The Elephant Vanishes - George V Tucker's Blog

William Bernstein -- what an awesome guy!

2010-09-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

It's official: I have a man-crush on William Bernstein. It's not his fuzzy beard; it's not his astonishingly learned and well-written books; it's not even his great website EfficientFrontier.com.

No -- it's his relentless campaign to help retail investors (that's small fry like you and me) get a fair deal. His books are mostly dedicated to educating investors about the hazards of Wall Street and how to use smart diversification to build wealth.

William Bernstein's books are awesome. For a sample of his genius check out this video.

For more, check out his books. They're learned, witty, entertaining and necessary:

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio

The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between

The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created

Index Mutual Fund post on Squidoo

2010-09-11T08:34:00.001-07:00

Check out my lens on the subject of index mutual funds on Squidoo.

I was an early adopter of Squidoo and wanted to use that forum to highlight the personal finance and investing knowledge I've slowly and painfully gained over the past 10 years. One of the most important things I know about investing is this: over time, most investors make market returns less cost. Therefore cost is one of the most important aspects of your investing.

Index mutual funds, especially those offered by Vanguard, have super-low costs.

Furthermore, index funds are among the best ways to "buy the market." Stock picking doesn't work (or if it does, it doesn't work forever -- reversion to the mean is a law of nature as compelling as gravity). Instead of picking sectors or individual companies, diversify by owning bits and pieces of thousands of companies.

I hope you find this information useful.

I am The Man, part 2

2009-07-31T05:43:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I had to fire an employee.

Here are the notes I took into the meeting:

Not going as we'd planned
Going to have to let you go

Here's what's going to happen:
Today will be your last day
Final check will be mailed to you
Info about COBRA will come by mail
My card/contact if you have any questions
Now let's go gather your personal items.

This is not a good match.
This is really better for all of us.

Don't try to fill awkward silences
DIGNITY

Like a good manager I Googled and researched before putting together my plan. The only helpful piece of advice I found came from, of all things, HR for Dummies. That book advised that you not try to fill awkward silences and you maintain the proceedings in a way that allow the employee to retain their dignity.

Then I thought about what my own firing could be like. If I absolutely had to be fired, no alternative, then how would I want it to go? I strived for that.

Having to tell someone they've lost their job is one of the single most emotionally draining experiences I've ever been through. I felt stressed before, went in with my heart pounding and my face flushed, and went home feeling as drained as if I'd been to a funeral. Hard, yes, it was hard. But I think I achieved my goal without any unnecessary loss of dignity.

Another awesome thing about Evernote

2009-07-26T17:23:00.001-07:00

I forgot to mention this in my previous paean to Evernote.

If you're like me, you have a love/hate relationship with PDF files. Yes, they're universal and nearly everyone, even my mom, knows how to use them. At the same time they're bulky and cumbersome. Still I have dozens of PDFs on my hard drive: ebooks I've downloaded, equipment manuals, instruction guides for computer games, electronic forms from two dozen vendors.

How to get a handle on this mess? Up to now, I've been giving them very-descriptive-keyword-rich-filenames.pdf and counting on Google desktop to track them down. But Evernote makes it even easier.

Check this out:

It's easy (like drag and drop easy) to save PDF files to Evernote.

Once you sync with the remote server and the PDF is uploaded, the text of the PDF is scanned and then becomes keyword-searchable. Evernote has a built-in PDF reader so you can read PDF files in your browser without waking up Adobe Acrobat reader.

How awesome is that? Now all my PDFs are indexed and easy to find. I don't even avoid PDF files any more. If you haven't tried Evernote yet, consider downloading their software. Even the free level of service is incredibly powerful.

Evernote: an online service that helps you remember everything

2009-06-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

Ever since I got my first computer (a late 80s Radio Shack Tandy), I've been completely obsessed with archiving and search. I typed document after document and then lay in bed, eyes wide, terrified that my precious words would somehow vanish, zapped into the ether. I experimented with every archiving and search tool I found. They were primitive, promising very little functionality. Because they seemed so limited I held back from fully committing myself to any digital format. I slowly acquired a number of legal pads and binders stuffed with the products of my creativity.

Eventually, after undergrad and during my graduate work, I transitioned to a primarily digital archive. However I didn't take the necessary precautions to secure my files (see The Saga of the Crashed Flash Drive for more on this). The sheer volume of the losses I encountered led me to a place I'd never been before -- existential angst. A complete unwillingness to write anything anywhere -- even on paper. How can you keyword-search your hardcopy?

At long last, I've found a tool that seems to offer everything I need: Evernote.

Evernote offers a fairly basic service: online storage of your rich text files. Evernote supports tagging and keyword search, and allows the user to set up separate notebooks or folders of notes for strategic organization.

Now, you may think, "I can do this with Google Docs." Or even Google Desktop plus whatever Office-like software you use. Or even your own personal Mediawiki install, or a hosted service like Jotspot. Evernote offers a few advantages.

The key features that make Evernote awesome include:

Optical character recognition of images

Upload an image to Evernote, and an automated OCR service inspects the image for text. Later on, the image's text becomes indexed along with whatever plain text you post. This is a fantastic feature for the graphically-oriented, or those too lazy to type the name of their favorite beer and prefer to snap a photo of the label. The OCR has been robust, in my experience.

Dedicated email address for notes or images

Out in the world? No access to a computer? No problem. Each Evernote account can generate a unique email address. Send a text email or an attached image to your Evernote email address and the text or image is added as a mailed-in note. Super-handy for when you're on the go.

Security and redundancy

Evernote offers a desktop application that allows you to not only interface with your hosted account on your laptop but to export an XML file that includes your entire database of notes. Ideal for those who've been burned in the past!

OCR of PDF documents

I have a love/hate relationship with PDF documents. They're universal and relatively secure. On the other hand, their proprietary format means that they're difficult to export to any 3rd party reader. Keyword searches of PDF documents usually leave me frustrated.

Evernote indexes the content of attached and/or uploaded PDF documents. The desktop app also includes an integrated PDF reader, so you can flip pages without even loading up an Adobe app. To me, this is awesome. I routinely email PDF documents to Evernote and then keyw0rd-search them -- just because I can.

Dedicated apps for smart phone

Yes, there's an app for that. Specifically a very nicely put-together iPhone app that allows graphic browsing of notes (similar to the browser-based interface).

Because I have an old-school BlackBerry, my version of the Evernote app has all the personality of a MS-DOS 3.2 text-only interface. But the iPhone version is lovely. And even my rudimentary BlackBerry app is functional, if ugly, distasteful and cumbersome (everything my BlackBerry is).

Other cool stuff

In addition the Evernote team has some more advanced tricks up their sleeves:

EyeFi is an SD card that stores images but also uploads them to your Evernote account.

Shoeboxed is a receipt-scanning service that scans and organizes your receipts before uploading them to Evernote.

Pixily is a document-scanning service that will upload PDFs of any hardcopy docs to Evernote for you, enabling keyword-search (exciting!!).

So far, the only downsides I've found to Evernote is the desktop interface. I find the PC desktop app to be a little bit clumsy and obnoxious. When I have trouble with it, I simply compose my document in Notepad or Word and paste the results into an Evernote note before titling and tagging it. You may not find this necessary, but sometimes it's easier for me.

In short, I highly recommend Evernote for storage of any information you want to be able to find again. Evernote offers a free level of service. So far I have only used the free service and have found that it more than meets my needs. I plan to use Pixily as well in the near future.

Perhaps soon I'll finally realize my dream of a fully-digitized, searchable archive of all my own work. Then what will my next excuse be?

An overdue hiker in Lake Tahoe + thoughts on hiking and preparation

2009-06-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

The day we left Lake Tahoe, my wife and I stopped at the Eagle Falls trailhead. On the way there we saw what looked like a police helicopter and two police 4x4 units parked on a turnout. Now, after living in South Florida for 10 years, I associate helicopters with bad traffic accidents, SWAT team deployments and Coast Guard rescue. I pointed out the chopper and made some comment about bad traffic ahead.

Mer and I stopped at Eagle Falls and climbed on the rocks a little bit. Then we crossed Highway 89 to the Eagle Falls trailhead. In the parking lot there, we saw four more police vehicles (all 4x4s) along with two cafeteria tables set up on the asphalt. Two competent-looking middle-aged women, bad perms and paper cups of coffee and stacks of photocopies, sat behind cafeteria tables that had serious-looking communications equipment squawking and hissing on them. I half expected a major storm or some kind of foreign incursion. We walked up to the trailhead map and announcement board.

Turns out, the helicopter and response units and competent-looking women were there because of an overdue hiker.

A young man named Matthew was one day late. He'd filed a wilderness permit and then marched off into the wilderness west of the lake (which looks like this) and was a single day late in returning. There were printouts with a mugshot-like photo along with a description of the missing hiker including the color and type of his gear (jacket, snowshoes).

Later, my wife said, "At first I was really surprised by the magnitude of the response. Then I felt guilty because I was surprised."

Frankly, I was just as surprised. Maybe because of my background in the Ozarks, I always have considered wilderness explanation to be at the risk of the explorer. Half a dozen officers, at minimum, searching the forest? A helicopter? Maybe if the vice president disappeared, but surely not for just anyone.

That was on Thursday, June 11, 2009. Today I found this article:

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE — After being lost in Desolation Wilderness for three days, a 26-year-old Pollock Pines man was located by rescuers in good health on Tuesday.

The El Dorado County Sheriff's department began the search for Matthew Kinney after they were notified he did not arrive at the Horsetail Falls parking lot as scheduled on Saturday morning, said El Dorado County Sheriff's Lt. Les Lovell. Kinney had left for a three day hike from Loon Lake to the waterfall on Thursday, but became lost, Lovell said.

About 60 volunteers from more than a half dozen local and regional agencies assisted in the rescue, which included 15 ground teams searching the more than 63,000-acre wilderness area. The teams were inserted into the wilderness on Tuesday via a California Highway Patrol helicopter, Lovell said.

Rescuers located Kinney, who was described by Lovell as an experienced hiker familiar with the area, disoriented but unharmed at about 3 p.m. near Lake Schmidell, Lovell said.

The area where Kinney was found is near the area he was scheduled to spend his first night, Lovell said.

Lovell recommended that backcountry travelers hike with a friend if possible and stick to a detailed itinerary of travel plans they leave with a friend or relative.

To me, this level of response is simply incredible. On the one hand, it implies an astonishing level of resources available to come to the aid of a potentially lost and desperate hiker. On the other hand, it represents a huge investment of resources with an extremely low return on investment. (Perhaps the ROI is tied to the reputation of the area -- that a location in which lost hikers are never heard from again gets a lot less tourist traffic?)

Back at home in South Florida, I found this discussion of the effort involved in rescuing two lost, unprepared, wilderness explorers. After some thought, I posted the following response:

I was in Lake Tahoe recently, where I saw at least 5 search and rescue units, plus a helicopter, plus an HQ/basecamp consisting of 2 full-time people, all dedicated to tracking down a single overdue hiker (overdue for 24 hours).

In one sense I agree with your thesis -- if one goes wandering in the wilderness, one must be prepared. But it seems to me that the folks responsible for actually enforcing this have made a decision. They have decided that it's easier, and perhaps more cost-effective, to engage in these big and risky search efforts for overdue hikers and lost city folk and the like THAN IT IS to enforce a minimum level of preparation among hikers.

Think about it -- it cost $120k to save these lost souls. On the other hand, it might cost $750k per year to man the trailheads with trained rangers who will inspect the gear of potential hikers and approve or deny them access to the wilderness. Plus, access to the wilderness is fairly porous...

Even though it's distasteful, it's very likely much less resource-intense to start a search for a lost hiker than it is to prevent unprepared and underequipped hikers from entering the wilderness.

The short answer is this: although it is much higher-profile, and easier to object to, it might economically be more efficient to search for the lost hikers than to insure that all are prepared. Search and rescue is probably cheaper than running orientation and basic skills classes for hikers.

The high-profile rescue appeals to our sense of romance and danger. At the same time it attracts budget hawks and those who say they know better. Without an actual study there's no way to know which side is right.

Speaking as a social liberal, fiscal conservative and wilderness preparer, I think the proper tactic is a blend of the above. Officials should offer training courses (maybe even including the rental of Personal Locator Beacons?) and orientation. At the same time, officials should be prepared to rescue those who fail to return as planned. This seems to me the best of both worlds.

The Saga of the Crashed Flash Drive

2008-01-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

I should've known something was wrong the first time my flash drive didn't save a file properly. I'd been working all morning on my reworking of the Robert Howard story The Fire of Asshurbanipal and when I hit CTRL + S, my laptop spat back an error: Drive not found.

I shrugged and saved the draft to my desktop.

The same thing happened intermittently for the next couple of weeks. I finished the story and felt really happy with it. A few days later, on a Wednesday after work, I plugged the flash drive in to print a copy of the story. Nothing. No flashing blue LED, no recognition on my computer, nothing.

I thought it had to be the USB port so I tried another. Nothing. I rebooted because sometimes Windows can lose a data port (why? no idea). Nothing. I tried another computer, a USB 1.0 port, NOTHING. I took the flash drive to work and plugged it into three different computers. NOTHING.

I had to take a lot of deep, slow breaths. Here's what was on that flash drive:

The latest draft of my first novel
The only drafts of my second novel
The short story I'd just finished
At least eight other short stories I've written in the last two years
Freelance projects I've worked on

I really didn't know what to do, so I Googled "flash drive failure" and a bunch of other related search terms. I found the same site over and over: eProvided. That site dominated the search rankings for a slew of search terms related to failed flash drives. But the site was so over-optimized I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do and how to do it. Finally I found a printable form and overnighted it, along with the troubled drive, to eProvided.

Four days passed.

During these four days, I very conspicuously didn't drown my sorrows in booze, even though I really wanted to. I kept reassuring myself that I'd be able to recover all the data somehow. eProvided might come through. I looked through my backups and saw that I hadn't archived anything, anything, since March 2007. I thought about Hemingway and the lost briefcase full of stories (except I'm no Hemingway, and I didn't lose a briefcase, and in any event I couldn't lay the blame on someone else) and how that lost briefcase made him the writer we remember. Maybe everything on the flash drive I lost could be retroactively labeled juvenalia and safely consigned to the maw of digital entropy.

On the fourth day I couldn't stand the wait and emailed eProvided -- "Did you get my drive? Can you save me, please?"

I got back a note requesting $30 via Paypal as an analysis fee. I paid it.

A week later -- seriously, a full week with not a single bender! How did I do it? Mostly, I distracted myself with the stock market. I wanted to follow the business news because it seemed as though something disastrous happened to some company or other, or some national economy, or some zaibatsu or currency, every day. I had no interest beyond prurience and a vague desire to become a millionaire by looking at MarketWatch.com eight or ten times every day. Instead of thinking about writing, I thought about its antithesis: money. A week later, I got a phone call.

My cell phone rang around noon. I was at work and went into the kitchen to take the call. Bruce, the owner of eProvided, introduced himself. He had a slow, calm voice suspiciously absent of accent that made me think he was either from a square state or maybe had been raised an Army brat.

"Well, I've got some news for you," he said. I noticed right away he didn't label it good or bad.

"What's the prognosis?"

"Well, this drive is totally trashed. Most of the circuits are broken and I haven't even put it under the microscope yet but there's some kind of corrosion that's eaten away just about everything."

There was a long pause. Finally, I asked, "Can you save it?"

"Maybe. But it ain't gonna be easy, and it ain't gonna be cheap." (Maybe he didn't quote Quint from Jaws but this is how I remember it.)

"How much?"

"Well, there's analysis, and I'm gonna have to see if I can rebuild this thing from scratch basically, you think you can get another one of the same lot? It'll take me a couple days at least. I'd say, hmm, $600."

"Six hundred?"

"Plus parts."

He said something about Radio Shack and something about micro-soldering but I stopped listening. In my entire life, I have never spent $600 or more on any single purchase other than my 1996 Dodge Neon, Princess, who is now no longer with us. To put this in further perspective -- the last fiction sale I made paid me $450.

Here's the time to wheel and deal, I thought. Maybe if I explain how I'm nothing but a lowly fiction writer he'll have mercy and cut me some slack. "Listen, Bruce, here's my situation. I'm a writer and everything I've ever written is on that drive. My first novel, my second novel, bunch of short stories... So I need those files. I really, really need them. If you can save them for me I'll be eternally grateful."

"Well, I'll do my best to get everything for you but there's no guarantee. There's a $90 assessment fee and if I can't recover any files then that's all you have to pay, so at least you don't wind up paying for something for nothing."

"Okay." I told him how much I appreciated his hard work and efforts and expertise, still hoping that my words could work a little magic on him and get me a deal.

Instead, he told me, "Well, I work with a lot of people and I have to tell them stuff like this pretty regularly. I have to say you sure do take it better than most."

I couldn't think of any good answer for that. He still didn't back down on the price.

Ten minutes later I sat down and Paypalled him $90. I had to know if I could get my files back or not.

The sun rose and set. Around the world, nine people died of H5N1. Presidential candidates spent hundreds of millions of dollars campaigning. I read MarketWatch.com some more. I spent about 15 straight days in a state of suspended animation -- going to work, coming home, waiting for Bruce to email me.

One night I was speaking to my buddy Jeff when call waiting beeped. It was Bruce.

"Good news," he told me, and started reading the names of directories. I just about wet myself. I went on and on about how great he was, how much he'd helped me, even made sure he read the directories containing my 2 novels. Huzzah! I buttered him up to the best of my abilities. Then gave him my credit card number so he could charge me another $690 for the recovery. It hurt -- it hurt real bad.

I'd spent a total of $820 on eProvided.com's services. If I can sell two of the stories Bruce recovered for me, I'll at least break even.

I offered to pay for overnight shipping so I could get a CD of the files right away, but Bruce told me he'd just send them the normal way. Which turned out to be first class mail.

Yesterday, the envelope arrived. A single CD with an eProvided.com business card. I ran to the computer and popped the CD in the drive.

Bruce managed to save the following:

My first novel
My second novel
The short story I had been working on when the drive started to fail
The previous 3 short stories I composed
Notes for my third novel
A copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1
A bootleg of an Elliott Smith concert (zipped)
Two journal entries
My freelance work
A set of Dell printer drivers

Here's what got lost:

At least 10 completed but unpublished short story manuscripts
Approximately 50 journal entries
Drafts of 2 screenplays I've worked on

The following short stories that have been published are now extant only in print: Dragon Drop, How I Learned To Fly, Crows, Myrtle Baggs's Boarding House for Young Gentlemen, Heat, Norman Oklahoma, Welcome to Justice 2.0. There may be more but I think my point is clear. Those stories exist now only as print -- only as the finished product. All the scaffolding I used to build them is gone.

I've gotten so used to infinite archiving, to having multiple early drafts of things to look at, that this is a personal disaster of a magnitude I can barely comprehend. Even though so much was saved, so much more is gone -- and not just misplaced, but gone. Extinct.

As much as I moaned about paying $820 for getting these files, I would've paid three times as much to get everything back.

So, let my experience be a warning to you: BACK UP YOUR FILES. If you don't it will cost you a pile of money, emotional trauma, or both.

MST3K is ALIVE!

2007-12-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

I've been a huge MST3K fan since the middle 90s. I've been debating whether or not to buy the entire series here, but $200 is still considered a major purchase in my household.

Then I stumbled across this. So far I've only watched 2 full episodes and a couple of shorts, but it's much more satisfying than waiting for Netflix to deliver my DVDs. Enjoy!

Books I read in 2007

2007-12-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

Books marked with an asterisk are books I reread this year.

The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential*, by James Ellroy

Sun of Suns, Permanence, by Karl Schroeder

A Fire On The Deep*, A Deepness In The Sky*, Rainbow's End, by Vernon Vinge

Shatterpoint, Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Stover

Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress, Sharpe's Trafalgar, by Bernard Cornwell

The Good Soldier*, by Ford Maddox Ford

Dead Man's Walk, Lonesome Dove*, by Larry McMurtry

Dark Gods*, by T.E.D. Klein

Hardboiled Cthulhu (anthology)

The Imago Sequence, by Laird Barron

First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, by Colleen McCullough

Your Movie Sucks, by Roger Ebert

On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, by Loren Coleman

The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik

Wall Street Noir (anthology)

Aggressor Six*, The Fall of Sirius, Bloom, by Wil McCarthy

Ancient Shores, by Jack McDevitt

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 1 and 2, by Alan Moore

Valentine's Exile, by E.E. Knight

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

Spin Control, by Chris Moriarty

Rifles for Watie, by Harold Keith

Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Conciliator, The Knight, The Wizard, by Gene Wolfe

Master and Commander*, Post Captain*, HMS Surprise*, The Mauritius Command*, Desolation Island*, Fortune of War*, The Surgeon's Mate*, The Ionian Mission*, by Patrick O'Brian

Confederacy of Dunces*, by John Kennedy Toole

King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard

Neuromancer*, by William Gibson

Silence of the Lambs*, by Thomas Harris

IBM laptop survives car wreck!

2007-12-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

I received this email from an IBM staffer, forwarded from the CEO of Lenovo (see below). This is hard to believe. It seems likely the laptop case had a lot to do with this tale of survival -- my thesis adviser had a similar, slightly less horrific, accident and her Mac PowerBook was completely destroyed.

Dear Manager:

All of us passionately believe in the quality and durability of Lenovo products, and that is why we've been evangelists for our best-engineered PCs around the world. But more gratifying than spreading the word ourselves is hearing directly from users about how our products continue performing, even under extreme conditions. This is always a source of energy and excitement for me.

Recently, I received a particularly powerful customer letter telling one of these incredible stories -- that of a U.S. graduate student using a ThinkPad to write her thesis, who survived a horrific auto accident uninjured along with her PC. It's a story with a happy ending and one that provides real-world proof of Lenovo's leadership in product quality and durability.

An excerpted version of this customer letter is below for your reference. Each of us should be very proud of her positive experience. I encourage you to read the letter and share the story with your teams, as well as family, friends, customers and other business contacts.

Lenovo makes the world's best-engineered PCs -- there's no doubt about it!

Regards,

Bill Amelio
President and CEO
Lenovo

____________________________________________________________

Lenovo Corporation
Customer Satisfaction
ThinkPad Place
Morrisville. NC.

Dear Mr. Amelio.

I am a graduate student at Harvard University. A friend of mine let me borrow her IBM ThinkPad 600X, so that I could use it in order to write my Master’s Thesis. On September 13^th, 2007, after visiting my mother in Maine, I zipped up the ThinkPad into its carrying case, loaded it into the back of my 1998 Subaru Legacy Outback, and headed for Harvard. While traveling southbound on Interstate 95 near Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, my car was struck by a man suffering a diabetic seizure. State Troopers estimate that this man’s car was traveling 85-90 miles per hour. I don’t remember the details of the crash, but the police later informed me that my car rolled front to rear several times, struck a tree fourteen feet in the air and then crashed back to the ground upside down.

At some point during the incident, the ThinkPad was ejected from the car. While at the crash site, but several minutes after the crash, I distinctly remember that the people in attendance asked me what things I wanted to take with me in the ambulance. I mentioned the PC and at least two people said that retrieving it would not be possible since the car “was on top of it”. However, one of these “angels” in attendance managed to dig it out and the PC, along with other belongings, traveled with me to the hospital. I miraculously survived the crash with only slight injuries. My car was completely destroyed. As for the ThinkPad, I was curious and concerned to discover what had happened to the PC on which my thesis was stored.

The friend who lent me the ThinkPad picked me up from the hospital and drove me to her home in Massachusetts. I took the ThinkPad out of its dirty carrying case. I plugged it into a kitchen wall socket, and pressed the power button. We heard the familiar whizzing and beeping as the POST ran, the hard drive engaged and the software loaded. The ThinkPad booted flawlessly, without a single error! In awe and near disbelief, I then ran Microsoft Word and opened my thesis document. My year-long efforts towards my thesis displayed intact and without any problems or data loss whatsoever.

Therefore, I am writing to express my deepest gratitude for building such a champion Personal Computer! When I travel. I treat my ThinkPad with gentle care. To have it tossed around in my car like a popcorn kernel in hot oil, and then to witness it boot without a single error really impressed me. Please accept my sincere congratulations and thanks for building such an outstandingly durable and carefully engineered product as the Lenovo ThinkPad 600X.

As I mentioned before, I do not remember many details of the accident. Should you wish to corroborate any of the details of the crash I can provide you with the names of the Hampshire State Trooper, the ambulance crew of the Exeter Fire Department or my friend who lent me her computer. They could all testify to the truth of this description.

Again, my gratitude goes to you for engineering such an excellent and outstanding PC! Based on my experience with the Lenovo ThinkPad, I would surely purchase another Lenovo Personal Computer, and I would recommend that others make the same investment. One cannot always foresee what will happen to ones laptop!

Another short story waiting to be written

2007-10-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

Read the story.

There are so many directions this could go. A criminal steals the anti-grizzly suit and uses it to rob banks. Or NASA buys it as a heavy-gravity exploration suit. Or...

Trap shooting - second round

2007-10-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

My second trap shooting trip, I shot an 18 and 19!

Mer came with me this time. I gave her all the same pointers Bob gave me during our one-on-one session. One time, when she said "Pull," nothing happened. So she said, "Pull!" Still nothing. She looked over her shoulder with the loaded shotgun still pointed downrange. Bob looked up and started yelling, "Don't look at me, don't look at your husband, you look over there!" pointing at the lake. Mer loaded up with Winchester low noise low recoil target loads that, with the earplugs in, isn't much worse than Black Cat firecrackers.

Mer shot one round and scored a 5. That's lower than the average first shooter. But, as a side note, she called our favorite podcast, Jordan Jesse Go!, and they played her clip on the air. Way cool.

Empire of Ivory - new Naomi Novik book

2007-10-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

I'm signed up on exactly three writers' mailing lists. I was so excited when I got the email a couple weeks back announcing the new installment in the Tremeraire series by Naomi Novik that I told my co-workers and then spent an inordinate amount of time explaining what the Napoleonic Wars were and why dragons made an interesting addition.

Yesterday I went to my local B&N and snatched the last copy of Empire of Ivory off the shelf.

This series combines the martial spirit and moral ambiguity of Patrick O'Brian with the workmanlike prose and the dragons of Anne McCaffrey, with an alternate-history Harry Turtledove twist.

I read them mostly to enjoy the strange historical twist -- Napoleon trying to invade England with dragon-borne infantry? I also really enjoy the contrast (and the nod) to Patrick O'Brian. Here's the downside: because Novik isn't quite as dextrous a writer as O'Brian, her "nothing's happening" passages are much more tedious than his. Her action passages are less exciting. Finally, her evocation of the world of the dragons and dragonriders is not as detailed or self-referential as O'Brian's age-of-sail jargon.

Ultimately, Novik's books are far easier reads. They're also less compulsively re-readable. I don't think they are bad, not by any stretch of the imagination. I recommend them -- and to those who thrill to Novik's adventures, I highly recommend Patrick O'Brian.

Escape Pod story: Save Me Plz by David Barr Kirtley

2007-10-04T05:47:00.000-07:00

Please listen to the podcast first, as this discussion contains spoilers.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about worldbuilding and the importance of internal consistency in a story, especially in speculative fiction. Here's a story that does an exemplary job of playing by its own rules, and even better, does so in a surprising way.

Meg is a regular college student who takes a sword with her whenever she goes outside, just in case she runs into a goblin or a giant spider. Her boyfriend Devon has vanished -- lately he's done nothing but play this new MMORPG, and now he hasn't spoken to her in four months.

So Meg buys a copy of the game and logs in. She receives a mysterious message from Devon's character: "I've discovered something big in the game but I'm trapped. Help me, please."

Meg begins a quest to save Devon and is assisted by a character that sounds like the Dungeon Master from that awful D&D cartoon you may remember from Saturday mornings many years ago. The DM gives Meg a unique and powerful artifact, the Wand of Reification, which is capable of altering reality to make the wielder's dream come true.

Meg has an encounter with lascivious goblins in a black SUV (funny how these recently-fetishized symbols of conspicuous consumption are now used as an indication of selfishness and evil) and finds the castle where Devon is trapped. On her way in she finds another Wand of Reification resting on an altar. Then, an armory full of suits of armor and racks upon racks of wands similar to the two stuck in her belt.

She finds Devon, and he explains to her the following:

1. Their world is really just a sophisticated simulation (using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle / quantum mechanics to prove his point).
2. Their world has a bug in its programming, allowing Meg to receive 2 Wands of Reification rather than just one. (The DM appears and Devon hands him the extra wand.)

Then the big reveal -- Devon has been using Meg to get these wands (over 1200 of them!) repeatedly, and using the wands to change the world to be more like -- you guessed it -- a fantasy MMORPG.

There's one poignant moment. Meg asks, "Why can't I remember any of this?" Devon tells her, "Because if you restart a quest you lose all your progress." And she's set out to save him so many times.

In the end she agrees to help him again and there's a wonderful Mandelbrot moment where he explains to her that the way she has to re-start the quest is to sit down at his computer and play the MMORPG.

There's a flash-forward at the end of the story, wherein Devon and Meg (now Prince Devonair and the elf maid Lena) are globetrotting heroes who slay dragons by the truckload and commute to their adventures via dragon or unicorn. Devon's world is finally, fully in place, and the original world barely a shadow in Meg's mind.

Here's what works about this story: the author gives us a fantasy world, somewhat consistent with the world we know of in WoW or EverQuest. Then he exploits the same sort of loopholes that are discovered and exploited in the game -- the programming bug in the quest system. Then he uses the rules of the game to affect the real world, which becomes more like the game.

My exposition on the well-crafted nature of this story's plot is nowhere near as elegant as the construction of the story itself. It's definitely worth a listen if you're interested in plot. The writing is a little on the flat/uninspired side but if you can get past that you'll find a story that's highly virtuous in its construction.

Download Save Me Plz

Trap Shooting

2007-09-30T22:36:00.000-07:00

A week ago I purchased a Stevens 311A double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun. It looks like this one:

... only mine's a lot more beat-up. Remember the gamekeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover? Imagine the kind of shotgun he'd carry and you're pretty close. The stock on mine has some dings and grime is ground into the grain of the wood. The blueing is mostly gone from the barrel -- the remaining finish is a kind of smooth, even brown.

Today I drove to Outdoor World and bought a few boxes of game shells (2 3/4", #8 shot). Fortunately one of the guys behind the counter was:

A) a grown-up

B) knowledgeable about guns -- quelle surprise!

Then I drove to the Markham Park skeet and trap range. Now, I've never done this before in my life. Luckily the sky was rather overcast and the range was pretty much empty. I had an entire (field?) to myself. Next door, a 16-year-old girl with a semiautomatic shotgun was blasting clay pigeons with monotonous regularity.

I put my ear protection on and Bob, the range officer, told me to go to the first post. This puzzled me as the field consisted of five narrow sidewalks in a fan formation, flaring out toward a lake. Bob watched me wander forward for a moment before shouting, "Where the hell are you going?"

"Post 1. Is that it?" I pointed toward a yard of white PVC pipe sticking out of the ground.

He shook his head in a way that I associate with my dad-- as if in expectation that certain information, mostly about cars and sports and firearms, is genetically encoded and passed down to all males.

Eventually Bob showed me where post one was. I faced a lovely lake, perhaps 1000 yards across, behind which was a stand of trees oddly denuded of foliage. Bob retreated to a lawn chair under a sun umbrella well behind me.

He offered to show me a clay pigeon before I shot -- he called it a "mercy bird."

"Sure," I said.

Something the size and shape of a china saucer, painted fluorescent orange, whizzed into the air like a frisbee, arced, and gracefully banked into the lake.

I loaded a shell into my left barrel (the Stevens has two triggers, one corresponding to each barrel). "Okay, I'm ready," I said.

Bob stared at me.

"Pull!" I said. The clay pigeon flew. I lined up on it and pulled the trigger. Nothing. Not even a click.

Now, let me say at this point that this shotgun was old (circa 1953) and had been hanging on a pawn shop wall for probably 10 years. I paid less than $200 for it. I hadn't dry fired it and didn't know enough about it to really detail strip it and insure function. For these reasons, I always half-expect any of my new firearms acquisitions to explode when I pull the trigger and am at least mildly relieved when they don't.

I looked down and realized that the safety had been on. Ah! I thumbed the safety off and nodded. "Pull!"

The clay pigeon flew. I knew the safety was off, so it was make or break, explode or survive time. I pulled the trigger. I heard a click. The pigeon peaked, seemed to hover for a moment, then slowly tilted to the left and joined its brother at the bottom of the lake. I scratched my head.

There are several reasons for a gun to go click when you're expecting a bang. Usually, it's the safety. But I knew the safety was off. Sometimes the ammo doesn't fire properly. I broke open the gun and peered at the shotshell within. Not even a tiny little nick on the primer -- which means the firing pin hadn't hit it. I closed the shotgun again. WTF?

"Are you pulling the right trigger?" Bob yelled at me.

Of course. Two barrels, two triggers. I gave him a confident nod and shouldered the gun. "Pull!"

The clay pigeon flew. I lined up and pulled the back trigger. The gun roared and bucked. The clay pigeon peaked, hung tauntingly in the air for a long moment, and gradually settled into the water.

Fortunately, I thought, there was no one else there to see my shame. I looked at Bob. He looked at me. I could kill him if I had to. I cursed myself for not giving an alias.

I missed the next 12 shots. Then I got smart and asked Bob what I was doing wrong. Turns out I was aiming the shotgun like it was a rifle -- that is, putting the front sight on the target and pulling the trigger. With a shotgun you need to actually cover the target with the barrels, to shoot as if it was slightly higher. After this and another couple of criticisms, Bob sat back down in his lawn chair.

I went on to break 10 clay pigeons in my first round. Not too bad considering that I had no idea what I was doing. I opted for a second round.

Now, I've fired shotguns before. I have fired 12 gauge buckshot which kicks like Jackie Chan. I know the best way to control recoil is to keep your cheek welded to the stock, so instead of a sharp whack you get a shove. Well, about halfway through the second flight, I forgot this important lesson. The butt of my shotgun reached over and cracked me right on the cheekbone. It didn't hurt too badly but the problem was that I wanted to keep my cheekbone off the stock on the next shot, which resulted in another whack. The more tender that spot became, the further I held my face away from the shotgun, which resulted in increasingly vicious smacks.

By the time I finished the second flight my right cheek had swelled noticeably. I looked like I had half a case of mumps.

I scored 11 on the second flight.

And here's the thing: I had a psychotically good time. I loved it even though I missed more than twice as often as I hit. The moving targets make the game much, much more challenging. I can't wait to go back.

By the time the flight was over, I felt like I'd been

Why every writer needs a blog

2007-09-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

George,

Sorry to resort to drastic measures such as commenting on your blog, but
I'm trying to follow up on a permissions request to reprint your piece "How I
Learned to Fly" in a coming-of-age anthology for The New Press. Both email
addresses I have for you were no good! Would you drop me a note and let me know
if you received my request letter, originally mailed to you July 20th?

Fred Courtright
aka "Perm Dude"
Freelance Permissions Editor

The Perm Dude never would've tracked me down -- because I'm so rootless -- except by Googling my name and tracking down my blog. Thanks, Google and Blogger!

A 9/11 memorial

2007-09-14T05:54:00.000-07:00

How did you commemorate the terrorist attacks on the US? Here's what Greg Perry did:

Tuesday, September 11, 2007, I celebrated freedom in the best way possible.
I bought a gun.

But he didn't just buy any gun, no sir!

It’s not just any gun. It is the gun. I bought an M1A. A Springfield Armory
M1A, a .308 caliber rifle. A rifle that shoots a bullet that has more energy
after the bullet flies 300 yards than an M16/AR-15 has at its muzzle.

In other words, my real rifle’s bullet is still more powerful after
it’s traveled 300 yards than the U.N.’s bullet the moment it leaves the gun. My M1A has far more than twice the distance of those little 22-caliber peashooters that the jackbooted thugs carry with them when they descend upon a nation to squelch the life from it. My rifle can really reach out and touch someone.

Now, there are several interesting things going on in these two paragraphs. The author's assurance that his purchase is a "real rifle," "the gun," strikes one as, well, protesting too much. Sometimes a cigar is so much more. Sometimes your phallic substitute is .08 inches larger (in diameter, of course) than the other guy's.

And, I'm sorry, but what in the world is going on with the "jackbooted thugs"? I wasn't aware that jackbooted UN troops descend upon nations and use their "peashooters" to "squelch the life from" them. Maybe they don't show it on CNN?

We also must assume that the author is prepared to drop the UN's jackbooted thugs at range. Or, as he so eloquently puts it, his "rifle can really reach out and touch someone." Here's where the Freudians start giggling. Stay away, "little .22-caliber peashooters" because my bullet is more powerful at 300 yards than yours is at the muzzle. Nyaaaah.

Guys who buy guns, and let's be honest, guys who conspicuously consume any durable good, love to talk about how much better theirs is than everyone else's. Although normally it's the neighbors who provide the yardstick rather than an international peacekeeping organization -- excuse me, I meant "jackbooted thugs."

I enjoyed reading this post so much I just had to share. Prepare yourself to be reached out to and touched!

The full, original post is here: What I Did on 9/11 by Greg Perry

Stay safe, Greg.

PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul

2007-09-13T17:44:00.000-07:00

PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul

And no one's willing to buy my soul.

When you work in online marketing you see things like this all the time. It's rather unfortunate that online media work so hard to blend "editorial" with "advertisement." Even more unfortunate that, unlike The New Yorker and other magazines, advertorial content doesn't come on a completely different paper weight (easily identified and ripped out) with a honking big ADVERTISING disclaimer.

There's a lot of money in blurring the line between advertising and, for lack of a better word, truth.

The next step in the evolution of the Internet: some brilliant (anti-NetZero) ISP will offer a totally commercial-free experience. They'll block not only pop-ups but Adsense ads, banners, affiliate links, junk websites, even those obnoxious double-underlined commercial links -- all that. And they'll charge... well, how much are you willing to pay?

A lot, I'll bet.

Short story waiting to be written

2007-09-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

Google News: Two War Critic Soldiers Killed in Iraq - ABC News
Two of seven soldiers who wrote a controversial New York Times editorial about their war experiences in Iraq were killed Sept. 10 in Baghdad."

In my mental universe, this story would be about the black ops assassin who was setting up these critic soldiers and, perhaps, the embedded journalist (or blogger?) who discovers the truth behind the operation.

Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well

2007-09-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking more and more about the intersection of creative writing and marketing -- which is as good a definition of copywriting as I've ever heard.

I like to think I'm adding value to my skills as a fiction writer by working on marketing writing. Sure, it's overkill to compare marketing writing to Hemingway, but it makes us hacks feel a lot better about ourselves. Minus the Nobel Prize, the house in the Keys, and the bestselling novels, of course...

My favorite part of this post: Hemingway was challenged to tell a story in only 6 words. The result? is a suitably melancholy sentence it seems only Hemingway could write.

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Full post here

"Circle" accepted by F&SF!

2007-08-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I found out that Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF accepted my story Circle!

This is pretty big news for me -- it's only my second (third?) pro publication in a periodical. The first, "DragonDrop," appeared in Writer's Digest The Year's Best Writing a long time ago. The second, Welcome to Justice 2.0, was also in F&SF. But Justice was a flash piece -- only a couple of hundred words long.

When I mentioned it to Laird Barron, he told me that the second pro sale was way more important than the first -- that a second sale put a writer way, way ahead of the one-hit wonders who appeared in the magazine. I'm not sure if this is true or false but it made me feel even better.

I don't yet have a date for publication -- I know Gordon buys stories way in advance sometimes. It'll feel so great to add another journal, especially one that I admire so much, to my shelf of contributor's copies!

Vacant neighbors

2007-04-17T04:53:00.000-07:00

The vacant house nextdoor has displayed two different realtors' signs since we moved in. It's vacant. I imagine the owners are sweating somewhere, arguing about whether they should lower the price, sweating every mortgage payment, the wife crying herself to sleep at night, the kids unable to eat breakfast because the tension twisting their stomachs precludes feeding. Seduced by the up-up-up real estate market and now one of the many families left holding the bag, as it were. It's all very told-you-so in the abstract but in the concrete, much more brutal. I keep thinking of that Carver story where the wife yells at the husband, "Bankrupt!" The ultimate declaration of worthlessness in a capitalist society.
Maybe they were even convinced to invest more money in having the house kitted out with a limestone kitchen and marble bathrooms? There will be, if there isn't already, an entire industry designed to prey on the bag-holders to help them liquidate their vacant properties at bargain-basement prices. The people who can't afford to ride out the downturn will be crying.

It's interesting to see evidence of abstract economics right next door to my house. It's less fun to read the Times article called something like, "Keep Renting For Another Year," but even that is somehow okay. I guess what I'm really after is confirmation that we made a smart choice, that we won't be among those who have to go begging to make the next mortgage payment. As long as I'm on the right side of that line then I can observe the phenomenon.

It's not romantic, though – I couldn't turn it into a good story. I couldn't write dramatically about people who can't make their mortgage payments. About people living in a haunted house, yes. If their 5-year-old son is communing with flying demons at night, yes. If the husband finds mason jars full of preserved ears in the walled-in closet, yes. But finances? No thank you, John.

Gardens

2007-04-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

My grandpa's skin was the same color as the earth he tilled and planted every summer. His straw hat and forehead, glistening. The black crescents under his fingernails packed with good honest dirt. The green sharp smell of the sun-hot tomato vines. Pale football-sized watermelons heavy on the side of the low earth mounds. Papa's waistband five shades sweat-darkened. Handle of the hoe and shovel long rubbed paint-free. The dirt so brown, powdery and silt-fine between your fingers and underneath the secret chocolate-brown rich earth that feeds the secret white hair-fine rootlets of the carrots, the cucumbers, the yellow-blooming cantaloupe vines, the spidery tall tomatoes, the bell peppers small and glossy, the sprawling cabbages lacy with caterpillar-bites, the short jalapenos and the tiny radishes.

My dad's garden: flat, sun-blasted and populated with straggling weeds and knee-high cornstalks that bowed under the heat. A relic, really, the tree-lined acre edged with ancient oaks and honeysuckle and a patch of blooming iris. But not even the weeds sprouted green from the poisoned earth. Every August, Dad sprayed the garden hose through the garden as if hoping a sprinkling of well-cold water could revive the crop. Every year we harvested nothing we could eat.

Finally rejected by AHMM

2007-04-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Took them long enough... what, six months? I'd like to think my story made it to round 2, at least, but there's nothing about the form rejection slip to indicate that my story did anything but begin to compost in the slush pile.

I don't feel too bad about it, though, because it's a good story. I used to submit stories I knew were unfinished and kind of skulk around and cross my fingers and hope that they fooled the editors (don't laugh -- it's worked a time or two) and end up in the pages of a journal, adding no credit either to myself or the publisher. But The Black Temple is a good story. It will find a home.

Story idea

2007-03-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

John Dufresne is always posting story ideas on his blog.

Here's my next story idea:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/AR2006122500192.html
British troops Raid, Raze Station House In Southern Iraq

I am The Man

2007-03-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

Here's what I've noticed:

The word "manager" is in my job title.
When I leave the room, people talk. When I return, they stop talking.
I was in the conference room yesterday when we fired our first employee.

How did this happen?

Florida

2007-02-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

Florida, as seen through the eyes of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee:

"It was easy to see the shape and history of Bayside, Florida. There had been a little town on the bay shore, a few hundred people, a sleepy downtown with live oaks and Spanish moss. Then International Amalgamated Development had moved in, bought a couple of thousand acres, and put in shopping centers, town houses, condominiums, and rental apartments, just south of town. Next had arrived Consolidated Construction Enterprises and done the same thing north of town. Smaller operators had done the same things on a smaller scale west of town. When downtown decayed, the town fathers widened the streets and cut down the shade trees in an attempt to look just like a shopping center. It didn't work. It never does. This was instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies. They had every chain food-service outfit known to man, interspersed with used-car lots and furniture stores."

Online dating for stupid people

2007-02-10T11:44:00.000-08:00

Normally I don't write about online advertising on this blog. But I couldn't resist this time. Whilst exploring the web, I found this banner for the online dating site True.com

What's wrong with this picture?

Personally, I think the odds are excellent that I'm going to score with a girl who's so dumb she wears a sock cap, a scarf and a babydoll tshirt. All at the same time.

See how her eyes are focused on something out-of-frame? Maybe she's looking for her parka.

Buying into South Florida

2007-02-10T06:07:00.000-08:00

Something I never would've dreamed of has become reality. My wife and I have made an offer on a villa (that's what you call a single-floor townhouse, or a ground-floor apartment with no one over you) in Fort Lauderdale.

Pictures are online here. (Don't you love the green door?)

The neighborhood is very nice -- quiet, tree-lined. We heard neighbors greeting one another by name. It's not too far from I95, which is nice, as we both need to commute about 20-30 minutes to work.

The house (I'm not an architect -- I think I can call it a house) itself is extremely cool. The ceilings are all exposed wood, very high. Makes the place have a sort of ski-lodge feel. The main living area (living room and dining room combined) and kitchen have red clay tile. Someone's gone a little crazy in the past and given the kitchen a fake-adobe treatment complete with missing patches in the fake adobe so you can see the fake bricks underneath (like something you'd see in a Pimp Your House magazine, cluck over, and turn the page).

There's a patio out back and a small live oak (20 years old?). There's quite a bit of space in the back yard -- unfortunately, the current owners poured concrete over it all. I plan to build up half of the yard back into yard with 4x4s and lots of dirt so we can plant cucumbers and tomatoes (and in all likelihood watch them wither and die). More importantly, there's a two-person jacuzzi that's accessible from the master bedroom's sliding glass doors.

The guest bedroom has a loft space that the current owners have set up as a miniature office. That's going to be my writer's garret.

Yesterday, I attended the inspection. The inspector spent two hours opening doors, pounding on walls, and squinting at things. There was only one flaw that needs immediate attention (a crack under one of the high triangular windows in the living room). But everything else looks solid and good to go.

I never would've seen myself paying 7x my annual salary for a house, especially considering how overheated the real estate market is. But at this point we can afford it. And, even if there's a bad downturn, we can ride it out and eventually the prices will start to rise again. We're far enough west that insurance isn't nearly as bad as it could be (but still ridiculously expensive).

Closing date is scheduled for March 13.

The Codex, by Lev Grossman

2007-02-10T05:40:00.000-08:00

I want to try something new. For a long time I've wanted to write book reviews. For a while I contributed to Amazon but I really didn't like getting buried under other people's one-liners. I never got the idea that people were really reading those reviews.

So my plan is to review every book I read this year. These reviews may not be in depth and will of course be slanted regarding my tastes, my likes and dislikes.

Without further ado -- my first book review.

The Codex, by Lev Grossman

Edward Wozny is a wunderkind, an investment banker who's achieved everything he can by the age of 27 (or thereabouts). His bank transfers him to London, leaving Edward with a couple of weeks to kill before moving to the UK.

Yesterday he'd been a hard-charging, highly-paid investment banker in New York, and two weeks from now he'd be a hard-charging, highly-paid investment banker in London. For now he was just Edward Wozny, and he wasn't totally sure who that was. Working was all he did, and it was all he could remember doing. What did people do when they weren't working? Play? What were the rules? What did you get if you won?

Before leaving NYC, Edward receives an odd assignment. One of his firm's biggest clients, the 13th Duke of Bowmry, requests that Edward archive his collection of rare books. The duchess tasks Edward with finding a Medieval manuscript composed by Gervase of Langford (a contemporary of Chaucer). And so the hunt begins.

During his search, Edward meets Margaret, a Ph.D. student in Medieval studies who's at work on her dissertation about Gervase of Langford. He also becomes addicted to a mysterious computer game called MOMUS that actually seems to mirror his own search in the real world. Late in the book, Edward meets one of the programmers of MOMUS and learns that he, too, was once employed by the duchess to find Gervase's missing book.

The Codex reads like an Arturo Perez-Reverte book if Arturo were an American who grew up reading Hardy Boys mysteries. The plot is well-thought-out and well-executed, the twists both necessary and surprising. The end is perfect. All this is very important to me as an inveterate plotter.

But what raises this book head and shoulders above so many others is the brilliance of descriptive passages like this one, describing Edward's late-night subway ride home:

A team of men and women in fluorescent vests hosed down the platform, and the air smelled comfortably of warm, soapy water. A blind Chinese woman pciked out "The Girl from Ipanema" on a hammered dulcimer. A gray pigeon floated by weaving hopelessly between the pillars, a lost soul trapped in the underworld.

The writing is very good, except where it is excellent. And where it's excellent, I stopped reading for a long time, as if trapped in the world the author had conjured.

This is the best book about books I've read since Possession. It destroys The Archivist and The Rule of Four so utterly that I wouldn't be surprised to find my copies of these latter books transmuted into little heaps of ash.

The Codex is an outstanding book and I very much wish I'd written it.

Alligator arms

2007-01-26T04:54:00.000-08:00

Today in zoomorphic fun: my wife introduced me to the phrase "alligator arms." She got it from work.

Alligator arms is a phrase used to describe:

In sports, a catcher who won't reach for the ball (presumably he has stumpy little arms)
In daily life, someone who is miserly (can't reach his wallet)

I have to assume this phrase is in use only in Florida (or other areas where alligators lurk -- Louisiana?). A delightful folkism, isn't it?

1/25/07: Progress report

2007-01-25T22:43:00.000-08:00

When I got home from work last night, drained from a minor work emergency, I really didn't want to sit down and write. But I did.

There's a scene late in my novel A Partial History where the two main characters sit down over bad coffee and several pages of scribbled notes in a borrowed kitchen. It's a quiet sort of scene but incredibly important because the two have to make amends for the tension that's existed since the beginning of the story -- and they have to take an important step toward becoming lovers.

In this new version of the scene, all this has to happen, plus I need to resolve a subplot. Fortunately I've thought of a weaselly, hinting way out of the subplot and that'll have to do for now. As soon as I get this scene right, I can strike #3 from the list of GC's 3 suggested edits.

Just from the way I'm talking about this story, Ican see the cinematic influences in my work. I tend to think in scenes, in visual scenes. I want all that's important to be dramatized and visual. I really hate exposition. I don't exactly hate it, but I have a hair-trigger gag reflex for exposition. I get extremely uncomfortable with more than a short paragraph of it.

Sometimes this is a real drawback -- trying to work exposition (necessary exposition) into longer scenes, the writing can feel choppy. Like a loaf of Wonderbread with slices of rye shuffled in.

More often, though, ruthlessly pruning exposition helps the story run faster and lighter. The stuff the reader needs to know can be incorporated in dialoge (so long as I avoid the notorious trope, "As you know, Bob...") and a little exposition can be dropped in (like carroway seeds!) where absolutely necessary.

So: 1 page of this new scene completed. Thanks, Jim.

The Top 10 Ways to Overcome Procrastination

2007-01-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

The Top 10 Ways to Overcome Procrastination

In association with the JPG Writing Challenge, a highly relevant article by Jennifer Koretsky lays out some excellent guidelines for overcoming procrastination. A few comments:

1. Recharge Daily
-- This also means don't overwork yourself. If you spend 5 hours one day but you're burned out for a week, the net progress you've made is less than if you'd worked 1-2 hours each day.

2. Get a Friend Involved
-- Thanks, JPG!

3. Reward Yourself
-- A glass of red wine after you've finished for the evening is a perfect reward for me.

4. Do Things in Pieces
-- Or as Annie Lamott says, "Think small." It's easy to get overwhelmed with the idea of writing a novel. Much easier to decide to write a specific scene within the novel. It's a simple mind trick but it works for me.

5. Use Music
-- Beethoven's 7th symphony is my favorite. Also love: Kronos Quartet's Caravan, James Booker's New Orleans Piano Wizard, U2's Achtung, Baby, Rufus Wainwright... Generally music without lyrics or music that I've heard so many times that I can hear without truly listening. Helps to drown out the whitenoise, the brainstatic, that's always in the background.

Quote of the day

2007-01-25T07:28:00.000-08:00

Virginia Woolfe:

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery."

My version:

"Write what you want, regardless of whether anyone other than you loves it. If you sell out, whether it's for the tangible rewards of commerce or the psychological strokes of Good job, you will turn into Kafka's monster."

That's not to say you can't have a job -- even a job that pays well -- only that you can't sell your soul. No matter what.

Writing Challenge progress report

2007-01-24T22:16:00.000-08:00

Spent 90 minutes working on my story "The Black Temple." When my wife came home I had thesaurus.com open looking for synonyms for death. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and walked away. I love her.

I think "The Black Temple" is done. 1 more month for AHMM to get back to me (according to my research, 4 months is the average response time ).

Writing challenge progress report

2007-01-23T21:21:00.000-08:00

I finished my story tentatively titled "Museum 2.0" which is probably the worst story title of all time, but has the virtue of being shorter than "Max Proffett and the Cartwright Museum."

So at least I have a completed -- if early -- draft of this story. Sent to JPG for comments (thanks in advance, buddy!)

The larger strategy:

I want to clear the decks of all the pending short story projects I've been working on since the hiatus from my 2nd novel. There are three total stories -- two are at okay places right now. I need another round of edits on "Condo Commando" so I can exchange copies of the ms for a variety of delightful rejection slips.

Then, back to the novel work. I have to make the edits GC suggested and to complete this draft of Novel #2.

Sometimes, I feel incredibly grateful that my writing will provide me with sufficient projects to keep me busy for the rest of my life. Now is one of those times.

The JPG Writing Challenge -- accepted

2007-01-23T08:16:00.000-08:00

My buddy Jim over at the JPGWrites blog has issued a challenge and is taking all comers. The goal: to write one page per day. No equivalents (you can't write 7 pages on Sunday and then chill all day long). His goal is to finish his novel by the end of this young, green year.

I'm in.

I've been looking for ways to jump-start my productivity for some time now, and this is an excellent opportunity. It's always better when you're measuring yourself to someone else's standards -- that way, you never feel like you're being hard on yourself. No, it's that other guy, the one who established the challenge -- he's the jerk.

Thanks, Jim.

Lil Debbie Does Dallas

2007-01-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

What do you get when you combine advertising with an irony deficiency? I'm not sure, but it sure tastes good!

(This isn't a photoshopped image -- it's for real. Sorry.)

Thanks to Snark Hunting.

Miami Noir reading

2006-12-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

The Miami Noir reading at Murder on the Beach -- great fun. There were a dozen of us authors present. From left to right: Lynne Barrett (my thesis director), Vicki Hendrix, the friendly guy whose name I can't remember right now, me, and Barbara Parker. Check out my socks! (What are we all looking at?)

John Dufresne, John Bond, David Beattie, and Les Standiford were also there.

After the discussion, we strolled down the street to have dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. I sat next to Barbara Parker and we discussed her current novel. She said something interesting about crime fiction writers vs. MFA students: people who write mysteries and crime fiction look at their writing as a job. They take it seriously. MFA students (at least in my experience) are more like a band of drunken vandals -- they don't seem to take writing as seriously. Maybe because MFA students, particularly poets, don't have a prayer of turning their work into money. And crime fiction writers do.

Interesting. I wonder if my second book contains enough crime to be commercially successful?

Notes from my trip

2006-12-13T20:17:00.000-08:00

On the flight back from Arkansas, I sat next to FedEx's only female long-haul semi driver. Her name's Darlette, and she grew up in Fort Smith. She was terribly excited to be going to Atlanta for a week-long training course because she wanted to see the Atlanta Motor Speedway.

I took 2.5 Klonopin (the last because the pilot, taking off from LR, really had the hammer down -- the speed and angle of accelleration were just too much for me). This is just enough that you can fall asleep, wake up with your head bouncing off the lowered tray table, look around, and go back to sleep. I did this three times.

More notes about crazed families and insulted politicos in a later post.

About my story "Silence of the Stone Age"

2006-12-13T13:45:00.000-08:00

In preparation for tonight's event at Murder on the Beach in Delray, I put together the following notes on the genesis of my story "Silence of the Stone Age."

Most of the time, writers don't talk much about the process behind a particular story. But because this one has an unusual angle, I'm guessing people might be interested in how I developed the idea. Take this opportunity to peek at the scaffold behind a published short story!

Check out Akashic Books's Miami Noir at Amazon.com or your local independent bookseller.

About "Silence of the Stone Age"

The question I've been asked most often, after "What the heck is an atlatl?" is probably the question every writer gets asked: "Where did you get that idea?"

There's not often a simple answer to that question. Luckily, for this story in particular, I can talk about where the idea came from.

When I was researching my novel A Partial History, I educated myself on archaeology. I read textbooks and monographs and magazine articles and tried to absorb everything I could. This was so I could learn about my two main characters, who are both archaeologists.

I became fascinated with stone-knapping. That's when you whack rocks together until you form a tool. I learned that archaeologists can look at a spear point, say, and determine the number of strikes that were required to make it. They can even tell the precise order in which the strikes were delivered. This amazed me.

I learned that most of the stone points I always called arrowheads were really the tips of atlatl darts. Atlatls are spear throwers -- just a stick with a little hook on the end, really, that allows one to throw darts much harder and farther than one could with arm-power alone. An atlatl is a lever.

I read theories that the extinction of North American Ice Age megafauna, the giant ground sloths and cave bears and saber-tooth tigers, might be credited to the atlatl.

This was the very first piece of technology with which the impact of humans on their environment became out-of-proportion to their actual number. Everything else was downhill from there.

But where did the story itself come from?

I learned about the World Atlatl Championships -- that seemed too good to pass up. Initially I worked with Dr. David Harper, the archaeologist who's at the center of my novel. He met Eustace Green at this particular event, and Green was killed by an atlatl dart. Maybe the first person in several thousand years to be slain by this particular piece of technology.

But that wasn't a good story. There wasn't a plot. And I've heard that stories need to have those. Green's death was just an accident. Whoops. And the end is a quasi-Joycean moment wherein the main character, Dr. Harper, stares into a stand of trees and imagines how much longer the life of an atlatl's stone tip is than a human being's.

Yawn. I put the story in a drawer with all my other masterpieces.

When Les came to me with this anthology, I dusted off the atlatl and showed it to him. He mentioned its lack of plot, its massive amounts of deadweight, and gently urged me to revise it.

Over the process of multiple revisions, the story is as you now read it. A tale of jealousy, betrayal, and stone-age weaponry.

I'd like to leave you with two fun facts: first, atlatls are still being made today. Just go online and google atlatl and you'll find a couple of reputable manufacturers -- one of them's called Atlatl Bob.

Second, please take note: the only legal methods of taking game in Florida are rifles, shotguns, pistols, longbows, compound bows, recurve bows, crossbows and birds of prey. Please contact your state representative today.

Conquering the Fear of Flying

2006-12-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

I started flying too late to desensitize myself to the experience. My first flight, at age 25, traumatized me pretty badly. I didn't know what to expect and every sound, every jostle, terrified me. I developed a dread of flying.

Here's what worked for me: Keith Godfrey's Scared of Flying website. Keith is a retired commercial pilot who's taken the time to put together an ebook (which I bought) and an entire CD set (also available as a podcast download). There's tons of great information and even a forum where people who are even more freaked out than you post about their terrors and other post-phobics try to calm them down.

After reading the ebook, I was able to handle my first trans-Atlantic flight (Paris, Dec. 2005) and my first transcontinental flight (Pacific Northwest, April 2006). If you're afraid to fly, I highly recommend the website.

A setback on the agent front

2006-12-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

So, the interested agent finally got back to me. To paraphrase:

As-is, not interested in offering representation. I thought these three things were wrong:
The first half of the plot is slow
The female lead is unnecessarily cruel to the protagonist
A subplot is resolved in a way that's inconsistent with the overall plot
If you're interested in making these revisions, I'd be happy to read the book again.

I'm more than a little bummed by this. I'd hoped that, by now, five or six big publishers would be engaged in a bidding war over my book. Instead, it's back to the drawing board for a round of revisions.

At least I know I'm doing *something* right. The book's strong enough it can almost stand on its own. I agree with the first two of the three points above. The revision will make the book stronger, I think. So I'll do it.

Uncross your fingers, Jim.

A scene from my novel-in-progress

2006-11-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

Since the POV breakthrough, new scenes from my novel have been much easier to write. The tone of the book is becoming darker. It's more of a thriller now than ever before.

_______________________________
"A little farther out!" Drasc called to the two men who lugged a dynamite charge into the forest. Then, to Nikolai, he said, "The trees will absorb most of the blast."

Nikolai shrugged. In truth, he found this entire scene remarkably distasteful. He longed for a clean stand-up fight -- or, at the very least, for a scope-mounted rifle and a place of concealment. He flexed his hands. He could almost feel a Dragunov's hardwood stock pressed against his shoulder, the black face-mask of an OMON infidel filling his crosshairs. Drasc's way of fighting was so indirect sometimes, so arcane. Nikolai had never had th epatience to play chess, as Drasc was fond of pointing out. Drasc himself had been a small-time celebrity, playing exhibition games against opponents both human and computer, and made a decent living for himself. But that was before the war. Now they scurried from place to place and spent more time covering their tracks than fighting the Russians. Nikola tasted bile and wanted to spit.

"That's far enough, don't you think?" Drasc murmured. He shouted to the two men, "Now, comrades, do you see the writing on top? Look close, it's quite small."

Nikolai watched the two men, small in the distance. They could be a comedy duo: first one, then the other, then both lowering their heads to the pile of wiring and dynamite Nikolai had cobbled together the night before. One of the men was willowy and young, too soft for this kind of work. The other was older, a short broad-shouldered who could've been a retired NCO. They were both half-Sakha and both members of the resistance -- and both affirmed pacifists.

Drasc pressed the CALL button on a plastic, battery-powered two-way radio -- the kind children used to play spy with, back when children were allowed to play. The two distant men vanished in a wisp of gray smoke.

The expanding shock wave knocked snow from trees as it approached. The sound was a punch to the chest -- quieter and less sharp than a tank's main cannon firing. Louder than an anti-personnel mine. Disturbed snowflakes danced in the air.

"Perfect," Drasc said. Hes tuffed the toy walkie-talkie into his pocket and spoke into a military-issue handset. "Comrades! There's been an accident."

Nikolai would help the others recover as much of the two men's bodies as possible. After all, he was more accustomed to this sort of thing.

Drasc shut off the radio. "You could've used a smaller charge."

"Possibly," Nikolai said.

Drasc raised an eyebrow. "Possibly? I've come to expect only perfection from you." Drasc leaned closer, lowered his voice. "Tell me the truth. Do you find all this -- beneath us?" He made an elegant gesture, as if to flick something sticky from his hand.

Nikolai considered lying. If he told the truth, Drasc might think he was going soft. That he needed replacing. But it was a mistake to lie to Drasc. The man had an eerily accurate knack for detecting lies and bluffs. It was probably all the chess-playing. Finally, Nikolai said, "Yes."
"So do I," Drasc said. He patted Nikolai on the shoulder. "I must keep a brave face on for our friends, but to you, to my closest and dearest companion, I can reveal my true feelings." Drasc sighed and Nikolai was amazed to see a tear glistening in the corner of his eye.

"Yes, this is all so far beneath us." Drasc's free hand made a wide sweep that took in the two dead men, their cave hide-out, Siberia itself." "Demeaning work for a man such as yourself. But it is necessary." The open hand clenched into a fist. "We will avenge our fallen friends. Countrymen. Our fallen nation. Nikolai, we will make the Russian bear regret the day he challenged the Chechen wolf."

Nikolai knew Drasc was right. But, later on, while he helped the weeping and vomiting revolutionaries pick rapidly-freezing bits of their friends out of the snow, he began to wonder just exactly how Drasc's plan would accomplish this goal.

Nikolai fantasized about concealing the remaining dynamite under a heavy coat and blowing himself up in the middle of the Russian police barracks. What a clean and glorious end that would be! But he had to trust Drasc -- who knew the importance of sacrificing pawns when necessary to make his larger plans succeed.

Beginning of my plot paper

2006-11-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

This is an article I've been wanting to write for a long time -- a sort of a rebuttal of the "Against Craft" article published in the AWP Chronicle 3 years ago. (Has it really been that long?)

The entire concept is based on the work of Thomas Pynchon -- specifically, The Crying of Lot 49, and my summation of the Pynchon Dilemna: conspiracy vs. chaos.

Here's the beginning of the paper -- hope it makes sense. Still a lot of work to do before it's whole and sound.

Thoughts on plot and plotlessness
During one of my first undergraduate fiction seminars, my professor told us not to end our stories in a way that makes sense. "An open-ended ending," he said, somewhat tautologically, "is far more memorable. It sticks in the reader's mind much longer than an ending that comes tied up in a neat little string." As an example, he cited J.D. Salinger's "Just Before the War With the Eskimos," the end of which is the main character deciding not to throw away an egg salad sandwich.
This puzzled me. Then again, many of the stories my professor assigned for reading and discussion puzzled me. I come from a working-class Ozark background. Stories were a staple of my childhood: stories told for entertainment and for instruction. On Wednesdays, the Bible ladies brought flannelboards to our classrooms and told us ancient stories about God. These stories had cause and effect - the escaped Hebrews worshipped a golden cow, so none of them was to see the promised land. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, so they had to move out of Eden.
College stories were different. Take Kafka's "In the Penal Colony." The anthropologist flees after witnessing the horrors of the penal colony, driving off the prisoners who attempt to climb aboard his boat. Or Bowles's "A Distant Mirror," where the linguist is mutilated, and ends up a mute freak who frightens children. "Going To Meet the Man." "Hills Like White Elephants." "Popular Mechanics." The list goes on.
These stories, though classics, made me wrinkle my forehead. "Huh?" I wondered if I was missing something. I read again and again, made copious notes in margins. I learned to appreciate irony (even the bitter taste of Kafka's brand), to pay attention to detail, to dig deeper into the imagined lives of characters. But I never truly believed, in my heart, that these were stories. Of course there were exceptions to this general rule -- stories I truly enjoyed, like "The Things They Carried" and Robert Olen Butler's exceptional "Love." Only much later did it occur to me to wonder, why did I like some stories and not others?

Signing at the Miami International Book Fair!

2006-11-20T06:11:00.000-08:00

Saturday, the 18th, Mer and I drove down to the MDC campus and spent some time wandering through the street fair that's my favorite part of the Miami International Book Fair. I always get a charge seeing all the different booths representing bookstores and small presses (and political organizations and activist groups) -- all the interest in books and authors. I'm not sure if this is true, but I've been told that the Miami book fair sells more books than any other book fair in the nation. It's refreshing to see people get excited about books. To see people lugging heavy book-filled shopping bags through the crowded streets. To see authors -- some authors, at least -- treated like celebrities.

Since I'm one of the 16 authors published in Akashic Books's Miami Noir, I had the privelige of sitting between two of my fellow authors and signing about 50 people's books. The Miami Noir signing wasn't in the same league as the queue for Jonathan Franzen's John Hancock, but it was still quite respectable.

To those 50 0f you, thanks! Hope you enjoy "Silence of the Stone Age."

Janet - A Sample Post for Janet

2006-11-16T08:03:00.000-08:00

This is a sample post for Janet.

See, Janet, See?

If you'd like to learn more about Janet, read up on Janet's latest dates and other doings at Janet-World.com

Voting in South Florida

2006-11-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

Voting in Oakland Park, FL

I went to my local polling place this morning to cast my ballot. When I first drove up, I was rather surprised by the abundance of parking. Usually there's quite a traffic jam around a polling place. Instead of a crowd of sign-waving campaigners shouting the virtues of their candidates, I saw only two sedate folks handing out flyers.

Early voting has been taking place from Oct. 23 to Nov. 5, so maybe the lack of crowd is unsurprising. Maybe it was only the last-minute folks like me showing up on this overcast morning.

The building, a run-down Unitarian Universalist church, was well-organized. Three separate districts were voting. After a 30-minute conversation regarding an address change, I was given permission to vote. I was also told by a friendly poll-worker, "No one gets turned away."

That was reassuring.

After my proper address was exhaustively established, the pollster with whom I'd been working asked for one of the election rolls -- the ring-bound list of registered voters, where each person signs for their vote. The following Kafkaesque exchange took place:

Worker 1: "What are you doing?"
Worker 2 (who'd been helping me): "I'm updating his address."
Worker 1: "You're writing in the book?"
Worker 2: "I'm going to write him down in the book."
Worker 1: "You're writing in the book?"
Worker 2: "Yes."
Worker 1: "But we were told specifically not to write in the book."
Worker 2: "But I just got off the phone with downtown [the supervisor of election's office?] and they told me to."
Worker 1: "Girl, you better know what you're doing."
Worker 2: "I'm just doing what they told me to."
Worker 1: "But they told us specifically not to mark in that book."

This all seemed to last much, much longer than it actually did. The total absurdity of it struck me: voting logs were kept on paper. But we were using electronic voting machines (presumably, because our elected officials didn't want to become the nation's laughingstock once again). Whether or not something was written down, or even should be, might determine whether or not my vote counts.

The problem as I perceive it was twofold:

1. No one was empowered to make decisions.
2. No one knew exactly what the rules were.
3. No one wanted to take the responsibility for making a mistake.

This could be easily fixed. If there were a single official, a precinct supervisor or manager, who was empowered to solve problems and accept responsibility for decisions, the whole process would go a lot smoother. This would mean more behind-the-scenes troubleshooting and problem-solving for the elections officials, but it would allieve a lot of stress on election day.

While I waited, a man came up and complained that a candidate he wanted to vote for hadn't appeared on his ballot. This conversation went like this:

Voter: "Charlie Crist wasn't on my ballot."
Worker: "Yes, he was."
Voter: "No, he wasn't. I looked all through it and I couldn't vote for Charlie Crist."
Worker: "Well, he was on the ballot. He's running for governor, right? That was the fourth part."
Voter: "Charlie Crist wasn't on my ballot. What kind of ballot did you give me? What kind of election are you running here? I want to vote again."
Worker: "Did you push the red VOTE button?"
Voter: "Of course I did."
Worker: "Oh, my. Well, that means that your vote has already been registered, and I'm afraid you can't vote again."
Voter: "This is an outrage!"

I'd just like to note, for the record, that 1), Charlie Crist was indeed on my ballot, and 2) I didn't vote for him despite the ream of junk mail and the 100 autodialer messages I received from his campaign.

After I was finally given permission (over the phone, by some anonymous official) to cast a real, not provisional, vote, I was handed a paper ticket. I stared at it. The ticket was about two inches high and four inches long, and the yellowish color of a manila envelope. I initialled it and carried it five paces, where I handed it to another poll-worker, and then I was directed to a voting machine.

I'd read a variety of stories about problems with the touch-screen voting system and I admit I was nervous that my sausage-like digits would mash the wrong candidate, but everything went well.

Everything important now will be in the post-vote analysis. We'll get a chance to see if minorities are shut out of polling places by police roadblocks, or if Palm Beach miraculously backs Pat Buchanan, and if the exit polls are wildly wrong once again. If things go as badly this time, I hope there's something we can do to stop it.

Novel breakthrough

2006-11-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

Very excited because I've made what seems like a breakthrough in the plan for my current novel project.

From the beginning, I've been struggling with a couple of key issues. First, and most importantly, was the limitation of a close 3rd person POV. I intended to stick to my main character throughout the book. During the course of the story, he uncovers a couple of plots that only tangentially intersect his own storyline. In order to discover these subplots, my main character Frank has to witness a lot of clues that he can synthesize, make sense of, only later (the moment when things to "click").

Unfortunately, communicating all these clues to Frank was taking up an inordinate number of pages. I was getting so bogged down in setting up the subplots that they were overwhelming the main story line. I couldn't think of a way around this except to work the subplot clues more deeply into the main narrative line -- condensing, so that both main plot and subplot lines were addressed in a single scene.

Then I realized that there was far too much subplot action going on necessarily offstage, in a place where Frank could never see or hear about it. The subplots wouldn't make sense without a long, long expository chapter like that which is plopped down in the third quarter of An Unpardonable Crime by Andrew Taylor.

What to do?

As with so many things, I finally realized that my first principles were getting in the way. I wanted a single point of view. Why? In homage to Martin Cruz Smith, whose Polar Star and Rose are two of my favorite books. But my story isn't sufficiently like them (no main crime for the rest of the story to orbit around), so the single POV wouldn't work.

I decided to have multiple 3rd-person POVs. I have misgivings about this -- multiple POVs can be considered lazy. And my first book, A Partial History, uses multiple 3rd-person POVs.

But so far, in the composition of the novel, the new scenes have really worked. I'm feeling a lot more energy sizzling in the new scenes I've written. Now I feel much more comfortable inventing motivations and plots for individual characters, because I know they'll be much easier to reveal. The reader can sit in on a solo scene with a character, or on scenes between two minor characters. The reader can know more about what's going on than my main character.

I'll post one of the new scenes later on. For now, I feel much more motivated and excited about this project than I have in quite some time.

Jotspot -- free personal wiki

2006-11-01T07:04:00.000-08:00

JotSpot is a great idea: your own free, personal wiki. You control the levels of access (public, invite only, private). It's really easy to create new pages and links.

I read a post on SEOBlackHat about using a personal wiki as a kind of online notebook. The idea appealed to me greatly -- it's an easy way to store huge amounts of information and is available from just any web browser. I'm thinking of a wiki as a way to record notes for a novel -- make yourself a sort of a map. I won't use it for this particular novel but maybe for the next one (or the next short story?).

So check JotSpot out -- see if the wiki-as-online-notebook thing works for you.

Amazon.com reviews of classic novels

2006-11-01T07:01:00.000-08:00

Charlie Stross's blog is always interesting, but this post about Amazon reviews of classic novels is hysterical.

As is the list of reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk -- who has this kind of time? (Maybe these people should get a blog?)

Mining the past

2006-11-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

Just got this note from Jeff:

I just spent the last few days in Boston, searching for Magic cards in my father's garage (pretty pathetic, huh?). A week ago I was looking online at some Magic: The Gathering card lists and it turns out I know for a fact that I had at least one Alpha "Mox Pearl" which is probably worth $1000 or so alone, not to mention the other 2-3,000 Magic cards that I have lying around God-knows-where. I only need to find the f-cking card box, and I'll be rich!

I love the idea of digging through your past treasures looking for priceless artifacts. It's like autoarchaeology Indiana Jones-style. Not really -- a true archaeologist would be examining the artifacts trying to make assumptions about the people and culture that produced them. In this case, it sounds a lot more Schliemann-like.

I sold all my Magic cards in 1997 to finance my move to Greensboro, NC. I remember I sold some of them to a senior manager at AllTel, some to a group of guys in tech support (one of them had a Prince Valiant haircut), and the rest to a friend. I don't really think about them, though at one time I was so completely consumed with Magic that I dreamed of new cards.

"Dragon Drop" rejected by Escape Pod

2006-11-01T06:09:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting for this one for a while:

Dear Mr. Tucker,
Thank you for sending us "Dragon Drop." Unfortunately, it doesn't quite meet our needs for our podcast. I didn't think the ending packed enough"oomph" to overcome its predictability. It seemed to rely solely on the shock value of the child "recycling" his grandfather. I never felt much empathy for the crotchety old man and I thought all things considered perhaps the kid was doing the guy a favor.
I hope you'll keep trying us.

It's always disappointing to get a rejection from a publication you admire. I don't agree that the ending is predictable (see the entry below on packaging vs. product) but I do understand the source of the criticism.

I guess that, on the "Predictability" scale, there are two settings: Saw it coming a mile away, you moron, or, That's stupid because it came outta nowhere. Or maybe I really am telegraphing the endings of my stories too clearly -- ?

I think it's better to be too clear than too fuzzy. Hmmm. What story shall I send them next?

Comments on Nancy Kress's "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls"

2006-10-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying the Escape Pod podcast for several months now. Recently, I started commenting on individual stories -- because it seems like a good exercise. I got all pumped when Steve Eley quoted my comments in one of the 'casts.

I just finished this post on Nancy Kress's excellent tale "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls." This is the first time I've tried to articulate my view on plot vs. style and the synergy of the two. I sure hope it makes as much sense to a reader as it does to me.

Quote [from previous post]:
"It mystifies me that people see this tale as compelling, because the story is so hum-dum predictable that I almost felt like I was hearing an audiobook of an episode of 'Scooby Doo'..."

Good fiction, like good marketing, has both a good package and a good product. Nancy's story had great writing -- excellent presentation. Very few people seem to disagree.

What most people don't like is the product -- the plot itself. It seems to me that most consumers of genre fiction become jaded very quickly because they read a lot of bad stories (say discount brands, with crappy packaging and substandard products).

Once jaded, you pay less attention to the packaging and compare the product to every other product you can remember. Once jaded, it's difficult to take a story on its own merits. We overlook virtues and pick at perceived shortcomings.

I think this story succeeded in terms of both packaging and product. You can, with very little effort, reduce the plot to "subject verb object," but you can do that with any good plot. Good packaging can make any plot, any product, shine like new.

Fingers sore, but still crossed

2006-10-21T06:25:00.000-07:00

Agent GC has had A Partial History for 5 weeks now. So far I've managed to restrain myself from nudge emails and phone calls, but it hasn't been easy. So far she's emailed me on Fridays only, so each week I look forward to Friday. When the day ends with nothing from her, I trudge home and sulk for a few hours.

As if this isn't already bad enough, I read this on Miss Snark:

In case this is news to you: reading full manuscripts can take a while. Minimum 90 days is industry standard. Lots longer is normal.

It's only been 35 days! What am I going to do??

"The Smallest God" rejected by Interzone

2006-10-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

With these interesting comments:

Note: this was a nice story, but rather lengthy for what it was saying
(basically good guy needing a supernatural experience with a small god to get his priorities sorted), a bit too mundane, and not quite ambitious or poignant enough for my liking. Good luck with placing it elsewhere, though.

I think this is an apt summation of the story. I of course disagree re: "mundane" and "ambitious" -- on second thought, it's not a very ambitious story. But I don't think it's mundane.

"The Smallest God" was loads of fun to write. It's still unpublished, though, after about 4 years. I have no idea what to do with it. I've already cut out about 2000 words (it was, of course, the florid descriptive stuff I love). Maybe I need to amp up the urban fantasy element. Maybe it needs more danger. Maybe it shouldn't have a love interest.

I don't know. It's so hard to take the revision machete to a story you really like. Even harder when you like the story and you think it accomplishes its goals, "mundane" and un"ambitious" as they might be.

"The Black Temple" out the door

2006-10-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

Submitted "The Black Temple" to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine today. It'll be after Xmas before they respond, most likely.

I've always had a soft spot for this publication. When I was a kid, my grandfather had a subscription. I remember a few plots to this day -- ones that really captured my imagination. Unfortunately (perhaps fortunately?), I forgot the rest.

I think TBT is a good choice for this publication because it's fundamentally a crime story. Although initially, I'd planned for it to be a supernatural Lovecraftian unspeakable-horrors-from-beyond-time-fest, it turned into something both more subtle, and, I hope, more publishable. A crime story with a supernatural red herring.

Well, we'll see what the AHMM editors think. The publication of a nice, fat (7000 words) story in such a high-profile magazine will definitely help build my case as a writer.

Credentials! I need more credentials!

Miami Noir by Akashic Books -- my first publication in a real book!

2006-09-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

Today, my 2 contributor's copies of Miami Noir came in the mail. They were unmarked and stuffed in a beat-up mailer (the kind that's padded with shredded currency and toilet paper -- you know the ones -- that leave a snowfall of gray scrap when you open them) so at first I just thought it was a book I'd ordered.

Miami Noir looks great. I have no idea what the cover image (a mannequin's hand on the beach? A disembodied arm asking for a handout?) has to do with the contents, beyond its "noir" feel. Be that as it may -- this anthology contains my story "Silence of the Stone Age."

I'm thrilled to hold this book in my hand! The story was accepted so long ago (May 1st, 2006) and I already blew the $200 on good beer. Finally receiving the book and adding it to my little contributor's copies shelf felt so good. Delayed gratification. In fact, it was like paying a credit-card bill in reverse.

Go buy a copy of Miami Noir. I'll read everyone else's stories and post about them separately. In the meantime, help support Akashic Books, who had the foresight to give me my first publication in a real book!

Hack your way out of writer’s block | 43 Folders

2006-09-22T06:48:00.001-07:00

Hack your way out of writer’s block 43 Folders

Great tips for working through writer's block. I still don't accept that such a malady exists. Malingering, yes. Laziness, absolutely. Total boredom with your own creative process -- yes, in spades. But writer's block? It's a myth created by writers to make their work look harder.

Send the rest

2006-09-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

Please send the rest of A PARTIAL HISTORY. Exclusively, if possible.

Thank you, GC!

Now, the waiting begins...

"Sleeping Beauty" submitted to Andromeda Spaceways

2006-09-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

I'm very fond of the short story "Sleeping Beauty." I wrote it in grad school, in the same workshop that gave the world "Dragon Drop" and the also-as-yet-unpublished "Blood Calls." This was the best, most productive workshop I've ever had. Thanks, Les Standiford!

So I sent "Sleeping Beauty" to Andromeda Spaceways. It's already been rejected by F&SF and Asimov's. Let's see what AS has to say.

Even if it gets rejected again, it does me some good to get my stories circulated again. It's been a long time since I've actively been sending them out.

"The Black Temple" -- my wife says...

2006-09-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

I named my rewrite of TTOTR "The Black Temple." This seems to be an appropriately Lovecraftian/Howardesque title...

I gave my wife a printout of the first draft. Now, normally you'd expect empty attaboy praise from a close family member. My wife's always been one of my toughest critics. In fact, she told me (years later) when I first showed her an early draft of my novel, she wondered if I might have a serious learning disability. She's harsh.

So, imagine my surprise when she absolutely loved this story. She even wanted to read TTOTR to see if I'd wantonly plagiarized, and was shocked to see I hadn't. She was so excited about "The Black Temple" I got all uncomfortable.

Then she asked me, "If you can take a bad story and make it good, doesn't that mean you'll never run out of story ideas?"

I guess it does. Ulp.

"The Thing on the Roof" replot: Outline

2006-09-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this exercise took 8 times longer than I anticipated. Here's the final story outline based on my notes and the first draft:

Kidnapping and first night in jungle
Ambush and mention of villagers. Susan (Dr. Vincenza) learns why they're there -- at least what they're supposed to be doing.
Susan and someone (Red). She learns a little bit about the village and temple. Valentine interrupts, he's getting sicker. Their medic, Spencer, is the person who'd disappeared earlier.
Arrive at temple. Valentine raving, carried on a litter. (He drops his pistol -- Susan picks it up and hides it in her bag.) Susan fascinated and repulsed by the temple, not sure if she can find a way in. No villagers to be seen.
Valentine deteriorating -- never lucid any longer.
One young boy from village survives, comes to Susan.
Franklin tells her what happened at the village -- big fight, Spencer vanished, village burned, most villagers killed. Susan realizes she has to get away from them.
Susan tells the men there's a treasure in the temple, and that the temple is already open (it is -- at the top).
Men climb down into the temple to look for treasure. Susan cuts the ropes, abandoning them in the dark. She and the surviving villager head back toward civilization.

__________________________

Notice how significantly it departs from the original plot? That's because the original plot was awful. I made it my own -- so much so that there's really no indication that Robert Howard's story influenced me at all.

I finally finished the first draft on Sept. 15 -- over a month after I first came up with the idea. So it took some time.

The good news is, it's a great read. The story seems front-heavy (all the walking through the jungle -- 12 pages in fact, before they get to the temple). I tried to avoid front-heaviness by having the story start with Susan's kidnapping but there's still a lot of backstory to plug in so the story makes sense moving forward.

If all goes well, I'll post in a few months that this story was accepted by AHMM or F&SF. If not, maybe I'll just get frustrated and publish it here. We'll see.

"I had an open house on Sunday... and no one came."

2006-09-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

At my office we recently posted a job opening for part-time clerical help. We got a massive number of resumes from realtors. Seriously, about 50% of the applicants were realtors who needed money. So we hired one of them.

Now, I feel like I have a spy on the inside.

More news as it develops!

Hurricane Ernesto: Natural Disaster as a Media Event

2006-08-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

It's pretty common in South Florida to think of a hurricane as Mother Nature's version of the SuperBowl. It's also a scary kind of holiday -- you get to leave work early, spend time at home, eat foods you wouldn't normally eat (trying to clean out the fridge in case you lose electricity).

It's the only time, and I mean the only time, anyone watches the Weather Channel. We Floridians also tune into our local news channels to watch young, handsome meteorologists assure us of the inevitability of our destruction with a certain latent glee.

We're reminded to cower under a mattress or the dining room table when trees come flying through the windows, showering us with glass shrapnel. We're reminded that, if we try to escape now, we'll likely be caught on the open road by the hurricane and slaughtered. Storm surges may flood your house. Lightning can start fires and kill the unsheltered. Roofs can blow off, leaving you exposed to the storm.

And so on, whipping audiences to frothing, mindless anxiety. (The interesting thing about this anxiety: normally, when anxious about something, I seek out more information. The only information I can find is not reassuring, but frightening. This sends me, and presumably others, into a feedback spiral that culminates either in nervous collapse or a fistful of klonopin.)

Despite the certainty of our destruction, each local channel dispatches teams of reporters to the most dangerous patches of beach, where hurricane winds are expected to be most fierce. The duty of these "journalists" is to report to us exactly how bad the storm is, exactly how fast the wind blows, exactly how much the wind-borne sand stings. To film pieces of roofs that blow away, or signs torn down, or palms uprooted. To provide constant updates when there's really no new information at all.

That's another thing: updates are constantly flooding in. Constantly -- every five to ten minutes. Even when nothing's happening. There's a storm surge of information that is almost totally meaningless.

It's all terribly entertaining in a low-key, reality-television sort of way. And because you're caught up in the anxiety spiral of the event, you may find yourself unable to pull away from the TV until your electricity flickers and dies. Then, you'll hunch over your battery-powered radio for more of the same.

A friend of mine once observed that television programming is designed to create anxiety among the audience. Because anxiety creates a need for reassurance (more information, more "updates"). The purpose of all this? Not to keep the audience informed -- not at all. The purpose is to sell advertising. Potato chips. It's possible to drive people to the verge of nervous collapse to sell potato chips.

We'll see even more of this when the next hurricane rolls through.

Ernesto? Where are you?

2006-08-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Monday evening: long lines of cars wrapped around gas stations. Urban assault vehicles and land-tanks thirsty to guzzle their fill of gas before the hurricane comes. Mobs descended on grocery stores, filling their carts with canned ravioli and dozens of plastic jugs of water. Hardware megastores stayed open all night and sold all the cheap plywood and chipboard in stock. SUVs never designed to actually transport anything rolled away with long wood sheets on their roofs, a couple of strands of parachute cord wrapped around (and the driver's hand, out the window, balancing the 100-lb. load).

Ernesto is coming! The Weather Channel and the brigade of South Florida meteorologists had all assured us it was so. So, sheeplike, the unprepared raced to buy D cell batteries.

Ernesto, like many Hollywood movies, was more marketing than event. South Florida didn't even get much rainfall. Keep in mind that, in the summer, daily cloudbursts of Biblical ferocity are the rule. Not a day goes by without 1-2" of rain.

Ernesto? Gentle breezes and light showers. A little lightning, nothing more.

For those of you who haven't been through a hurricane before, let me tell you: this was not a hurricane. For South Florida at least, Ernesto was a media event and nothing more.

If I sound bitter, I don't mean to be. I'm glad that all the idiots who didn't have hurricane supplies before are a little more prepared now. What never ceases to amaze me is the sheer number of folks who think it's okay to not be ready until hours before the hurricane is expected to come ashore.

"Ahh, I'll buy a flashlight next time there's a hurricane."

Proper supplies, by definition, do not go bad for at least a few years. So WTF, people? Come on! We all know that hurricanes come every year (even when some of them are really, really wimpy). Get it together, get ready. There's no good reason to wait until the last minute.

Lest ye forget:

Replotting The Thing On The Roof

2006-08-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

The original idea, straight from my notebook:

Why not... - steal the plots of those "Lovecraft Mythos" failed stories &
rewrite/update 'em as my own? Why not indeed!

I knew this would be challenging so I told myself I'd use the very first story in the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which contains some of the pulpiest pulp published. The first story, Robert Howard's "The Thing on the Roof," I outlined below.

Clearly, TTOTR is a completely failed story.

In my replot, I only held onto two elements of the original: the Honduran setting, and the idea of a hidden/lost/mysterious temple. I used some background I still have in my head (archaeologists, ancient Mayan cultures) and my own interest in plotted dramatic stories. Here's the first draft of the new plot, straight from my notebook:

Backstory: "Security forces" (mercenaries) dispatched to Guatemaula to hunt down narcoterrorists in the jungle. One assassination squad finds an ancient temple hidden in the jungle. They've seen a dozen already and would've ignored this one, too, but it looked different than the rest. One whole section was clean -- meticulously picked clean of vines, lichens, etc. Capt. Franklin et. al. are here to track down and eliminate a village-elder type -- a small-time politician who's somehow offended the govt.

When they find this village (called the Old Place by the locals, just map coordinates to outsiders) it's full of strangely degenerated people. Twisted, deformed as if by long exposure to toxic radiation [total Lovecraft strophe!]. Mercs catch a few (Valentine gets bitten on the arm) and burn the village, take the head man in the forest, torture them to talk about the temple. The 3 villagers all die screaming in some unknown dialect. The headman chants ceaselessly until Red can't stand it anymore and shoots him in the head.

All the villagers have fled into the forest, so the squad investigates the temple. Pull down vines, hack away with machetes. Try to find a way in and can't. Spencer disappears in the middle of the night -- they never find a trace of him.

Capt. Franklin is convinced there's something valuable in the temple -- if they can't find an entrance, who can? They hike out to the dig site near Copan for medical supplies (Valentine needs antibiotics) and for a translator.

The squad infiltrates the camp in the middle of the night and holds everyone at gunpoint. [present action begins here] Take Dr. Vincenza (threatening to shoot a laborer every 5 minutes until she's ready to go), meds, supplies and some old dynamite, and head for the temple.

Reversal: Dr. Susan Vincenza starts most powerless and Capt. Franklin most powerful. Power structure inverted.

Dr. Vincenza goes from pacifist to murderer (she's surrounded by ruthlessness, by the jungle). From revealing info to hiding info. She's like Gretel in Hansel and Gretel.

Go thru forest. Valentine getting sicker. L-shaped ambush of drug smugglers, Dr. Vincenza hobbled and guarded.

Approaching temple. Nightmares. They know they're getting closer.

Find Spencer's tortured, mutilated body. Or maybe he's still alive? (Note: find later [otherwise they'd take revenge on the villagers when they encountered them]).

To village. Dr V can speak to villagers.

Temple. Dr. V works on translation. Greatest leader inside. Capt. F wants to blow it open but V convinces him not to (converting priceless artifacts to scrap?). Says she thinks the villagers might know a way in, or at least can shed some light on the problem.

She meets w/villagers, tells tehm how to attack the squad, what to do, when, etc. She does this in the presence of the guards, but in the Ch'orti' dialect no one else can speak. She gathers the villagers w/prybars and at her signal they attack the soldiers, overwhelm them. Capture Capt. F. He begs for mercy (wounded?) and V offers him the same mercy he gave the village headman.

V stays, surveying and documenting. Becomes the head of the tribe.

Epilogue: 2006
Strange degenerate tribe discovered deep in the jungle, led by a white woman. Temple. A few pieces of rusty equipment. Further research required.
___________________________________
So, there I have some of the characteristics of a Lovecraft story: a mysterious, ancient temple. Degenerate people. No monsters in this draft.

I don't usually plan this much before writing a short story. I was only able to break out of the mold of my process because I viewed this story as an exercise rather than a "real" story.

Request for an exclusive!!!

2006-08-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

This just in:

> Please send me the first fifty pages of A PARTIAL HISTORY,exclusively.

Woo-hooo!!! Thanks, GC!

So out of my 10 queries, I got 3 requests for partials. Awesome.

And it's kind of cool that they're requesting partials of A Partial History.

Robert Howard's "The Thing on the Roof"

2006-08-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

... is a terrible story. Now, I love Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian stuff (ever think you'd hear an MFA say that?) so I can say this without any snottiness.

Here's a plot summary of "The Thing on the Roof."

The main character (not the POV character), Scholar Tussmann, wants a very rare book. The POV character (PC, who may not even have a name) agrees to get it for him.
After an exhausting letter-writing campaign, PC gets the book.
PC hands the book to Tussmann. Reading it, Tussmann learns that, during his previous travels in Honduras, he'd found a temple that contains a great treasure but he didn't have time to plunder it. D'oh!
Tussmann returns to Honduras (offstage, mind you).
Tussmann returns to jolly olde England. At T's request, PC visits and brings the book. T reads the book again, sees information he didn't notice before -- a warning not to disturb the temple. Double d'oh!
That night, the monster that followed T to England breaks in and stomps on him. PC finds his remains. The End.

So, what's wrong with this picture?

The POV character has only the most tangential involvement in the story. It's like The Great Gatsby told from the point of view of the concierge of the hotel the party visits on that fatal day when Daisy runs over the blonde.
The interesting things -- Tussman's trip to Honduras, raiding the temple, the fatal encounter with the monster -- all happen offstage. There's almost nothing to hang onto in the story.
It's a very writerly, sophomore-creative-writing type of story. I had this friend who did something really weird/crazy/Honduran and it caught up with him.

I replotted the story to write a new, revised version of my very own. The new tale bears only passing resemblance to the original -- but this is good, so no heirs or estate can sue me.

Next installment: an outline of my new, improved plot!

New fountain pen for my birthday!

2006-08-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

I got a great new fountain pen for turning 32! I'm very excited about it. I freaking love fountain pens -- used to be hooked on Schaeffer but now just anything with flowy, sloppy ink turns me on.

The new acquisition is a Penatia, by Cross. It looks like this:

Now, try to imagine it as a fountain pen.

The red part is a ridged plastic-vinyl sheath that adds a nice tactile feel. The part you grip (what's the technical term for that??) is metal, so is cold to the touch but warms up quickly. The nib is super-narrow and capable of extremely fine lines. The cap isn't very heavy, like some of my other pens, so you can reverse it without changing the balance of the pen. Overall, this Penatia is an excellent package.

Only one complaint: it dries out fast. I mean, like 5 seconds after you take off the cap you'd better be writing. Maybe that's a positive -- maybe it discourages mulling over words. Maybe this is a first-draft pen!

It takes a marketer's mind to turn a disadvantage into a feature.

Next: what I've written with my Penatia fountain pen thus far...

"Dragon Drop" sent to Escape Pod

2006-08-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

If you're into podcasts, or even if you're not, I have to recommend the Escape Pod program. They do great work. Not only are they publishing (generally) excellent fiction, they separate themselves from many podcasts with a truly polished, professional sound. A lot of work goes into each episode of Escape Pod, which means it sounds easy.

Anyway -- they have some Hugo recommended stories available in the archived podcasts. I recommend those without reservation.

I sent them my short story "Dragon Drop" -- winner of the 71st Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition, genre story category (ridiculously specific, isn't it? But they paid me! Twice!). Even though it doesn't have a happy ending I'm hoping they'll think it's suitable for them.

Fingers crossed!

Note: this story contains one of my very favorite sentences I've ever written:

Dennis graduated to vertebrates.

Mystery Beast of Maine: Update

2006-08-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

Famous cryptozoologist Loren Coleman had an opportunity to examine what was left of the creature found a few days ago in Maine. His analysis? The beast is a mere chow that's gone feral. Impossible to prove or disprove without a DNA sample... Read the full report here.

It's disappointing when something like this turns out to be just a stray animal -- the natural world, rather than the supernatural. All the same, it's good to know that not everyone in the world jumps to the werewolf conclusion.

This story interests me for a couple of reasons:
1. werewolves are cool
3. monsters are cool
9. my new novel has a mysterious animal in it

Hopefully there'll be more news about the Maine critter. I know I'll be looking for more.

Wolf-dog hybrid monster

2006-08-17T06:32:00.000-07:00

Wow -- unbelievably, undeniably freakish. Looks more like a chimp/wolf hybrid in this photo. Here's the whole story -- brought to you by Fox News (the less said about them, the better).

"It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget," [the witness] told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."

Creepy!

This view reminds me of some drawings I've seen of La Bete de Gevaudan:
... but that monster was WAY bigger than 50-60 pounds.

Querying agents by email

2006-08-15T09:21:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the great resource AgentQuery, and to my boss's vacation, I spent half a day at work preparing query letters for about eight different agents who represent science fiction. This is all for my thesis novel, A Partial History.

I always feel an exhilirating mix of anticipation and fear when sending my work out... this time's no different. I wonder if I should kiss the envelopes, sign each letter with the same pen or different pens, whether my penmanship on the SASE matters.

Fingers crossed.

And speaking of hurricane insurance...

2006-06-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

Check out this nifty tool for making a home inventory list for insurance purposes.

Making an inventory list is something I've only done casually -- jotted on the back of an old electric bill:

Computer
Stereo
World Poker Tournament commemorative mug

...you get the idea. But it's a really good idea to have a home inventory so, after the next big hurricane hits, you can squeeze every dime out of your insurance company.

Happy listing.

Hurricane Insurance

2006-06-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

Fact: You can't buy hurricane insurance once a storm has formed. No one will insure you if you wait that long to buy insurance. Can you believe it?

Fact: Hurricane Katrina had an economic impact of about $100 billion. This cost more than the entire hurricane season of 2003.

Fact: Insurance rates have skyrocketed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as insurance companies scramble to:

1) Recoup their losses. They need to get back all that cash they've been paying out. Rising rates are even spilling over into non-Katrina-affected areas.

2) Anticipate the increased costs of catastrophes in the more active hurricane cycle.

Get hurricane insurance! Even if you don't actually live in South Florida but own property here, you should invest in some coverage.

Coral Gables Permit Nightmare

2006-06-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

One of the phrases I've heard kicked around recently is Coral Gables permit nightmare. I wasn't really sure what the source of this particular nightmare was, so I did a little digging and discovered that the phrase most likely originates from a Coral Gables Planning and Zoning Board Meeting.

Now, this is fun for several reasons -- primarily because the transcripts are published online! (And yes, the city of Coral Gables really does own the URL citybeautiful.net, beating out such fine metropolitan areas as Des Plaines, IL and Fayetteville, AR in a brutal bidding war. Maybe someday soon they'll upgrade to citybeautiful.comfor a measly $2500.00)

The source of the phrase permit nightmare seems to be some citizen kvetching about ugly houses someone had the gall to build in a Gables neighborhood.

And here's the thing about ugly houses: not only do people have to live in them, their neighbors have to look at them! Property values plummet across the neighborhood just because one guy cheaped out on his architect. Foul!

Take a minute and browse the CityBeautiful.net archive of zoning board meetings -- they're wonderfully prolix and at times moving in their demonstration that human beings can become worked up over anything -- anything -- no matter how trivial and pedestrian.

South Florida beaches slowly disappearing

2006-06-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

In 2003, the city of Hollywood lost about 75 feet of sand all along its beachfront. Showers, lifeguard stations, royal palms and volleyball nets fell into the ocean. I remember standing on the Broadwalk and looking down into the water which, the month before, had been about 100 yards away.

The really unbelievable element in all of this is the cause of this sudden reduction in the beach. A breeze, a steady 20 mph wind out of the east, blew for about eight straight days. As you know if you ever watched The Perfect Storm, wind blowing over the ocean can whip up some serious waves. In this case, the waves weren't serious -- nothing over about three feet, certainly nothing worth surfing on -- but because of the relentless steadiness of the wind, the waves chipped away at the beach, eroding mind-boggling amounts of sand.

As this NY Times article points out, wind isn't the only factor in this equation. Rising sea levels, even fairly innocuous amounts of sea-level rise, can have dramatic effects on a waterfront area. Every day, when I'm driving to work, I think about all the people in their fat SUVs and how their exhaust pipes are going to drown us all in a lake ofnew waterfront property as the old stuff slips under the waves. Happy reading!

Port St. Lucie, Florida: America's 3rd Fastest Growing City

2006-06-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

The NY Times tells us:

Americans have been moving west and south for decades, and last year was no
different. All but three of the 50 fastest-growing cities from 2004 to 2005 were
in those regions of the country, with many in California and Florida...

This migration of people from the northeast is what's fuelling real estate prices in South Florida. As the Keys, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm become increasingly packed with people, developments sprawl westward where the Everglades used to be (it's really sad to see a white heron delicately picking its way over someone's golf-green front lawn looking for a meal).

But there is a westward limit to the expansion. At some point, especially with the state of gas prices, westward expanstion peters out. Commutes above about 90 minutes become unacceptable to most people. Keep in mind that there's basically no public transportation down here, so that's 90 minutes at the wheel of your car, parked on I95, burning up premium unleaded at $3.35 a gallon.

Because of these factors, the sprawl has been directed north. Port St Lucie is one of those previously quiet little hamlets that woke up one morning to the sound of bulldozers knocking over mangrove stands and ancient banyans. Now, you can own a sterile 3-bedroom home on recovered swamp and swat mosquitos (because all the mosquito-eating birds are gone) and get in your SUV and drive to Wal-Mart for a hot dog and nachos on weekends.

It's the condo nightmare writ large.

But don't worry, folks, keep coming -- it's a seller's market.

Don't know what an atlatl is?

2006-06-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

Then you're in for a treat! The atlatl is the first known missile weapon that allowed early man to strike and kill animals at a distance.

In an early draft of my story "Silence of the Stone Age" (forthcoming in anthology from Akashic Books), I say that the atlatl enabled mankind for the first time to alter his environment. That from the moment they could begin to harvest large, dangerous animals at a distance, mankind began to disrupt the natural balance. I'm not sure if this is actually true -- but it was perfect for the story.

Check out www.atlatl.com to learn more and maybe even to buy an atlatl of your very own.

Antikythera Mechanism: World's oldest computer?

2006-06-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

The Antikythera Mechanism is an incredibly complex analog computer, about the size of a shoebox, fashioned of over 30 bronze gears and covered with over 2000 previously-unidentified characters.

Now, 95% of the text has been deciphered. It appears that the device was a sort of dynamic almanac, able to calculate the positions of the sun, moon and key stars. It is a level of engineering and mathematical precision stunning, considering the device was fashioned approximately 1900 years ago.

Think about it: around 80 CE, a Roman ship tooling around the Mediterranean had this device onboard as a crib sheet for the navigator. Imagine, during WW2, if ENIAC had been aboard one of the Iowa-class battleships and used for navigation (and presumably ballistic arcs). The Antikythera Mechanism may have been a secret weapon like the ULTRA device, employed at great cost and great risk to help the Romans (who weren't a seagoing folk by nature) find a hidden rendez-vous to meet with an informer.

If I made this up, no one would believe it. The story would go in the specfic pile along with alternate history and tales of alien abduction. The world is an infinitely fascinating place where things like the Antikythera Mechanism simply turn up from time to time.

Homemade weapons becoming more prevalent

2006-06-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

From United Press International:

NEW YORK, June 13 (UPI) -- Police across the nation have recently been
finding an alarming amount of homemade guns and weapons, Newsday reported.

The New York Police Department, during a narcotics raid in the Bronx,
reportedly found a gun made out of a flashlight, the newspaper said. Sources
told Newsday that disguised weapons allow drug dealers and other criminals to
stay armed without arousing suspicion.
Police have said that the rise in homemade weapons is likely a response to the careful attention paid to finding and removing illegal guns.

Newsday reported that police in many other cities are also finding homemade
weapons -- among some of the items recently confiscated was a rapid-fire pistol
disguised as a cell phone.
The recent rise in homemade weaponry has sparked fears of an evolution to more sophisticated homemade guns and weapons, the newspaper said.

Hmmm... do you think the atlatl will be next on the list? Flint knives? Bolos?

Paleophilia: the love of really friggin old things

2006-06-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

While researching my novel A Partial History, I read a lot of archaeology textbooks and books intended for the average reader. I discovered that I'm really enamored with the ancient world.

"The ancient world" -- what does that mean, exactly? To me, it means preliterate civilizations. From the time hairy monkeys first started walking upright to the Myceneans. Perhaps I'm fascinated with this pre-history because there's such fertile grounds for the imagination to wander around in. In modern times, interesting bits and pieces, fragments of the ancient world, occasionally come to light and are wondered over. Archaeologists write abstruse papers about them, publish in journals so obscure that they're, for all practical purposes, nonexistent, and get into blood feuds over potsherds and the angle of the hook on the end of an ape's femur.

I want to keep track of these delightful bits of trivia -- document them somewhere. And where better than here?

Hurricane Alberto a disappointment

2006-06-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

To live in the path of a forecast hurricane these days is to be bombarded by dire Katrina-inspired exhortations...

Nowhere is this more true than in South Florida. Every time a tropical depression (isn't that a great phrase, tropical depression? Makes you think of a guy on vacation in Cancun who just can't drink another pina colada... sigh...) coalesces out in the Atlantic, local weather forecasters remind us that we'd better by God have a stock of batteries and water laid in or else.

In 2004, when Hurricane Charley made landfall in the panhandle (above the armpit of Florida, if you like), my wife-to-be and I laid in bed and watched footage of a gas station sign gracefully falling apart in the wind. That's it. A desperate news crew with a camera focused on that gas station sign, watching it disintegrate, again and again.

Cue transition: sound of roaring wind, stock footage of palm trees bowing before the mighty surge, red letters: HURRICANE ALERT!!! The whole point seems to be to raise the average anxiety level to a fever pitch regardless of what the actual news is.

My friend William has an interesting theory about this -- one he honed to fine edge while sitting in a bar watching Shock&Awe (TM) rain down on Baghdad.

But, let's recap: 2005 was the most active hurricane season since people crawled out of caves and started carving weather records on stone blocks. Climatologists have already predicted a 2-decade cycle of increased hurricane activity. AND global warming of the oceanic temperatures MAY play a part in fueling tropical storms and hurricanes.

Maybe I'm a chump, but I've got a big stock of food, water, batteries and all that other stuff I posted about earlier. You probably should, too. Unless you live in Minnesota -- then you should buy a condo in Miami Beach so you can collect a hefty insurance payout sometime this hurricane season.

South Florida Hurricane Preparation

2006-06-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

The following is the recommended hurricane preparation kitaccording to the National Hurricane Center. I've added my own comments to the items that I found useful or useless.

The NHC's Hurricane Preparation Kit:

Water - at least 1 gallon daily per person for 3 to 7 days
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. But on day 1 -- that's a single day after Hurricane Wilma disrupted our utilities -- we saw people scooping water out of the swimming pool. Our Oakland Park condo overlooks the swimming pool so we had a great view from our balcony of the folks who'd gone unprepared. We also stock a one-liter bottle of plain bleach -- sodium hypochlorite -- in case we need to disinfect water from the lake.

Food - at least enough for 3 to 7 days— non-perishable packaged or canned
food / juices— foods for infants or the elderly— snack foods— non-electric can opener— cooking tools / fuel— paper plates / plastic utensils
We cracked open the fridge and started cooking up everything we could. I started a fire of deadfall branches on the balcony (thanks Kendra and Andre for the Hibachi!) and Mer started prepping dishes. I've rarely eaten as well as I did on Days 1 and 2 after the hurricane.

If you don't have a mechanical can opener, you'll be making friends with a pair of tin snips or -- worst case scenario -- a plain kitchen knife and a hammer.

Blankets / Pillows, etc.
Who doesn't have blankets and pillows? You'll need to take some with you if you need to evacuate, though -- shelters don't stock creature comforts. Or creatures, either, for that matter.

Clothing - seasonal / rain gear/ sturdy shoes
You don't really need this unless you plan on leaving your house. If you leave before the hurricane, you don't need it. If you leave once the hurricane's started, then you're in serious trouble and probably shouldn't spend a lot of time considering your footwear options.

First Aid Kit / Medicines / Prescription Drugs
Disinfectants for minor cuts and scratches. Any prescription drugs of the tranquilizer/painkiller variety highly recommended.

Special Items - for babies and the elderly
Is this a euphemism for "diapers"? Since when did "diapers" become a dirty word?

Toiletries / Hygiene items / Moisture wipes
Moisture wipes are a lifesaver when you can't shower. On about day 4, you get pretty rank. I wore the same pair of pants for five straight days and I started to smell like my Uncle Dale, who lives in the woods and only eats things he's killed himself.

Flashlight / Batteries
Yes -- also look into those eternal flashlights that you shake to charge up. They're supposed to last forever. Extra batteries are a very good idea so you can run your GameBoy/Ipod/radio/portable TV/electronic entertainment and feel soothed by its LED glow.

Radio - Battery operated and NOAA weather radio
Any radio will do. There's no reason to lay out major bucks on the crank-powered Grundig, unless you're still expecting the Russkies to nuke us.

Telephones - Fully charged cell phone with extra battery and a traditional (not cordless) telephone set
All the cell towers around us were levelled, so our phones were only handy to open up for a nice soothing light source. A traditional phone handset is super cheap (around $10 new) and EXTREMELY HANDY for when the phone lines come back up but electricity's still down. Get one.

Cash (with some small bills) and Credit Cards - Banks and ATMs may not be available for extended periods
Cash is absolutely vital. Gas stations aren't going to take your check or credit card -- not when there are 250 people in line behind you with fistsful of twenties. Get a couple hundred bucks if you can afford it -- $50 minimum. Enough to get out of town and to your nearest friend who lives outside of the affected area.

Keys
If you forget your keys, you're probably too dumb to be reading this, anyway.

Toys, Books and Games
Otherwise, you'll probably go crazy. I read Caleb Carr's Angel of Darkness and though I think his work is uniformly awful, this book was quite good. And it was long enough that it absorbed me for all the daylight hours of about 6 consecutive days.

Important documents - in a waterproof container or watertight resealable plastic bag— insurance, medical records, bank account numbers, Social Security card, etc.
Know where this bag is so you can grab it in case you have to run out the door.

Tools - keep a set with you during the storm
Among these tools, a firearm and ammunition would be a very, very good idea.

Vehicle fuel tanks filled
But if you run to the gas station after work on the day the impending hurricane is announced, you're in for a LONG wait. Try going around midnight that night, or even later, if you can. But get at least half a tank of gas in the car. Also, a 5-gallon gas can that you can fill and store is recommended. That way, if things go south and you need to bug out ASAP, you can just throw the gas can in the car along with your cash, documents, and "tools" and drive north until you see streetlights shining.

Pet care items— proper identification / immunization records / medications— ample supply of food and water— a carrier or cage— muzzle and leash
Remember that shelters will not accept animals! You have three choices: stick it out and keep Fluffy with you. Drop Fluffy off with a friend or take her with you when you bug out. Or, leave Fluffy to fend for herself when you run to the shelter. If you choose the latter, I hope Fluffy bites you.

First hurricane of the year!

2006-06-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

That's right, ladies and gentlemen -- hurricane Alberto is the 3rd earliest hurricane on record. He's slated to wipe Florida's armpit clean this week.

It turns out that my paranoid fantasies of hurricanes being fueled by rising ocean temperatures caused by global warming may be nothing more than a paranoid fantasy, thank God. Climatologists have predicted a hurricane cycle -- increased intensity for the next two decades or so. Global warming has nothing to do with this.

Global warming might have an impact on these hurricanes. But of course even if is no one except Al Gore wants to discuss it.

Alberto may be the beginning of another extremely interesting hurricane season -- and another body-blow to the slumping real estate market.

Biscayne Landing: a mixed use commercial/hotel/residential community... with a heart!

2006-04-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Many people familiar with the Interama area off 135th Street feared that, when Swerdlow Group and Boca Developers finally got permission to start cutting down trees, that it would be the end of the green space you see in this picture.

The proposed 193-acre development will be approximately where the big words are in this picture.

Now, this may seem sad to you if you like trees and stuff. But in this case it's okay. Because, instead of completely paving the entire 193 acres, the developers have decided to preserve part of it.

A fraction of the Biscayne Landing site consisted of wetlands nourished by Biscayne Bay. Instead of going to court with environmental groups who wish to preserve such things, the developers chose to preserve those wetlands, in the form of a park.

From the developers:

The Biscayne Landing environmental park will be created with an emphasis on helping it to retain its relatively pristine habitat.
It will feature nature hikes, jogging paths, information plaques that describe the resident wildlife and trees, benches, a canoe landing and a boat house. It will also have connecting trails...

Okay, now, it is cool that they decided to preserve a smidgen of the land they're going to build houses on. But how can they keep it a "relatively pristine habitat" if they add a boat house? Is it intended as a "pristine habitat" for kayaks? I've visited a few pristine environments in my life, and here's a hint: they didn't have benches, information plaques or canoe landings.

Popping the Housing Bubble

2006-04-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Jack Guynn added to the housing bubble debate with these comments.

"'There are some local markets, especially in coastal Florida, where I've heard stories for more than a year about behavior that's got to be characterized as nothing other than speculation,' Guynn said it response to questions after his speech." "'It makes me very uncomfortable. Some buyers, some builders, some lenders are going to get burned, could very likely get burned, in some of those local markets,' he said."

Emphasis added.

Remember that line from The Amityville Horror? Folks, it's time toget out.

The $45,000 Website

2006-04-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Back when I was working for a Miami marketing firm, I met the guy whose company designed the website forEverglades on the Bay, another faceless glass tower rising from downtown Miami -- only this one's different. It's green!

Go take a look at the website. I'll wait.

So the developer, CABI, paid 45 large for that website.

Go on, take another look. You know you want to.

It's a very basic rule in the pre construction real estate business to finish your website before you even think of starting on the building itself. But still, you've got to wonder -- if the website had any relationship at all to the site itself, why is the woman in the silver dress standing in the woods? She should have a flannel shirt and a hunting cap on! Come on, guys, this isn't Maine, this is downtown Miami!

But somehow the image of the sultry model dodging traffic while homeless people tried to pull quarters off her outfit just didn't seem appropriate for Everglades on the Bay... Too bad.

Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross

2006-02-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

I've read several installments of Charles Stross's novel Accelerando when they appeared in Asimov's (back before I let my subscription expire...) They were smart, they were funny, they were well-written -- which set them apart from 95% of Asimov's stories. One day at the bookstore I picked up both Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise because I remembered the author's name.

Here's what really charms about these books: the universe Stross creates is utterly believable, internally consistent and wildly interesting. The science is hard enough to be believable but with just enough techno-hacking to make it fun. There's a LOT going on. Remember the first time you picked up Startide Rising? Stross's universe is like that, minus of course the phantasmagoria of alien species.

Both books (but Iron Sunrise especially) are well-plotted and well-paced. Both engrossed me utterly. Both would make fabulous big-budget Hollywood films (I mean that as a compliment) because they're visual, contain a great balance of action and exploration and have larger-than-life characters.

I'm not going to go on and on about these books. Just this: they're great. If you like SF you should run, not walk, to the bookstore (but who does that anymore?) and buy them immediately.

Identity Theft by Robert J. Sawyer

2006-02-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

Read Identity Theft.

In a shameless bid for Hugo votes, Mr. Sawyer made his entire novella available for free online. On a slow Friday afternoon, with my boss out of the office, I found his blog and his story. "Ha," I thought to myself, always suspicious of authors who give their work away. "This'll be awful."

I've never been more wrong.

The good: Extremely well-plotted. The world Sawyer describes is small and closed, but internally consistent and utterly believable. The characters are believable if slightly stock. The twists of the plot kept me guessing, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is completely apt. Bravo on all points.

The bad (more about my tastes than the story): I'm so tired of the Raymond Chandler/Mickey Spillane retread -- seems like every issue of F&SF or Asimov's has at least, at least one wry, jaded and hard-boiled detective into whose office a beautiful woman swaggers. Enough already! Private detectives, yes, but maybe tweak the stereotype a little? How about a PI who's not a laconic alcoholic?

Definitely one of the better sci-fi stories I've read lately. It's far more ambitious than Czesko though not as "big" a story as Shambhala. Nicely executed, Mr. Sawyer!

Czesko by Ef Deal

2006-02-13T18:34:00.000-08:00

Another good story in this installment of F&SF. First, how can you not like a story written by someone named Ef Deal? Sounds like an elvish mafiosi to me... oddly appropriate considering.

The story's a 1st-person voice type of tale. The narrator speaks directly to the reader in a kind of boroughs street-speak that's familiar to anyone who read Motherless Brooklyn. The "so I said, so he said" came very close to annoying before the story got its hooks into me. The voice seems completely appropriate if a bit heavy-handed.

Here's the set-up: the narrator gets a call from her friend Czesko, who's in a bar. Czesko wants to be baptized, but he can't leave the bar. I don't want to say much more than that, and risk defusing the story's brilliance. I think Flannery O'Connor would be proud of the baptism scene to which we're finally treated.

No spoilers -- but the twist at the end is what really makes this story brilliant and makes it memorable. I think this one story's worth the measly cover price of the magazine. Ef, wherever you are, two thumbs up!

Interesting side note: Ef is a fellow Slush God survivor whose story was rescued from the Great Compost Heap by none other than John Joseph Adams. Good work, John!

Shambhala by Alex Irvine (short story)

2006-02-10T05:09:00.000-08:00

From the March 2006 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction

This story has a lot of great things going on in it. First, and most importantly, it does what I think all good sci-fi stories do: it provides a snapshot of an entire world -- in this case, a world about 25 years in the future. Irvine hints at ecological devastation, brushfire wars, and killer flu viruses, but all this takes up less than half a page of the story. Nonetheless, the reader is left with an image of this particular future, painted in broad brushstrokes like Japanese calligraphy.

At one point in the story, POV switches to two stoned soldiers watching an oil well burn and discussing whether it looks better in IR or UV wavelengths. Not only does this little scene amuse, it offers a synecdoche for the rest of the world. It's easy (at least for mildly cynical me) to imagine the last of the world's fossil fuels as streaming black columns of smoke while drug-addled soldiers, laden with tens of thousands of dollars in high-tech gear, look on and, "Like, woah."

Second, Shambhala is a story about a technological problem. Many, many people have chosen to leave the crumbling Earth behind and take the "Virt Squirt" and live in a virtual network called Shambhala. What happens when the network infrastructure starts to collapse? That problem is the engine that drives the story forward to its ultimate, and may I say perfectly apt, ending. Technology is used to help solve the problems created by technology.

Third, (perhaps should be a part of point 1?) Shambhala is atmospheric. Even in the boardroom meeting, perhaps one of the least atmospheric of all possible human gatherings, Irvine nails both the mood and even the speech of the pudgy-handed corporate drones (though it's mostly delivered in summary -- and really, shouldn't all board meetings be so rendered?). Finance offers to solve the problem by "pulling the plug" on the virtual reality, if they determine it will be cheaper to settle with the families of those who live on in the Virt. Chilling to imagine these conversations happening in real life, every day, isn't it? Perfectly capturing both the soullessness and ineptitude of corporate decision-making.

Great lines: "Hope you have a budget line for therapy expenses." And, the classic (paraphrasing here), "An idea so dumb only a VP of marketing could have come up with it."

An absolutely perfect little gem of a story, and well worth the cover price of $3.99 US for the entire issue. My hat's off to Alex Irvine.

Jacob Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm, said:

2006-01-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

"The Lord made small things as well as big ones, and everything man looks at closely is full of wonder."

I ardently believe the second clause in this sentence.

Philip Pullman on story in fiction

2006-01-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

When his book The Golden Compass won the 1995 Carnegie Medal (awarded by librarians to the best children's book), he gave a speech wherein he stated:

"There are some themes, some subjects too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a chidren's book. ... In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness... The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do."

- as quoted by Laura Miller, The New Yorker, Dec. 26 2005 & Jan. 2 2006 double-issue

If you haven't read his The Golden Compass, you should. It's an incredible journey -- fantasy and science fused together into a true adventure. The books are allegedly for children but Pullman is one of the few children's authors who have as many adults as children reading their books.

Aristotlean basics of plot

2005-10-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

We'll discuss this tonight in class. But here are links to relevant information about Aristotle and his theory of drama and tragedy:

Recognition and reversal

Outline of all the Poetics

10/13: The class about character

2005-10-12T20:24:00.000-07:00

Character is the first element in our equation that equals a story. So what is a character?

A character is a fictional representation of a person.

How is a character different from a real person?

People are infinitely complex. As we all know, each individual carries around inside of themselves a unique version of the most complex structure in the universe -- the human brain. Each person has a unique history, unique perspective, associations, etc. It's simply impossible to do justice to the complexities of a real person in print.

A character is like a sketch of a person -- a line drawing, with shadows and contrast, realistic but not real. A character is a semblance of a real person, but without all the incredible complexity that every real person has.

A lot of beginning writers make the mistake of starting a story without knowing a sufficient amount about the main character. This can lead to misdirection, confusion and writer's block down the road. More about this in class.

A lot of beginning writers make the mistake of creating a character that's too similar to themselves. These semiautobiographical characters almost always make for bad fiction. Why? Because most writer-types are quiet, nonconfrontational observers who are acted upon by the world and tend to wax poetic about it. For some reason, creating autobiographical characters nearly always paralyzes the narrative and turns a story into an exercise in navel-gazing.

Fortunately, the opposite is true -- the more unlike the author the character is, the more active the character tends to be. Remember this when inventing your main character.

What's the difference between flat and round characters?

Flat characters are one-dimensional. Flat characters see the world in a limited way. Take for example the character of a notorious miser, Ebenezer Gluck. Ebenezer goes outside in the morning and sees a clear sky, a delightful sunrise, a cool comfortable temperature -- what does he think? Not What a beautiful day! but I can turn off the lights and open the windows -- it's finally cool enough to leave the air conditioner off all day.

Flat characters are incapable of change. Their one-dimensionality precludes them from being able to learn and change. Therefore, flat characters make bad protagonists/main characters.

Flat characters are frequently used in comedy, or for comic effects. But they're important in all fiction.

Round characters are more complex. They are capable of seeing the world in more than a single way, are capable of learning and therefore are capable of change.

Because of this complexity, round characters must be more deeply imagined and researched and documented than a flat character. Round characters have biographies, likes and dislikes, life stories. Flat characters may be not much more than a name.

Making a character round instead of flat automatically tells the reader that she is more important than any number of flat characters.

How much do I need to know about my main character?

A lot. The more you know, the better. At the minimum, you'll need to complete a character biography for each round character in your story/novel. Not all of this info will make it into your story (indeed, maybe none of it will), but it's equally important.

The information that you know about your character but don't include is like the chips of marble that are knocked away, leaving a statue behind. Even though those bits of marble are gone, their "ghost" lingers and gives shape to what's left.

What's a character biography?

Nothing more than a list of facts about your character. Examples will be distributed in class. You can make up your own character biography format or copy the example I give you.

How do I go about making up a character?

This can be as easy or as hard as you make it.

If you're starting from scratch, making up a character and letting that character lead you into a story, then you can pluck your facts out of thin air. I stole a trick from novelist John Dufresne -- he takes phone books from hotels he stays in. That way, when he needs a name, he just pulls down a phone book and pages through until he finds one that he likes.

Every time you ask yourself a question, "What kind of ethnic food is Jarred's favorite?" your first instinct will be to answer the question as yourself, the author: "Cuban." If you pause for a moment, and separate yourself from the character, you can give a different and more interesting answer, and start to create a new, more interesting character: "Navajo. He developed a taste for Navajo cuisine during the two years he worked in the oil fields out west."

If, on the other hand, you have a plot in mind and you're looking to create a character who fits the plot, you should first determine what kind of person fits the restrictions of the plot. We'll discuss this more in class.

What makes a good, memorable, interesting character?

A combination of factors. Memorable characters are frequently larger than life, dramatic, showy -- think of James Bond. They're often quirky. They're frequently obsessed with something (there's a lot of energy in obsession... it's interesting).

Active characters, characters who do things, are interesting. Readers are far more entertained by people doing things than by people thinking about things.

Outrageous characters are interesting. So are funny characters.

Think about characters you remember from books and movies. What makes them so memorable? Make a list.

Reply to this post with questions or for clarification.

Good books mentioned in class

2005-10-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

Someone asked if I'd post the titles of the books I mentioned in class. So here you go.

Good books ("literary" fiction that's both well-plotted and intriguing):

Possession, by A.S. Byatt
Wonderboys, by Michael Chabon
Straight Man, by Richard Russo
Confederacy of Dunces, by J.K. Toole
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susannah Clarke

Bad books (popular fiction that lives down to its negative reputation):
The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown
Shogun, by James Clavell

Please feel free to add your picks to this list.

About Me

2005-07-26T18:43:00.000-07:00

All about me.