Winchell Chung and Stuart Slade, neither of whom interacted with me directly while I was writing, but whose contributions were critical for this thing to bear any resemblance to hard science fiction). I've already decided to split the dedication: Metatwaddle (obviously), and Chris Szitovszky, with something along the lines of "Wrongfully convicted, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, March 2007" underneath. Who the hell knows--maybe the book will be a runaway bestseller and it will draw enough attention to his case to get him out of the hole into which a lying prosecutor and 12 Victorian imbeciles put him.

One final note: my self-imposed exile from SDN ends on 1 September, but I don't know if I'm coming back. It depends entirely on my self-discipline. I may come back for a few weeks, then go into exile for another three months if it's eating too much of my time.

This concludes this public service announcement.

Another HI update

2007-07-24T16:07:00.000-04:00

Chapter IV is complete.

Also, a title change is likely in the works. I've never particularly liked The Humanist Inheritance, and in the rewrite, the humanist theme is weakening. This is unfortunate, but as the story evolved, that theme became more and more forced anyway. I promise you it will be much more pronounced in Crash and its hypothetical sequel, Interregnum.

Also, work has started on a short story set in the HI universe, entitled "Eminent Domain". No clue when that will be finished.

This concludes this public service announcement.

HI Update

2007-07-14T10:51:00.000-04:00

Just a little update on how HI is coming, and some of the changes being made:

1. Chapter I has been substantially reworked. The story is the same, but a ton of details have been altered. This is mostly because either A) I plan on changing the story in later chapters, and I need to foreshadow different things, B) I've changed elements of the backstory, and/or C) I am committed to killing as many infodumps as possible, and Chapter I has a lot of them. I reworked quite a bit of the Tran-Fitzthomas interactions, in part because her backstory has changed slightly, and in part because I always felt their dinner conversation was a little too much "As you know, Bob...". I think the results are a lot more natural; Metatwaddle said she felt like she was listening in on a real conversation.

2. Chapter II has only been slightly tweaked. It was always one of my favorites. Some of Guillaume's backstory has changed, but since his backstory isn't revealed until much later, his introduction can remain mostly unchanged.

3. I went after Chapter III with an ax. The story is unchanged, but I told it with about 30% fewer words. The GINORMOUS infodumps are either gone entirely or pared down to something more efficient, and I think I managed to put away the soapbox.

4. Chapter IV's rewriting is underway. I don't anticipate many fundamental changes.

In all chapters, I'm correcting awkward turns of phrase, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, that kind of thing, as I or Metatwaddle come across them. The general rule is to tighten whenever I can, unless something in the first draft is so unclear as to require more information.

On the other hand, I am thinking of adding a chapter that would have two viewpoint characters--David, on the ground in Europe, and Helen back in Willsboro, coping as the civilian situation deteriorates (the war has gotten MUCH nastier--germs, terrorism, cyber-attacks, and nanotech attacks on civilians are commonplace). I'd love to visit New Orleans again, but as yet I don't have a non-contrived way to do so, except possibly by making Adrienne a viewpoint character (which could be fun, but I don't know what I'd do with her). I'm not too worried about adding a chapter because there are major cuts coming; the story is going to end, more or less, right after the Battle of Uranus (which I think I'm going to have take place in the Uranian system itself).

Metatwaddle has been immensely helpful with all of this. She's my first reader for all changes, and has been extremely gracious about dropping what she's doing whenever I call for help. She's a good test reader; she's well read, with a good knowledge of what makes good reading, and she's scientifically literate, so she can spot egregious science errors AND point out places where I've under-explained some concept (the thinking being if a physics undergrad doesn't get it, Joe Reader probably won't either).

I'm hoping to get this revision done by the end of the summer, but no promises. At the pace I work, Christmas is looking a lot more likely. I think another draft will be needed after that, but there won't be much heavy lifting necessary. I hope.

Post Script: I'm led to understand Marina O'Leary has decided to write a series of vignettes (Global Mean Temperature-style) about a post-Peak Oil world. I'll have to avoid reading it; my next project, I think, is going to be a prequel to HI set during the events of the Oil Crash--called, appropriately, Crash. It will be stand-alone in the sense that you won't have to have read HI to follow the plot; in fact, if HI fails to sell, I'm still going to attempt to sell Crash.

Introducing Metatwaddle!

2007-07-01T11:49:00.001-04:00

Hi, I'm Significant Other. RedImperator has kindly offered to let me use this blog to post about music every so often, so I'll be here occasionally.

In the unlikely event that you, dear reader, care to know a bit about me, I'm a 19-year-old physics undergraduate student at the University of Delaware, and my hobbies include playing the piano (I mostly play classical stuff), reading science and science fiction books, and wasting time. My moniker, Metatwaddle, is a word made up by Richard Dawkins to refer to intentionally obscure and incomprehensible postmodernist nonsense. I chose the moniker because I like the word.

I'll be posting about anything in music that I find significant or rant-worthy. I'll try to keep the classical stuff to a minimum because (a) most people find classical music a little bit austere, (b) my taste in classical music is actually rather limited to piano music, and (c) much has been written about classical music by people who both know the music and write about it better than me.

My taste in music is fairly broad, and includes a lot of rock with some pop and folk influences, among other things. Since I took piano lessons for twelve years and still play now, I tend to like a lot of artists whose music prominently features the piano. louis vuitton handbags I love good lyrics, and I have a thing for funny music that goes beyond Weird Al Yankovic. Also, I love female vocals, and women are overrepresented in my music collection, but I'm trying to correct that a little bit. I'm always trying to discover new music, so recommendations are appreciated.

One of these days I'll make a proper post here. Right now, though, I am in the Adirondacks, and it's beautiful up here, so naturally I'm going to throw knives at a board and hope they stick.

P.S. My old 20GB iPod is borked. If anyone wants to buy me a new one, please leave a comment.

Dispatch from the banks of Lake Champlain

2007-07-01T11:40:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the delay in this update, but I have been busy preparing for the aforementioned vacation to the Adirondacks. This will not be a long post because, bluntly, I have better things to do in the beautiful mountains with beautiful weather with my beautiful girlfriend than fuck around on the Internet.

That said: I have (finally!) finished revising Chapter I of HI. Hopefully I'll have Chapter II before I go home.

This concludes this public service announcement.

This is what I think about...

2007-06-20T21:41:00.000-04:00

...when Significant Other is out of the country.

So I was reading the inimitable Atomic Rockets (again), and was looking over the life support section when I had a thought. Life support is a really big pain in the ass when you're designing spaceships, either for half-assed sci-fi novels like I do, or for actually really real, like NASA engineers (assuming NASA actually designs spaceships anymore, instead of shitty hundred billion dollar space hovels where the computers don't even work right). Anyway, what follows is the idea:

There's a way to eliminate the problem of life support altogether--algae tanks, sewage boilers, oxygen candles, and all. The only catch is the crew has to leave their bodies in long term parking at the spaceport.

If you assume that the contents of a human brain can be uploaded onto a computer, and that a sufficiently powerful computer can run an emulation of a human brain (much like a PC can emulate, say, a Nintendo Entertainment System for those of us having an attack of 80s nostalgia years after we sold the old box in a yard sale), then the crew can have their minds uploaded into the ship's computer and leave their bodies behind.

Sensory information isn't a problem--anyone who has ever had a dream could tell you that the brain cannot distinguish between actual data from the sense organs and stuff the brain just made up on its own. I would imagine if you can upload a brain, you understand enough about it to feed it fake sensations. The crew can experience being on a spaceship (or riding the Orient Express, or laying around on the beach in Key West, or whatever they like) despite being just a bunch of zeroes and ones on the mainframe. For long, boring trips, they can simulate whatever distractions they like, or just reduce their "frame rate" to near-zero. If there's an emergency or an unexpected situation at their destination, they can speed up their frame rate and run multiple simulations of it, so that they can try out multiple solutions and practice whatever they decide to do--possibly in a fraction of a second of real time.

For a spaceship designer, this combines all the advantages of an unmanned vessel and a manned one. The mass and expense of the crew and their support systems are lost, but you still have humans around to give the computer orders if necessary. You can have as large a crew as you want and not pay any penalties for it. If the mission isn't expected to be too dangerous, they can even bring along their families without this being catastrophically stupid, like it was in "Star Trek: The Next Generation".

There are a few problems, however. First, from a practical perspective, if you can run a human brain on a computer, you can almost certainly run something much much smarter on the same computer. So why are you bothering with people at all? (This was always the elephant in the room during space fighters vs. missiles/unmanned drones debates at SDN, especially when the compsci people showed up talking their argle-bargle and the beleaguered space fighter people would shout, "If computers are so great, why are there people on ANY of the space ships? Huh?! Huh huh?!" Or they would have, if they weren't so dumb they actually thought space fighters were a good idea).

Second, the "upload a brain, get a person inside the computer" idea assumes that the dualists are right and the body is just a machine for moving the mind around. This is by no means certain. How can you have, say, a flight-or-fight reaction if you don't have adrenal glands? How do you feel something in your gut if you don't have one? Of course, the computer can just send digital hormones to a digital brain the same way it sends digital sensory input, but I can see stories where digitized space crews struggle to hold on to their humanity because the bureaucrats and engineers who designed the system left those out.

The third problem is, of course, that the crew won't be able to leave the ship when they arrive at their destination unless they can upload to a different computer, or maybe loaner bodies, either organic or mechanical. Bringing their bodies along with them defeats the point of the exercise; if they're colonists, maybe you can grow them new bodies once you arrive (Walter John Williams has a short story, "Incarnation Day" where this is not only how humans are colonizing nearby stars, but how children are raised until they're adults and can pull their own weight in society).

Fourth, there's a little bitty existential problem here: have you actually transferred a mind, or did you just make a duplicate and now there are two copies of the crew? This crops up a lot in debates about Star Trek's transporters, which, thanks to the efforts of writers who apparently never thought this through, actually kill the original and create a clone. I don't quite know how to get around this one. Maybe you try to pull a Ship of Theseus where the crew member is, at least momentarily, simultaneously in control of his organic body and a digital copy on the computer before the body is shut down, so there's no discontinuity of consciousness, but I have a vague feeling that this is cheating somehow and I'm not smart enough to figure out why. Any other way, it seems to me from the point of view of the original crew member, he puts his head into some Clarketech do-funny, and then they kill him. Putting him into hibernation until the ship gets back and the digital copy is turned off is just killing someone else (and pointless besides). Arguing that there's some kind of property of the human mind which allows it to be converted into digital form but never copied, only transferred, is just lame. Allowing unlimited copies of the same individual to run around everywhere--and believe me, if it's possible, it will happen--is going to throw a huge wrench in conventional ideas of what it means to be human. Not that that's necessarily bad in science fiction, but if you're trying to write a simple story about an intrepid space crew without worrying about keeping their fragile meaty bodies alive, then "Oh yeah, in our society, people duplicate themselves at will" is a really big huge thing to have to ignore.

Anyway, as the title suggests, this is what I think about when Significant Other is out of the country for a week. I need her to come home so I can go back to thinking about sex again.

Fuck Tuesday

2007-06-19T15:53:00.000-04:00

There is a hierarchy of days of the week, as there is in most things in life. For your edification, here it is, from best to worst:

1. Saturday: Well, duh. No work, no school, no church, no bullshit. Saturday is the only day of the week that's fully yours. Monday is a million years away. You can wake up as late as you like and go to bed whenever you want. You can do whatever you want. Wanna drink yourself into a stupor? Want to lay and bed and jerk off for five hours? Saturday is your day.

2. Sunday: Now Sunday, on the other hand, Sunday isn't so great. When you wake up Sunday morning, the first thing you notice is some asshole strung the Sword of Damocles over your head. The asshole is your boss, and the sword is called Monday, and the string is going to break no matter what you do. This plus your hangover from Saturday more or less ruin Sunday. About the only way to make it worse is going to church; I don't have to worry about that, but you might.

Actually, the very best way to make it worse would be to go to work. That's why Sunday still comes in at #2 despite its self-evident flaws.

3. Friday: Woo! Party! The very best moment of the entire week is the moment work ends on Friday afternoon: the weekend is at its very longest right then and there. Unfortunately, to get there, you have to deal with work. Still, Friday night is so nice that it almost bumps Sunday into third place, but ultimately a day where you have to go to work at all is worse than a day you don't have to go to work at all.

4. Wednesday: Hump day. Wednesday beats Thursday because Wednesday doesn't have that broken down, exhausted, "Oh God, I still have another day of this" thing going the way Thursday does. At lunch time you officially tip over onto the downslope of the week. All day Wednesday, you can think about how, at the end of the day, you will be closer to the upcoming weekend than the previous one for the first time. And that's special.

5. Thursday: Speaking of special, here comes Friday's ugly cousin, Thursday. Thursday is the day you're completely sick of work but you still have an entire work day tomorrow. Being close to the end of the week doesn't help; Thursday is like having a beautiful woman reach down your pants, only to walk away as soon as things get interesting. Thursday's chief virtue is that it isn't Monday or Tuesday.

6. Monday: All right, Monday sucks. But you can at least take a little bit of pleasure in telling stories about all the crazy shit you did on Saturday (if you sat around playing Galactic Civilizations all weekend, you can lie about all the crazy shit you did; don't feel guilty, your co-workers are probably lying too). Plus, during football season, there's Monday-morning quarterbacking. If you're smart about avoiding the boss, you can bullshit about football for at least half the morning.

7. Tuesday: Fuck Tuesday. It's still the beginning of the week, but now there are no more stories, and talking about football is just bitching at this point. Any shine the week might have had on it on Monday morning has rubbed off; you realize now why you hate work and wish a Brinks truck would drop a bag of money on your driveway. Fuck Tuesday.

This concludes this public service announcement.

All aboard....well, the car

2007-06-18T21:25:00.000-04:00

Say you're a young fellow looking to take his best girl on a trip to the countryside along the shores of beautiful Lake Champlain. And let's say you've become a little alarmed by all this talk of global warming and peak oil and you'd like to do your small part to consume as little fuel as possible on the trip. And let's say you're a railfan from way back and have always wanted to take a long train ride through some pretty scenery (Philadelphia to Boston in late December on the Metroliner doesn't count). What do you do?

Why, you drive, of course, because it's well over $300 for two people by Amtrak, you can't leave on the day you want because the train only runs in the morning and you have to work, and sometimes the Adirondack gets delayed for ten hours.

Passenger rail transportation in this country is pitiful. And while I'm aware of the economics of the situation, I'm also aware the economics have been skewed by hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal loot for the airline and automobile industries (mostly indirectly in the latter case, in the form of highway subsidies) while Amtrak has to beg for pocket change from Uncle Sam and go to the freight railroads with its hat in its hand for time on their tracks. So it costs too much and the service sucks, driving away customers, which costs them money, which makes it cost too much and the service suck.

Which brings me to another irritation: the stumpfucks in the Pennsylvania State House who are bitching and moaning about funding SEPTA on the Commonwealth's dime after they cripple its ability to raise money any other way. Anyone who has ever had to regularly ride SEPTA knows what a third rate transit system it is--especially if you've ridden the DC Metro or MBTA or the New York subway--but the potential is there for SEPTA to actually be a respectable system, if the money ever shows up. What we'll probably get is more wailing and crying about it from the Pennsylbama contingent in the legislature, who bitch about transit subsidies for the big bad city (it's full of Negroes and the gays, you know), as if the infrastructure for cars and trucks is free.

Only in my wildest fantasies (and novels) is the US crisscrossed by a network of electrically powered bullet trains, but for a country that's supposedly started getting the Green bug, we sure don't seem to be doing very much to actually get cars and trucks off the road. And this is the easy stuff.

Playing bocce in the mountains

2007-06-18T15:20:00.000-04:00

marriedtothesea.com

If I ever make a fortune writing (and with a master's in education, that's the only way I'm going to make a fortune barring a lottery jackpot or getting run over by a rich guy), I'm going to buy a summer house up north, in the Adirondacks region of New York. Significant Other and I are going up there over July 4 week along with some old friends of mine to enjoy a few days of liquor, sleeping in, and bocce in and around an old farmhouse a few hundred yards from Lake Champlain.

Besides the relaxation, the primary benefit of staying up in the mountains is avoiding the damn heat. Jersey is a crowded, smelly furnace in the summer, and the only wise course of action is to get the hell out, preferably until the leaves start turning. I mention this only because it was 92 degrees today, and it has drained the life out of me. Significant Other has been complaining for months that she's always cold and I'm always comfortable. Well, soon the tables will be turned.

In my mind, it's always summer here. Whenever I imagine Jersey, it's always a blazing July day; cloudless, sticky, so hazy the horizon is white. Deserted sidewalks lining jammed roads so wide they wouldn't be shaded even if there were any trees growing there. Weeks without rain, with no relief in sight. Water restrictions. A steady death count from Camden and Philadelphia, where old people bake in tar-roofed rowhouses. I never imagine the winter, even though it can get bitter cold and stay that way for weeks (never enough snow, though). The cold doesn't stick in the mind the way the heat does. Maybe that's why I have no love of the Sun Belt or anyplace else that doesn't get a proper winter. I need the winter to recharge my batteries, to get myself psychically prepared for summer again.

Or I could just go play bocce in the mountains. Whatever works.

X-Ray Blues

2007-06-17T23:19:00.000-04:00

Hi there.

My name is Matt Lineberger, and this is my second attempted foray into the Blogosphere. The first attempt was a Livejournal page to which I diligently posted for three whole days (and ended on a cliffhanger, at that). I was a big fish in a very small pond on the Stardestroyer.net boards until I went on a voluntary three month hiatus. I am known there as RedImperator, as I tend to be most places I go online.

Two half-assed theories led me to creating this blog. The first is that writing a blog post every day will get me into, and keep me in, the habit of writing every day, making it easier to diligently edit my novel-in-being The Humanist Inheritance (heretofore known as "HI"). That's a working title, by the way--I'm pretty sure I'm going to change it. The other half-assed theory is that people might actually want to listen to my ill-conceived ramblings on politics, science fiction, and the like.

(Actually, that was a little bit of false humility. As my wonderful, loving, warm, brilliant, funny, beautiful, well-endowed, and oversexed girlfriend could tell you, I'm a spectacular egotist. I am convinced people want to hear my ill-conceived ramblings, and I am further convinced that they are actually very well conceived and don't ramble very much at all.)

At any rate, I think that will serve as an introduction to this blog; I really just wanted to have something besides the spamcatcher (again, thanks to driftglass for the idea) up on the first night. I suppose a note on the blog's title is in order: there is a chapter of HI entitled "X-Ray Blues", and it happens to be my favorite. The name is from a little known but apparently real phenomenon: if you shoot X-rays directly into your eyeballs, you'll see a blue glow. I read it originally on Wikipedia, and so I assumed it was the Colbert Nation or somesuch having fun with me, but it turns out to have a real source. I'd love to actually do this, and I would, were it not for the fact I'd have to shoot deadly ionizing radiation directly into my eyeball.