enigma_prime

It's the start of a new decade. I've just finished the fourth major draft of Imbolc Night at the Fishpunk Ball, and I've been taking advantage of my time in England to catch up on all the kinds of cider I can't get in the U.S.A. I've also been ripping DVDs to an external hard drive so I can take them with me (one of those rare cases where I really am just making personal copies of things I legally own), which is why my desk is surrounded with towers of cases.

I like schedules and schemes, I tend to be more productive with my hobbies when I can reduce them to quotas. (Writing excepted, trying to tabulate word count never seems to work.) As such, in the past few years I've made Resolutions to do various things, and I've even posted some of them. Not last year's though, which is a pity, as I can't remember what I resolved to do last year.

Nevertheless. With a new year, and a new decade at that, I have been considering for the past few weeks a few not-so-grandiose schemes for the coming year. Here, then, are the resolutions, as part of a grand self-betterment project labelled an Undertaking:

1) Read the Bible cover to cover. Yes, I declared I was starting this 1 1/2 years ago, but I got as far as the end of Genesis before getting heartily sick of the Bible I was using, and deciding that I'd start it up again as soon as I could find a King James Bible. Since then I've checked in every second-hand bookstore, and nothing. (And I thought the USA was stereotypically uber-Christian.) I've therefore borrowed my father's copy (atheists can be surprisingly well stocked with religious texts), and I'll be reading an annotated NIV for interpretation.

2) Be more aware of current events. For this, I'll be getting subscriptions to The Week and The Economist. A weekly meta-newspaper and a weekly analysis of current events - that should do nicely, so long as I make time to read them. (After which I might be better informed to answer the question 'how much current events do you have to know, as your duty as a citizen, and how much news is cyclic that I can safely dismiss'.)

3) Read/watch every Shakespeare play. I'm not certain if I can do this, but it'd be great to have done it. Plus I have my sister's BBC Shakespeare set to borrow from. (Currently copying The Taming of the Shrew starring John Cleese - that should be interesting.)

4) A few other things. After all, does anybody really want to hear me bleating that this year I'll finally have some good enough stories I can submit to publishers? Nah. So that's all, tally ho, have a good decade, and make sure you smash that glass ceiling of the cosmos on your ascent to (in)famy.

I first encountered Max Brand in a best Western anthology. This was 'Wine of the Desert', an absolutely superb story about thirst that definitely appears in the top 1% of stories I've read these past few years. He's since then appeared in many best Western anthologies, a different story each time, and a pulp story called 'The Ghost' which I rated highly but can't recall a single detail about.

Tangent: when I think of insanely prolific authors, it's hard to imagine someone more so than Isaac Asimov. I mean, he wrote a book titled '500' because it was his 500th book he'd published. Now, although some of this tally includes weighty textbooks, others include anthologies that he's edited, merely providing the introductions to each piece. (Being Asimov, these intros are excellent, and sometimes more entertaining than the stories themselves. It's said that Asimov gives a more honest autobiography in his intros to the stories in Before the Golden Age than he does in any of his actual autobiographies.)

Frederick Faust (who used the pen-name Max Brand, among many others), as far as I am aware, neither edited anthologies nor really branched into non-fiction. He just wrote a ton of fiction, and when the film Talkies turned up, he moved to Hollywood and was one of the highest paid scriptwriters of the era.

I'm unfortunately short on time, but Wikipedia lists him as serving in WW2 as a front-line correspondent, and was mortally wounded by shrapnel in Italy in 1944. President Roosevelt commended him for bravery - my hurried search does not clarify if there was a specific deed attached. Not that one would have been needed. In his fifties, he could easily have avoided an overseas placement.

Previous years:
2009 - Bret Christman (Golden Age comics artist, co-creator of the original Sandman and genuine aerial ace; killed in Burma in 1942)
2008 - WIlliam Hope Hodgson (influential cosmic horror author, still popular today; killed in Ypres in 1918)


We stand on the shoulders of both giants and ordinary people, a perfect tessellation of humanity. We must remember that, and look down every so often.

I'm typing with a cocktail in hand again, although at least I have more of a reason this time. Six months ago one of my housemates left to do a temporary research placement on a military base in Hawaii. (Not exactly a hardship, although he says the cost of living's astronomically high.) He left behind a decent amount of food and drink in the fridge, and said we were welcome to whatever we liked. This included a mostly full 1 1/2 liter bottle of gin, and decent gin at that. He's coming back in a few days. Danni and I have been valiantly trying to finish the bottle off before he returns. (This may also explain why the fridge has been armed with ginger ale, limes and tonic water.)

Never mind. As it happens, I have an excuse for celebrating. Thirty-two months ago I started a project, the Millennial Keystone, to read a thousand short stories. This was partly to read certain anthologies that had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, but mainly to better understand the short story medium; what I learned from those thousand short stories was supposed to be the keystone on which I could write better fiction.

I reached my thousand in just over six months and kept on going. I didn't feel I'd learned all that much, and I was half-way through a lot of anthologies I wanted to finish. Besides, it turns out my character type likes these sorts of quotas. Each short story gives me not just the pleasure in reading it, but also the knowledge that it's one more towards my quota for the day. There's a Simpsons episode where, to make a boring chore interesting, Principal Skinner suggests, "See how many you can do in an hour; then try to break that record." While I don't quite measure short story intake by the hour, the graph I keep of my month-by-month totals keeps driving me to beat last month's stats.

Tonight I hit my five thousandth short story. The project's still just as enjoyable as ever. In fact, I'll probably make it to ten thousand at some point. (After all, adding up all the anthologies I own, I have another two thousand short stories waiting on my shelves in Philly alone.) I probably won't do it as fast, though, as I want to increase my novel reading (although that has its own spreadsheet and quota, where I regularly knock off 75 pages each day). I also want to increase the time I allow for writing - after all, that was the original point of the whole project - but as writing can't be condensed into quotas nearly as easily (despite trying several times), it keeps getting inched off my schedule.

This project has inevitably changed me in other ways. After all, reading this amount takes time, and that means sacrificing other things on my schedule. I watch a lot fewer television shows nowadays, and almost no films; in fact it disturbed me a few days ago when I realized I've probably seen less than five films this summer.

This is especially strange if you remember the project before the Millennial Keystone was to watch the equivalent of a film a night (which I kept up for ten weeks). That too was designed to give me a veneer of expertise in SF and horror films, and every so often I still appreciate the benefits of those studies. But at some point in the past few years I realized I couldn't be sufficiently knowledgeable with all media; I had to choose a specialization.

So here I am, post-choice. I'm friends with plenty of people over twice my age who made the same choice at similar times in their lives. They've got such a lead on me, they're so stuffed with cool stories of every genre, it drives me even further to strive to catch up. I know I won't. But by the time I reach their ages, I intend to be at their level.

Actually, if possible I want to be beyond. I can be quite competitive that way. And even if I fail, I'll still know one hell of a lot of good stories. Here's to the next five thousand.

I feel like one of those people who turn up to placard-wielding demonstrations, wielding a placard saying "I have no opinion one way or the other" or "Down with this sort of thing (whatever it is)".  Life is continuing the same as before, it's just a bit more busy nowadays. Even the new stuff has now been relocated to a more neatly defined part of my weekly timetable.

Work continues. We're into the second busy season of the year, scrambling to finish all of the extended tax returns (many of them extended because they are so absurdly byzantine), so I won't be at a loss for odd jobs for the next month. Outside of that, Tuesday evenings remain my writing group, Wednesday evenings are now taken up with business venture meetings that I probably shouldn't discuss on the internet, and Thursday evenings I'll be resuming my actually-paying-for-it writing course, because I still have a lot to learn about critiquing pieces.

Those are the weekly regulars, and it's outside of them that the fun and occasionally helter-skelter stuff goes on. Take next weekend: Friday evening, thanks to a scheduling error, has Philly hosting two author lectures simultaneously, David Gerrold and L.A. Banks. (I'll be going to Gerrold's; not because he's the person who wrote 'The Trouble with Tribbles' episode, but because he wrote 'The Man Who Folded Himself'. And because certain embarrassing juvenalia of his will be apparently be dredged up in the course of the evening.) Saturday afternoon is William Gibson giving a lecture, which should be totemically potent if nothing else, and Sunday is when my four-hour book discussion meets. (Not only that, but I think I've conned a couple of new people to join the discussion!)

Mind you, October as a whole looks like it's going to be pretty hectic. I'm going to two conventions (D.C.'s Capclave, a heavily literary convention, and NY Comic-Con), and W00tstock, an ill-defined geek event which nevertheless promises to be entertainingly crazy. And research for the upcoming NaNo, of course; when my family came over to visit a few weeks ago they brought me some recreational mathematics books for idea fodder. I'm not sure if I can work in Pierpinski's carpet or the Banach-Tarski paradox, but both of them are certainly fun concepts. ("Dismantle a ball into a finite number of pieces, then you can reassemble the pieces to form two perfect copies of the ball." Yes, I want to understand the math behind that too.)

I still intend to move back to England eventually. But I want to do as much as possible first.

A couple of days ago I joked about the phrase 'painting the town red', and we came up with matching colors to pigment anything from a hamlet to a continent. The Earth itself? Turquoise. That'll look lovely from space.

As I'm meant to be doing real writing right now (a rewrite of the first chapter, just with a volcano erupting in the background - trust me, it makes more sense than that), here are a few novels I've read recently.

Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser

This series is always fun. It's an adventure series, sometimes verging on pulp, with dozens of pages of historical footnotes afterward giving you the satisfaction that you're learning stuff at the same time. This one is particularly good for the historical  angle, given that the Taiping Rebellion aspect of the Opium Wars isn't all that well known in the West. This book left me with a strong desire to learn more.

I volunteered this for my book group, so this is a re-read. On actual analysis, the plot's fun but nothing too deep, and some of the readers had a problem with the main character being so unheroic and cowardly. (Blackadder takes a healthy number of traits from Flashman. Ciaphas Cain is essentialy Flashman in 40k.) The historical aspects are definitely the strongest part, with the discussion on the sundering of the Summer Palace being absolutely electrifying - one of the most memorable things I read last year. That chapter alone is well worth the book itself.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Well, I've memorized large chunks of the musical, so I had to eventually read the source material. The two are very similar - the musical is a shortened version of the novel with almost no changes at all (other than streamlining and excising). I doubt this is overfamiliarity talking, but the musical presents a distillation of the novel, purifying the essential themes and character stuff into catchy and beautiful songs. If you want the story, go for the musical. That said, there's a lot of good things about the novel.

The writing style is slow but often moving. For strange reasons I read this in a mixture of two translations, and I'd say Victor Hugo's writing style is practically translator-proof - the really good lines are too basic to screw up. And there are a lot of these, especially in the paragraphs introducing new characters - probably my favorite aspect of the novel is these character designs. On the other hand, it's 1200 pages long and the author struggles to fill it. I know it was a style of the time to include large chunks of non-fiction into novels, but when he digresses into fifty pages detailing the battle of Waterloo, that serves no purpose other than to set up a one-page scene with a character's grandfather, it really drags. This book is therefore something you'd be safe reading an abridged copy.

You might also feel like skipping over Marius and Cosette's "I wuv her" scenes. Feel free - these are probably the weakest two characters to modern eyes, with Cosette coming across as a gormless ninny and Marius as an indecisive dick.

Changes: Book 12 of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

My reward after Les Miserables. This series, despite its turn towards darker and edger, is even more lighthearted fun, with a nicely snarky wizard protagonist and ever-absurdly epic stakes. (Books 1-2 threatened a city. Books 3 onwards have all threatened the entire world in increasingly apocalyptic ways.) I've been a bit disappointed with the past couple of books; although they'd had their moments, they felt a bit formulaic compared to the rest.

The title sums this book up perfectly. By the end of it, a lot of elements of the status quo have gone or changed. Now, knocking down bits of the status quo is a reasonably cheap way of affecting the reader, and a couple of bits jar as gratuitous for the sake of changing things. But the majority works - it genuinely feels like the stakes are higher than ever, and the last eighty pages are a sumptuous orgy of destruction that never loses sight of the main character. For me, this has given the series a shot in the arm - I'm eagerly awaiting the next volume.

I'm currently working on the second draft of Menace of the Quicklime Killer, and I've been looking closely at how authors introduce their cities. Some of them, where they give a distinctive flavor to the world by the end of the first paragraph, are envy-inducing. For instance, earlier today I re-read Viriconium Knights by M. John Harrison, which starts as follows:

"The aristocratic thugs of the High City whistle as they go about their factional games among the derelict observatories and abandoned fortifications at Lowth. Distant or close at hand, these exchanges - short commanding blasts and protracted responses which often end on what you might imagine is an interrogative note - form the basis of a complex language, to the echo of which you wake suddenly in the leaden hour before dawn. Go to the window: the street is empty. You may hear running footsteps, or a sigh.  In a minute or two the whistles have moved away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. Next day some minor prince is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut, and all you are left with is the impression of secret wars, lethal patience, an intelligent manoeuvring in the dark."

In that one paragraph I not only have a detailed sense of what it would be like to walk down those streets, I'm left wanting to know so much more about the city.

[later] As I was extremely impressed when I read the first few Viriconium stories at the end of 2007, I skimmed through my LJ posts and came across this gem. I've no idea what I was thinking at the time.

...I did calculate that you could physically complete a NaNo in two days. All you need is the mother of all fever dreams. A plan forms, involving a non-stop diet of Aleister Crowley, Charles Fort, Carl Jung, alchemy and esoteric mathematics during the month of October. Of course this would probably leave me in no state to attend a job or anything reasonably coherent, and the resulting manuscript would probably be unreadable... but hey, it worked for Hunter S Thompson.

"Cacoethes scribendi": The insatiable urge to write.

As they say, the past is another country. In my case it's one I frequently find I haven't been to. And although I shamefully haven't yet read anything of Crowley, Fort or Jung (although for unrelated purposes I've been recently tempted to get hold of Fort), my methodology of binge-research beforehand is exactly what I use nowadays. I've already requested my family bring me my copies of amusing and esoteric maths in preparation for this year's NaNo...

I tried this 'who do you write like' website and it tells me James Joyce. Now, is this 'evidence that normal people's lives really are dull' Dubliners Joyce or 'my target audience is a dozen literary critics' Finnegan's Wake Joyce?

Besides, my writing group commented that my style for the piece is more like a lesser M. John Harrison: individual sentences might be pretty, but after a couple of paragraphs you've no idea what's been going on.

EDIT: Hmm. Out of the five most recent pieces I've written, I've been likened Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King and Dan Brown (twice). Granted, some of those were composed in different styles, but I think this says more about the program than it does about me.

So here's what happened yesterday.

06:20 - Wake up. As I came back from a convention committee meeting late last night, and I haven't had much sleep this past week, this was accompanied by swearing at the alarm clock.

07:00 - I find out the maintenance crew for our rented apartment have downgraded from 'thoroughly incompetent' to 'actively doing what we told them not to'.

07:05 - Now I probably like ginger a bit more than the next guy, but what sadist decided to put it in a breakfast cereal? More to the point, why did I buy it? Other than insatiable curiosity, of course.

07:40 - Leave house. 11 blocks to subway, half hour of reading on the train, ten minute walk; the usual commute to the office.

09:10 - Check email. Discover that film screening tomorrow isn't near a major transportation line. After google maps recommends I take a four hour journey to get there, discover a bus that goes directly there in one hour.

09:40 - Discover film screening is potluck. Email my mother (because to let my dial internationally on my cellphone would require me to give my passport info to the phone company, for some strange reason) for tabouli recipe. I could have searched for a recipe, but I contracted a virus on my work computer last week and I suspect it was from too much wandering around looking for recipes. (On the other hand, the vindaloo was excellent.)

09:00-12:30 - Work. Quite a good day, played around with a client's bank statements, figuring out which expenses could be deductible.

12:30 - Lunch! Devour couscous served with a stew I found in the freezer. Not sure when I made it, but it was tasty. Spend lunch break editing Abby's new chapter of her novel. Adobe Acrobat is great for editing - those text boxes mean I can ramble on, adding jokes and snark, as much as I like.

13:00 - Success! My mother sends me recipe, albeit one without quantities. Make some guesses and prepare a shopping list.

13:00-16:00 - Work, much the same as before. Busy, though; it feels like I've achieved more today than I have in the past week (which isn't quite true, but is possibly closer than you might think).

16:00 - There's only one person left in the office, and I need to get to Reading market before it closes. Leave early. (That's the nice thing about a job where pay is determined by billable hours, though only if you can get the hours in. One of my cousins routinely works until 19:00 on Fridays to catch up on those hours.)

16:20 - Catch train. Attempt to edit manuscript of a friend who's never written any fiction before. It's difficult to figure out where to start.

17:00 - After the usual train delays, arrive at market. Second-cheapest place in the city to get fresh fruit and veg, and with a dozen meat and fish counters to choose from options aren't limited. Pick up ingredients and a block of scrapple (kind of like if sausage meat was served in brick form, and for breakfast you slice off a square. But more flavored than typical sausagemeat.) Walk 17ish blocks back.

18:00 - Make the tabouli. Doesn't go all that badly, actually, although I've never needed to deseed tomatoes and cucumbers before. (Note for next time - skin the cucumber.) Stick in fridge. 

20:00 - Notice the time. Hot-foot it 19 blocks to the Philly SF meeting (PSFS). Although the author lecture doesn't start until 21:00, the committee meeting started at 20:00, and I feel it somewhat my duty to attend those.

21:00 - Wait for guest to appear. In the meantime, the second-hand book dealer succeeds in selling my a writing guide by John Gardner, another excellent book of essays by de Camp, and a gay and lesbian SF anthology. (I recognize one of the stories in the last one, and didn't remember any gay or lesbian themes being in it. Aside from the author being gay, I don't see why this story appears in here. May use it as an excuse to re-read the thing - it did win a Hugo Award, after all.)

One of my friends at PSFS read the story submission pile at a major SF magazine for 17 years, reading 30-40 stories a day. After having read and critiqued almost a dozen manuscripts this past week, I ask her how she ever managed to survive.

21:15 - Right, so this month's author is in fact an artist, and she's brought along a slide-show to accompany her speech. First of all the committee didn't bring the right projector. Then they find that, because the MacBook doesn't have a VGA port, they can't use the projector. As I am the youngest and most sprightly attendee, I am recruited to run off to Radio Shack to see if I can pick up a proper cable. Run around several blocks - not sure quite where I went, and I backtracked a number of times to look for a number that isn't there. You see, Radio Shack is building 0212, but on that road the building numberings jump fromm 0100 to 0300...

21:40 - When I return, I suggest that because I live only 19 blocks away, I could go home and fetch my laptop and cable. Someone offers to drive me, breaking as many speed limits as he can in the process.

21:55 - Return to PSFS meeting, laptop in hand. (As it's only on standby, I'm really hoping I didn't leave anything suggestive or illegal on the desktop.) Turn it on, plug all the bits in and...

22:00 - I can't play the guest's picture files. It turns out they're in some sort of Photoshop format, and only a handful of programs can play them. None of which I have. Mess around trying to make my existing programs work, then finally download a Photoshop reader by the deceptively suggestive name of 'GIMP'. I'm very glad there's an unsecured network nearly that I can leach from, and I hope whoever runs this doesn't look at their download log and find 'GIMP'.

22:25 - Success! The first image appears on screen! I become a very crude projectionist, loading each panel and dragging it to the projector via an extended desktop screen (the thing I've been playing around with for the past few weeks - if you only have a hammer...). For terms of reference, on most nights by this point the author's presentation would have been almost over, and people would be preparing to decamp to the diner for late-night snacks and milkshakes.

23:00 - Presentation comes to an abrupt end, not long before security kick us out. I get a chance to speak to some of the people going to the film screening tomorrow, and between us we figure out how they can give me a lift there and back. (Which, as it means not needing to rely on after-midnight buses in the middle of nowhere, is entirely welcome.) As I'm now laden with a laptop, someone drives me back to my house, an excellent offer only slightly hampered when the driver discovered half-way there he'd left his hat in the meeting room, and had to return to get it.

00:30 (no, I don't quite know where the time went either) - Get back to my place. Sleep. Savor the thought that tomorrow, with its all-day film screening, might be a restful day for once...

This'll be quick. I need to write a second draft of my short story "Faces of Death (2010)" for critiquing submission tomorrow. I have also just used a discarded monitor to give my computer dual-wielding screens, and I really want to experiment with whether this will help my multitasking in any way. So here's the prompt; an account of things going on in my life will hopefully turn up eventually.

Alternatively, try out this short story I found today: Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt. It starts off with a guy wandering into a video rental place and finding the director's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons (with Orson Welles' commentary track) and the Harlan Ellison scripted I, Robot. Definitely falls into the category of 'I wish this was real'. Plus it won a Hugo Award.

Prompt: "I hit the snooze on my alarm and slept for six hours before getting up."
Alternate prompt: "Spare time"

I hit the snooze on my alarm and slept for six hours before getting up. Once I was up I started swearing - it meant I might have to use up some of the spare time I'd been saving for a special occasion.

After I'd had a jolt of coffee I went to the coat stand and felt inside my jacket pockets. The nugget of time I'd managed to smuggle out was there, but it was small - barely more than half an hour. Still, it was better than nothing.

I rummaged around the clothes on my floor until I found which one held my wallet, and pulled out yesterday's payslip, good for eight hours. I really didn't want to spend this now - the Factory of Tempered Merit only paid me in time, and I desperately needed every minute of time they gave me so I could keep up with my other job, a material one that actually paid me in money. I guess it was going to be dried noodles again tonight.

Kipple. I can't seem to stop generating kipple. I've only lived here for a year and a half and I still have sufficient piles of miscellaneous papers that I can't find the prompt I was going to use tonight. No matter, here's one I came across while I was rooting through the papers.


Prompt: There have been six Titanic movies (I have a feeling "My Heart Will Go On" was playing in the coffee shop at the time)


"Six Titanic movies, and no polar bears!" Dane said as he opened his car door; it was his turn for the carpool.

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "There weren't any polar bears on the Titanic."

He turned to look at me. He knows I hate it when he does that, as his driving's not all that good to start with. "Of course not, don't be stupid."

"What do you mean then?"

"They should do a more faithful adaptation some time. Have the ship's captain wrestle with a polar bear on the iceberg, that sort of thing."

My collection of useless trivia sometimes comes in handy, and it did so now. "Wait, that's from the book Titan, the one published before the accident. You're confusing real life with fiction again."

"I prefer it this way," he said. "Besides, I'd pay good money to watch Leonardo di Caprio get eaten by a polar bear."