Goodbye Puppy

A bit of bad news to report. Nikolai, our beagle, died tonight. He's been having some serious pain in his back left leg for several weeks now. We've been increasing the dosage of pain meds over the past week or two, but it just hasn't had any effect. It turns out he had bone cancer, which according to the doctor is one of the excruciatingly painful forms of cancer for dogs. Tonight he couldn't stand up, couldn't lay down, couldn't poop -- he was just in agony. We took him to a veterinary emergency room about 11:30 tonight and the doctors said there just wasn't anything more they could do for him -- he was already on the maximum dose and it wasn't having any effect at all. They brought him back to me, and he didn't even wag his tail or lift his head up to see me because he was hurting so bad, so I knew it was time. He died at 12:45 AM. I held him and told him everyone loved him right up until the end.

He was 14, so he had a good long run with us. He's been with us a long time, a lot longer than anyone thought he would (especially since he was a purebred, which don't live as long -- he was also the runt of the litter). He was a very good boy, the world's smartest beagle. We're going to tell the girls in the morning and will call my son tomorrow afternoon.

Sigh.

The End (again)

Yesterday I finished the second draft of my novel -- much rejoicing! This is the first version to be a functionally complete story, the first that can actually be read. It has the new 1945 storyline intertwined with the main storyline, with both arcs reaching climax at the same point. I was able to draw parallels throughout the book between the two arcs, and as a result, I think the book is much deeper and richer than it would be otherwise.

What I don't know at this point is whether the writing is any good!

Now, normally, I know when I've been writing well. I can re-read a turn of phrase and say to myself, "Damn, that's pretty good!" But with this latest revision, I'm way too close to it to even know. I was focused on getting the plot written and the characters illustrated through the text. As a result, while the book is probably okay, it's almost certainly not at the "breakout level" of fiction that it must be before it can go out. Sending out a publishable, but not breakout book can kill your career. If you don't get the sell-through on this first book, you probably will not sell a second one. "Good enough" is actually worse than not publishing at all!

So, even if the book reads fairly well now (and I have no idea if it does), it's nowhere near done. On the plus side, I now have a complete manuscript that I can start applying Maass' Breakout Novel Workbook exercises to -- which long-time readers of this blog may recall is what convinced me to start writing a novel in the first place! At any rate, I loaded the draft onto my wife's Sony Reader so that she can be the first reader. I also printed out a paperback-sized version and used the "perfect binding" techniques I saw on the web to make a print version of the book. It's pretty neat to see it actually looking like a novel! I gave this to a very good friend of ours, though I'm not sure this particular genre will be her cup of tea. I'll be very curious to see what they think.

So now I'm going to have to get some distance from the book so I can see where I need to go from here. I'm going to start brainstorming the plot for the next one, then in a month or two I'll come back to the current story. I may play around with some of Don Maass' exercises as well -- that should help both this book and the next one.

Good progress!

Status Report

I noticed that a few people actually check this blog periodically, so maybe there's a passing interest out there in what I'm doing. Just an update, then: I am working on the second revision of the book now. I've finished Act II and am starting the last Act today. A few days after I finished the first draft, we went to Payson to spend the weekend with my wife's mother at their cabin. I was sitting down for breakfast, and my wife noticed I had an odd look on my face.

"Thinking about your book?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"Got a new idea for it?"

"Yeah."

"Is it going to be a lot of work?"

"Yeah."

And sure enough, it is. But I can already see the end result is worth it. Basically I've added in a second storyline set in 1945 around the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II. It's told from the point of view of the protagonist's wife, Elisia, whose funeral in 2007 starts off the main storyline. The result is that we not only get to know Elisia, we also get to learn about Farmer (the protagonist) from her point of view. I'm drawing strong parallels between the storylines. In fact, the answer to the mystery of the main plotline will actually have its roots in the 1945 plotline. Both plotlines will climax at the same point, even though they take place 62 years apart -- the solution echoes across the two time periods. Pretty neat, assuming I'm pulling it off correctly. So far, so good, though.

Obviously that means I have to write the second storyline, so I'm doing that as part of the revision process. All of the continuity problems mentioned in my previous post have been resolved as well, so that's a relief. I'm really enjoying writing about Elisia and letting the reader get to know her directly rather than just through Farmer's memories of her.

In other news, I've been in contact with an agent from Donald Maass' agency, which is hands-down my first choice for representation. He critiqued my query letter for me and gave me a few suggestions. He said the final version was "first-rate" and definitely ready to go. One of his notes after the plot hook paragraph was "Wow! I want to read this one!", so that is certainly encouraging. He also encouraged me to query him "for real" when the book is ready. I expect that will be a couple of months, though, in which time he may have completely forgotten who I am. Ah well. I had planned to have this next draft ready for initial critique by the end of the week, but both kids are violently ill right now, so I'm not going to make that goal (and the semester starts next week). Hopefully I'll only be a week or so late, though. We'll see.

I'm really stoked about the agent's response, though. Landing any agent at Don Maass would simply be the best possible thing that could happen to me professionally, but I like Stephen personall,y as well. I feel like we could work together very easily. And as long-time readers of this blog know, Don Maass' philosophy towards writing almost exactly matches my own in any event.

I'll post more when this draft is in a form that I might actually show to someone...

The End

I just wanted to share that tonight I reached those two magical words, "The End", in my modern fantasy novel, The Farmer Takes a Life. My goal was to reach 80,000 words during the month (I actually started on 16 May); the final total came in at 81,696 words, or about 460 manuscript pages. It took me 28 days to get the first draft done.

I still need to fix one major plot hole. I decided that for best dramatic effect, I needed to move a scene from the beginning of Act II to the end of Act II. Unfortunately, an item which appears for the first time in and is critical for the moved scene also needs to appear in the (now) earlier scene. I'm not sure how I'm going to fix that, but I made the decision not to slow down writing the first draft to figure it out. I think it was probably the right choice.

I also think I will expand a couple of chapters that focus on the protagonist's friends when they are separated -- they could use the character development. As long as I keep it under 100,000 words total, I should be okay. The story is good, but the writing is, as I believe Nora Roberts put it, words vomited onto the page. That will get fixed in the months to come. I'll be using WriteWay (http://www.writewaypro.com/) for the revision process -- great for moving scenes around and organizing research.

Some statistics and advice for those who might be interested:

• I usually wrote between 3000 and 4000 words (15 to 20 pages) a day.
• I wrote every day, including weekends, except for taking my birthday (the 30th) off, and the two days I had a 102 fever from food poisoning (and I managed to write 1200 words each day even then).
• I usually spent between 3 and 4 hours to reach my 3000-word goal each day.
• I took a five or ten minute break every 500 words. This was very, very important -- otherwise I would have been too fatigued to write the next day.
• If you are writing in the present day, get a copy of The Writer's Guide to Places, by Prues and Heffron. It saved me from having to get up to research locations on the Net. I'll still need to do research to flesh it out, but I didn't have to interrupt the writing of the first draft.
• Get an AlphaSmart Neo (http://www.alphasmart.com/). Seriously. It's the best writing investment you'll ever make. You can write anywhere and in short snatches. It doesn't require booting up orshutting down, no need to save, and it's always ready when you've goteven five minutes to spare.
• The computer is far too much of a distraction for me. I had to stay away when writing, hence the Neo was absolute godsend.
• Most of my writing was done between 10 AM and 3 PM, though as mentioned, I found I could write pretty much anytime with the Neo.

It's a good feeling to finally have the whole story down on paper. I'm going to be taking a course in writing a query letter from Gotham Writers' Workshop that is supposedly going to be taught by an agent. One of the agents who sometimes teaches the course is actually the very agent who is first on my list, so it's a good opportunity. I've got a long way to go before I'm ready to send anything out, though.

I do, however, have a marketing plan for the novel. The book just screams for bumper stickers and t-shirts. There are some way-cool sayings that kept popping into my head as I was writing. It'd be fun to see those around town! I have also reserved a domain name, http://www.PeterFarmer.org, which will serve as the home page for the series.

Much rejoicing!

Professionalism

Recently, a writing friend of mine just had her first professional sale -- a major milestone in any writer's career. She also ran across a ten-year-old essay by Mike Resnick that basically says anyone who sells to a non-pro magazine (defined as anything under 5 cents a word) is, essentially, a fool (in fairness, he didn't actually use that word, but there is an obvious disdain evidenced in the essay). Now, I don't know if Resnick still feels that way, but I think he's got it fundamentally wrong. I wrote as much in a reply to my friend's frustration, but I think it's worth repeating here.

I wrote a little essay about Heinlein's rules for writers in my blog a while back if you want to see that discussion. The key is his last rule:

"You must keep it on the market until it is sold."

If all the prozines have rejected the story, then you try other markets -- you keep on trying until it is sold. So take heart, you're not just a professional writer, you're a successful professional writer, by definition.

Resnick does have point that I think is worth considering, though. It's something I've been putting a lot of thought into. I don't believe that it is true any longer that short stories are the way to break into speculative fiction. In my opinion (and it's only my opinion, but it's a consdered one), the only way to have a career as a writer is to write novels. Think about it: Even if you had a short story published in every issue of Analog every month (a blatent impossibility), you couldn't make enough to live on. And there are lots of SF authors who didn't get started in short stories at all (Holly Lisle and David Weber come to mind -- Weber wrote a few, but that wasn't where he made his break). Now consider the fact that Analog has something like a 98% rejection rate, and you can start to see why living off of short story income is something of a dead end strategy -- even for the acknowledged pros.

I think there is a purpose to writing short stories, however. Resnick points out -- and again, I agree with his assessment -- that writing a novel that is good enough to be sold is much harder than writing a short story that is publishable. In my mind, if you are learning to write, you will learn much faster writing short stories simply because you can go through the entire writing process many more times in the same period as you would spend writing a single novel. In short, you have more chances to make mistakes -- and learn from those mistakes -- writing short stories than you do writing novels.

So, in my mind, writing short stories is equivalent to an apprenticeship. You're not writing them sell, you're writing them to learn. If someone -- anyone -- pays you money for the product of your learning effort, great! It's all free money, since the purpose of the story wasn't to make money anyway. Seen from that standpoint, Heinlein's rules are spot-on: There's no reason at all not to sell to the minors if the prozines have rejected your story. As a professional writer, you keep it on the market until it sells. As an apprentice writer, you also keep it on the market because learning how to write cover letters and sell pieces is -also- part of what you're supposed to learn.

On the other hand, the implicit assumption in all this is that you are learning the craft in order to write novels -- good novels that sell through well and secure your career in writing SF. Not everyone likes writing novels, though. Unfortunately, for all the reasons stated above, I don't see any other way to make your living in the current world of fiction publishing.

But, as Heinlein pointed out, just because you don't make your living from writing doesn't mean you aren't a professional. Resnick's opinion to the contrary is the fundamental flaw in his essay.

Clarion East in San Diego

In case you hadn't heard the news, the original Clarion SF Writers' Workshop will be leaving its long-time home in Michigan and moving to -- San Diego? You can read the official announcement here: http://www.theclarionfoundation.org/rw-home.htm. As you might predict, previous graduates of Clarion are bemoaning the move, saying that while it will still be Clarion, it won't be the same Clarion they all attended. They say they won't feel the automatic bond they do with current Clarionites, much as they don't (according to some posters) feel a bond with the Clarion West graduates. Basically, I get the impression that they see this as the death of the "original Clarion" and the birth of "Clarion California".

And they may be right. But I don't think so -- or more specifically, I don't really think it matters one way or the other. The value of Clarion (East, West, or South) is in the experience, the teachers, and the contacts you make. I get the impression that Clarion West graduates felt somewhat like second-class citizens with the Clarion East grads (who, I believe, never refer to themselves as anything other than just "Clarion graduates"). I think in the past decade or so, though, Clarion West has come into its own and proven that it is just as good as -- CW grads predictably argue its better than -- Clarion East. I think the wider recognition of the very term "Clarion East" illustrates that. One could even argue that Clarion West is somewhat better organized (Clarion East has had no end of uncertainty in its financing), but I really think that's more because of the support, or lack thereof, given by the hosting institutions. I would claim that both sets of administrators are top-notch. Given that, then, moving someplace where they can get better institutional support is, in my opinion, exactly what Clarion East needs.

So where would I go? Well, up until this announcement, there was no question I would go to Clarion West. First and foremost, all of the instructors and students that I have met attended CW. That doesn't mean it's better, but it's true that graduates of the two workshops don't really intermingle much. Given that the education is the same, why not go to the one my friends have attended? It's not a comment on the quality of either workshop at all. Furthermore, it's a shorter and slightly cheaper plane ride to Seattle than to Michigan, so that would make it easier to visit family and have them visit me during the six weeks.

But San Diego? My, my, that is tempting. I've never actually been to SD, but my wife has family and friends there. It has a number of things going for it: 1) It's only a six-hour drive, so I could actually drive myself there, 2) Plane tickets are about half the cost of plane tickets to Seattle, 3) IT'S WARM AND SUNNY (this is no small thing for someone with seasonal affective disorder -- Seattle is very close to Hell for someone with SAD), 4) There's a great beach, 5) Did I mention it was warm and sunny? The instructors for next summer are, in my mind, about equivalent. Both are heavy on the fantasy side, with only one real SF writer (Nancy Kress at West, Cory Doctorow at East). I love Nancy to death and would dearly like to study under her, but since I really want to go to Clarion to stretch my horizons as a writer, having all the fantasy and horror writers as instructors is actually a good thing for me -- maybe better than having SF authors in the long run.

So where to apply? In the end, I think San Diego will probably win out. The reason is that no matter when I attend Clarion, it's going to be a huge sacrifice emotionally for my family. I'll have two small children at home who are going to seriously miss their Daddy (my college-age son is less likely to care...). I have a faithful and loving wife who is going to be forced to be the sole caregiver for a month and half, all while teaching astronomy every night. That's not going to be easy. Going to Clarion: SD would allow me to come home one weekend and fly them all out to SD another. Also, my ten year anniversary is coming up and we had plans to go to Disneyland. L.A. is still a pretty good ways from SD, but it's not impossible for me to meet them there (as much as I would rather introduce them to my classmates).

And there's one other factor: I actually like being a trailblazer. Next year will be the first class at the new site. It's a chance to start some new traditions and hold a place of honor in Clarion history. That's not to be taken lightly.

You may have noticed a fairly significant change in this post from my previous posts of just a few weeks ago. My wife and I have talked about it, and she feels (and I agree) that next summer is simply the one-and-only perfect time (professionally) for me to go to Clarion, particularly in light of my goals. So, we're going to go for it. I'm actually going to apply to Clarion in the spring. I'll definitely apply to both workshops, but if accepted to SD, I'll (with some regret because of my friends) definitely go there. I think my writing is up to Clarion level, so I feel like I have a decent shot of getting accepted (though it's not easy -- Clarion East got 76 applications for a bit over 20 slots last year). I've signed up for the Virtual Clarion Workshop and I think that will be valuable training. I'm also going to see if Marta Randall (past president of SFWA and a simply outstanding teacher) is still teaching SF at Gotham Writers' Workshop. If so, I'm going to take her advanced class in October. Hopefully the prep time will give me a good shot. Even if I don't get in, it will certainly help me make giant strides towards my goals. There's no substitute for good training. That's why I'm going to Clarion in the first place, in spite of the sacrifice.

But they really have to figure out what they're going to call the workshop now...

Effortful Study

It's been a productive day today. I wrote a new draft of my flash fiction story on my Neo while waiting for DMV to tell me that I don't have the paperwork they want (grrr...), did a bit of research for my Ph.D., and wrote a new scene for one of the short stories I'm working on. Not bad at all. The title of this entry comes from the Ph.D. research, actually. I was reading an article in Scientific American* about expertise and how experts remember things. It quotes some research that I already had in my thesis proposal, but one passage I found particularly relevant in light of the previous entry.

Anders Ericsson argues that experience per se is not what matters for achieving expert status, but "effortful study." Erricsson defines effortful study as continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's ability. This explains why many people (myself included) show an early large improvement in ability, but this improvement rate rapidly tapers off as soon as the learner achieves an average level of proficiency. This applies to music, driving, golf, almost anything. In fact, Ericsson makes the example that someone can play ten thousand hours of golf and never achieve expert status because they aren't playing against anyone other than amateurs like themselves. Experts-in-training, Ericsson contends, are continually looking at their efforts and trying to figure out how they can improve.

I've read many bios of science fiction grandmasters who say they taught themselves how to write by critically examining the works of others. The "Clarion Method" of workshopping fits well within Ericsson's theory as well -- in fact, it's an almost classic example, and certainly explains why students can progress so rapidly in just six weeks at Clarion. it also provides a bit of theoretical justification for my strive to get a Hugo in two years. A concerted effort to work towards that challenge -- well beyond my abilities right now -- is exactly what's needed to improve.

It's also seriously making me wish I could go to Clarion next summer as planned. I had everything arranged so that next summer would be the perfect time, both logisitically and professionally. I think by next summer I will be exactly at the place in my professional development where Clarion will do me the most good. My daughter would also be old enough that she can live without Daddy for six weeks without too much hardship. With the new baby due in two months, though, that's going to be just the wrong time to be away. I would never forgive myself if I missed her first steps. Ah well. Life is what happens while we're making other plans, eh?



*A side note, all science fiction authors should read Scientific American -- there's a wealth of story ideas there, accessible even to the non-scientist.

Worldcon

In looking back over this blog, I see that It's now been months since I last made an entry. That seems about proper, since for six months I was posting every day. I'm still not planning to post every day -- I have far, far too many things on my plate right now, most of them, fortunately, writing-related. Recording observations and things I've learned in a blog is good, but the temptation to write an essay every day is quite strong -- and essays are not the kind of writing I want to do just now. So, instead of a daily commentary on writing, I'm just going to use this blog to record any insights I've had that I don't want to lose. Many of these will simply go into the pocket journal I carry around with me everywhere, but when I happen to be near a computer, I'll see if I can't preserve them here instead.

As the title of this entry indicates, I just got back from the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, popularly known as Worldcon. Now, I'm not really much of the convention type. I attended a few comic book conventions in college (and was bored out of my mind) and have been to a number of gaming conventions (where the point is to play and run games, not to attend panels). This was my first real exposure to "fandom," however. I found it interesting that while the con is basically a chance for fans of science fiction to get together and have fun, there is a parallel, almost secret track for writers of science fiction going on at the same time. Very few of the fans I met were interested in the writing panels or in meeting "famous writers." Most of fandom was centered on the movies and television shows, and rightfully so. There were some fans of written fiction, of course, quite a respectable number, in fact. But for the most part, the writing panels were attended by neo-professional writers and those that would like to be. What impressed me was how well the two groups got along, like a pair of favored cousins. There was a mutual respect that was evident, even if there was a rather strong separation of interest. It was a really interesting dynamic.

Worldcon was an absolute blast, though, mostly because the friend who convinced me to come is friends with a couple who have been on both sides of the house (fan and writer) for over ten years now. Everyone knows them. I had no idea that the real con takes place in the parties, not in the panels (although the panels were interesting and incredibly valuable). As far as I know, this couple attended none of the actual panels. Why should they? Most of the panelists were coming up to them to have lunch and hang out. A case in point: I joined the writer of the couple for breakfast with Connie Willis, master of ceremonies for the Hugo Awards and winner of multiple Hugos herself. She's a delightful and encouraging person. The main thing that I took away from Worldcon, though, was a burning desire to write. To immerse myself in this world, to finally be able to "fellowship with my peers," as the saying goes.

I also came out with a resolve to win a Hugo two years from now, or at least a Campbell award (for best new science fiction writer). I met the current Campbell recipient (before he knew he had won) and a couple of past recipients. Their stories are a lot like mine. They are much further along in their craft than I am, as much as two or three years further along. I also realized something I probably already knew, but hadn't let come to a conscious level: Every writer goes through a long (usually three or more year) struggle in which they have no idea if they are any good or not. Nor do they have any idea if they have potential to be good. It is in this latter bit that I find my motivation. Right now, I suck. While it's a notch above amateur, from a professional perspective, my writing sucks (if you'd like to see just how badly I suck, join the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror -- I'm starting to post some pieces there, though nothing I've yet been serious about). On the other hand, I have received two personal rejection letters, one hand-written from the editor of a magazine on par with the New Yorker and one from Stanley Schimdt of Analog (who said my writing was "quite good at times"), and have been told by a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America (she was my instructor in a writing course I took) that I've got a lot of talent. So while I do, in fact, suck, at least I know I've got the potential to be better. Whether or not I realize that potential entirely depends on whether or not I'm willing to sit in my chair every day until my writing finally comes into its own. You see, no one can teach you to write, not really. In the end, you have to teach yourself, and that only comes by, well, writing. I just finished a great book on the writing life by Heather Sellers called Page After Page. Read the book, but the best advice in the entire book is simply this:

Give yourself permission to suck.

That's it. You're in training, why should you expect to do anything else but suck? I do believe that anyone who writes -- and reads -- every single day for three years will write something good at the end of that time, assuming you have the slightest bit of talent (and most everyone does to some degree). I set a two-year goal for myself for three reasons: 1) I won't be going to Worldcon in Japan next year, but I will go to the 2008 Worldcon in Denver, 2) I am convinced that I have a modicum of (as yet undeveloped) talent and I think I can write something good in less time than the average person, and 3) I firmly believe that in order to succeed you have to shoot high, not with the mindset of "Oh, I'll aim high, but I know I probably won't get quite that close" but instead with the bullheaded drive to achieve that goal. Realistically, some of the best writers who have ever lived have not won a Hugo. What makes me think I can get that well known in that short period of time? Ah, the challenge! I love a challenge. Nothing spurs me on better!

So here I am, finally back in training. I spent all summer teaching, all spring working on my Ph.D. thesis proposal. I'll have a baby coming on October 30th. But I've got a priority. I'll be teaching more than full-time after the baby comes, since I'll be teaching my wife's classes in addition to my own. But by that time, I'll be in the habit once again of "running a mile" every day in my writing. Once you get in training, it's a hell of a lot easier to just keep going. I'm counting on that. After all, babies have a habit of not sleeping, so I'll have plenty of time to think about writing!

It's Done Then!

As you can see, I've been much too busy to post here lately. When I was finally completely free of NASA at the end of February, I realized that it was going to be very difficult to get my Ph.D. dissertation proposal finished by the end of the semester (especially since I've been teaching four college classes this semester as well). I decided, reluctantly, to put all of my other writing projects on hold and focus on the proposal.

I submitted the first draft to my committee chair today!

The proposal is exactly 30 pages, including eight pages of references. This is the third version of this that I've put together so far. Dealing with my committee is like going on a fishing trip. I'd give them a draft, and they'd say, "No, this is not quite what we want." Without, of course, saying it is they do want. This current version is my absolute best work. It's deeply researched, extremely focused, and I've tried to anticipate (and deal with) every possible objection they could come up with. In short, it ain't gonna get no better than this, Hoss. While I'm certainly open to specific suggestions or requests, the fishing expedition is hereby over. If they do to me what they've done the past two times, I'm done. I don't need the Ph.D. for anything. I'm a writer -- a Ph.D. is hardly a job requirement. Is it nice to have? Sure, but there is still a cost-benefit analysis that has to be made. I've made mine. I won't be doing a fourth major rewrite. Honestly, I have gone over and over this proposal. There's nothing, nothing wrong with it. If they don't accept this one, then there's not much hope of ever getting one done. I don't think that will happen, but then again, it shouldn't have happened with earlier incarnations either.

Time will tell...

WriteWay Pro

I have been using WriteWay Pro for a few weeks now. Let me just say, this program rocks. I was a bit skeptical that it would be useful, but it really does make the process of writing a long novel much easier. You can have "notecards" that are readily accessible while you are writing text. You can also do full character sketches (including pictures of your character), and have all that info handy when you need it (no more searching for the character's alma mater that you made up on page 9 -- just record it as you write). The printing functions are outstanding. Just by selecting a couple of radio buttons you can choose how much of the story to print (scene, chapter, act, or the entire book), and it will automatically format in draft or manuscript form (for submission) as you choose. In the Pro version (which I have) you can also print galleys, which puts two facing pages on a single landscape page (it looks roughly like a paperback book opened up). The main feature that I find useful, though, is having the outline of scene titles continuously on the left side of the screen. This allows me to really focus on writing a single, independent scene, yet helps me keep in mind its place in the larger whole. A small thing, maybe, but it turns out to be a major boon to have this all in one place. All the formatting options you would expect are there, but my only complaint is that there doesn't seem to be keyboard shortcuts for underline, bold, etc. Also, the spell checker does not run continuously as Word does; you have to run it from the menu. Still, those are pretty minor complaints compared to everything else. The Pro version also allows you to keep up with "research folders," which can include everything from web pages (which will be displayed in the folder) to pictures to text. This is turning out to be pretty useful as well. I've always kept my notes in text files in a folder for each WIP, but it is nice to call something up without having to leave the WriteWay editor. It's probably not worth the $30 difference in price, but it is a major convenience.

I'm even using WriteWay to write my dissertation for my PhD. It's turning out to be a great way to organize my thoughts and being able to rearrange whole section by just dragging and dropping is a godsend!

Humor

I've been thinking about the novel I've been working on, and I think I've finally put my finger on what's been bothering me about the tone of the book. In looking back, all of the memorable characters I've created have been funny. More precisely, they've had a very dry sense of humor, and that's come through in the writing. I'm not saying that I write slapstick or even comedy -- I don't -- but all of the characters that I've truly liked have been able to look at the world and find something ironic or humorous to say about it. In my current story, I've tried to take a very serious approach to the tale. That comes about originally because one of the main sub-themes in the book was going to be that the protagonist (a teenager) would basically have to prostitute herself to make her escape from the world she's on. That's a serious subject, and really isn't something to be kidding around with. So, I've been trying to emphasize the tragic nature of the protagonist, one way to increase the dramatic tension in the story.

There's nothing wrong with this, and it can work quite well -- but it's not me. Yes, I can write okay stories in this mode, but they aren't what I consider to be my best work. I think the reason I haven't been as pleased with the plot so far is that I've cast the character with the wrong personality. Yes, she's a reluctant revolutionary. Yes, she is a natural leader whether she wants to admit or not. Yes, she's had a hard life. But she can still maintain a sense of humor about it! Some of the best scenes I've written so far have had that humor come through -- but it was inappropriate for the character I'd been developing. I found myself having to write scenes where she says (essentially), "I can't believe I actually said that!" Ya think she's trying to tell me something? : )

So that's definitely going into the next re-write. As most of you know, I've never tried to write a novel before, only short stories. One thing you gotta say for short stories: It's a heck of a lot easier to make major changes like this!

A Double Woo-hoo

Since my computer was in the shop last week, I didn't think to check to see if the latest issue of the Journal of the Traveler's Aid Society (a gaming magazine I read that has gone to an online format) was out. I checked tonight, and sure enough it was -- and not only they, I found not one, but two articles of mine in this issue! And not only did they buy the text to both articles, they bought the artwork I drew for one of the articles as well! This will be a fat paycheck... That means that so far I've sold everything I've submitted to this magazine. It helps greatly that I'm a long-time reader of the magazine (I have, I believe, every issue since it was started in 1977). Because I've been reading the magazine for so long, I know exactly the kinds of things they buy. It definitely pays off to do market research before writing the article instead of the other way around.

I can think of a few times when an author has had two articles in the same issue of this magazine, but it doesn't happen very often. I recognize that it has more to do with fitting articles to the available space than anything else, but still, it certainly looks good for me! Time to update the sales page of my author website, I guess. I'm pretty psyched!

Back Online

I finally got my computer back form the repair place today. It took them five days to replace the keyboard and network card (a five minute operation) and reinstall the system software (a one-hour operation). I took it to them on Monday, the first day of our spring break, and got it back on Friday -- the last day of spring break. So much for getting caught up with my projects over the break! Oh well, at least the wireless card works now, which is a major boon. I've restored all of my data to this machine from my wife's computer, so now it's just a matter of reinstalling my software. Hopefully things should go a little more smoothly now. Nevertheless, it's not as bad as it could be. I just picked up the 16" x 20" print of last year's art nude photo from the photographer (8 months late, grumble). She said her whole drive crashed, so she had to take it to a data recovery place. They recovered all 35,000 of her photos, but the file names were nothing but numbers. She now has to sort and rename all 35,000 photos. Ouch...

All these computer troubles make me appreciate my Neo even more. It's always ready, doesn't crash, and does nothing but what I need it to do. It really is the perfect writing machine. I highly recommend it!

Happy Birthday, Sunshine!

Today my daughter turned three. We've been playing this up as a big day for several weeks now -- she's a "big girl" now! When she woke up this morning, she was thrilled beyond imagining that it was her birthday. And not, as with most kids (and adults), because she was going to be getting presents. She doesn't remember her second birthday, so really didn't have much of an expectation there. In this case, it was all about status. As a three year old, she's no longer a baby. The first thing she said when she woke up was, "I need to throw away my paci's!" After all, big girls don't use pacifiers. And sure enough, she tossed them one by one into the trash can.

She's been a delight all day long. At one point, she just burst out with, "I'm so happy!" What a hoot! Sure, she loved the cake and presents when they finally came, but having a milestone special day was what made it for her. Everyone has commented on how adorable she was today. We brought cupcakes to her school to share with her friends. She took a cupcake and presented it to each of her friends, giving each one a kiss on the cheek as she did so. What a sweetie! She is just too cute for words.

Happy birthday, sunshine. I'm glad you came along our way. I love you!

I'm Back (more or less)

Things are starting to settle down a bit (though that's about to change, see below), so I'm going to try to start posting quasi-regularly again. I've decided that I'm not going to try to post every day, though, but I think once or twice a week is pretty reasonable. I want to keep this blog focused on writing, to the greatest extent possible, and sometimes there's just not much more to say other than, "Yep, wrote some today." I know some writers post their daily word counts, but I've always found that rather dull. I am planning on trying out the Write Way Pro software, so I'll post a review of that later on.

The big news, however, is that we found out my wife is pregnant! The baby is due around Halloween. We're cautiously excited. We don't have a terribly good track record with this, as we've lost two out of three babies, so anything could happen. She goes to the OB for the first time on the 27th, so we really won't know much more until then. It's a huge change for our family, but we're well and truly pleased. Here's hoping!

In other news, as of 1 March, I'm officially a free agent and no longer employed by NASA or Arizona State University. That's a huge relief to have that particular monkey off of my back. Sadly, my boss at ASU and I have some pretty serious disagreements as to the level of the last activity I wrote for her. She seems convinced that most teachers are incompetent (she doesn't put it quite that way, of course, she calls them "beta teachers", as opposed to the good "alpha teachers") and so couldn't handle anything other than a mindless cookbook-style activity. I like to give teachers a lot more credit than that -- my experience has been that with only a very few exceptions, most teachers are highly-trained, highly-motivated professionals. You have to be to want to teach in today's educational climate. Ultimately, since she is the customer and I'm the consultant, she can do what she wants with the activity, but one would think that as a consultant, she's paying me for my expertise (something she lacks, though she is loathe to admit that). We'll see how they make the final product turn out, but if they change it too much from my original, I may ask that my name be taken off of it. We'll see.

And the last bit of news, my computer apparently got a virus (I assume -- neither Norton nor McAfee ever detected anything) that made the machine no longer recognize .exe, .bat, or .com files. Pretty hard to troubleshoot in that case! I was able to access the hard drive over the network, and backed most things up, but I realized this morning I did not get my archived writing folder. That hurts pretty bad. I have hard copies of everything (NEVER rely solely on electronic backups), but that still means a lot of retyping if I ever need that material. One of the pieces I lost is an article I've sent off to a magazine that includes three maps -- each of which took me several days to make. I have the hard copies of those as well, but if the editor decides he wants changes to the maps, I've got a lot of fast work ahead of me. If he does, I'll have to decide whether to ask him to send me electronic copies back. While I realize these happen -- and so does he, I'm sure -- it does seem very unprofessional to me. I'll have to check my old CD-ROM backups to see if I have these, but I doubt I do. My older stuff should be there, though. My current work in progress is safely on my Neo (including my research notes), so I didn't lose anything there, thank goodness. I hate machines. :)

A Sort of "Woo-Hoo"

Yeah, I know I said I wasn't going to post for a while, but I thought this was worth sharing. I heard back from Cicada magazine the other day about the story I sent to them. I saw that they had returned the story, so I knew they hadn't accepted it, so I didn't really look through the packet to read the rejection slip. Rejections don't bother me, that's a big part of the writing game. If you can't handle rejections, then you're in the wrong field. So today I was cleaning up the counter and decided to file the rejection letter. I pulled it out of the envelope and realized that the editor had written me a fairly long (half-page) hand-written note praising the writing but saying it was a bit too long and had a bit too much technological language for their magazine. That's about as good as it gets, folks (short of buying the story, of course), so that's call for celebration. Cicada is a top-of-the-line market. They pay about $850 for stories. I sent it out figuring I may as well shoot for the top (see my December 1 blog entry), so I was psyched to get such a positive response. The editor made it clear the writing was great, but the story wasn't quite right for their magazine. More importantly -- and as I understand it, this almost never happens -- she gave me advice on what they are looking for in a story. If she didn't think my writing had potential, she wouldn't have bothered. Much rejoicing!

So, I've got two professional editors (here and Stanley Schmidt at Analog) who have written me personal notes saying my writing was good, even if the story wasn't quite right for their magazine. I can't begin to tell you how encouraging that is. Maybe there's hope for a career in this!

Still Alive

As you've no doubt noticed, I haven't posted to this blog in a week. I'm coming to the end of my work at NASA (I finish at the end of the month), so I'm scrambling to get all the last-minute stuff done. I'm also embroiled in a strong disagreement with the director of the program about the educational content of the activity I've been writing (essentially, she wants less educational content, if you can believe that -- she feels that teachers are basically lazy and no one but the "alpha" teachers will pick up a lesson that has anything more than blindly -- and mindlessly -- following a cookbook recipe. An attitude that offends me in the extreme...). Ultimately, she is the customer and I'm the consultant, so I'll give her what she wants, but I'm very seriously considering having my name removed from association with the product. One would think that I was hired for my (widely recognized, if I do say so myself) expertise. If she chooses to ignore that expertise, why bother having me write it in the first place?

At any rate, in a few weeks I can wash my hands of the whole deal, as disappointing as that is to me. I'm not naïve enough to believe that just because I'm no longer getting paid, I won't be still finishing this up. I probably won't be posting again (unless I get a spare minute) until mid-March or so. When I started this blog, I had planned to see where we were at the six-month mark and decide then whether or not to continue posting on a regular basis. Six months has passed (can you believe it?), but I'll wait until March to decide if there is enough value to keep going. We'll see how it goes.

See you in March!

*Incidentally, this is my first post using The Journal from a different computer than my own. I installed it to my USB drive (the program has a specific installation option for that), and it seems to be working fine! Gotta love that...

Protecting the Innocent (and the Not-So)

One of the recurring questions almost all writers have is "How much of my writing can be based on real people?" You see, even if we don't explicitly base a character on a person we know, our friends and family are constantly reading our work and looking for themselves or people they know in it. If they decide a character is based on them, and that character does reprehensible or simply embarrassing things, then you are setting yourself up for major row. It doesn't matter if you really were thinking of the real person or not when you created the character. As I've written before, it is our life experiences that provide the raw material for our stories, but that raw material is very rarely used verbatim. It's just the straw that we spin into gold, and "any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental." But our friends and family don't generally buy that line.

So, should write to protect your loved ones from controversy? Or to put it another way, would you want your mother to read the steamy and perverse S&M-laden sex scene you just wrote for your protagonist? It doesn't matter if you have never (and would never) participate in such an activity, if it needs to happen with your character, then it needs to happen. But plan on raising a few eyebrows if write a sex scene in which the protagonist has an affair with his sister-in-law. Your brother may start watching you extra closely...

So, again, should you shy away from this type of thing? The answer is an unequivocal "no." The minute you tie your hands (no pun intended), you have effectively hamstrung your ability to write moving, meaningful stories. You may end up being the "bad child" as a result of your writing, but if you write to be the "good child" then you've doomed your career before it starts. Sometimes it's best to have a talk with the family about what fiction is and what the creative process is like before the book is written and not try to explain it after the fact. Beyond that, write what has to be written. Only you can be true to your Muse, after all.

Do You Call Yourself a Writer?

Twice this week I've had a casual conversation with a near-stranger. As is often the case, one of the standard small talk lines is "What do you do for a living?" So here's my question to you: Do you call yourself a writer? I've been writing for a long time, but the vast majority of the things I've had published wouldn't be known by Joe Average-On-The-Street. I do, however, write freelance now (or near full time, as I'm still working on my Ph.D. as well). It used to be I could say, "I work for NASA," and that would start up all kinds of interesting conversations, but in about three weeks, I won't be able to say that any more. Many people still consider someone who stays at home and writes all day to be basically a bum who couldn't get a real job. Even some well-intentioned folks betray that subconscious bias sometimes. For example, Betsy Lerner (The Forest for the Trees) reports a story she heard a writer who was seeing a therapist (a subject worth an entry all its own, I guess). The therapist only wanted to schedule the writer for morning appointments, since she saved her after-5:00 appointments for "people who work." The assumption is that since you work at home, you aren't really employed and so can make any appointment during the day -- never mind that your "peak writing hours" may be at midday or even from 9 to 5, the same as people with "outside" jobs.

There's no reason why non-writers should understand that writing is a job and that it takes just as much effort and work as any other job. We writers are guilty sometimes of wanting to make it seem like "magic" so we can enhance our mystique, as well. But when you are in casual conversation with a non-writer, you don't really want to take the time to explain all about the writing process and how much work it really is -- and you would be considered a bore if you did. On the other hand, if you call yourself a writer, but they haven't read anything you've written (or seen it published), then their suspicions are obviously confirmed -- you can't be much of a writer if you aren't getting published in the "major" magazines. Never mind that there are many, many very successful professional writers who neither have published in the "majors" nor are they seeking to. My education writing is in a very esoteric market, yet I'm highly respected within that market --but Joe Average has never heard of any of it, so that really doesn't matter, does it?

I'm proud to be a writer, and I generally introduce myself as such, particularly since I no longer have another "label" to use in small talk. But I still haven't found a really good, quick way to convey that in the positive sense that it is, and I'll admit to feeling just a tiny bit uncomfortable calling myself a writer to strangers. If I publish a book they can find in Borders, then I think I'd feel better about. But let's face it, that's just silly. You're a writer because of what you do, not because of what and where you publish. And yet...

How do you deal with small talk situations?

The Demon

I'm continuing to read The Forest for the Trees, and while it isn't breathtakingly illuminating, it is at somewhat thought-provoking. I just finished the chapter on how writing and alcoholism seem to often go hand in hand. It starts out innocently enough, a drink to loosen up and inspire before sitting down to write. But in almost every case, as you might expect, eventually the drinking kept them from writing instead of making it possible. As Shakespeare said about sex and alcohol, "It builds you up, but then it ... lets you down."
Apparently, the last generation of writers considered being hard-drinking to be a character trait essential to maintain the "image of the artist." Let me just say that I'm glad this at least has changed (or at least is changing very quickly). We're starting to see that no matter how much the alcohol may help to begin with, it the end it always is the main source that ended a career (an sometimes a life).

Now, I do drink. I like alcohol, and I don't have any moral compunction not to drink (Jesus drank wine, don't forget). The problem here is not the alcohol itself, it's relying on anything to "get your Muse going." Your Muse should come from you and your love of writing and your desire to communicate, be it a good story or an illuminating piece of non-fiction. I don't care if it's alcohol or pink pajamas, anytime you rely on something other than yourself and your life for inspiration, you're asking for trouble. At best you're hamstringing your talent; at worst, you could be destroying it altogether.

And in this corner...

The other day I heard about a possible challenger to the Sony Reader for the eBook platform that may finally make eBooks worthwhile. It's called the "iLiad" and it's made by a Norwegian company called iRex. The technology, best I can tell is very similar to the Sony Reader's, though it is very slightly thicker and just a bit heavier. Unlike the Sony version, it has wireless LAN and a stylus for interacting on the screen. You can find details at http://www.irextechnologies.com/shop/products/iliad.htm.

Both the Sony Reader and the iLiad will debut about the same time (Sony says "Spring 2006," the iLiad says April 2006). Sony has announced their reader will cost about $350, but I haven't seen any pricing estimates on the iLiad. The possibility exists that they will price it slightly less in order to compete with Sony's huge marketing share (while they are essentially an unknown), but since they reader seems to do a bit more, maybe not. I have not seen a good screen shot that tells me anything about the quality of the screens, nor has the iLiad given any battery life estimates that I've seen (the Sony will last some 7500 hours before needing to be recharged -- more than enough). The touch screen may end up being a disadvantage for the iLiad. Remember, the idea is to replace the paperback book. The touch screen means having interact with it like a Palm Pilot; it also means that the screen will be more fragile than the Sony design. The idea for iLiad is that you can read a full newspaper on screen and click on a column of text to have it magnified and "floating" above the page. It's a good paradigm, but I'm not sure it's really worth the extra trouble and bother. You can read the news in a single-story format just as easily, I think, and since I don't really read newspapers anyway, that's not a big draw.

What does worry me a bit is that Sony will do something dumb to preserve "intellectual property rights" on the content as they have done with Mp3 files. I don't take kindly to someone installing spyware on my machine. Not only that, Sony could make the same mistake Apple did with the Mac. The PC was open architecture, so took over the world. If you want to introduce a new technology, you've got to have lots of avenues for content purchases, not just the Sony Connect Store. I'm not at all sure Sony has made that connection, although supposedly the Sony Reader will also read PDFs (after they have been converted). A PDF would have to be carefully formatted to be the size of a paperback instead of a letter-sized sheet, as most are now. Easily done, but not all publishers will think to do it. We'll see, but no matter how you look at it, having a competitor for Sony is a good thing. My only hope is that they don't go the Beta-VHS route and use mutually exclusive formats...

Happy Birthday, Buddy!

Today is my son's 17th birthday. It's a big milestone for me as a parent, even if (so far) he doesn't act as if it is one for him. You see, a 16 year old is still a rookie teenager, just barely out of pre-adolescence, learning to drive, learning the real way of the world. 17, in my mind, is an apprentice adult. At this age, he should have the maturity to make smart decisions without the input of his parents, and -- hopefully -- be more concerned about his future than his present. In short, he's getting ready to take his place as an independent in society.

Now, I don't really think there is anything magical about the number 17. Some kids have this maturity much earlier, some don't really develop it until much later. But one year from today, for better or worse, he will be an adult in the eyes of the law. At that point, if he wants to tell his dear old dad to go stuff himself, there's not a thing I can do to stop him. He's got one more year of training, and he will never have another birthday as a child. That's a sobering thought. Turning 18 is something of a celebration, but I think there is a lot of anxiety and pressure in turning 17, just because that legal change is coming -- and coming fast. It hasn't been all that long since he was just learning to drive, yet in just that same amount of time, he's going to be 100% responsible for his own actions. This is as stressful for the parents as it is for the teens, of course. This is it, our last year to try impart our values, or better yet, the ability for our child to develop his own values after reasonable thought. We've just got a year to finish giving him the life lessons he needs to survive, and, like every parent, we're worried that we haven't taught him everything he needs to succeed and won't have time to do so in the next twelve months.

But we've got it luckier than most parents. My son is a good kid. I'm extremely, extremely proud of him, practically every day. I try to make him aware of that, but I'm sure I don't always succeed. Happy birthday, buddy. It's a big step!

Debt-Free (almost)

Today was something of a major milestone for me (and my family): As of today we have paid off all of our loans, debts, etc., with the exception of the house and one of our two cars. And there was much rejoicing! I had a bunch of student loans from grad school to pay off (interestingly, I didn't need any loans as an undergrad), plus car payments and VISA and such, but we managed to consolidate most of that into the home equity line of credit once I decided to leave NASA (had to lower those monthly payments). We've been doing really well paying down the line of credit and today we were able to make a massive payment to pay it all off! That's a huge relief, since I will stop working for NASA part time at the end of the month, so our income is going to be cut even further. I'm teaching four classes and selling an average of an article a month (which still isn't big bucks, but it helps), plus we have my military retirement pay and my wife's full-time teaching job (and benefits), so we're doing okay. It's still tight, but without the added debt load, we'll make it.

One thing every full-time writer is going to struggle with is how to pay the bills. Let's face it, even when writing pays, it doesn't pay well and it doesn't pay often. None of us (at least none of us who stop and really think about it) gets into writing to strike it rich. My family cut its income by 40% when I quit my NASA job, so certainly money isn't my major motivating factor. I simply decided that no amount of money could make up for wasting my life not doing what I really was meant to be doing.

I can't think of a better reason to take up writing.

Inspection

This morning my Civil Air Patrol squadron had it's "subordinate unit inspection (SUI)," in which a team from the Wing's Inspector General's Office comes to the squadron and begins tearing through our records (or, more precisely, ordering us to tear through our records while they watch). The intent is to ensure that we are following all of the Air Force's regulations -- and believe me, there are a huge, huge number of them. We've been preparing for about three weeks, but we just had a change of command and most of us were appointed to the jobs we would have to "defend" to the IG folks at that time. That's not a lot of time to read and understand 500-600 pages of regulations! And, as reported earlier, I'm a sucker and agreed to take on two jobs to help out the squadron.

Overall, we did well. Our administration officer was pretty screwed up, sorting all of his big pile of records on the table 15 minutes before the inspection started (and in full view of all the inspectors). Needless to say, that didn't make us look very good from the start. My first review was with my communications officer hat on, but since we don't yet really have a communications program, that mostly consisted of telling the inspector what I would do once we get assigned a radio. This inspector was a friend of mine too, as it turned out, so that went pretty smoothly. For the professional development officer review, however, I drew the assistant IG for the entire Wing. He was ... thorough. We went page by page through records that I had reconstructed from web searches (in theory, these records should have been maintained over the years, but weren't). He compared them to a list he had and had me explain the discrepancies (there were a few). I showed him the organization system I had come up with, along with the training library (in hard copy and on a USB stick) I had put together. Most of this was done from scratch over the past week -- I literally had nothing to go on. After keeping me on the hot plate (with the burner on "high") for half an hour, he finally finished up some notes and said, "Lieutenant, you've certainly got your act together." He said as much to the squadron commander, too, which was gratifying, since I don't thing the commander realized just how much work had to go into to getting all this stuff ready.

So overall, it was a good event, and I definitely appreciated the "attaboy." We don't get enough of those as adults, I don't think. I'm still not sure I like being part of the Air Force, though. Okay, I am CERTAIN I don't want to be part of the Air Force, what I'm not sure about is whether the hassle is worth the benefits of CAP. Something for me to think about. I'm not sure CAP is really doing much for me, in spite of the fact that I'm pouring a lot of effort into it. We'll just have to see. No more inspections for two years, though! Whew!

Depth of Feeling

[Fourth try to get Friday's post up...]

One of our main tasks as writers is plump the darkest depths of the human psyche. Even if that level of psychology and emotion isn't the main thrust of the story, one could argue that the most meaningful stories -- at some level -- are driven by the psychological pain of the protagonist. The greater the pain, the greater the desire, the greater the conflict. Your character may really want something, but if the situation is not causing him serious emotional distress, then he doesn't want it bad enough to make a really good story. Suppose he doesn't attain his goal. Will he survive (mentally or physically) the failure? If the answer is yes, then he doesn't want it bad enough.

But I wonder, is it necessary for the writer to have felt that level of psychological pain to be able to carry it off on the page? I'm not sure. We all hear about the tortured souls who write Pulitzer Prize literature. After all, you aren't an artist if you aren't suffering, right?* There may be some truth about that. "Write what you know" has become a trite truism, but it's a truism precisely because it is true. If that's the case then, do writers need to experience depression and other forms of psychological pain in order to write about it convincingly?

And if so, is it worth it? Life is about balance, after all. Obviously, I tend to believe that you can be happy and still write good stories. If not, what's the point? Remember, if you aren't having fun, you aren't doing it right...



*Old critiquing line: If the writer dumps too much of the background he has meticulously researched on the reader at one time, this is referred to as "I Suffered For My Art. Now It's Your Turn." :)

Media Tie-Ins

[The posts for Thursday and Friday keep vanishing from the blog. I'm not really sure why... Fortunately, I've been writing my posts in "The Journal" software, so I have back-ups.]

I was reading an interesting discussion on the Other Worlds Workshop mailing list about a guy who just had his first professional sale, but wasn't sure whether to celebrate it or not. My initial reaction was, "Say what???" but apparently it was a Star Trek short story that was bought for an anthology. He had heard that some editors (and writers) consider those who write media tie-ins to be hacks, so he wasn't sure it was something he should celebrate, much less something to mention to an editor in a cover letter.
In my mind, that's just silly.

Writing is writing. It doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't matter what form you write it, what matters is whether you're writing is any good. A good Star Trek novel requires just as much skill with the written word as does a story set in your own world. Somebody thought his story was good enough to pay money for. Go back to Heinlein's definitions: If someone buys your story, you are by definition a successful professional writer. You've proven that you write something saleable.

It may be that there are editors that turn up their nose at a media tie-in credit, but I'm willing to bet there aren't many. I think most of this attitude comes not from editors but from other writers. That's jealousy, plain and simple. The publishing industry is tough right now, maybe tougher than it's ever been. We should celebrate the successes of our peers, not denigrate them. The more good stories that are written, the more the general public will attracted to reading over other forms of entertainment. And that, my friends, helps us all.

Flying Solo

Tonight my son drove himself to work, alone, for the first time.

I cannot begin to convey how terrifying a moment this is for a parent. He got his license a few months after he turned 16 (he had to bring his grades up, which he did), but then because he is having to pay for his own insurance, he went almost a year without driving (he just had no interest in getting a job or in driving, either, really). In retrospect, I worry about the lost practice. The specifics of our insurance meant that he was covered as long as he was a student driver, but as soon as he got his license, he was no longer covered. While I suppose we could have paid for his insurance while he was (theoretically) looking for a job, I think it's important that he begin to understand how to make his own way in the world, particularly since college is coming soon.

So, once he got a job and was able to pay for gas and insurance, we started a "refresher course" for him, essentially repeating the things we taught him when he was learning to drive in the first place. It's only been a couple of weeks and while his mechanical skills are starting to come back together (with a few exceptions -- more cause for terror), his judgment is still a bit lacking. He hasn't quite caught on to the fact that maintaining situational awareness seems effortless for mom and dad only because we've been driving every day for 20 years! Do something multiple times a day, every day, for 20 years and it doesn't matter what it is, you'll make it seem easy! And in truth, it's not lack of mechanical skills that causes accidents, it's failure in judgment. There's a reason our insurance doubled when he was brought on to the policy. The insurance companies know the score.

But we have to give him his wings, and it's time to suck it up and do it. He's at the point where he's not going to learn much more from me. I can only hope that he has learned enough to have a close call instead of an accident. Think back to when you were learning to drive. One or the other is pretty much inevitable. And you begin to understand the terror.

Of course, the fact that he ran off the edge of the driveway pulling out didn't do anything to inspire confidence...

Made in China

Tonight in a fit of green-ness (and a tech junkie's curiosity), I bought one of those LED flashlights that you recharge by shaking. Now, I understand how the technology works -- just pass a magnet through coiled wires and you'll generate electricity -- though I don't believe the flashlight will last forever, as it's advertisement claims. It's still got to store the energy generated by shaking the flashlight, either in a rechargeable battery (it claims that one of its advantages is that it doesn't lose its storage capacity over time like a rechargeable) or perhaps in a capacitor. I only paid five bucks for the thing, so I'm sorely tempted to satisfy my curiosity on this last question and take the thing apart. That might annoy the wife, though...

What I find tragic about this flashlight is that the people who made it didn't bother to get someone who speaks English to write the instructions on the box. Check this out:

"Features:
1. Only shake it forward and back while use. So as to make it generating to light up.
2. Its switch system is based on advanced magnetic induction technologies. So it's long in service life and reliable in performance."

But wait, it gets better:

"Advantages:
1. A torch is used for emergency lighting purpose. However, the traditional battery-supplied torch may cause you a big trouble because the batteries become ineffective and produce pollution if the torch is left idle for a long time. The chargeable torch also has the problem of power leakage; or it will help you remember to charge only at the time you need. This innovative torch is the breakthrough in solution to waste and inconvenience.
2. Being self-supplying, it will serve you long and well."

A sticker on the box reports that it was "made in China," which judging form the ad copy isn't a big surprise. But come on folks, how hard is it to get someone who speaks English to write a quick instruction list for the box? "Shake it up and it lights up" isn't really all that hard. I don't really have a problem with imported goods (although I do understand how trade deficits are killing us), but hey, I'm sure there are a lot of freelance writers who would be happy to write you some decent ad copy at a very reasonable rate!

It's been a long time since I've seen a commercial product with language that bad. I think they would have been better served by just leaving it in the original Chinese. No, I wouldn't be able to read it, but do we really need instructions for a shake-up flashlight? They really didn't inspire a lot of confidence in their "advanced technologies" with that copy...

The Ambivalent Writer

The Forest For the Trees has some specific advice for the different "types" of writers that the author has encountered during her years as an editor (and now as an agent). The first type she deals with is the "ambivalent writer." I think the title is a bit misleading. The ambivalent writer is not the writer who can't decide whether or not he should write at all. Instead, he is the writer with far too many ideas and never completes (or sometimes even starts) any of them. My son soundly falls into this category. He has a number of really outstanding starts to a story, but to my knowledge, he's never actually completed an entire tale. I haven't finished reading the entire chapter, so it's probably premature to pass on any advice at this point, but one solid piece of advice is to choose one form (novel, memoir, non-fiction, etc.) and stick to it. While there are some famous exceptions (James Joyce is mentioned), there are very, very few writers who excel in more than one form. It's reasonable to argue that even if you have the talent to master more than one form, you probably shouldn't try to master them all at the same time. Choose one, stick with it, and truly master it, then if you really feel the drive to expand your horizons, go for the second form.

I'll be interested to see what advice she gives for finishing what you begin, though. I think my son could profit for that...

The Journal

I've been evaluating "The Journal" for Windows (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/), and so far I've been very impressed with it. Sufficiently impressed with it, in fact, that I went ahead and bought it before the 45-day trial is up. Just the ability to type up blog entries off-line (and have them spellchecked -- I can see all you readers breathing a sigh of relief) is worth the price of admission right there. I was also able to (relatively) easily copy the entire contents of this blog into the program's database so that I have it for reference off-line as well. I did figure out how to set up multiple journals, so I have my "personal" journal along with the one that contains my blog entries. Uploading the day's blog entry doesn't upload the personal entry, so that's a goodly thing.

In addition, though, the program also has a "loose-leaf notebook" that is perfect for storing the ideas that I come up with and log in the little notebook I carry around with me. Because I can organize them under headings, I've got a much easier time of finding things later. Overall, it's an excellent tool for writers, whether or not you decide to use the blog tools. The fact that it has strong encryption (and you can get even stronger security for an extra $10) is a big plus, too. While I don't really think there's anything so interesting in my personal journal that I would really care if it came out, still, a personal journal should be, well, personal. If you don't have that guarantee of privacy, you might not be as open with yourself as you would otherwise. And writers, of all people, need to be able to plum their very depths, as this is where the true emotion in print comes from.

My only complaint is that there isn't an automated way to give your blog posts a title. I'm trying using a Blogger API trick, but I'm afraid it won't work unless I upload the entry as plain text (losing all my italics and such). I'll continue to experiment. This has been a much-requested feature, and the author has acknowledged it's utility, so I think there's hope it will be included in a future release.

Spam

I hate spam.

Don't we all? Yeah, yeah I know, but the reason I hate spam is not the reason you may think. Up until recently (more on that in a sec) my spam filter has done a pretty good job of filing into a special folder the literally hundreds of spam messages a day that I get through email. At least once a day, I quickly scan through the folder, "unjunk" anything that isn't spam, and delete the entire contents of the folder in a couple of keystrokes. It's somewhat annoying that I should have to do this, but the process really isn't that bad. At the very least, it's much easier when I had no filter and check each message individually or risk deleting an important message by mistake.

The reason that spam just grates on my nerves to the point of insanity is that virtually every message insults me in some way. Yeah, I'm inundated with the "enlarge your manhood" message (more humorously, so is my wife), but what really offends me is that these people must think I'm a complete and total idiot. Do they really believe I would trust my mortgage to a company who can't even spell "refinance"? Do they really think I'm dumb enough to send my bank account info so that I can launder money for someone in Africa (or South America or Iraq or ...)? Or that I would buy medicine from someone who isn't educated enough to put together a complete sentence in English? Come on folks! In truth, I vastly prefer spam to telemarketers. After all, they haven't yet come up with a way I can simply delete the person on the other end of the phone line (yet -- though there is a very cool science fiction short story on just that subject). But to see the number of transparent scams and illiterate advertisements just saddens me. I like to believe that no one is dumb enough to respond to these things, but if that were really the case, companies wouldn't use them. Which means, of course, that there really are people dumb enough to respond to these things. Sigh. And I think what grates all the more is that as I understand it, a lot of these are written by people in our profession: freelance writers.

Lord, if ever I fall to that level, please just push me over and call me home. I'm already dead anyway.

At any rate, the number of spam messages getting through my filter is on the rise. And it's getting hard to find the non-spam messages that get accidentally filtered (messages for my students get routed there a lot). So, real soon now I'm going to have to change my email address again. That is a huge pain in the afterburners, and I deeply resent the spammers who are forcing me to do it. I guarded my current email pretty carefully, and for a long time no one but my friends knew of it -- so no spam. Somehow the word has gotten out, so it's time to start again. Ah well...

Self-Sabotage

My wife and I both have been substituting for another astronomy professor all week, so between us we've been teaching a double load. It's been exhausting, but the extra money will be appreciated. As a result, I haven't gotten much farther than the introduction to The Forest For the Trees at this point. One thing I found interesting, though, is that the author says that one of the main reasons she wrote the book is to provide advice to aspiring writers who are sabotaging their own careers. Now, while she does address how they might do that through their dealings with publishers and agents, what she's really talking about is how these authors sabotage themselves through neurotic writing habits that actually get in the way of writing. I think that's a worthwhile topic, since it's not something you really think about, and it's certainly not something I've seen anyone else write a book about. I'll be interested to see how she handles the topic. Do a significant number of writers have writing habits that kill their ability to write? Somehow I guess that possibility has never occurred to me, though (for that reason), I certainly might be susceptible. I'll be curious to see just exactly what habits she's seen as an editor...

Teaching

We are nearing the end of the first full week of classes that I've been teaching this semester. It looks like I've got a really good group in all four of my classes. The physics class I'm teaching is the first class I've taught for science/technical majors -- people for whom this is the first step towards their career goals (as opposed to the students who just need a science credit to graduate). Having a motivated student makes all the difference in the world. Some of the students in my astronomy classes have had the attitude, "I don't want to be here, so it's up to you to make me learn something. You're the teacher, after all." Unfortunately, short of brainwashing and torture, there's not much way to force anyone to do anything. I do my very best to make the course interesting, to show them why this is something they should want to learn, but ultimately, if the student isn't willing to put in the effort, then there is absolutely no way they are going to learn a thing. My physics students are all there because they're interested in the subject. As a result, even though they have roughly the same ability as my astronomy students, they will ultimately learn a lot more.

This speaks to one of the fallacies of the current system of "teacher accountability." The laws that hold teachers accountable for their students' learning are flawed from the outset. There's no way these teachers can force a child to learn. Either they have the support structure in their home and community that makes them want to learn or they don't. I see these schools with signs patting themselves on the back saying, "We are 'highly performing'" (the new top-level school rating), but all that really means is that the parents who make up their community value education and have instilled that into their kids. It really has very little to do with the school or with the teachers. Some parents blame the schools for "not making my kid learn" but seem to forget that the onus is really on the parent, not the school. Until we make that fundamental shift in thinking, no system of accountability has a chance of working. The current system is going to do nothing more than make the teacher shortage worse. Who would willingly volunteer to be abused like that?

Since I teach college, I'm not directly affected by these things, though. I find that when I'm teaching and the kids are responding (and I have a rather off the wall sense of humor in class), it's fun. I feel good about myself. I come home jazzed about how class went. I'm not sure I'd want to ever do it full time, but as a part time job, I have to say that it rocks. What more can you ask for?

Editors and Editing

I have begun (again, I was sidetracked by reading Talyn) reading The Forest For the Trees, a book written by an editor at Simon and Schuster with advice for writers. Interestingly, it's not a book about learning to write, as the author makes clear from the beginning. The book is more about how a good editor can motivate a writer to write as well as about the editorial process itself. So far, it's been fairly interesting, but I'll provide specific insights later on.

What I've found especially interesting is that apparently the woman who wrote the book has had much success as an editor at a major publishing house, but has not found success (nor has she really attempted to find success) as a writer. You would think that in order to recognize good writing -- or make good writing better -- you'd have to be a very skilled writer yourself. Yet, off hand, I can't really think of any big-name editor who is also a big-name writer. When you think about it, writing and editing are really two separate skills. Writing requires a great deal of creativity -- you are creating something from nothing, after all. Editing, on the other hand, requires the ability to see all the different ways in which a given piece could be presented, and choose the way that will make the piece the strongest it can be. The editor does not do anything original at any point in the process. She does, however, have to "see the forest for the trees." Editing is the art of seeing a multitude of paths simultaneously, something most writers never have to do. The author of this book discovered early in her career that she had the talent for making the writing of others better, so that's where she directed her career. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less.

Editors, then, are not magical demigods who are looking for people who can write as well as they can. I think in the back of my mind I've always thought of editors as "master writers," the next step up once you have proven that you have mastered the craft of writing. That's really a misconception. Editors have an entirely different skill set from writers, and recognizing that fact will go a long a way in improving your relationship with that breed!

Journaling Software

I'm trying out something new with this entry, a piece of journaling software for Windows called (appropriately enough) "The Journal." It's not free ($39.95), and it doesn't do much more than the freeware program "Advanced Diary" (which is itself not much more than Wordpad tied to a calendar program), but it does have a few features that make it attractive to a writer. First and foremost, of course, is the ability to publish entries to an online blog. I've had problems with Blogger running extremely slowly in my web browser lately, and the problem has been getting worse the more entries I've added to the blog. I don't really understand this, as there are blogs out there with far more entries than mine. I'm more inclined to point a finger at our cable company. More and more people in our neighborhood have signed up for Cox Cable, so there are more and more people sharing the same cable feed. For a while, we couldn't stay connected more than a few minutes at a time. The network would always come back up on its own, but for several seconds (to hours) it would simply drop out. While it's a bit better now, I think there may still be enough delays to be causing Blogger to have fits. I have been using Blogger for Word, sometimes writing the entry on my Alphasmart Neo and uploading later, but it's just not as well organized as I would like. The whole purpose of a journal (or a blog) is to organize your thoughts, so this is a rather serious drawback. If this software works out, I will be able to write entries offline and have the software upload them while I'm doing other things. It supposedly will also let you have entries that are not uploaded, which would be handy since not all of my thoughts are really worth reading by strangers. I think it only allows one entry per day, though, so -- because I generally post every day -- that doesn't help a whole lot. I'll have to check it out.

The demo version of this program is good for 45 days, so I'll make a decision after that. Advanced Diary, as I said, is free, so that is certainly a contender. It would just require me to cut and paste into a browser, though, which is a royal pain. We'll see if this works out better.

Talyn Complete

I finished reading Holly Lisle's Talyn a few minutes ago. It really is a great story, so my hat's off to Holly. Once it got going (and once I gave up trying to pronounce the foreign words "correctly") the story kept me involved and interested in the characters and the plot. Unlike a lot of fantasy stories, the goal was not to go on some long trek to recover the Sacred Amulet of Whatnot, it was more of an exploration of what happens when three cultures collide. I thought the final victory was just a little too straight-forward (I won't say easy -- the characters had a devil of a time getting to that point), but overall I didn't mind much. It just seemed like the book wound itself up a bit too quickly in the end. There wasn't anything wrong with the pace of the ending, it was just such a different pace from the rest of the book that it was a bit jarring. I did appreciate the irony of the heroes coming up with weapons to fight the villain, only to end up supplying the villain with those weapons for his own use. Very clever, and a very entertaining tale. I highly recommend it, even if you don't particularly care for fantasy. You won't be disappointed!

Phobias

My son had his debut performance today. He has been practicing a duet with our church's choir director for a couple of months now, and this morning was his first time to sing -- more or less by himself -- in front of an audience. He did a really good job! It was outstanding, the crowd was cheering, something that doesn't happen often in a church. He was very nervous, but came through it with flying colors.

Even more than a demonstration of my son's talent, though, it was a conquering of his fears. He gets stage fright in the extreme. Even as a small child, he never liked new situations or even anything even marginally outside of his comfort zone. That he was able to do this was a huge step for him. Everyone has phobias. Surprisingly enough, I have rather acute acrophobia. Yep, a pilot who's afraid of heights, go figure. In truth, heights themselves don't bother me, it's the insecure feeling that you might fall. If I'm in enclosed in an airplane, I have no problems at all. Standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon on an incredibly windy day (and there are a lot of those up there), was a different story entirely. I did it solely because I refuse to let my phobias get the better of me. As a character in a story I read once said, "There's no such thing as an irrational fear." Just because a fear may be illogical doesn't mean that you don't feel it just as strongly. The only real definition of courage that has any meaning is the ability to do something in spite of your fear. The soldier who knows no fear and charges bravely into battle isn't really showing courage. It doesn't frighten him, so it took no real effort for him to be able to do it. The guy who is scared witless and charges into battle anyway -- that's real courage!

The lesson here is that your protagonist doesn't have to be fearless. In fact, if he is truly fearless, then he can't be truly courageous. Give your characters bone-shaking fears and then put them in situations that forces them to confront those fears. Let them show their real courage!

Hardware and Software

Today my two-year-old daughter started wearing "big girl panties" for the first time in our continuing -- and largely unsuccessful -- efforts to potty train her. Physically, she's fully capable of being potty trained. This stubborn child can hold it for hours and will refuse to use the potty. The instant you put a diaper on her, she cuts loose. The hardware is in place and ready, but the software just isn't there yet.

Interestingly, the same thing happens with the developing human brain, and it's been fascinating to watch it happen with our daughter. Almost no one can remember anything before the age of two or three, and yet our memory systems are fully functional during that time. We easily remember things from twenty or more years ago, so why can't we remember being an infant or even a toddler? This was brought home to me when my daughter noticed a picture of her and her mother on the wall. This was one of the art nudes we did last year, and it's a picture of her breastfeeding with her mom. You could see she was puzzled by it, so I explained that she used to drink milk from her mother's breast. She gave me the most incredulous look I've ever seen on the face of a two year old. She was like, "No way, stop kidding, Dad." Even though it's been less than a year since she stopped breastfeeding, she has no memory of it whatsoever. It's like it didn't happen.

As it turns out, the memories are likely still there, but since she stopped breastfeeding, she's learned language. Her brain has changed to support the new paradigm, and it now literally can't access those memories that are stored in the old format. It's like trying to run an old Amiga program on a new Windows computer. The software is still there, but the hardware has changed to the point that it can no longer run it. It's amazing to see it happen in real time. What if we could build an "emulator" for those earlier memories? This would allow you to run your old stored memories and literally experience what it is like to be an infant. I can see a lot of potential for science fiction stories here. I might just write that one myself...

Classes Begin

Today ended the first week of college classes that I teach this semester. I'm teaching two physics and two astronomy classes this time, so it's going to keep me pretty busy. I think I've got a good group this semester. They were all awake and involved and seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. The problem with astronomy is that a lot of people take it thinking that it's an easy way to get the science credit they need to graduate. Astronomy is actually one of the more difficult classes you can take -- it's all applied physics, after all. This means that I tend to get a lot of students who would really rather skate than put in any effort. I'm a tough teacher, but by the end of my class most of them say they've never had a better one -- and never worked harder in a class. I count that a victory.

But today they were all laughing at my jokes, which is always a good sign. I got lots of nods of comprehension and the understanding checks that I did in class all seemed to show they were getting what I was saying. I don't need them to know anything about astronomy, or even science in general. What I do need is for them to be willing to put in the effort. Like writing, the only way to learn astronomy is to do astronomy. Learning is an active process. I hope people maybe learn something from my observations here, but you won't really learn it until you get out and try it for yourself. I know that's certainly been my experience on this journey!

The World Wide Web

What did we do for research before the Web came along? While it's (very) true that a non-trivial percentage of the information on the Web is complete bunk, even it's detractors can't deny the usefulness of being able to search for the information you need right from your desktop. My Civil Air Patrol squadron has a big inspection coming up in a couple of weeks and like an idiot, I volunteered to take over a position in the squadron that's been vacant for years. I needed to re-create a full set of training records on each member of the squadron. Normally that would mean calling CAP Headquarters on the phone, having someone track the relevant records down for me, mail them to me, and then I would frantically try to get everything typed up= and organized the day before the inspection.

Ah, but the CAP has joined the 21st Century and most of the personnel records are available on-line, if you have the proper authorizations -- and because of my new appointment, I do. The records aren't complete, and some entries don't make sense (such as the guy who qualified as a Misison Pilot -- the highest qualification -- before he qualified as a Pilot, the lowest qualification), but probably 70% of everything I need is there. I was able to cut and paste the info form the Web into a Word version of the training record (also downloaded form the national site). I'll email it out to each member of the squadron tomorrow and let them fill in what few blanks remain. If push comes to shove, though, what I have will match national's records, so we should pass that part of the inspection even with what I have now.

I distinctly remember teaching a course to a bunch of teachers that included use of the Internet -- FTP, Gopher, telnet, etc. There was this new thing called "Mosaic" (the term World Wide Web hadn't been invented yet), but it wasn't much more than a front end for FTP. There were very, very few sites. I told the group then that I wasn't impressed with it, and that I couldn't see it replacing the search tools like Gopher that we'd been using for years.

Called that one a bit wrong, didn't I? :)

First Draft

Today I finished the first complete draft of the educational curriculum I've been working on for the Phoenix mission to Mars that will launch in 2007. This draft came in at 21 pages, but it will probably go up a little once the graphic artist adds the illustrations and such. Still, it's a good-sized curriculum. It's designed to teach students the properties of soil that studied by both Earth-bound and Martian soil scientists, as well as what those properties mean for the possiblity of Mars regolith (the technical term for Mars dirt) to support life -- Martian or Earth-born.

I sent the draft off to the rest of the education department to start the process of getting comments. It will take several weeks of revisions before we get to a final product, but still, there's something about having that first draft complete and in your hand. In all the time I've been writing, that feeling hasn't really changed. It's very special, and it's actually one of the things I look forward to as I get closer to finishing the first draft. I can't wait to get there with the novel I'm working on!

It's these little milestones that keep us writing, I think. Cherish them!

eBook Reader

A while back I was bemoaning the fact that none of the eBook readers currently on the market are really viable options. They are too large, too heavy, too hard to read, too hard to hold, and just in general don't give the same experience as reading a book.

That may change very soon.

Sony will soon be introducing an eBook reader called (appropriately enough) the Sony Reader. You can find the details at http://products.sel.sony.com/pa/PRS/reader_features.html. What's impressive about this reader is the technology in the screen. There is literally no flicker because the screen is only written to once for each page. Black and white "beads" in the screen change state and require no current to keep them in that state. The result is that it literally prints a page for you on the screen. I read one report of a guy who picked up an early model and asked the demo technician when a working model would be out. The tech said, "That is a working model." The screen was apparently so paper-like, the guy thought that it was a mock-up.

The size is about right (6.9” by 4.9” by .5”), and I can't imagine it gets very hot since the screen is not actively redrawing. It only weighs about 9 ounces, which is very close to paperback weight as well. It can hold 80 books internally, but has a memory card slot that will hold more. Best of all, Sony has gotten rid of their elaborate copy protection scheme. The reader will view eBooks, HTML, PDF, and a few other formats as well. This may be it folks. I would very much like to carry my library around with me. This reader may actually make that possible...

Art

Since our daughter was a newborn, we have had a photo taken of her and my wife for my birthday. Now, these aren't portrait-type photos. What we wanted was artwork, the kind of art you might see in a gallery, we just wanted it to feature our family. It doesn't even have to show their faces, but we wanted to chronicle the growth of our family in art. We found a photographer who normally does landscape photography, but she agreed to do a photo shoot of us. She suggested that we do the pictures nude, so we figured, "why not?" Nudity has never been an issue around our house, so it wasn't a big deal. The photographer is really good. The picture we got from the first session were simply outstanding. Some of the best artwork I've ever seen; it's hard to believe it's us in the pictures.

This past year, however, she just didn't seem to get the magic shot. She works in large-format film and does effects in Photoshop, but she still needs the raw material to start with. Our daughter was good, but she wasn't quite as cooperative as when she was only a year old, so we had a harder time of it. I'm not really happy with what we were sent to look over, though I realize there is only so much she can do.

Sometimes writing is like that. Like all artists, we need the raw material to start with. If the raw material is good, we can use our art to turn it into something outstanding. That ability is what separates the craftsmen from the mere technicians. Virtually anyone can write a passable story. The concepts aren't all that difficult to master. But there is an intangible talent -- an art -- that can turn that same passable story into something inspires us, frightens us, uplifts us, or just makes us see the world in a slightly different way. This is what it means to be a writer. Sometimes our brains give us the raw material we need to start our craft. Sometimes they don't. This is why I think some stories work, while others just ... don't. Part of our maturity as writers comes from knowing when we've got something we can work with and when something just needs to be recycled for later. It's not something that can be taught, and it's something that changes as our skill changes. The master can work with more difficult clay than the apprentice, after all. Sometimes it's hard, though, to see what is worth shaping and what isn't. I think this is one of the most critical and difficult skills for an aspiring professional writer to develop, and yet I can't recall seeing it mentioned in any of the books I've read on the subject. But I can't really say that I blame them.

How do you teach that which is unteachable, after all?

Odds

As most readers of this blog know, I'm a pilot. Flying, however, is rather expensive right now, mostly because of rising gas and insurance costs. A new Cessna 172 will cost $140,000 -- about as much as our house cost (obviously, I don't live in California). While having our own plane would make it much easier for me for me to stay current (if you can stay in practice, don't fly at all) and would also make it easier to visit our friends in Los Angeles -- an easy two-hour flight away. Trips to Las Vegas for the day or night become a possiblity. Basically, having a plane is just like having a car, but it greatly expands the range of places you can visit as a day trip. But the thought of making essentially a second house payment -- not to mention the maintenance costs, tie-down fees, etc. -- is not something that is even close to being in the realm of the possible for someone who has just quit their job to become a full-time writer. If I had stayed at NASA we could have afforded a plane easily. That was something I thought about and was a conscious choice I made when I quit.

King Schools, however, offers another way. King, along with Sporty's Pilot Shop, is one of the best producers of flying curriculum around. They use a combination of video and computer software along with flights with your local instructor to take you all the way through the training. It's a good system. Every two years they get a new plane to use for filming their instructional videos. The old one is then raffled off. Everytime you buy something from King Schools, you get one entry into the contest. The published odds of winning are about 200,000 to 1, which is better than lottery odds, but not much better.

Ah, but every contest is required to have a "no purchase necessary" option. For King, all you have to do is send a postcard with your name, address, and e-mail. You're limited to one entry, per person, per day. So, my wife and I have each sent a postcard every day for the last year and a bit more (we missed maybe 10 days in that time). To work in round figures, that means that we sent a total of about 700 postcards! I did buy quite a few things from King Schools, but since you only get one entry per day, those didn't help us. If you assume no one else had this idea (which is unlikely, but who knows), then the odds of winning have improved to about 285 to 1. Still door prize odds, but way better than lottery odds. The investment was just a 23-cent stamp and a penny's worth of paper and ink per card, or about $170 over a year or so. Since the aircraft they are giving away is worth $140,000, that represents a 82,300% return on the investment -- if we win. The drawing is today, which is why it's on my mind. We won't know who won for a couple of weeks regardless, though.

The key here is to compare the potential return on the investment with the odds of getting that return. If you spent $100 on lottery tickets, your potential return (assuming you win $10 million), is a million percent. Your odds of winning, however, are only about 1 in 2 million (at best). Even though the return is huge, the odds of obtaining that return dwarf it -- it's not worth the money. Buying only a single lottery ticket increases your potential return by a factor of a hundred, but the odds similarly get worse by a factor of a hundred -- you can't win. This, in a nutshell is why I don't play the lottery.

What does this have to do with science fiction? Just this: The amount of money we spend on the space program is miniscule compared to essentially anything else in the budget. You could give all of the space program's budget to social services, and they wouldn't evne know the money was there. You can't solve the world's problems by gutting the space program. There are no guarantees that the space program will produce new technologies that will pay dividends in the long run -- but the odds aren't bad. What you (and our lawmakers) need to ask yourself is this: Does the potential return on the investment exceed the odds of getting that investment. The space program currently gets about 0.75% of the federal budget. With technologies form the space program we have medical imaging, the laptop computer I'm writing this on, weather satellites, safer aircraft, and a host of other things. It's not just Tang and Velcro. It really bugs me when people say, "What has the space program ever done for me?" -- as they are chatting on their PCS cell phone.

It's a small investment with a huge potential return -- and good odds of getting that return. Show me a missile system or a bomber program that can say the same thing.

Beginnings

I started Talyn last night, and so far I'm enjoying the book. It hasn't totally drawn me in quite yet, but I think that's mostly because I'm as yet unfamiliar with the world of the story, so I'm still trying to figure out how everything ticks. I'm not that far into it, so it's understandable. It does, however, highlight one of the biggest problems faced by those who want to tell a science fiction or fantasy story. With mainstream fiction, the only real question the reader asks when picking up the book is, "Why should I care?" The reader wants to know why this character and this set of conflicts is important. The wise author will answer those particular questions right away. On the other hand, the first question a science fiction or fantasy reader will ask is, "Where am I?" Particularly in fantasy, while there are rules (or, at least, there had better be...), the reader knows that he can't take any rules for granted until they are laid out in the story.

So, while you've probably heard that your opening has to grab the reader's attention, in genre fiction it has to do much, much more. The challenge of writing a good opening for a genre novel is the challenge of getting your reader oriented and at least headed off in the right direction without driving him to close the book in frustration or boredom. It's no easy task.

So far, Holly Lisle has done an okay job with it. I think that her use of an invented language -- particularly when she includes a pronunciation guide in the beginning of the book -- is a big mistake. I've posted earlier about made-up languages, so I won't repeat that here. In this case, however, I think the pronunciation guide works against her. Instead of just pronouncing the words the way they seem to be spelled and moving on with the story, I find myself constantly breaking out of the narrative to figure out how a particular word is "supposed" to be pronounced. Unless there is a key plot reason why a mispronunciation might drive events, why risk dragging your reader out of the story? Inventing languages is fun and cool, but we're writers not linguists. If it doesn't drive the tale, it shouldn't be there. That said, Holly's writing itself is excellent as always, so there's no danger of my dropping the book. I like the protagonist already, and I'm curious to learn more about her. That's always a good sign!

Talyn

I finally managed to get a copy of Holly Lisle's Talyn. This book is devilishly hard to get! I imagine that's very good news for Holly. I'm very anxious to read it. As those who have been following this blog will recall, Holly feels this is her best work yet, and manages to get both well-developed characters and a well-developed plot in the same story (some of her earlier books excelled in one or the other, but not both, in my opinion). I don't know anything about the story, really, other than the fact that it is fantasy. That's okay with me, though. I don't generally get into fantasy, so I don't want to bias my reading of it. Not that I have anything against fantasy, it's just too many of them rely on the plot device of the Foolish Villain who puts all his power into a single artifact (which he then loses), or the Quest for the Item of Something or Another that must be found to save the world as we know it. About the only original fantasy storyline I've seen is Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern series. But I've got high hopes for this book. I've got a lot of respect for Holly as a writer, so I don't really think she'll let me down. On the other hand, as I commented to my son the other day, the one disadvantage of being a writer is that you can no longer read books just to read them -- you're always trying to figure out how they pulled off a particular effect! :)

Sci-Fi Channel

For those that didn't know, Battlestar: Galactica started it's third season this week. This is a great show, and not just because it shares elements from one of my favorite shows as a teenager. In fact, other than the superficial elements (names, the overall situation), the show really bears very little resemblance to the original series. That's okay though -- the show stands on it's own merits. And it really is one of the best pure science ficition shows I've seen on TV in a long time.

Which means, of course, that Sci-Fi Channel will probably kill it. Farscape was also a great show, and one could argue that it put Sci-Fi Channel on the map. Since getting bought out, though, the new owners of the channel seem to be systematically eliminating all traces of science fiction from the lineup and replacing it with (for the most part) horror shows. I don't know if that is an inherent bias of the owners or what, but until BG started up, I had pretty much boycotted the channel. Like Farscape, Battlestar: Galactica has been phenomenally popular, much more popular than the pundits predicted. Maybe, just maybe, this will be a signal to Sci-Fi Channel that Americans are ready for more science fiction on television. One can only hope.

It's gotta be better than the crap that reality shows have become, but don't get me started on that...

Experts Teaching Novices

As part of the research I'm doing for my Ph.D. dissertation, I'm reading some research on training methods intended to bring about long-term retention of skills and transfer of those skills into new contexts. It turns out that some of the training techniques that give you high marks during the training will cause you to forget your training more quickly later. The converse is also true: When techniques that have been shown to improve long-term retention are used during training, the trainees actually perform more poorly while the training is taking place. The research also shows that intensive programs are much more likely to lead to loss of skill than programs that spread the same training over a longer period of time (but you knew that, didn't you?).

There were some other interesting findings, but one of the things that struck me was the section on expert modeling of a skill. The idea is that the expert shows the novice how to perform the task (be it repairing a computer or finding the roots of an equation), and the novice is supposed to learn from this demonstration. The problem is that almost by definition, most experts have internalized the task to the point that they aren't consciously aware of all of their thought processes while they are performing it. As such, they can't convey all the procedures needed to do the task to the novice. This is the root of the observation that many college instructors are very good at what they do, but they can't teach it worth a darn.

Teaching is an art, quite apart from knowledge of the content area. In order to teach, you have to not only understand your own thought processes, you have to create a mental model of your own thought that can be transferred to the student. You also have to keep a model of your estimation of the student's understanding in your head as well. Finally, you have to come up with an efficient way of modifying (or helping the student to modify) the student's mental model until it matches your own. No easy task! I'm amazed they let college professors even try it without explicit training in education...

Hard-Workin' Teen

Tonight was my son's first night to work at Wendy's, so -- naturally -- my wife and daughter and I decided to go have dinner there so we could harass him. I have to tell you, this turned out to be one of those turning points in a parent's life that sort of sneaks up on you and surprises the heck of you. It was his first day on the job, and had a pretty stern trainer. She wasn't taking any nonsense, and my son was scrambling -- really scrambling -- to learn, understand, and perform under pressure for I believe the first time in his life.

And he was working hard to do it.

You spend 16 or 17 years hoping you can teach your kids the attitudes and life skills they will need to succeed. But deep down, every parent is terrified that the child hasn't learned it. You never know how they'll do until they do it for real -- and by that time, it's too late to change much. Seeing him working hard and really trying to do well was like passing the midterm exam for parenting. I am inordinately proud of my boy, let me tell you. I was grinning from the time we walked in until now. If I do half as well with our daughter, she'll be in pretty good shape.

If our kids are warped, at least theyre warped in our own image!

S-U-C-K-E-R

... according to my wife, that's what I have tatooed on my forehead. :)

We had a Civil Air Patrol squadron meeting tonight, the only meeting I'll get to attend this semester (I'll be teaching physics on Monday nights starting week). We have our "subordinate unit inspection" on 4 February, so tonight was spent planning what we needed to do to get ready for it. We've just had a change of command and there are a lot of new people in the squadron, so things are a bit chaotic. We haven't had all the staff positions filled, so a lot of them got assigned last night. I'm already the communications officer, the information services officer, and assistant emergency services officer. They needed someone to serve as personnel development officer as well. I'm fairly new in the squadron, and since we didn't have a PDO, I'm not shy about digging until I find out what I need to know myself. As a result, I'm pretty much the only one in the squadron who knows the regs on the various qualifications. So, I'm a sucker. I took on the job.

Now I have to figure out where everyone's personnel records are and get the organized up to standards. And then I'll stand inspection by the Arizona Wing inspector general in just three weeks!

Some day I'm going to learn to keep my mouth shut... :)

Magazine Formats

What's your preference for reading fiction magazines? Two-column text or single column text? "Digest" (5" x 7") or "glossy" ("8" x 10")? E-book or print? Lately I've been reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I have to say, I really love its format. I find it's a joy to read (completely apart from the content). I don't really like the large-format magazines because they aren't easily transported. I can fold it in half and stick it in my back pocket, but it's still long enough that it pokes me when I sit down. It also gets in pretty bad shape pretty quickly. I would dearly like for e-books to work, but so far I haven't seen a reader I could live with. An e-book reader can't weigh any more than a paperback book, but needs to have a screen that is as easily read and contains the same number of characters per page as a paperback (at least). It also can't get hot, needs to be comfortable to hold, and the batteries have to last a long time. In short, it has to be a paperback book that can hold thousands of stories. We're getting closer, but we aren't there yet.

So I like the digest format, but it wasn't until I picked up Fantasy and Science Fiction recently that I realized how much I prefer the single-column format. The problem with Asimov's and Analog (apart form the fact that they are longer) is that you can't fit even close to a full phrase on a single two-column line. I am a very visual person. Part of the reading experience for me is the white space on the page -- I actually use it in my own stories to help tell the tale. With two-column text, you simply don't have that luxury. The stories are just as enjoyable, of course, but the overall reading experience is just slightly better with F&SF.

So, if you'll excuse me, I've got a magazine to curl up with...

Starship Design

I've been working on the deck plans for the various spacecraft that will appear in my novel. As I've mentioned before, I think a scene comes across as much more realistic when you have all the details down on paper in the form of a map (for figuring out travel times, etc.). The ship I'm currently working on is streamlined so that it could enter an atmosphere, although it never does. In this, it is very much like most of the ships we see in science fiction.

And why is that? What is the need for humans to create streamlined, aesthetically-pleasing spacecraft? They aren't airplanes, after all. Unless you plan to enter an atmosphere -- and darn few planets have a thick enough atmosphere to worry about -- there's no inherent reason to build an interplanetary or interstellar ship to be streamlined. NASA certainly doesn't. I can think of only one good reason, and it's the reason I'm using for justification -- but even I admit it's a little weak. This particular ship requires a crew of four, but is currently being crewed by a single individual. It's important to the story that this person be an isolated, rugged individualist. I see him cutting profit margins to the bone, always staying out in the "Big Black" as long as he can. For that reason, it's conceivable he'd rig his ship to be able to skim hydrogen from a gas giant. The hydrogen could be made into a fusion fuel with some effort. In this way he gets essentially free refueling -- and he doesn't have to come back to civilization as often.

I may or may not actually mention the hydrogen skimming in the book, but because the plot requires that he stay out by himself for long periods of time, I need a plausible means for him to do so. By designing the ship in this way, i've figured out how he can do just that. As I said, it's a bit weak (the easiest fusion requires helium-3, which is going to be a vanishingly small percentage of any hydrogen he scoops -- but who says he's using the easiest variety?), but it serves for my purposes. As Loren Wiseman once said, "I don't have to build it, I just have to decribe it."

Amen!

Entering the World of Work

My son got his first "real" job today (at Wendy's, like a lot of teenagers). I'm really proud of him. He's been putting off getting a job for a long time, even though most of his friends work (he will be 17 in February). To a certain extent, I can see where he's coming from. Once you start working, you'll never have another summer to sit around and do (essentially) nothing again. I distinctly remember that sensation when I got my first job. On the other hand, I also don't think he really understands just how much money he's going to be making with this job. He's never had an allowance. I've always felt that the world isn't going to give you anything for free, so there's no reason not to start teaching basic economics early. He's always had the opportunity to earn money by working around the house, babysitting his little sister, etc. I realize that many people who give their kids allowances also require them to do chores, or else they lose their allowance. While that may work out to be the same thing monitarily, the association of work=money isn't quite as strong. So far he's been happy with the piddling he makes from us, so he hasn't really wanted to get a job.

Ah, but college is coming soon, and we won't be paying for it. As a college teacher myself (and my wife agrees with this observation), it's always very obvious who has parents paying for their school. The kids don't show up for class and really don't care if they fail it -- after all, they can always take the class again. On the other hand, when it is your money that is going down the toilet, that $300 per class starts to really mean something. i don't know many 18-22 year olds who are willing to simply flush that kind of money away -- if it is their own. Same thing with driving. My son has to pay for his own car insurance and gas -- that's part of the cost of operating a vehicle. He hasn't had a job to pay for it, so he hasn't driven since getting his license. I think it's odd that it wasn't a bigger motivator, but hopefully the lesson will pay off when he learns how convenient it is to be able to drive yourself places.

Wendy's isn't the world's greatest place to work, but it's a good start for a teen. He's done a good job!

Search's End

Well, the long Civil Air Patrol search and rescue operation is over. We found the aircraft late yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, the pilot didn't survive. It looked like he was following a GPS course and thought he was descending into a valley, but was actually about a mile or so off course. Sadly, this meant he descended right into the mountains. GPS is pretty darn accurate, but at 10,000 feet it's not 100% accurate. Considering the fact that he probably wasn't exactly on the center line of his course, a mile's error isn't unreasonable. But descending into an unlit and unfamiliar valley at night isn't very smart. Without lights, the mountains are absolutely invisible. There are no cities in that area to give you a reference, either. The lesson to be learned -- and I can see a good science fiction story written around this -- is that too much faith in technology can fatal. The pilot trusted the GPS display to keep him out of trouble, but he didn't really understand that no technology is 100% accurate or reliable. And it cost him dearly.

All in all, the Civil Air Patrol flew 14 aircraft on 26 sorties (searches), for a total of nearly 80 hours of flight time. 86 people were involved in the search. The search cost about $10,000. If we had found the pilot alive, there's no question it would have been worth every penny, and even now it's probably worth it to provide closure for the family. Still, a lot of people don't realize what goes into saving a single person -- or the fact that none of the crews get paid to do it. We're all volunteers and wouldn't have it any other way. Nevertheless, one always wishes search and rescue was never necessary...

Sigh.

Character Sketches

A while back I mentioned that I was going to use Poser, a 3D figure modeling program, to create pictures of all of the main characters in my novel. I really think that seeing your character's face goes a long way towards visualizing her in your mind. Of course, you have a pre-existing (though likely incomplete) mental picture to begin with, so part of the process is making the photo match your image while still giving you new information. I like to think of it as bringing her out of the shadows.

I tried a number of different possiblities, but none of them really seemed "right." Oddly enough, I accidentally applied a wrong morph to the figure, and all of the sudden it hit me: That's her! I recognized her right away. It was totally shocking. I'm not sure I could duplicate what led to the character, but the beauty of computers is that I don't have to -- I just saved the file. For the curious, I've attached a couple of renders below. The protagonist is a late-teen miner who eventually becomes a revolutionary leader. I think her face is one that shows her as-yet unrealized potential, while still maintaining her natural innocence. I'm pleased!

Two for Two

It just occurred to me that today is the day the latest issue of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society comes out, so I dashed over there to check out the latest issue -- hoping, of course, to see my name as one of the authors.

Much rejoicing! They bought another of my articles!

They are printing it in two parts, so the next half will come out in two weeks, but I'm more than okay with that. This was the scond article I sent them, so I'm batting a thousand so far -- two for two! Woo-hoo!

Neeedless to say, I'm psyched. I'm definitely starting to think I've got a shot at success here. Admittedly, these are non-fiction articles, and I've been writing non-fiction for years now. Fiction is a whole 'nother ballgame, and that's what I really want to break into. On the other hand, pick up any copy of The Writer or Writer's Digest and well over half the articles are about non-ficiton authors. I don't really feel non-fiction is inferior to fiction, nor do I think it's necessarily easier to write (or sell). But I've been doing non-fiction for a long time, so the real challenge for me is in fiction writing. Nevertheless, as I've mentioned in previous posts, freelance non-ficiton is a different beast from the non-ficiton I was writing as salaried work. As I said then, with freelancing your skill as a writer is evaluated on every single piece -- there are no chances to say, "Well, it wasn't my best work, but it was okay." Having "passed" two of those evaluations in a row -- and my first two attempts, at that -- is something to get excited about, I think.

Cheers!

Real Life: Search and Rescue

I got a call this morning from my Civil Air Patrol squadron's operations officer. A plane was due to arrive in at one of the outlying Phoenix airports on New Year's Eve, but he never arrived. We launched about 8:00 this morning to join the search operations. The pilot had called his friend in Phoenix on his cell phone about 8:00 PM, and disappeared from radar shortly thereafter. One of our CAP planes flew the route, and he also disappeared from radar about the same time, so likely what happened was the plane simply fell in the radar shadow of the mountains (and this is extremely rugged country). The pilot of the missing plane had reported strong headwinds and was descending. Now, he was a "low-time pilot," which is a nice way of saying he was a rookie. The odds are he was not very familiar with Arizona's mountain country ("Isn't it all desert?") -- even experienced pilots don't fly through there at night. There are no lights to give you a horizon, and it is very easy to simply fly into a mountain -- they are virtually invisible in the dark. Few people in our modern age appreciate just how dark it gets without city lights everywhere. No emergency locator transmitter signal was detected, so either a) the batteries on the ELT were dead (unlikely, but possible), or b) he hit so hard that the impact destroyed the ELT along with the plane (which happens). If the latter, then what we are looking for is a body to give closure to his family. Still, people have survived stranger things, and we don't know that was what happened, so there's still hope.

I flew two very long, very grueling missions. Search and rescue is not as simple as watching out the window while you fly. It's actually very difficult to force yourself to focus your attention on specific areas on the ground (I use a four-spot, four-second repeating pattern). There were a lot of forests and gullies that could hide an airplane, and we were about 1000 feet above the ground. If your attention wanders, you could overlook a huge area without even realizing it. It's exhausting to maintain that level of concentration for four solid hours, all the while you're bouncing up and down from the turbulence that always occurs in the mountains.

If I saw an area that looked suspicious, we'd circle around it until we could identify it. There were a number of those, but none of them panned out. Still, it was better to be sure than to get home and wonder if maybe you missed something. And that's the real dichotomy here. You know that the odds of the polane being in your grid are low. You know that the odds of your finding him even if he is there are even lower. Yet if you let your mind wander from the task at hand, someone may literally die. You know that at the end of the day, you're probably going to go home tired and frustrated and worried. The guy's chance of survival goes down with each hour he is missing. There's a huge sense of responsibility when you are workingn as emergency services personnel.

And, of course, you want to be the one to find him. Who wouldn't want to be the hero? You don't want to let ego get in the way of the important thing -- finding the pilot -- so you're constantly at war with your already-frayed emotions: I want the other crews to find him quickly, but I want to find him first. Given your already stressed psychological state, it can be an issue that's difficult to put aside.

I'm home now and I'm exhausted. I have 24 hours of crew rest before I can be called up again, and that's a good thing. You must be fresh and sharp to do this job, because your effectiveness goes down as your fatigue goes up. You owe it to the guy to have the best crews in the air. They may call off the search by Wednesday, but I hope they find him tomorrow.

Sometimes we never find them.

2006!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!!!

Here's wishing you and yours a fun, safe, healthy, and prosperous new year. May 2006 outshine the best of years past!

The End of the Year

Tonight is, obviously, New Year's Eve, so it's customary to reflect back on the year that's now past. 2005 has been a very ... interesting ... year for me and my family. We rang in the New Year at my parents' house last year and almost as soon as we got back to Arizona, I began the final two flights to prepare for my private pilot license flight test. I took the test on the 5th of January and checked off one of my major life goals. Huzzah!

In February, my son turned 16 which is a milestone even for boys. He got his driver's license, and I grew about a dozen new grey hairs. Most of all, though, it dramatically pointed out that my little boy is well on his way to being a man. It's both a scary and proud time for a parent, let me tell you.

In March, my daughter turned two. Over the past year I've watched her grow from "baby" to "little girl." The transformation has been amazing. She is literally not the same person she was at the beginning of the year. Her language development has skyrocketed. She speaks in complete sentences, can carry on a good conversation with an adult, and can even recognize the first dozen or so letters of the alphabet. She can also spell her name, a fact she is inordinately proud of. What I find interesting is that because her "hardware" has changed, it is now incompatible with the early version of her "software." She no longer has access to her memories of being a baby or even a young toddler. A year ago she was still breastfeeding, but when she saw a picture of her nursing, the idea of drinking milk from Mommy's breast was completely foreign to her -- and yet a year ago she would even ask for it. It's amazing to watch the child and the child's personality bloom. I don't regret not going to Clarion this year. I can't imagine having missed the huge changes in my little girl.

In May, I decided it was time for me to make a major life change and leave NASA. I wasn't terribly happy at work (for reasons I won't go into), and at that point I was finally convinced that not only were things not going to change on their own, there was also nothing I could do to change them. I got the "Sunday night dreads" and knew it was time to move on. At the same time, I realized that my real overriding life goal was to be a science fiction author. I knew I could write -- I've had professionals tell me so -- and I had gotten a lot of practice refining my craft through writing educational curricula. The smart thing would have been to stay with NASA until I was firmly established in my writing career. But about this same time, my wife was offered a full-time position as a professor at the community college near here. This was her dream job, and it also meant that she would be making almost as much money as I did at NASA. We talked it over and decided that happiness with life was more important than having lots of money (and if we had remained a two-income family, we'd have been doing quite well). At that point, I set into motion the plans that would lead to my taking up my dream career myself. While we did have two incomes, I worked on paying down all of our debts (our home equity loan is the only one we have left, and we cut it in half) so that we could be financially secure ove rhte next year. I still get my military retirement pay, of course, and while we couldn't live on that, it does make a huge difference. Overall, we've been doing okay, even though working at home full time for the first time in my life still feels a little strange.

Over the summer, of course, I started this blog. :)

In August we sent the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter on its way to Mars, and it was fabulous being a V.I.P. at the launch. It was bittersweet because I knew this would be the last time I would get any "special treatment" from NASA. After this I would become just another member of the interested public. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars early this year, so there is still excitement to come. It's too bad I'll just be tracking it through Space.com. Still, no regrets there.

In September I finally left my job at NASA and struck out on my own. I'm still working half-time for them until February (when this last project is due), as well as working on my Ph.D. The end result of that is that I haven't spent all day, every day writing fiction and articles as I had hoped, but that time will come in just a couple of months. Even so, I've already managed to sell a couple of articles as well as sent out some short stories to make the rounds. Most importantly, I've made significant progress on my first novel, so that's a major thing as well.


So now as we roll into 2006, it's been an eventful year, but there promises to be even more excitement in the year ahead. Part of me has this paranoid fear that it's all going to come crashing down this spring. I've never had as few safety nets as I do right now (but I've got some even now). A bigger part of me, though, is glad that I've finally taken steps on the adventure that I now realize I've always dreamed about. I'm happier than I've been in a long time, and that's no small thing.

Here's to 2006!

Spin Gravity

One of the recurring problems of science fiction is how to create artificial gravity for our characters. In novels it's not such a big deal -- it's easy to write scenes showing they are in freefall the whole time. Movies have more problems, as freefall is very difficult to recreate convincingly on Earth (Tom Hanks actually took his entire crew up on the "Vomit Comet" to film parts of Apollo 13). Aside from that, we know that there are physical problems associated with long-duration exposure to freefall, so some kind of artificial gravity makes a lot of sense.

The easiest way (and only way, that we know of) to achieve this is by spinning the spacecraft or habitat on its axis. Centripetal acceleration will cause objects to be attracted to the outside of the spin (that is, radially, or perpendicular ot the spin axis). The amount of acceleration you get depends upon the radius of the rotation and the speed of the spin, specifically:

a = omega^2 * r

where omega is the rotation rate in radians/second (there are 2 * PI radians in one rotation) and r is the radius of spin in meters. The acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/sec^2, so, for example, a 21-meter radius and 5 revolutions per minute spin (2 * PI radians per 60 sec) yields a centripetal acceleration of approximately 0.6 g. If you want higher "gravity" either increase the spin rate or increase the size of your spin radius. As you move inward radially, the "gravity" decreases to the point where it is zero in the exact center.

But, alas, it's not quite that simple. There are two effects that we have to be concerned about. First of all, we cannot have a gravity gradient that is too large. Simply put, we can't have our crew feel significantly less gravity at their feet than they do at their heads. Not only is this physically disorienting, dropped objects would not only accelerate as they fall, the rate of acceleration would increase as well. Our reflexes are tuned to a constant force of gravity, so learning to deal with things in this environment would be difficult in the extreme. The formula for the gravity gradient is:

DeltaW / W = (Rb - Ra) / Rb

where DeltaW is the change in apparent weight, W is the weight, Ra is the initial radius, and Rb is the final radius. In practice, DeltaW needs to be less than 20% or so. All this means is that your habitat must be greater than about 7.5 m in radius. So, rotating your little Apollo capsule is not going to help you very much.

A much more serious problem is the Coriolis force. This force is felt by any object moving linearly (in a straight line) in a rotating system. If you've ever tried to walk straight on a rotating merry-go-round, then you've felt Coriolis force for yourself. The force also affects the fluid in the semicircular canals of the ear. This is why when you are rotating and turn your head rapidly, you become disoriented to the point of nausea. The magnitude of the force is given by:

F = 2 * omega *v

where v is the linear velocity of the moving object. So, the more slowly you move, the less Coriolis force you feel. Similarly, the slower your habitat rotates, the less force you feel. Since we have established that "gravity" depends upon both rotation rate and radius, and since we now know that rotation rate must be kept as slow as possible, this means we need to make our habitat radius as large as possible. Studies have shown that most people can adapt with minor difficulty to a rotation rate of 2 rpm, and almost no one experiences symptoms at 1 rpm or less. So, if we choose a fixed rotation rate of 1 rpm (omega = 0.105 rad/sec, omega^2 = 0.011 rad^2/sec^2), then the gravity we get is determined solely by the radius of the habitat. In order to get an artifical gravity of 1 g, we need a habitat 894 meters in radius. Basically, the ship is 18 football fields across! Needless to say, we can't build anything this huge anytime soon. If we can live with Martian gravity (0.3 g), however, we can get by with a third of this, or 268 meters in radius. That's still a really huge ship, but it's getting into the realm of reasonable. As a benchmark, a 100-meter radius habitat will produce about 0.11 g.

There are some other strange effects in a rotating habitat that could be put to good use in a story. If you are moving, the direction of your motion changes the gravity you feel:

• Moving outward forces you against the direction of rotation
• Moving inward forces you along the direction of rotation
• Moving in the same direction as the rotation increases the effective gravity you feel
• Moving against the rotation reduces the effective gravity you feel

So, by simply running in the direction of the spin, you get heavier! Run in the opposite direction and you get lighter! Pretty cool... A native could use these forces very effectively against an attacker who wasn't conditioned for them - a definite cool use of science that can drive a science fiction story.

Languages

I was thinking about dialogue today, and that led me to thinking about the languages our characters speak. Now, of course, not everyone in your story is going to speak English as their primary language -- in fact, in a fantasy story, it's highly unlikely that anyone will be speaking English! On the other hand, your reader likely isn't fluent in Elvish (although Klingon is becoming more and more popular). How do we resolve this? Most writers simply ignore the issue, and that's fine in general. For myself, I take the "Farscape approach." In the SciFi Channel series Farscape all of the aliens speak their own languages -- none of which are English. The Earth-born protagonist wonders aloud, "Why are you all speaking English?" To which one of the aliens responds, "We're not. You're hearing English." Each of them has "translator microbes" that translate speech into the host's native tongue. It works, even if the microbes are a little cheesy. When everyone in your story is speaking the same language, it's easy enough to just say, "You're hearing English; they aren't speaking it." Star Wars does this -- have you ever noticed that all of the text in the movie is an alien script? Many fantasy writers, however, like to add "foreign" (invented) words to their tales, particularly names for things. This violates self-consistency in many (if not most) cases. If the characters are all speaking Elvish (or whatever) but the reader is simply hearing it as English, then there should be no Elvish words at all in the book. I don't care how cool it looks or how "other worldly" it makes your book read -- it doesn't make sense. Same thing for alien cultures in science fiction. Don't make them speak broken English unless they aren't fluent in their own language (which is unlikely).

On the other hand, if some characters speak one language and some speak another, then you're justified in using words from the other language in your story. In this case, we learn the "new" language right along with the characters. This can be fun, and also it can also convey a sense of what it's like to meet an alien culture. More importantly, it's self-consistent. This, I think is what bothers me most about many fantasy stories (other than the fact that so many of them are "Quest for the Item" stories): They don't follow their own rules. Fantasy authors need to think even more carefully about rules than "realistic" authors. Since the writer makes the rules, he has to think through all their ramifications -- and some of them aren't immediately obvious! Nevertheless, those ramifications can add layers to your tale that will make it much more powerful in the long run.

Vanity Anthologies

A while back my son posted a portion of a short story to a website that allows comments and critiques (theoretically, though I've never actually seen it happen). A few days ago, he was contacted by the representative of a company saying they had noticed his writing (it is good), and they were putting together an anthology of short stories by new writers. Would he be interested in submitting a 1000-word story?

My son responded asking for more information, and received an email back from one of the two (!) guys who run the company. From their response and the impersonality of the original email (which he showed me today), it's obvious that they simply spammed everyone on this website. I went to the company's website and read the information there. The "company" is really just a vanity press. Although they aren't charging authors to include their stories in the "anthology," they are up-front about the fact that they don't expect to sell copies to anyone but friends and family of the author.* A lot of their statements show that they are somewhat ignorant about the publishing world, though. They say they formed their company when one of the partners was unable to get his book published due to "getting the run-around" from publishers. I've never known a publisher to turn down a good story -- for any reason. Odds are the book simply wasn't any good. That's why people use vanity publishers anyway. But they also talk about how the "author gets to keep the copyright" -- duh, you never sign away the copyright; you just license someone the right to publish your work. They also say they will shop the book of short stories to agents to see if there are any authors the agents are interested in. Sorry, agents decide if they are interested by looking at submitted work -- and they almost never deal in short stories.

The bottom line is this: writers get paid to write. If all you want is a bound book with your name on it, by all means, find a print-on-demand service and print a few copies of your masterpiece. It's definitely cool to see your name on the cover of a book. But don't pretend that it means you're published. These guys aren't trying to scam people, I don't think -- they don't make any money at all if you don't buy the book -- but I do think they are misrepresenting themselves as a "publishing company." Even on their FAQ they mention that the two guys met in business school. This definitely sounds like a project cooked up in a classroom. The idea of a "vanity anthology" is a bit of a twist on the old theme, but it doesn't change the tune. Vanity presses are not evil (generally), in spite of what you may have heard. But you do need to always keep in mind exactly what you are buying -- and you are buying your book, not some reader. It's just as important for a writer to learn the business of publishing as the mechanics of creation. Sometimes it's easy to forget that not every young writer knows how things work. My son was flattered to be asked to contribute to this book. I think he's starting to realize that everyone was asked to contribute -- they didn't even know his name. For that feeling of disappointment, I'm pretty pissed off at this company. They may not be misrepresenting themselves in a legal sense, but to an inexperienced writer they certainly are.



*In this way it's very much like the "Who's Who Among American High School Students" book my parents were suckered into buying when I was in high school -- anyone can get in and the only real "honor" is seeing your name and picture in print. You still had to buy the book to do it, something none but those inside would do.

Ship Designs

(First off, we've been drinking apple martinis made by our friend who is staying with us, so apologies in advance for typos...)

I've just finished the deck plans for the ship that features prominently in the novel I'm working on. I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. As I've mentioned before, it really helps me to have maps of the area I'm writing about -- seeing the layout not only helps with descriptions, it also helps with practical things like getting how long it take to get from point A to point B. In this particular case, for example, I'v edecided that the cargo hold -- wher ethe protagonist will stow away -- is unpressurized. That should lead to a very nice tense scene as she has to decide whether to give herself up (and risk being spaced) or run out of air in her suit (which would accomplish the same thing). It's the little details that lead to huge conflicts.

In keeping with my business model, however, I've also made sure that the deck plans follow the format and rules of the gaming magazine I've been writing for. I'm hoping I can use these deck plans as the basis for an article I will write. I'm also probably going to make a 3D Poser model of the ship, which I can also likely sell. I think that's a big part of writing in addition to just putting words on paper -- figure out how many different ways you can sell your work.

Have you sold any of your development work lately?

Creativity Boosters?

What gets your creative engine in gear? I know a lot of people who have to have music in the background before they can do anything, be it write or study. I've never understood that. If I'm listening to music, how can I focus on the task at hand? If I have music in the background, I'll just end up procrastinating, not getting any useful work done. I might could see instrumental music turned down low -- it's the words that I think would distract me. Now, except for songs I've known well for a long time, I can't actually understand the words to most songs, so maybe straining to make them out is the actual distraction, I don't know. But it seems to me that two tasks involving language -- listening to to the words of music and writing words on paper -- almost have ot be mutually exclusive. And yet I know a lot of people who do this and are, in fact, productive. How does this work?

I might could see instrumental music, though. The idea of a "soundtrack" for a particular scene is appealing. By envisioning the scene playing on a movie screen, I can definitely see where you could be more descriptive in your writing. In general, though, I like to have sunny days and maybe an ocean sounds CD playing in the stereo, just because I'm most happiest at the beach. Other than that, most anything else is just a distraction. It's interesting how the brain works -- and is so different for everyone -- isn't it?

Merry Christmas!

Hopefully things have settled down for everyone, having spent the day playing with new toys and spending time with friends and family. We have a good friend from grad school staying the week with us, and she's practically family, so we're getting both in one package. :) My daughter had the first Christmas where she really had a clue of what was going on, so it was fun to watch her. As she opened each gift (and lemme tell ya, a cute two-year-old red head makes out like a bandit) she would be so entralled she'd completely forget about the rest of the presents. She was continually surprised when there was another one for her to open. She got lots and lots of books, which, along with her baby doll and stroller that Santa brought her, are her favorite things in the world -- yes, I'm starting my kids young.

And, really, it pays off. My son is planning on majoring in creative writing, but even if he hadn't gone that route, his love of books has really broadened his mind a lot more than many of his friends. He will sit in a bookstore and read an entire book in the time it takes the rest of us to do our shopping. I have friends who say they have always hated to read, and I have never understood that. One of my friends saidd her parents made them spend an hour a day reading -- which they sorely resented. Obviously force is not the way to inspire love for something.

I think the answer is to get them fascinated early, to tap into the deep human instinct that loves a good story. People complain that our kids are so into movies and television that they never read, but really, whose fault is that? How many of those parents read themselves, much less to their kids? If you want to introduce a child to joy of reading, to the new worlds waiting to be discovered, there's no better way than to simply read to them. If you've got older kids, let them see you reading -- they may start to wonder what's so interesting!

Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here, I know. I doubt anyone without at least a passing interest in writing bothers to read my ramblings -- and every writer I know of started out by being an avid reader. But maybe we can carry the message to our non-writing friends. Maybe there's a niece or nephew waiting to be read to right now!

Santa's On His Way!

'Twas the night before Christmas, and Kilo's blog beckoned
So he sat at his keyboard, his thoughts he did reckon.
The gifts were all wrapped, the toys were out too,
He suddenly realized there was naught left to do!

Christmas is here, the stores are all shut
No more shopping, no driving, no pre-Christmas rut.
There's nothing left but to bask in the time
Of a quiet evening spent with good friends and wine.

A bit of that peace I wish for you and yours:
A warm night of snuggling and steamy cocoa pours.
My thanks to my readers, faithful and true,
Here's my hope that Christmas is also good for you!



Happy Holidays to all of you, from all of us.

Research

At this point in Wiesner's outlining method, you are allotted seven days to do "background research." This is as important in fiction as it is in non-fiction. Nothing will turn off a reader faster than getting the facts blatently wrong. Even in fantasy or science fiction, once you have established the "rules" of your universe, you're bound by those rules. Your background research in this case may consist of formulating those rules, or in making sure you follow reality where you claim you are doing so. In science fiction, it's particularly important to get your background right, as the average science ficition reader is not going to allow you many outright mistakes (or even things that look like mistakes) at all. Wiesner recommends interviewing experts in the various subjects and keeping a file of those interview notes for use in all of your work.

In my case, I'm in the enviable position of being one of those experts, at least for a lot of the fields of physics, astronomy, and space exploration. Having worked at NASA as a spaceflight engineer is a huge advantage in writing science fiction, so I really count myself lucky. In fantasy, of course, I'm as clueless as the next guy -- which may be why I tend to write science fiction instead! :) In spite of all of this, I do background research of a sort. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I like ot map out the locations my characters will be living and interacting in. Part of it is just because I enjoy it, of course -- I am a confessed cartophile, after all. But I do find that it really helps for me to a have map of the area while I'm writing, so I know (for instance) how long it takes to walk from one location to another. As a side benefit, I can often sell these maps and descriptions (with a lot of extra material) to gaming magazines as campaign settings, so in some sense I'm killing two (or three) birds with one stone.

The main thing is to do whatever you need to do in order to really see the place or action in your mind. Once you can do that, you're golden!

Author Websites

My brother has kindly hosted several websites for me over the past several years. Nowadays, registering an Internet domain name is quick, cheap, and easy. For $15 you can register any name you like for a year. The only catch is that the name has to link to some page on the net -- even if it's just a "holding" page. With my brother hosting the site(s), that wasn't an issue.

Alas, situations change and he's not going to be able to host it for me any longer, so I signed on with a hosting service that charges $6/month. So far, I'm quite pleased with it. I've had two domain names (my wife owns one as well), for a while now, one for my consulting business (Kepler Educational Consulting) and what until now has been my personal site, Exodus Project. Originally, Exodus Project wa a site for articles, gaming scenarios, and stories set in my Exodus Project background, but once I decided I might someday write professionally, I realized that I can't publish my work online -- publishers generally want to buy first print rights. The site quickly became just a personal home page. A few months ago, I basically gutted it, but never got around to refurbishing it. Switching hosting servers has given me an excuse to do something about it.

Having an author website, preferably with a domain that is your own name, is increasingly becoming an essential marketing tool for writers. Not only do your readers get to know more about you as a person, it helps you to maintain visibility in-between book releases. Unfortunately, there are companies out there that have caught on to the value of particular domain names. Apparently a company in Africa snapped up "keithwatt.com" and all the other various deriviatives. They then sell these domain names back to the person with the name for huge sums of money. It's a pretty lucrative business, I guess, even if I find it somewhat morally repugnant. For $15 they can register the name and for next to nothing they can host a page on a slow, cheap server. They can then sell the name for thousands of dollars to the person desperate enough to pay it.

I'm not that desperate.

But I am technologically competent. You see, there's a great little UNIX tool called WHOIS that gives all the domain registration information for any domain name you want -- including the date their registration expires. I simply marked my calendar for when the first "keithwatt" variant was due to come up and jumped in ahead of them. For $15, "KeithWatt.org" is now up and running! There's not all that much there, really -- people who read this blog will find a lot more of my thoughts here than there -- but there are some cute pictures of my kids for the curious.* Still, it's fun to do and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I'm also pleased with my success in out-teching the tech geeks. Take that, ye survy knaves!



*And for the really curious, the two lovely young ladies in the last picture are my son's half-sisters (his birth mother's daughters). There's an interesting tale in that, but that's probably what my son calls "T.M.I" They are super, super kids!

The Longest Night of the Year

For those that don't know, today is the winter solstice, the longest night (and shortest day, obviously) of the year. For those in the Southern Hemisphere, of course, it's the summer solstice -- the official beginning of summer. What many people don't know is why we have a solstice at all. Earth's axis of rotation is tilted by 23.5 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit (called the ecliptic). Yeah, okay, most of us did know that. But contrary to what a lot of people believe, the Earth's axis does not wobble back and forth over the course of a year.* Relative to the stars, the axis always points in the same direction -- coincidentally, very near the star called Polaris, or the "North Star." As we orbit around the Sun, however, the effect of this is that when we are on the "Polaris side" of the Sun, our axis is pointing away from the Sun, while when we are on the side of the Sun opposite form Polaris, our axis is pointing towards the Sun. A simple diagram makes this clear:

The labels are for the Northern Hemisphere, and this is not even close to drawn to scale, of course. So, while it's true that the Northern Hemisphere is pointed towards the Sun in northern summer and away from it in northern winter, the axis itself hasn't (really) moved. Solstices are a result of our position in our orbit, not because of any wobble of the Earth's axis. we will be in the exact position of the winter solstice at precisely 11:35 A.M. MST (18:35 UT).

The seasons result from the fact that during winter the rays of energy from the Sun strike the surface of the Earth at a steep angle. Because of this, the same amount of energy is spread over a much larger area, so the energy per square foot shining on the Earth is much less. Seasons have nothing (much) to do with the length of the day. After all, at the poles, we have six months of continuous daylight, yet they are still the coldest places on Earth! Here's a diagram which shows what's happening:

The area on the ground at B is much larger than the area on the ground at A, but each area is receiving the same amount of sunlight. As a result, it is colder at B than at A. This is also why it's colder in Boston than in Florida!

Now don't you feel smart?

*It does wobble, but very, very slowly. This is called precession, and is the same thing that makes a top wobble as it spins. Precession will make our axis point towards Vega instead of Polaris when I'm a great grandfather -- in about 23,000 years or so. The effect over the course of a year is too small to be noticed. The great pyramids are aligned to the North Star, but it was not Polaris.

First Drafts

As I've mentioned before, I still work half-time for the Mars Education Program writing a curriculum package that we had committed to before I left to strike out on my own. I'm writing this set of activities for the Phoenix mission, which will be launched in 2007 to Mars, if all goes as planned. The activities are designed to teach students what the major properties of soil are and how we measure them so that when the Phoenix lander starts sending back similar data about Martian soil ("regolith," technically, since "soil" implies there is life present) they will be better equipped to understand what the data mean. There is a companion soil habitability curriculum that I was originally going ot write as well, but have luckily managed to farm that off on someone else (much rejoicing!).

Tonight, the director of the education program asked if I would send them some of the early drafts I've completed. They are starting work on the soil habitability curriculum and want to make sure the formats match as closely as possible. I think that's a great idea (and in fact, I'm surprised as they typically don't do things until the very last minute over there). There's only one problem: I'm extremely uncomfortable letting anyone see my work until it's finished.

Now, fiction writers "workshop" their works-in-progress all the time. The idea is to get feedback on the early draft so that they don't have quite as much rewriting to do later on. I don't like it at all. I don't want anyone to see anything less than my current professional best for any reason. I will often submit a piece for comments that I think is as done as I can get at a particular stage (even knowing that the piece isn't really finished), but I find it hard to evaluate (or accept the evaluation) of a piece that isn't at least complete. The reader has to guess what is missing and try to fill in the missing pieces herself. Unless she is a particularly amazing psychic, her imagination is probably not going to match mine.

The same thing is true in the educational products I develop. I've acquired something of Scotty's (of Star Trek) reputation as a "miracle worker" in the field. I think a small part of that reputation is because I don't let anyone see the junk I write that makes up the first draft. Ego? You betcha! But building a reputation for being the best is much easier when no one sees anything but your best work.

For some people, getting comments on a early draft is very helpful to them, and I think that's great. For me, though, I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I want to say in the story before it's written. The early reader may or may not get that, depending on how far along in the process I am, but I don't think it's worth her time to give me comments when I haven't yet communicated what it is I'm trying to say. I recognize that not every piece I write is going to work. But I want to at least try to say it my way first, and we'll talk about changes after that.

Cranking Up the Conflict

As I've been working with the novel I'm writing, I've been enjoying telling the tale from the point of view of the antagonist as well as the protagonist. You may have heard that "every villain thinks he's a hero" and that your villain should be so complex and so well-developed that he could easily be the protagonist himself. I decided to take that one step further and actually give equal time to the antagonist. Now, he is a ruthless guy, but he's not evil. In fact, from a certain point of view (and it's a view he holds, of course), his actions really are altruistic and motivated to help those people that the protagonist and company say are being hurt by them. What I'm trying to do is get the audience believe both sides -- both contradictory sides -- of the issue at the same time. Its not easy to do, especially since I have decided that the antagonist is going to clearly be the antagonist. I'm handling it by making him an extremely charming and persuasive guy. Hopefully, the reader will fully understand how the protagonist could fall in love with him, even as she has to strive against him. In fact, their love for each other is real. The irony, the twist of the knife, is that they know there is a way they both can "win," a way in which they could both be happy. Unfortunately, in order for that to happen, the protagonist would have to turn her back on bringing about change for her people. Is it worth disrupting the status quo when all it can do is make you unhappy? Instead of adding one conflict after another (which is typical and a good way to handle plot), I'm trying to layer the main conflict deeper and deeper. In the end, she will have to choose between literally love and death (either hers or the antagonist's or both). I hope by that time, you won't envy the choice she has to make because you will really understand that both points of view are, to a certain extent, valid. It's a lot of fun knotting the rope!

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

At my son's request, we rented Mr. and Mrs. Smith today and had a family movie night (after the baby went to bed, of course -- she was entralled by The Polar Express before bedtime). I managed to make it through the movie, hoping that I'd see something good from Angelina Jolie.

What is the attraction of so-called "action movies"?

I was bored out of my skull almost the entire time. There is essentially no plot to this movie, and I think it has that in common with a lot of action films. I'm sorry, but it takes more to hold my attention than people diving around in obviously choreographed moves (no real soldier would hold a gun the way these two do -- the recoil would destroy your aim every time). Blowing things up continuously doesn't earn you any points, either. I thought there might be some interesting dynamic between Pitt and Jolie, but the dialogue is flat and forced throughout the movie. This seems to be true of most action movies, at least the few that I've seen.

It doesn't have to be that way. The Bond films are action movies, as are the Indiana Jones movies. Yet none of these are action for it's own sake. They have a complicated plot, usually a puzzle that has to be solved. How much harder is it to add a layer story instead of endless scenes of flying bullets and knives? Pretty hard, apparently. Mr. and Mrs. Smith seemed to rely on it's cute premise: boring married couple turns out to be competing super-assassins (wait, wasn't that done already in True Lies?). Unfortunately, the premise doesn't hold any longer than it takes to read the synopsis.

At least Harrison Ford can deliver a witty line...

Dancing on Air

My wife and I have been taking a swing dance class every Friday night this semester (since she is faculty at Glendale Community College, we get to take classes for free). It was a lot of fun and was basically our weekly "date night"; it was good to get out of the house (as it turned out, we didn't actually get to dance with each other much, but it was still fun). Our instructor teaches at a local Bally's on a weekly basis, and tonight that class was having a dance party to celebrate Christmas. Our instructor invited us, so we went. It was a good time!

This got me wondering. What will people who live in free fall full time do for social recreation? Dancing is certainly possible, and would be very fascinating to watch. The dance would have to consist of controlled push-offs from walls in a large open area. The dancers might have "wings" attached to their sleeves that they could use to change direction in mid-air. They would literally be "dancing on air." How cool is that?

I can also imagine teenagers coming up with clever ways to show off in free fall. In the YA story I just submitted, one of the characters meets up with the protagonist in a corridor. The corridor is covered in Velcro on all sides, and the characters wear Velcro booties so that they can hook to any wall surface that's convenient. Transport down corridors, however, is still a push-and-glide affair. One of the tenagers in the story launches herself down the corridor at an angle, hits the floor with her hands, and uses the impact to push off, twist in mid-air, and lock her velcro booties on the ceiling. In the end, she is upside down with her face ten centimeters from the protagonist's face. How's that for showing off?

It's important that when we imagine our worlds in science fiction (and fantasy too, for that matter) that we make sure we carry each environment's situation to its logical conclusion. Otherwise, our stories could be taking place in an office building or a shopping mall instead of aboard a ship, for all the difference it makes. Part of the way we carry this off is to think about how the environment affects things like recreation. Recreation isn't likely to drive the plot -- in fact, it might not even be mentioned at all, except in passing -- but it's the small details such as this that turn your story world into a living, breathing world of its own.

Plot Summary

Moving along with Wiesner's outlining method, days four and five has me write up a summary of the plot, or as much as I know to start with. I actually have a pretty good idea about the whole story, so this is a rather long document. While I don't usually write this kind of information down, I usually do keep up with the major scenes in my head. What I don't usually keep up with are the smaller scenes that occur in between. One of the troubling points about outlining in general, I think, is that you don't always know what scenes are going to be there until you actually find yourself writing the scene. For example, I knew I would have a scene in which the antagonist and protagonist meet and he tries to tempt her to his side. What I didn't realize initially, however, is that they needed to have a social engagement -- I had them go out to dinner -- to highlight the differences in their statuses. The outline wouldn't have picked that need up.

Now, in defense of outlining, so long as you never force yourself to stay exactly on the outline, this isn't really a problem. But if the point of outlining is to anticipate future plot holes, how can it do that if all the scenes are there? I suppose I might have thought of this missing scene while writing the outline, but I'm not completely sure of that. The scene just flowed naturally from the dialogue between the characters -- something that wouldn't have been included in the outline. It remains to be seen if other scenes from later in the story occur to me as I'm writing the summary of scenes I already know about.

Plot Threads

Day three of Wiesner's outlineing method involves writing out all the plot threads and the overall plot goal of the story. Now, this is not a bad idea, and writing out the subplot threads (some of which might only be minor side interests and not what I would consider a real subplot at all) can be very useful. With the list in front of you, you can look out for opportunities to weave these threads into the story. On the other hand, I really think that McKee's Story does a much better job with this. Wiesner's worksheet is pretty superficial. I don't know if she will do more with it later, but right now I'm not too impressed with it. Anything that gets you thinking about plot is good, but I would look to McKee for good theory-based suggestions over just random brainstorming (even though that, too, has it's place).

One thing that does concern me about my story is that I don't normally think too much about real subplots. Most of my fiction-writing background is in short stories -- where having subplots is a really bad idea. I'm concerned that the novel I'm writing won't have enough depth, although I will admit I had no trouble identifying a number of subplot threads as Wiesner defines them. This is something that wold be very difficult to add in later, so it's somewhat important that I deal with this in the first draft. I am telling the tale from the points of view of both the protagonist and the antagonist (who is also a somewhat sympathetic character), so I don't really want to confuse the issue with needless subplots. But are they needless? That's the real question here...

Setting Sketches

(I had some problems posting last night -- sorry for the delay.)

Day two of Wiesner's First Draft in 30 Days involves creating setting sketches for all of the locations that appear in the story. She specifies two different kinds of sketches: one for each location in its own right, and one for each character showing where that character goes during the story. I did both, since I'm trying to give her outlining method a fair shake, but I think this is somewhat inefficient. The character setting sketches ask for specifics about things like where the character works, where she lives, etc. The general setting sketches are more for things like cities or other large areas. I see her rationale: You need to be able to see vividly where the action is taking place in the story, but you also need to know how the "story setting" fits into the larger "world setting." All well and good, but there is a lot that gets repeated between the two sheets. If I were going to use these, I'd give serious thought to redesigning these sheets.

But I'm not likely to use them. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I have a program called Campaign Cartographer. This is the ultimate mapmaking program (though it's a bit arcane to use sometimes due to it being a Windows shell placed on top of a DOS program). I really think that the best way to visualize a setting is to completely map it out. This can be done much more thoroughly and much more rapidly than making written descriptions. And there's no need to imagine what you are seeing -- you can actually print it out and show it to people! I carry maps of the mining complex that is central to the storyline around with me everywhere. If I need to know about how long it would take to walk from location to another, I just pull out my map and look at it. That's extremely hard to do with a written description. The written description is of necessity incomplete -- otherwise you'd write a book just on the setting.

If you really want to be able to see what the place looks like, you could also render it in Poser. This is a lot of work, and I don't think it helps enough to justify the level of effort required, but it sure is impressive! Campaign Cartographer has an add-on called Perspectives Pro that will let you make quasi-3D perspective maps very rapidly. The only real problem is that almost all of the symbols they have are for fantasy rather than science fiction or modern settings, but for rapidly giving you a sense of "being there" the program is hard to beat. Hopefully they will come out with some modern symbols for PP soon.

Point: Wiesner

As I was finishing up the character sketches that Wiesner recommends for her outlining method, I realized that I had a problem. One of the secondary characters, who won't make her appearance until about halfway through the book, was slated to be the protagonist's older sister who disappeared years ago. This character is now a bounty hunter who has been sent to "recover" the protagonist. The character sketch form asks for the character's birthday. Well, I hadn't thought about it (since she hadn't appeared in the story yet, there wasn't much point), but in the interest of completeness I tracked back through Exodus Project timeline to see when she could have been born.

Uh oh.

You see, it's critical that she be an adult when protagonist's parents leave Earth. But if the parents are going to be the age they need to be (and have a teen-aged daughter), then that simply isn't possible. In short, there's no way this character could be the protagonist's sister. The dates just don't work.

Now, I haven't mentioned anything about the journey from Earth -- it happened nearly twenty years before the story takes place. But if I change that part of the timeline, it will have an effect on the entire "future history" of the storyline. I created the timeline specifically to make sure all the events I refer to happen in their proper timeframes. So, even though the date of birth or the age of this secondary character isn't mentioned, it still is going to cause problems down the road. The protagonist has already made a passing reference to a "sister" in the part of the story I've written so far (about a fifth of the book).

After thinking about it, the character works just as well as the protagonist's mother's sister (the protagonist's aunt). The dates work out perfectly, and in truth, it makes more sense that the aunt would be left behind on Earth than would an older sister (even an adult). But the point is this: If I hadn't caught the inconsistency now, I would have had huge amounts of text to rewrite and no guarantees that I would catch all the changes that needed to be made.

So score one for Karen Wiesner.

Maybe there's something to this outlining business after all, I dunno. There's nothing magical about Wiesner's "method" -- in fact, I wouldn't call it a method at all, it's just simple planning ahead. Nevertheless, it's planning ahead that I don't usually do. Editing and revising is easy for me. I don't mind it at all -- in fact I enjoy it. But I have to admit that catching things like this early will get me to a finished book faster, even if it means I only eliminated one rewrite. That may be worth the price of admission on it's own.

More on Character Sketches

Per the instructions for day one of this outlining method, I have spent today creating written character sketches for all of the characters who play an important role in the book. That works out to something like six major characters (three of who are most important) and a couple of secondary characters. I'm not going to bother to create sketches for characters who only appear in a couple of scenes. Now, in all fairness, I already had fairly detailed sketches worked out for the characters who have appeared int he story so far, but I do think there was value in creating sketches for the others as well. Each character has his or her own internal and external conflicts, so I may find a way to weave some of that into the story -- which will only make it richer. I would have gotten around to doing this once they walked on stage anyway, but maybe since I've done it early I'll do more with foreshadowing. Or maybe I won't. We'll see how it goes. The one thing that I don't like about this outlining is that I'd rather be working on writing the story itself. Still, the book claims that you can produce deeper stories using this method, so I'm willing to give it a try. It's all an experiment anyway, right?

One way or the other, I find that I'm really liking my characters. Coincidentally, The Writer last month had an article on creating imperfect characters, something we all know we should be doing. Still, it's a useful reminder. I do like how they are fleshing out to be such interesting people though!

Character Sketches

Day one of the "30 day method" for outlining involves doing character sketches for all of the main characters. This is something I've always done in my head, but have occasionally also put on paper. A while back I also suggested using role-playing game character creation systems to get the creative juices flowing. All of these techniques can work extremely well. While I think it's true that you will come to know the depth of your character's personality as you write about her and see how she reacts to various situations, I also think that it's important you have at least some idea of what the character is like before you start writing.

The book suggests cutting out photos from magazines that remind you of the character. I think this is a great idea, as having a strong visual image of the character can go a long way towards making her a fully-realized human (or whatever). For those who are so inclined, though, I'd like to recommend another approach: the 3D character design program, Poser. Poser is very easy to use and gives amazing results. Not only can you design unique and realistic characters, you can also render them in backgrounds that inspire your writing even further. The full version of Poser isn't cheap, but there is a scaled down version (Poser Artist, I think it's called) that might be a good entry-level program. I've got the latest version of the program and (no kidding) three DVD-R's worth of clothing, hair, props, etc. so there's a lot I can do with the program. I'm going to create images of all of the main characters for this story in Poser. Who knows, it may serve as an inspiration for whoever does the cover art for the book, should it ever sell. I don't have the first renders for the novel ready, but I thought I would post some panels from a webcomic idea I had a year or so ago. These don't include the lettering, so you can see all the artwork. I set the renderer to give a "comic book" feel to it, but you can also render images that are almost indistinguishable from a photo. It's pretty amazing!

Outlining

As I've alluded to in several earlier posts, I don't generally outline my stories before I write them. Part of the fun of writing, from my perspective, is having your characters surprise you -- it's almost as if your subconscious is telling you a story. I can't really imagine writing any other way. I feel like if I did write an outline, I'd simply be wasting my time, since I know I'd never follow anything on it.

For the past several months, though, I've been interested in experimenting with different techniques related to writing. No matter how much you think your way of doing things is best, there are still tricks to be learned from others. And after all, until you've tried the other approaches, you certainly can't claim that your way is best -- even best for you. So, I've tried to keep an open mind to other ways of doing things. In that spirit, I recently picked up a copy of First Draft in 30 Days. This is not the NaNoWriMo book (that one is No Plot? No Problem!), and in spite of the title, the book is not really about putting together a first draft in thirty days. In reality, the book is about outlining. The author lays her method for outlining a book, which she claims is so detailed, you generally only have to write the final draft once you've completed the outline. No endless major revisions of the novel. The fact that she's broken it up into steps that extend of thirty days is really just a marketing ploy (which is a negative thing in my mind -- an instruction book should be honest in its selling points). Nevertheless, having thumbed through her suggestions, I think there might be some merit here, so I've decided to give it a go. I honestly can't see it making me want to outline before writing, but she does acknowledge that many people write the way I do, and she says her method is not incompatible with that. We'll see. As I said, I do try to keep an open mind, and I'm always interested in experimenting!

Sweat, Tears, and Angst

Today is the last day of the term at the community college where I've been teaching part time. I've actually got everything graded that's been handed in, so all I need to do is tabulate the grades, work out the final averages, and assign the letter grades. That actually doesn't take very long, since I track everything in an Excel spreadsheet from the start of the semester.

It's somewhat humerous (and from another perspective, somewhat sad) how the students act during these last few weeks. Everyone is stressed, and I don't find that humerous at all, of course. But so many of the students here are more interested in trying to see what they can "negotiate" than in actually buckling down and studying. I've had a couple of students come up to me and say, "What do I need to do to be able to pass this class?" Umm, let me think... Do the work starting at the beginning of the semester, maybe? "Well, can't I do some extra credit?" Let's think about this: You want me to take the time to come up with additional (valid and reliable) evaluation instruments, give you an opportunity no other student in the class gets, spend hours grading it, and then scramble to get grades posted by the deadline?

Ah, no, I don't think so.

Or here's a classic: "But if I don't pass this class, I won't graduate this semester!" Well, gee, if you knew the class was that critical, why didn't you make sure you were actually in class and oh, maybe turn in the homework every once and a while? This one I can't fathom. I mean really, if I were graduating, I think I'd make doubly sure I was on top of everything in all my classes.

The thing is, many of the teachers around here (much more soft-hearted than me -- I'm vicious and cruel) give in to the sob stories. So many times, in fact, that the students have come to expect it. It's much less work to do an extra paper at the end of the semester than it is to actually keep up with the work and learn the material throughout the semester. They aren't stupid. The other thing I see a lot of is students who blow off a class and then withdraw in the last two weeks. Most of these students have their tuition paid by their parents. This is just extended high school to them. You can bet that if the $300/course came out of their pockets, they'd be a lot more upset about not getting anything for that money. This is one of the many reasons we are going to make our son pay his own way through school. Too many times, it's just a waste of money if the parents pay for it -- it doesn't mean anything to the kids, so they don't put in the work to get something out of college.

Ah well, one way or the other, the semester is over, and I'm glad of the break. I've had some really good students this year, in spite of what I've said above. In fact, I've actually had less of the above-mentioned behavior this semester than I have seen in years past. I'm a tough teacher, as any of my students will tell you. But they come out of my class with a feeling of accomplishment. A feeling that, yeah, I worked my butt off, but I actually did something to be proud of.

I think that lesson is just as important as the astronomy they learn.

Book Six Complete

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince this aftrnoon, and while I still don't think it's as good a book as the first one in the series, unlike The Order of the Phoenix, it's a very respectable piece of writing. Very entertaining, and even though I knew the "secret" at the climax, I knew nothing about how it was done or how it would get there. One of the things that I thought was best about the book was that Rowling successfully pulled off what I call "the reversal." By that I mean that she presented clear clues to the ending that are misinterpreted by the reader (and the characters, of course), so that when the climax is revealed we are left amazed and surprised -- yet we don't feel she cheated, since all the clues were there. At the climax we get a rush as we instantly re-interpret all the clues we've been given. In this case, of course, it was the fact that Snape really was working for Voldemort and was not just a spy for the Order. He defends himself and his loyalty to Voldemort to Draco Malfoy's aunt, but again, we think that he is only playing a role. We now know that he wasn't, so instead of an act, we instantly re-interpret that scene as truth. It's a tough trick to pull off, but Rowling did a very good job with it.* We trust Dumbledore's judgement, just as the other characters do, even though we know that Dumbledore makes mistakes -- Rowling makes a point of telling us so. Everything is well within the bounds of fair play (from a writing standpoint), so the effect thrills rather than disappoints. Very well done, indeed.

I also approve of the fact that Harry will not be returning to Hogwart's next year. There's not much new to discover at Hogwart's, so while it is still a location we're going to want to visit in the next book, it's not really appropriate to base the story there. Harry has come of age and has now taken up the quest for the final battle. It's not appropriate that he have to worry about getting detention any more. Incidentally, this is also why Dumbledore was the perfect main character to kill off. Dumbledore is Hogwart's, as any of the characters would tell you. But throughout the last two books, he has played less and less of a role in the day-to-day lives of the characters. This is also masterfully done. We still care about him, and that's why his death hurts, but by the sixth book, we've already learned to live without him somewhat, so the series can still go on.

I will at some point write up my theories of the Harry Potter phenomenon, but I haven't fully worked everything out yet. One of the key foundations of that theory, though, is that Harry is the original Everyman. He's not a great hero. He didn't do anything special himself to get his reputation. Fame has been forced on him, completely against his will, and he doesn't want it. This innocence is part of his attraction. He is a hero, so we want to be him, but because he is also Everyman, we still identify with him. More than any other fantasy protagonist, Harry is a hero we feel we could be ourselves. What I think is interesting is whether this will work against Rowling as she tries to write the seventh book in the series. You see, Harry can't stay the innocent Everyman any longer. If he did, we would no longer buy into the story -- too many events have taken place which should have changed him. On the other hand, he is now a true hero, not someone who just wants to live as a normal kid. We won't be able to identify with the Harry of book seven quite as much as we have in the past. Will we still be attracted to him? There is enough of an audience for any Harry Potter book that we all want to know how the story ends. The book will sell, no matter what. But will it be a sensation on its own merits, or will it just ride the coattails of the first few books? Time will tell...



*Of course, if it turns out that Snape is still a spy for the Order in the 7th book, then we're all going to feel robbed. But killing Dumbledore can't be interpreted as good for the Order no matter how badly they need a spy, so I don't think that is the case. At least, I hope not.

The Half-Blood Prince: First Impressions

I am about two-thirds of the way through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and so far I'm much more satisfied with it. The story isn't as conflict-driven as some of the other books, but it is more of a mystery, with clues being dropped every so often. We're left wondering what both Dumbledore and Draco Malfoy are up to, and that's a good thing. I do find it a little annoying that she is being so coy with Dumbledore. Why doesn't he just come out and explain what's going on to Harry? The answr is, I believe, specifically because Rowling wants to string us along. That's fine as far as it goes -- you definitely want to write in such a way that your reader wants his questions answered. I wish it weren't quite so transparent that was what she was doing, but it's not tragic. Similarly, I'm very interested in the flashback scenes, since they tell us about Voldemort's background, something we haven't known much about until now. Again, though, the device comes across as being a bit contrived, even if it is something we all want to know.

Overall, though, I'm enjoying the book. I had to force myself to get through The Order of the Phoenix, but not so with this book. While I still don't think it compares (so far) with the first book, it still definitely harkens back to that style, and that pleases me. I know what happens to Dumbledore in the end, but I don't yet see how it happens, so that's all good as well. Here's hoping the book continues to live up to its promise!

Moving On

I finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and while things did finally start happening, I can't say this was even close to as good a book as the first three (the fourth wasn't bad, either). In fact, the "problem" is almost a classic "non-problem": The Ministry of Magic is causing all the problems for Harry and Company because they think Dumbledore is trying to stage a coup. He's not, so most of the conflicts that have driven the entire book magically (no pun intended -- really this time) go away as soon as Voldemort is revealed. Of course, like most of the books, this one ends with major changes for Harry, and that's a good thing -- the characters must not be left unchanged by story events, and victory should always be mixed with defeat. But most of the events of this book could have been told in a standard-length novel, and the events and background revealed that are really important to the series could actually fit in a short story. It's almost as if Rowling got too busy with the movies and public appearances (which even she admits interfered with the writing) and just needed to crank one out the door.

I'm probably going to be roasted alive because of my disappointment with the book, but I'm doing my best to evaluate it based on the principles you've read about in this column. I've heard that in the next book Rowling is back to her old style, so I'm very much looking forward to that. Other than the big surprise at the end, I know nothing about it, so I'm hoping this will be a good read. The fifth book, though, came across to me as more of an example of how not to write than how to write a blockbuster. Moving on!

The Order of the Phoenix

I decided that this time I would make it all the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I'm now on page 600, and finally something is starting to happen in the story. How can an excellent YA author manage to tread water for 300 pages? I mean, really -- nothing happens of any consequence for the first half of the book! As just one example, she spends ten pages describing the cleaning of the drawing room in the Order's headquarters solely, as far as I can tell, to include two paragraphs about Sirius Black's family tree. There's a lot that could be cut here without hurting the plot (what little there is so far) in the slightest. So why wasn't it cut? The answer, of course, is simple: It's Harry Potter.

And herein lies the magic (no pun intended -- well, okay, maybe just a little) of serialized novels. If you can write a blockbuster that introduces a series, then you can slack off on one book and it will sell anyway (though, as I recall, book five didn't sell nearly as well as the previous four). The writing is still very good. And for all the true fans, I'm sure it's great to get an in-depth look at what it's like to be a wizard in the Muggle's world. But up until now, there's been no story, no real conflict.

We all write scenes that we love, but eventually have to cut because they don't further the story. Rowling, obviously, does the same thing. But why weren't these scenes cut by the editors before the book was published? I think the answer is twofold. Frst and foremost, the book would only be about 300 pages long (novel-length, not coincidentally). There's nothing disgraceful about that, but this book would look out of place on the shelf next to the mighty tomes that are the first four volumes in the series. People would have felt cheated. The second reason, though, is that it is simply Harry Potter. Fans can't get enough of him and his world. And that's something that Rowling should be proud of. I can't count the number of kids I've met who really want to go to Hogwart's. This is not idle fantasy, they want to be there with all their hearts and souls. If adding 600 pages to the book let's them live the dream for a few hours longer, well, that's all well and good. It's certainly going to sell a lot of books.

I think, though, that as I look for clues to the phenomenon, I'm going to have to go back to the first book. I've actually got some theories, but they don't quite work out yet. It's certainly interesting to think about though!

Sleeping Again

I had an appointment with the ENT doctor and went over the results of the sleep study with him. I've been a bit anxious about this, as it will have a rather major effect on my life (flying, CPAP machine, etc.). The doctor said that they recorded a number of "mild apnea events" (I wasn't aware that "apnea" could beused as an adjective, but maybe I should get ticky... :) ), but that they were of such short duration that he wasn't willing to diagnose them as actual sleep apnea. Now, he's a pilot as well, and he knows that once I've been diagnosed, that's it for me. I don't think he was just cutting me some slack -- after all, sleep apnea can be quite dangerous in the long term. I do think, though, that he wasn't willing to cause problems by giving a diagnosis "just ot be on the safe side," as I've heard of other doctors doing, so I really appreciated that.

In the end, they are going to keep me on nasal steroids for a while, since that seemed to be doing some good. The doctor assures me that there are no long-term effects of being on nasal steroids, but I'm not convinced. Anyone know of any studies on the matter?

Harry Potter

The open-captioned version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire finally came to the theater this weekend, so my wife and I went to see it. It's a good flick! I'm told it doesn't match the book as well as the other films did, but I honestly can't remember much of what happened in the book, so that didn't really bother me. I remembered the scene when the Dark Lord returns, and I remember that Hermione ends up dating Krum, but that's really about it. Since they got both of those scenes right, I didn't have a problem with it.

What I did have a problem with is that the cast can no longer convincingly play a group of fourteen year olds. When the first movie came out, I was amazed at how much the cast looked like the characters from the book. They did a really good job. I don't think they should have recast the parts (Dumbledore was recast, sadly, for obvious reasons), and it simply takes longer than a year to make a movie (or a book), so I don't know really what they could do. Nor do I know what they will do for the next one. At some point, the age of the cast is going to be so out of whack with that of a bunch of high school students, that it will distract from the story. Really, this should be the last Harry Potter movie, from a practical standpoint.

I am absolutely certain that won't happen.

A Harry Potter movie -- any Harry Potter movie -- will make its producers a fortune. Hollywood has never been one to let a sure thing pass by, to say the least. It's the safest movie ever made. The series is simply that huge a phenomenon. I don't know how J.K. Rowling did it. I really wish I did. I wish I could even identify what it is about the books that makes them such a sensation. Maybe it's time to dig out the books and read them again, this time with a critical eye. I never finished the fifth book, and really didn't care much about the sixth either. Nevertheless, there's an education to be had here.

If I can just figure out what it is I should learn from it...

ARCHER is a no-go

Well, it seems ARCHER training just wasn't meant to be for me. I spoke briefly with the office manager at Civil Air Patrol Headquarters a couple of days ago, and she said she would email me travel information. I told her that I needed to leave "as late as possible" on Friday, but since she seemed to be in a huge hurry (and it was long distance), I assumed she would send me some possibilities to choose from via email, and we work out the details that way.

As you've probably heard many times, never assume anything.

She went ahead and booked me on a plane that leaves Phoenix at 11:40 AM -- not exactly what I would call "as late as possible," especially since there were in fact later flights. I had agreed to take over another astronomy faculty member's class on that Friday (the last class meeting), so there is no way I could leave that early. Now, apparently they do things differently in Montgomery, AL, but where I come from you don't book travel for someone without getting their okay that the flight is workable. I called her to let her know that flight wouldn't work for me, and when I finally got her to take my call, she was quite, shall we say, snitty to me. She basically said, "Well, these tickets are bought, there's no way I can change them now, you'll just have to come then." Umm, hello? Civil Air Patrol is an all-volunteer organization. I'm willing to volunteer four days away from my family to further the mission, but I'm not willing to turn my back on my responsiblities just because you didn't have the foresight to check with me before buying that ticket.

Needless to say, I was most annoyed. I kept my squadron commander in the loop (old Navy habits come back to you quickly), and he is totally supportive of me, as was the Arizona Wing Commander when my commander called him. I logged on to Orbitz.com and found any number of flights that would work (though I will admit they were now hugely more expensive since there is now less than a week left). I finally talked to the head of the program and another officer this morning, and they basically said that the program is too strapped for cash to fund a ticket change. I respect that. The last thing I want to do is jeopardize the ARCHER program -- I think it is literally the future of Civil Air Patrol. In hopes of finding other solutions, I had arranged with the college administration to get permission to move the final for this class into finals week (through a bizarre twist, this class actually ends a week early), but the catch was that all of the students in the class would have to agree with it, or it couldn't go. Of course, the odds of that happening were pretty small, and in the end that didn't work out.

I emailed the officers involved at lunch withdrawing my name from the program.

Of course, I may can get into a future class, but there's no way for me to know if the schedule will work out any better. I'll still be teaching this same class on Fridays next semester, after all. At this point, I'm not counting on it. I'm disappointed, as you might expect, but there's not much to be done for it. On the positive side, I won't be away from kids (my son's youth group is doing a performance that weekend, so now I don't have to miss it). My participation in CAP is going to decline next semester anyway, since I'll be teaching a night class during squadron meetings. Ah well, things usually have a way of working out for the best.


In writing news, the short story is out the door and on its way. Hopefully I'll be doing the happy dance in another two or three months. We shall see!

Another One Out the Door

I finished all the edits that I wanted to my short story, so it is ready to go off in the mail first thing in the morning. I really intended to mail it today, but when I got to the post office I sat down in the lobby to do one last read-through -- and naturally, I found some things that I wanted/needed to change. So, I got the envelope weighed and bought the postage for it ($1.29, for the curious -- 16 pages plus the return envelope), made the changes at home, and I'll put it in the mailbox tomorrow.

I'm psyched to be sending out some fiction. While I've been writing non-fiction almost continuously (salaried and freelance) for the past several years, I haven't delved into the fiction realms of publishing in a while. This market is sort of like submitting to the New Yorker, both in terms of pay and in numbers of submissions they receive each month -- over a 1,000/month, according to the writer's guidelines. But I figure you may as well go for the big leagues from the start, eh? If they don't buy it, I can always work my way to smaller markets. The story really is exactly the type they would buy (in my opinion, of course, but I think it's a justifiable opinion). It's written spot-on for their target age group, deals with issues that teens often face, and is (again, in my opinion) a darn fun story to read. We'll see what happens. You never know, I may get a first reader who hates science fiction (they publish all genres, though they do say specifically they are looking for science fiction).

In the cover letter, I mentioned my NASA background and how all of the science in the story is real -- I also mentioned that their teenaged readers could be the protagonists in the story in just a few decades. I put in some other bits that I think (hope) will help generate some interest in the reader's mind. Again, we'll just have to see how it goes. Their turn-around time is twelve weeks, so I won't hear anything until late Februrary or early March. A long time to wait, but such is the nature of our business!

Writing Markets

Most of us who write professionally are aware of Writer's Market, the annual four-inch publication that lists practically every market for practically every kind of writing. While there are markets that aren't listed here (markets have to submit their information to the book's publisher), there are more than enough places to sell your work listed in this one volume. This past year I decided to buy the "deluxe" version, which includes a one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com. This website includes all of the markets listed in the guide, but in a searchable electronic form.

Several years ago, I wrote a science fiction short story and submitted it to Analog. I got a nice letter from the editor rejecting the story, but making a point of telling me the writing was "quite good" and they wanted to hear more from me. Clueless amatuer that I was, I didn't realize that the story -- a tale with a teen protagonist and was really aimed at young adults -- just wasn't appropriate for their magazine, which caters to adult readers. Now that I know a little more about the science fiction industry, I wouldn't think of sending this particular story to a magazine like that (though I admit it was gratifying to have Stanley Schmidt call my writing "quite good"!). Not really knowing where else to send it, I put it away and have always planned to use it as one of my Clarion application stories.

I haven't played much with the electronic search features of the website, but for some reason that old story came to mind, and I wondered if there might be a home for it somewhere. I put in the search parameters, and lo and behold, no less than twenty markets came up. I noticed a lot of those paid in copies of the magazine (no thanks), so I further limited the search to markets that paid above a certain rate. I found the perfect market! The editor says they are looking for all kinds of fiction (but they mention science fiction specifically), but the protagonist must be a teenager over the age of 14. They prefer stories of 3,000 to 10,000 words (my story is 3500), and they pay 25 cents/word! For those that don't feel like doing the math, that's $875! And from the description of what they are looking for, I think my story will fit right in. I need to find a copy of the magazine first, of course, since I've never heard of it, but I think it sounds like a good match. I pulled the story out and (naturally) found some things I want to change, but they are all fairly minor. We'll see if it all pans out, but I have to say that thus far I've found WritersMarket.com to be worth every dime. There are other features to the site (submission tracking is one, though I have my own system), but just this feature alone is outstanding. It's worth your while to check it out!

Breaking the Rules

I just read an interesting article in Writer's Digest on "breaking the rules" of publishing. The author lists ten rules that we all "know" we're supposed to follow, and then explained how successful she was by breaking those rules. Some of the "rules" are not much more than tips that help out certain writing styles, so if you break them successfully, that just means you have a different routine for writing. For example, one "rule" you may have heard is that you should know your characters so well before starting to write the book that they speak to you as you write. As I've commented before, my characters do seem to take on a life of their own, even though I know that's just my subconcious speaking to me. The writer of this article claims that never happens for her, and I've heard other people say the same thing. Nothing at all wrong with that. Of course, in the same paragraph, the writer says she just tries to imagine what her character would do in a particular situation and writes that down. That's not really that different -- in both cases you're essentially letting the character drive the story. Who cares if you "feel" what the character feels or if you just intellectually decide that's what he should do? A lot of her "rules" are actually of this variety. If a rule of this type (suggestion, really) works for you, great! If not, fine, do whatever does work.

Some of her other "rules" are a little more serious. For example, she says you should never follow an agent's guidelines. Related to this, she says you should always send them a completed manuscript, not a query. She then goes on to talk about the "friendly" rejection letter she got from one agent that she sent her entire manuscript to. She says "I never got a rejection letter saying, 'You didn't query us first, so we didn't look at your manuscript.'" Well, duh. Many agents have said they just trash any manuscript that wasn't specifically asked for. Why would they bother to take the time to write you a nice note telling you you're an idiot? Publishers and agents establish their guidelines because that is what they've found help them to work most efficiently. The writer of this article says that by skipping the query and partial manuscript phases, she's bypassed two chances for rejection. Maybe so. But maybe not -- she just may have been rejected out of hand without being reviewed. But even if there is an advantage to you, as the writer, in not following guidelines, you aren't showing respect for the editors who are working 70 hour weeks to get through all the material they have to review. They are people, and they have lives. Why would you intentionally make someone else's life more difficult, even if it is to your advantage to do so? Yes, some editors/agents will buy a piece that break their rules. In the end, they want good stories, and if something really catches their eye, they'll buy it regardless, just because the world is driven by business and not by convenience. But your manuscript had better be much better than anything else the editor has ever read. And if it's so good, won't that come through in a query letter? Editors don't reject things randomly. They need good writing to earn their living. If your writing is good enough to be published, it's good enough to be published without making the editor's job harder.

There is a certain arrogance in the type of behavior this writer advocates that really bothers me. In fact, her entire article shows that same arrogance and condescening tone: "Oh, you poor saps, you've been lied to all your life. Let me grace you with the real story." She's published a YA novel (just one), and I applaud her for that. But I think I can live without following her advice, especially considering the attitude of the source.

ARCHER

A couple of months ago, I posted a description of the Civil Air Patrol's new ARCHER (Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance) system that is being deployed to support homeland security, search and rescue, and disaster relief missions. For those that don't want to re-read that post, basically this is the equivalent of Star Trek's planetary scanners. You can do minerology, crop assessments, search for specific objects on the planetary surface, and lots of things that used to only be envisioned by science fiction. I commented that as science fiction writers, any time we can get real-world experience like this, we can improve the sensation of "being there" in our stories. After all, how many writers for Star Trek actually got to run Mr. Spock's sensor scans for real? I took the screening exam and applied to program, more or less on a lark.

It seems I've been given the nod.

I got a call today from the director of the program (he's in Colorado Springs, CO), asking if I'd be interested in attending the four-day intensive training program. He said that they were being very selective, so he was personally interviewing all the candidates (apparently nearly 25% of the first --and only, I believe -- class of ARCHER trainees flunked out, costing CAP $5,000 each), but that my background -- between the Navy and my work with hyperspectral imaging with the Mars program -- made me a perfect candidate. So, in two weeks, CAP is flying me to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama for the training. I am the only person in the state of Arizona who will be trained, and there will only be twelve students in this class. Coincidentally, I had a CAP squadron meeting tonight, which -- also coincidentally -- the group commander (the group is the next level of command above the squadron level) was attending. I mentioned that I had been selected for the training, and the group commander was quite impressed (apparently he flunked the screening exam). He said that the wing commander would really like me to do this training, since if the Arizona Wing has a certified ARCHER operator, we have a chance of getting one of the new high-tech ARCHER aircraft permanently stationed here. And since I'd be the only person trained to fly it, it would essentially be my aircraft, which I think is pretty cool...

The first two days of training is ground school on the theory of hyperspectral imaging. Since I'm one of maybe three dozen people in the country who actually did this for a living, I'm not too concerned with it. On the third day, though, we are actually going out to the hanger and will uninstall and install the system in the aircraft. This is no small thing, and I believe requires us to get an FAA certification for this maintenance. We will be trained to fix the thing, not just operate it, so that's going to be way cool. The fourth day we will be in the air running the system, and will be given the final exam that we have to pass to get certified. All in all, it's going to be an intense period, but I'm actually looking forward to it (though I'm not looking forward to being away from my family for that long).

I think this will be a huge boost in real-world experiences that I can use to power my writing. I'm definitely going to have to work in a story that uses this type of system, I can already see...

Manga Takes Over the Universe

We used to play a game called "Illuminati," an absolutely hysterical and viciously backstabbing game (it even has rules for cheating) that pokes fun at all the conspiracy theories floating about. The basic premise of the game is that there are secret societies that are controlling the world by controlling other organizations as their puppets (some of which have their own puppets, as well). You can get some very interesting results, such as discovering that the Boy Scouts secretly control the Porn Magazines who in turn control the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow (who are equipped with their Orbital Mind Control Lasers). You have to play it to appreciate it, but trust me, it's a lot of fun.

In reality, manga controls the universe.

Our friend (who is staying with us this weekend, see last night's post) and I used to follow several comic book series, so we made our traditional trek to the comic book shop as we do every time she visits. All of the comic book series I used to read have long ended, so I'm not currently reading any of them. When we walked into the store, I was amazed that fully two-thirds of the store was devoted to manga and anime. And it's not just in the shops, look at Saturday morning cartoons. Even the non-Japanese cartoons are now being drawn in a "manga-ish" style. The transformation is complete: All animation now involves characters with big eyes and small mouths.*

Now that in and of itself is not really a problem, as far as I'm concerned. What bugs me is that manga has -- in my heretical opinion -- some of the single worst artwork I've seen anywhere. I understand the conventions are different. For exmaple, it's more iconic: Lines streaming out from a character's head indicate anger or rage, motion is indicated by blurring the surroundings instead of blurring the characters, etc. That doesn't change the fact that the characters don't really look like people even when they're drawn well. What bothers me even more, though, is that in the same book there will be panels where they've obviously taken a lot of time to drawn the characters and some panels where it looks like a art school drop-out drew them. I don't understand the inconsistency, though there's probably a reason for that, too.

One way or the other, it doesn't really matter what my tastes in the artwork might be. Manga has taken over in a big, big way, so there's no point in fighting a battle that was decided long ago while I wasn't paying attention. The stories, at least, are often quite good, and as a writer that's my big interest. I will say one thing for them: I hate that traditional American comics are so short. You can't tell a story in 18 pages (or whatever), so you end up having to wait months just to see even one event resolve itself. It's really hard to remember what's going on in the story after all that time. Manga, to its credit, has much longer books, so you can tell complete tale within its pages. Maybe that's the secret of its popularity, and that's a good thing from a writer's point of view.

In the end, I waved the white flag and bought a manga comic that had an interesting premise. Viva la revolution!



*There's even a roleplaying game called BESM, which stands for -- you guessed it -- "big eyes, small mouth."

Friends Near and Far

A very good friend of ours is staying with us over the weekend; she'll be back for a week or so over Christmas. She's been friends with my wife and I since grad school (in fact my wife was one of her housemates before moving in with me), so it's been really great to see her. She is also part of our extended network of friends who meet online to play games (mostly massively multiplayer games). What I find interesting is that while I met all of this group in person before we started playing online, some of the members of the group have never seen each other "in the flesh." And yet, they all consider themselves to be friends, and we all have the typical friendship dynamics that you would expect from a group that gets together for drinks once a week or so (falling outs, habits that annoy each other, new marriages - not to each other so far, ups and downs, etc.). I've experienced the phenomenon of building a mental image of a radio personality, only to have that image totally oblitherated upon actually seeing what the person looks like. I've often wondered if a similar reaction would occur if my friends actually met each other in person.

All of this is in my mind, of course, because it's a central theme in the short story I'm writing. It's purely coincidence that our friend has come to visit at the same time I'm writing this, but it's interesting to get her perspective. I'm not completely sure the idea is powerful enough to carry the story (see my previous post on the story for a plot synopsis), but I think it's strong enough to be worth the time for a first draft. I'm still working on the novel, as well. Oddly enough, I think this is the first time I've ever multi-tasked story writing. Normally I can't think about more than one story at a time, but I don't think this short story will interfere much. We shall see.

Story -- Complete

I finally finished Robert McKee's Story last night. It's really an excellent book, and he is obviously passionate about his theories of how story works. For the most part, I think his theories are spot on, so there is a lot to be learned by reading this book. I'm sure he is a very dynamic speaker, and I'd love to attend one of his seminars one day (although I seriously doubt I could ever afford it). Unfortunately, his writing is so -- dramatic -- that it's sometimes hard to get a good grasp on what he's trying to say. A good teacher boils things down into clear, concise pieces of information that he wants his students to learn. McKee talks a lot and gives you a lot of examples from film -- all of which are good -- but he's not as good a teacher as I would like him to be. As I said, though, there is a lot to learn from the book, and it's certainly not dull, so I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to take fiction writing seriously. On the other hand, I would also strongly recommend that you have written at least one complete novel (sold or unsold) before trying to apply his techniques. I really think you need to have the experience of plotting and carrying out a complete novel (or screenplay, obviously) before his ideas will make sense. You'll get something out of it no matter what, but reading this book is a big investment time-wise, so you'll want to make sure you're getting the most for your money.

I'll post some examples of things I've learned from the book in the next few days. Even though the book is aimed at screenwriters, there is really only one chapter that isn't all that applicable to novelist -- and even that chapter is interesting, as it reveals how the "other half" lives. Screenwriters are under a lot more restrictions than we novelists are, and some of the techniques that work for screenwriting would be a death nell for novelists. Nevertheless, having the ability to write only what the "camera" sees -- no thoughts inside anyone's head -- for example, would be a powerful exercise for any budding novelist.

Overall, the book is well worth the (hefty) price of admission.

Thanksgiving

It's traditional (in the U.S., at least) to take Thanksgiving to reflect on all the things that we are thankful for in the past year. It's certainly been a busy year, with lots of changes coming down. My daughter has evolved from a baby to a child, and that's been amazing to watch. My son has taken an interest in his life and school and is becoming a mature young man -- no small feat for a sixteen year old. My wife has a new job, a permanent position doing exactly what she loves, working with people that she enjoys being around. And me? Well, I'm probably riding the biggest wave of all, living a dream I've had for twenty years or more. I'm writing all the time, working from home as my own boss, and am actually enjoying life for the first time in a long time.



I'd say that makes for a pretty darn good Thanksgiving, never mind the turkey and trimmings.



Here's hoping that you and yours have as much to be thankful for and that you're enjoying the beginning of the holiday season!

Traditions

Today my daughter had a "Thanksgiving lunch" at her school (she's two, you'll recall), and parents were invited. She was pretty tickled to see me at her school during the middle of the day, and even moreso when I sat down at the little table with her. She didn't eat much of the meal (although she did shout her Thanksgiving mantra, "It's turkey time!"), but she has discovered that she loves "punkinpie" (one word). She generally doesn't like anything gooey, but I guess she made an exception for pie!

When we got home, she was thrilled to help her mom cook in the kitchen. "I'm makin' punkinpie with Mama!" It was too cute, she was so excited. My wife was having a ball, too, because this is the first holiday tradition that our toddler has really been able to understand. My wife got a real kick out of being able to pass on one of her family traditions.

It makes me wonder what kinds of traditions an alien civilization might have. It's obviously not a racial thing (as humans all have widely different traditions for holidays), so it's not immediately obvious how to figure out what their traditions might be. For that matter, a group of colonists living in a space station might develop holiday traditions (or other kinds of traditions) that are radically different from our own. I think you'd have to do a very good job of developing the sociology of your alien culture to be able to even guess at what their traditions might be. On the other hand, this type of color can really add to the richness of your story, so I think the effort is well spent! It can be quite a challenge, but a fun one to think through...

You're the Inspiration

Where do we get our ideas for stories? Sometimes, I think it comes from the most bizarre places, but other times, it's from the fairly mundane. I had to drive down to ASU to meet with my thesis committee chair this morning. At an average speed of less than 10 MPH (not much of an exaggeration), it takes an hour and half or more to get there, so I had a CD playing in the car stereo system.* One of the songs was "Will You Still Love Me?" which has lyrics that go something like, "Just say you'll love me for the rest of my life." I started thinking, what if a man met a woman, and they fell in love, but she was in some dreadful accident. The only way to save her was to essentially turn her into a cyborg. Now what of his promise to love her "for the rest of her life"?

And that led to further explorations with the idea. Internet chat rooms are so popular these days, it's not uncommon to have good friends that you've never met in person. Marriages have even resulted in not a few cases. What if the man and woman met through a chat room? They fall in love, but the woman is deathly afraid of a coming event that will turn off all power to her region for a few hours. The man can't figure out why she's so afraid, until she finally confesses that she's not a human -- she's an A.I. Now he has to deal with love, and whether one can love a machine, and also with the impending loss of that love. Even if the A.I. is rebooted, it will not be the same personality, even if all the memories are restored.

And thus was born a short story, "Will You Love Me When the Lights Go Out?" The story explores not only the facelessness of our Internet culture, but also what it means to love, and to even be human. It also deals with the conflicts of love and loss, which is the driving force behind the story. I think it will be fun to write!



*For the curious, it was "Chicago: Greatest Hits." My hearing is not good enough -- even with hearing aids -- to actually make out the words to any of these songs, so I pretty much only listen to songs that I knew well from before I lost my hearing. My brain sort of fills in the words for me, so I still enjoy it (mostly). Interestingly enough, there are some songs on this CD that I don't know. It's kind of weird to be enjoying the music and then suddenly not be able to follow any of it. Odd how memory works...

** By the way, for those that don't recognize it, the title of this post is also a great Chicago song...

Story Length

A recurring quesstion among new (and not-so-new) writers is "How long should my story be?" The standard answer is "As long as it needs to be!" I once heard (from Mark Twain, I think, but I'm not certain) that a speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. The same could be said of a story.

That's all well and good, of course, but it doesn't really answer the question. Yes, to a certain extent, the story you have to tell will dictate it's length. You may be aiming for a short story, but if your tale really needs multiple plotlines in order to be told properly, then what you're really writing is a novel, you just haven't realized it yet. The "official" word counts (as measured for the Hugo awards) for the various forms are:

• Short-short (or flash or sudden fiction): less than 1500 words
• Short story: 1500-7500 words
• Novelette: 7500-17,500 words
• Novella: 17,500-40,000 words
• Novel: 40,000 words and up

This is why National Novel Writing Month participants are expected to write 50,000 words in one month: this is the minimum length for a novel. In reality, though, a publisher will almost never buy a novel this short. Between 40,000 and 80,000 words is a "no man's land" in which there are very few markets (I'm sure there must be some, but I can't think of one off-hand). If your story falls in this range, then it may be unmarketable (even it would otherwise be publishable). In general, editors say they want novels of 80,000 to 120,000 words, though a first novelist would be wise to stay around 100,000 words or less, since 120,000 words is something of a gamble for the publisher -- a gamble they probably aren't willing to take on an unknown author. Young adult (YA) novels tend to run a bit shorter, usually around 60,000 to 80,000 words, but again, tending towards the upper end of that.

I think more people have trouble keeping within the word count limit than they do reaching a word count limit, though. That's because all of us write great scenes that don't really advance the plot, but hurt too much to cut out ("If they don't read this scene, the readers aren't going to fully appreciate what happens later!"). I can sympathize, since I do the same thing. If we're writing for ourselves, that's one thing, but if we want to sell a piece, then we have to be pretty ruthless. I read somewhere that those cut scenes can often be expanded into a great short story after the novel becomes a best seller. Works for me!

For myself, I'm shooting for the 100,000 word mark. No, I'm not going to artificially try to hit a predetermined word count, but I will add just enough depth to story to put it into that ballpark. While it's true that the story sets the length, you control how deep a story you set out to tell, so in the end, you do have some measure of creative control. I think the big thing is to just write. While I know editing is incredibly painful for some, I still think it's a lot easier to cut than it is to create. So, write your tale and don't worry (too much) about the form. In your editing phase, though, it's time to look at all the story elements and decide just how long it really needs to be.

Royalty

Today we took our two year old to the Devonshire Renaissance Faire. For a small little two-day Faire, it was really good. They had a huge owl (at least two and a half feet tall) that had been rescued, and they were letting children (and adults) pet him. He was very calm and still -- in fact, most everyone thought he was a stuffed doll until he turned his head and blinked at them. Our daughter was entralled. She went up to the lady running the booth and asked if she could pet the owl all by herself. She's not terribly shy, but you could see she wanted to pet that owl very badly. The Faire also had jugglers and knights conducting swordfights and lots of movement and color. What really thrilled her, though, was that she was asked to meet the queen.

We were walking past the queen's pavillion, and apparently she saw how cute our daughter is (not uncommon -- I'm not just being a proud dad when I say everyone is strangly attracted to how cute she is). The queen sent one of her nobles over to ask her to come sit with her. Our daughter did very good. She walked into the roped off area of the pavillion all by herself. Bowed at the end of the carpet, then walked up to the queen and sat in her lap. She talked to the queen for a while, and was given a "magic bracelet" to take home. Our daughter got down from the queen's lap, bowed again, and came back to us. It was so cute! She was totally impressed to meet a "real" queen.

But what is it with humans and royalty -- or nobility in general? I should say on the front end that I'm not immune either, but I would like to understand the feeling. Why are we so entralled with people who were born into noble families? They didn't do anything to deserve it. They aren't "better" people -- in fact, due to in-breeding, they're often a little worse than us "commoners." Is it nothing more than five millenia of conditioning? Or is it that this is the one thing that no matter how much we achieve in life, we can never have? I honestly don't know. You would think we would resent the nobility (and of course that happens too -- the French Revolution is a case in point), but in general we look upon them as an extremely positive thing, even when, in today's world, they have no real bearing on anything. I might could have understood it when the nobility literally wielded the power of life and death over you, but that's far from the case anymore. Again, I'm not immune to the feeling either, but that doesn't mean I have the tiniest inkling of why we feel that way.

Nobility is not often used in science fiction, although it's extremely common in fantasy. The science fiction role-playing game Traveller had nobles playing an important part, as do the nobles in the Honor Harrington series, but those are about the only examples I can think of. While there is a monarchy in the world of the stories I write (only one out of six Solar Nations), the monarchy doesn't play a big role. I think the Babylon 5 universe provides an example in their "Rangers" that taps into the same feeling without explicitly having knights and kings and queens. The Rangers are roughly the equivalent of knights errant, and are respected as such, but they have a wholly science fiction feel to them -- they aren't just transplanted fantasy elements. I'm thinking that I should come up with something like that to tap into this strangely human trait of respecting the nobility, no matter who they really are. There could be some interesting conflict there for science fiction that, unlike fantasy, hasn't been done to death a thousand times before. Definitely worth exploring...

More Big News

I got a bit of good news today. This afternoon I got an email from the editor of the magazine who bought my first article. As you may recall, I neglected to include all the information their writers' guidlines require on the second article I sent to them, so I had pretty much given up hope on that one. Today the editor asked me to send him the illustrations that accompanied that second article -- rock and roll! The guidelines specified that you should not send any illustrations with the initial submission; they will ask for them if they are interested. So, while he has not committed to buying the article, he is certainly interested enough to want to see more. If he buys it, that makes me two for two on articles submitted.

This is the kind of roller coaster ride writers thrive on, I think. I was pretty down about this article since I didn't think it would get a chance -- even though it's a good article. But just an editor saying, "I'm interested in this, send me more" is enough to send me sailing along! I don't envy them their jobs. You'll note that his messge was sent on a Saturday. I have a very good friend who has worked as an editor (you know who you are!), and she has my total respect. I think it would be interesting to do for a couple of months, but I think it would eventually make me crazy in the long run.

I'm sailing for now, though!

Part-time Jobs

I've only actually applied and interviewed for one job in my life (and while they had already decided on someone else for the position, after my interview they decided to hire me instead -- I confess to feeling a little guilty about that). Every other job I've had has just sort of fallen my way as I was either in the right place at the right time, or someone had heard about me and actively came looking for me.

It seems it's happened again.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I teach two astronomy night classes at one of the community colleges here in Phoenix. One of their other astronomy instructors has accepted a job somewhere else, so the department asked me if I'd be willing to take over her class (there are only four weeks of class left). The lecture class meets Friday mornings and the lab meets early Friday afternoons, so my newly-flexible schedule makes it pretty easy for me to teach it. So now next semester they want me to teach that slot again, which is fine with me. They also found out that my undergraduate degree is in engineering physics, and I worked in orbital mechanics at NASA, so they've asked to teach a mechanics class (a branch of physics) on Monday and Wednesday nights next semester.

Once again, I seem to have fallen into a job (though not a full-time job, thank goodness) without really trying.

This leads me to the fundamental dichotomy between writing and eating. If you want to be a professional freelance writer (as opposed to the salaried writing I was doing at NASA), the odds of you being able to feed yourself, at least for the first five or ten years, are pretty small. That's why everyone cautions you not to quit your day job until you have a lot of royalties coming in. My family doesn't really need the money, although it's nice, of course. I mostly agreed to take the classes simply because I love teaching, and I've missed it over the past few years. The nice thing about this particular job is that it only ties up one working day a week (I don't usually write much in the evenings anyway -- that's not when I most creative). There's still papers to be graded, but again, I do that in the evening when it doesn't interfere with my writing time. Overall, this is a pretty good fit for someone just starting a writing career.

I can't help feeling a little guilty, though, as if I've betrayed the mission by doing something other than writing one day a week. Objectively, I know that the benefits (emotional as well as financial) far outweigh the drawbacks, so I'm sure I'll come to terms with that. There's just something about saying, "Yeah, I don't do anything but write all day" that's good for the soul. :) On the other hand, I really do love teaching, especially physics (and most especially mechanics -- there's a reason I love orbital mechanics so much). I guess the real litmus test is this: Suppose I wrote the next Harry Potter and it nets me a bazillion bucks. Would I still teach these classes? I can honestly say that I would, so in that sense, I think it's all good.

Sleep Study: The Aftermath

Well, last night basically sucked.

I showed up at the sleep clinic, and they immediately had me get undressed (completely) so that they could start hooking wires and stuff to me. I tell you, I looked like some weird science experiment gone bad. Most of the wires were on my head, but there were also electrodes on my face, behind my ears, down my legs, you name it. They also put bands around my chest and stomach and jammed a sensor up my nose to measure breathing. Once I was completely wired, I had to gingerly get in the bed without pulling anything out. I had to sleep on my back without rolling over -- not the way I sleep best. They also had an infrared camera watching me (so I guess I just made my first nudie video...). It took them about 30 or 40 minutes to get everything calibrated, then they turned the lights out, so that was it for writing time. Oh well.

I managed to get to sleep finally, but I was not sleeping very deeply. Then sometime in the middle of the night (there are intentionally no clocks in the room -- apparently some people have sleep problems because they obsess with looking at the clock), the tech came in, turned on the light, and said they were going to connect me to the breathing mask since I had stopped breathing in my sleep several times. In theory, if I do in fact have sleep apnea, I'd have to sleep with this mask on for the rest of my life.

I think I'll just die early.

The mask only covers your nose, and it has a sensor that supposedly detects when you exhale. If you exhale through your mouth, however, the sensor doesn't pick it up and keeps blowing air down your throat. Instantly, you feel like you can't breathe. Talking is basically impossible. The mask also has to fit very snugly, and if there are any leaks, the sensor doesn't work. I had a little bit of congestion last night, so sometimes I wasn't breathing hard enough through my nose -- and once again, the air was being forced down my throat keeping me from breathing. Again, you can't roll over because you'll break the seal on the mask. It took me forever to fall asleep with the mask, and when I woke up once in the night, I had trouble falling asleep again.

And then there were the various other indignities. If you have to go to the bathroom during the night, you have to call the tech to come disconnect you and make sure the coast is clear in the hallway since you're buck naked. You then have to wander down the hallway naked with a bunch of wires in hand while you attend the call of nature. Over all a lousy, lousy night. What makes it worse is that if I do indeed have sleep apnea, I'm grounded -- I can't fly. We'll have to see how that goes...

Sleep Study

Well, tonight should be an interesting experience. I've apparently had sleep apnea for some time now. For those that don't know, sleep apnea is when you mysteriously stop breathing for as much as 10 to 15 seconds while you're asleep. You never actually wake up, but it keep you from going into a deep sleep. The result is that you wake up feeling like you've not had much sleep at all. I had surgery on my nose to straighten it out back in March (I've broken my nose several times), and while things are much better, it's still not where it should be. So, the ENT doctor wants to do a sleep study to see what's going on.

Apparently they are going to hook me up to a bunch of wires and sensors while I sleep at their clinic tonight. I'm not at all sure how I'm going to be able to sleep connected to a bunch of machines, but we'll see how that goes. I have to go over there about 9 PM tonight, but they don't want me to actually go to sleep until my usual bedtime (around 11:30 or so). That means I'll have two hours or more of uninterrupted writing time tonight, so I'm not looking at this as an all-bad thing!

I've always been fascinated with sleep. Everything sleeps, but why? Why does your body shut down after 36 hours or so? Dreams and why they occur are interesting, but what I find fascinating is why we need to sleep at all. I saw an episode of the Twilight Zone in which a group of Vietnam vets (this was the new version obviously) had a gland removed from their brain during the war. The result was that they no longer felt the need for sleep. The idea was that if they didn't sleep, they'd be more agressive. What I found interesting was the idea of how much more time you have available in your life if you don't need ot sleep. One of the men commented that it was like living a double lifetime. I think it would quite cool to experience this first hand, but of course, since we don't know why we need to sleep in the first place, we have no idea what the side effects would be. There is a lot of raw material for some good science fiction short stories there, though!

Those Stubborn Protagonists

I am continuing to struggle with my protagonist who, it seems, simply doesn't want to be the person I've laid her out to be. I have her cast at the beginning of the story as a fairly self-conscious teenager who, by the end of the tale, has grown into a self-confident leader. The problem is that she simply doesn't want to be self-conscious! That girl has a smart mouth on her, and she's not afraid to use it, particularly when she is with the antagonist (whom she can't stand but will eventually fall in love with -- just before she blows him up).

Now, normally, I don't have a problem with this. As I've said before, half the joy of writing is letting your characters grow and tell their own tales. The writer is as entertained as the reader! But in this case, I think the story loses some of its power if we don't see this maturity develop in the protagonist. Actually, I think the story loses a significant amount of power, and that's why I'm worried about it. I've written out the controlling idea, as McKee recommends, and based on that, it shouldn't really matter if she is already self-confident or not, but my gut still tells me that this is an important facet, even if it isn't the main facet.

So, the question is do I force her into her early role and let events cause her to mature, or do I let her be herself from the beginning? I've always trusted my characters to develop as they are "meant" to, so I'm leaning towards the latter, but I still can't shake the feeling that I'm losing something as a result. I'm not going to go back and change what I've written just yet, so maybe I'll be able to compare approaches. I do like her as a person better now than as she was originally -- she's a lot funnier. We'll just have to see how it all turns out.

Ka-ching!

I'm doing the happy dance , since the check from my first magazine sale arrived today. It still strikes me as a little odd that I've had zero communication with the editor. The first time I realized they had bought the article was when it was published. I've never heard anything afterwords, either, though the check did arrive in a timely manner. I don't know if they are having trouble getting through to me via email (at least one person was), but I've since sent them an alternate email address and a fax number. If they were really trying to contact me, I figure they would have enclosed a note with the check, but nothing there, either. I guess that's just how this magazine runs things -- they are pretty busy, after all. It doesn't do my comfort zone any good, but I guess my only real reaction is to shrug and say "Whatever -- so long as I get paid!"

Which brings me to the topic of this post: Do we write for the money? We all know that even successful writers (with lottery-odds exceptions) don't make much money. In fact, most writers will never make enough to even live on. I think most of us would say that we aren't writing for the money, we're writing because we "have something to say" or some such. But is that really true? Can any of us honestly say, "I don't care if I never make a dime on anything I've written"? I think that very, very few of us can. So are we just kidding ourselves? If we're in this to make money, we are so in the wrong field. But I think it's fair to say that deep down, getting paid is a fundamental motivation for just about all of us.

I think I have an answer to the dichotomy, though. It's not really the money per se that we are interested in. But in writing, money is how we keep score. Whether a story is "good" or not is purely subjective. Just because one person didn't like it doesn't mean that it's a bad story -- in fact, it could be the best piece ever written. But when an editor pays for the story, then we can all agree on the points received in the game (equal to the number of greenbacks received, naturally). Thus, we can rate how good a writer we are by how many of those points we've received for our work. It's all about the game -- and even more importantly, it's all about validation.

So now you can honestly answer, "No, I'm not doing this for the money," because you aren't -- you're doing it for the points that money represents! Change it from money to Pulizers and you get the same effect, after all!

Learning the Craft

I was chatting with one of the members of my thesis committee before my exam the other day, and she mentioned that she has a teenaged niece who is very much into writing. She and her friends apparently get together and just sit around writing. She says virtually 100% of their work is deriviative, but at this stage in the game, I really don't see a problem with that. Interestingly, my son and a group of his friends have been working on a "story" for quite some time now. I think they were originally going to do a movie script, but I haven't heard anything about that project in a while, so maybe it went by the wayside. One way or another, they had a great time being social and plotting out their tale, and I think that's great. I think that the desire to do this kind of writing from an early age is one mark of someone who has what it takes to be a writer later on in life. And if the stuff they write is completely unoriginal, what of it? The way to learn to write is to write.

And that's what I see as the real advantage in both of these teens' lives. You've got to write about a million words before you really get a handle on the mechanics of the craft of writing. They've got the talent, sure, but they don't know how to use it yet. There's no better way to learn than by simply writing. Even if they are writing what will likely be throw-away stuff, they are learning how to plot, how to develop a character, grammar, and all the other tools that we writers need in our toolbox -- and they are learning them ten years earlier than most writers do. That's good no matter how you look at it.

I see real talent in some of the things my son has written (and that's reading it as a critic, not as his dad). As I've said before, he still needs to learn the craft, but he's got a huge start on the art portion of writing. I wrote a bunch of things when I was his age, but then I got sidetracked into music and let it slide. He's already out-produced me as a teen. It's really tough to make it as a writer, so I'm trying to gently convince him that he's going to need a day job to pay the bills -- but there's no reason in the world why he can't become a professional writer if that's what he wants to be!

Lost, Take Two

Okay, so we sat down to watch another episode of Lost, and I think I now understand why last night's episode didn't make any sense: What we saw was part one of the pilot! So, yeah, nothing happened by the end of last night's episode -- it was only half over!

We watched the second half of the pilot and the next episode ("Tabula Rasa," which translates roughly as "clean slate" -- appropriate given the content of the episode). It's still definitely not what McKee would call "archplot," a story that moves through time with the character's actions (and reactions) driving the conflict. Instead, so far we are seeing the conflict internally in the characters develop. Even when two characters are in conflict, they are still really battling against their natures. For example, Sayid and Sawyer get in a fist-fight over Sawyer's accusing Sayid of being a terrorist. Sayid isn't really fighting Sawyer, his struggle is internal over being a military officer -- but an officer on the losing side of a war.

McKee calls this "miniplot," a plot which reduces the story down to its bare essentials. Because this type of setting is so limited in the tools it has available to show change in the protagonist(s), it often is also "multiplot," and that certainly seems to be the case here. So, I think I understand what Lost is trying to do a little better now. I'm still not totally buying into it yet, but I am somewhat intrigued by the conflicts they've set up, I'm just not sure how they can keep the story going without resolving them -- and I'm not sure how the story can keep going if they don't. Still, it's an experiment I've never seen done on television before, so I applaud it. I'm not a big fan of miniplot, but I'm open minded enough to see if it hooks me. My wife loves it, even just the first half of the pilot dragged her in, so maybe my tastes are just a little too mundane. :)

If nothing else, looking at it as an exercise in story analysis will be well worth the price of admission!

Lost

Many people have told me how much they enjoy the television series "Lost." I've never seen it, and I've been told that it's not a series you can jump into late and expect to figure out what was going on. So, my wife and I rented the first DVD of the first series and watched the first episode tonight.

What exactly are we supposed to be getting out of this show?

Now, in all fairness, my wife loved the episode. But there was no story whatsoever! None! There were a lot of questions set up and a lot of blood and gore, and of course all of us are just a little bit afraid of being in an airline crash, so they play on that fear very well. But the epsiode itself tells no story whatsoever. Maybe that's why you can't come in late -- one story in this series takes much more than an episode to tell. If that's true though, I found the pacing to be rather slow. Yeah, there was a lot of flash and bang and things that go bump in the night, but I was really pretty bored. I dunno, we're going to watch the rest of this DVD, so hopefully I'll get hooked in the next couple of episodes. It's a hugely popular show, so they must be doing something right. I'll be interested to find out what that is...

Comp Exam

Today I had the oral defense of my Ph.D. comprehensive exam answers. The committee sat down at the table, they looked at me, I looked at them, and I said, "Okay, what questions do you have for me?" The looked at each other and finally one member said, "Well, honestly, we don't have any questions. Your writing was very clear, the organization was very convincing, and we were able to follow all of it. There's really nothing else to ask you." They looked at each other again, and the committee chair said, "Well, congratulations, you passed."

Let me just say, it's good to be a writer.

Our ability to write, to convey meaning in print, doesn't just apply to fiction. Because I've taken the time to develop the skills of a writer, I was able to write a 25-page paper that was clear as well as convincing. So much so, that the committee literally ran out of things to ask me! It was the easiest oral exam I've ever taken!

I firmly believe that writing -- all writing -- is nothing more than persuasion. Your job is to convince your reader of your Controlling Idea. Just preaching it to them isn't convincing -- and that's why sermons make poor fiction. My comp exam was not fiction, but I was still tasked with conveying my Controlling Idea (which is this case was related to science education) through my arguments. Instead of dialog, I used carefully arranged research, but the effect is the same. One of the committee members commented that most grad students hate to write. I think that's true, but I think it's because they've never learned the craft.

Don't ever let anyone denigrate your writing ability -- it's a Ph.D-level skill!

Caught in the Act

I don't normally do a lot of outlining when I write my stories. Part of the magic of writing for me is to watch my characters grow and change and take on lives of their own. Yes, I realize this is nothing more than my subconscious finding a way to express itself, but because -- by definition -- I'm not consciously aware of the process, it still seems like magic as my own creations tell me a story. It's a big attraction for me.

On the other hand, I realize that I might could write stories that were more truly powerful if I took more care to plan out the actions of the characters, particularly in terms of what McKee calls the Controlling Idea, Inciting Incident, and act design in general. Now, in all fairness, I do think about these things in the revision stage of writing (though I've never used those names), but logic suggests to me that more power will be contained in the story if I design it that way form the start. I'm not convinced, and I certainly don't want to lose what makes writing fun, but I'm open minded enough to give it a try. So, I spent a good bit of time today in explicit act design. Before I start to write, I usually have a pretty good idea of how the story is going to go in general terms, so constraining what turned out to be four acts wasn't all that hard. What was important was making certain the Controlling Idea was the guiding theme in each act climax. McKee's law of conflict says that conflict, as an expression of the Controlling Idea, is the only thing that moves a story forward, and each conflict must be more powerful than the one that came before it. It's also important that primary value expressed in the Controlling Idea change state from one act to the next. McKee argues that if things are good and then get better (or bad and get worse) from one act to the next, then the second act will be less powerful because there will be less contrast between it and the previous act.

I find it a little constraining, but maybe that's a good thing. This novel is really just intended to be an experiment in which I can try out some of these techniques. It will be interesting to see how this all turns out!

The Bionic Woman

My mother is in the hospital right now recovering from surgery to have her knee replaced with an artificial joint. This is the second one that she's had replaced (so I think it's safe to say she's done), and the technology has improved tremendously just in the last couple of years. Her recovery from the first surgery was long and excruciatingly painful, involving many months of physical therapy just to get to a quasi-normal range of strength and mobility (and the last time I saw her, she was actually not getting around as well as she was before the surgery). Not so this time. She'll be leaving the hospital early (probably tomorrow) and has apaprently made huge strides in her physical therapy with the new system. It's pretty amazing, actually.

What's amazing to me, however, is that we are quietly and unremarkably approaching the age of the cyborg. I'm always amazed to see how science fiction becomes reality -- and often without anyone even really noticing the change. My mother literally has bionic knees, and while she certainly isn't going to be leaping over thirty-foot walls anytime soon, the relative increase in power over what she was able to manage before the surgery is actually comparable to Steve Austin and Jamie Summers' best. Knees aren't the only thing being replaced. Cochlear implants as essentially bionic ears. They are brain implants that stimulate the auditory nerve to produce electrical signals in such a way that the brain perceives them as sounds -- computer implants in the truest sense. Can Neuromancer be far away? We are also learning to stimulate the optic nerve directly in a similar manner. Does anyone remember G'kar's electronic eye in Babylon 5? Pacemakers and artificial hearts have been reality for decades.

The question we have to answer is this: How much of your body has to be replaced before you can be considered a cyborg? This is not just idle speculation, science fiction writers; the future is already here!

The Gap

No, I'm not talking about the clothing store... :)

Yesterday I mentioned what McKee calls the "Gap," but I didn't really go into much detail about it. McKee says that all human beings are basically lazy (I strongly agree with this statement -- that's why I'm such a good engineer :) ). By this he means that a person will take the action that will allow him to achieve his goal with least possible amount of effort. If the protagonist of your story has a goal, he will choose the most conservative path that he feels will be a positive step towards achieving that goal. The moment he makes this choice, however, the external world (in a good story) steps in and things do not react in the way he anticipated, blocking him from his goal. The forces blocking him are, of course, embedded in the antagonist and his cohorts. Instead of achieving his goal, a gap has opened up between him and the goal.

This opening of the gap is crucial to the progress of the story. When the gap opens, the protagonist realizes that his normal way of doing things isn't going to work -- he must take extrordinary action if he is to achieve his goal. Of course, this action leads to even larger gaps, and this is how we can build tension through conflict throughout the story. It's a good way at looking at conflict. If the "gap" that opens up isn't really a gap at all -- if the protagonist can easily overcome it, or if his actions lead to the results he expected, then you don't really have a story. Also, good, deep storytelling comes into play when the gap is accompanied by a flood of realization. The events that occur as a result of the character's actions are unexpected, but are totally consistent with the meaning in the story. In fact, the opening of the gap will often force us to re-evaluate everything we have seen as a result. This requires a keen mastery of the craft of storytelling, but it's something we all can aspire to!

Scene Analysis

I've been continuing to work with McKee's Story and there are quite a few great points in here. I sometimes think that while is certainly a great writer and a great theorist of writing, he's not a terribly good teacher. I've run into this many times before. In science, in particular, there are many excellent scientists who might can tell you how they do what they do -- but they can't tell it in such a way that you can actually learn it. McKee is not quite that bad, and as he's gotten to the more practical info, I find I'm not having to work so hard to understand what he's trying to say. Still, as a teacher myself, I find myself wishing he was a bit more of one.

One of the more clear techniques he provides is for scene analysis. It is a five-step procedure that goes something like this:

• Define the conflict. Remember, if there is no conflict in the scene, then it probably serves no useful purpose in the story.
• Note the opening value. This could be anything from justice to love to faith. it will either be in a positive or a negative state.
• Break the scene into "beats." A beat is one exchange between the characters. You should be able to describe not just the outward events, but the subtext, the meaning behind what is being said. Usually this can be described in a single word (pleading, ignoring, etc.)
• Note the closing value and compare with the opening value. Did the value change from positive to negative or vice versa? If not, nothing has happened in this scene, and it probably needs to be cut (or if it is exposition, find some way to include it in a real scene).
• Examine the beats and find the tunring point. This is the moment when the character does something with some expectation, but the result is not at all what he predicted (what McKee calls the "Gap"). This resulting tension is what drives the scene.

It's a good way at looking things. While you may think it's a lot of work to go through every scene in your story this way, I think you'd be amazed at how transparent it makes your story structure!

Neo

No, this isn't a post about The Matrix... :)

I've been playing around with the AlphaSmart Neo, and I'm totally pleased with it. The keyboard is great, requiring much less "finger action" than the AlphaSmart Pro did (though I have to admit, I tend to have a soft touch on the keyboard -- I would never have survived with a manual typewriter). I've got 12,000 words or so of my novel transferred into the machine and got it to transfer it to my notebook (which never worked with the AlphaSmart Pro) on the first try. Much rejoicing! While lots of people have complained about the greenish-black color, I actually don't mind it. I had plans to use vinyl dye to paint the top half blue and the bottom half black, but I like the green enough that I don't think it's worth the effort. I may still do it at some point, though.

I love the six-line screen and the proportional font. The contrast is much better than on the Pro -- my poor eyes are already thanking me. The thing I like most about it though is the word count feature. It not only tells you the number of words, it tells you the number of characters, paragraphs, and pages in the document. You can also "link" files (such as outline) and flash between the linked and main files just by hitting ctrl-L. It's exactly what I was hoping for: a customized and optimized writing machine. It's even lighter than the Pro and much more comfortable to type on. Ergonometrics have become a big thing for me, so the ability to write comfortably anywhere is a major factor.

In other news, I commissioned a silver ring with the original seal of the Knights Templar from a craftsman in Spain. It finally arrived today! The seal is a bit bigger than I would have liked, mostly because I have such a skinny finger (US size 7), but it still looks good. It's got quite a bit of "heft" to it, too, which is something I like in a ring. The seal looks like this:



I'm pleased overall!

Epiphany

Last night on the way to Chicago (en route to Phoenix and home) I was reading Robert McKee’s book when I suddenly had an epiphany about the novel I’ve been writing.  It was the strangest thing, because my realization really had nothing to do with what I was reading.  I think my subconscious had been struggling for a long time with this and just suddenly worked it out.  

Without going into to much detail of the plot (I’ll practice writing plot synopses later), up to this point I had created a sympathetic antagonist (yes, you read that right – it’s an experiment, as I’m trying to stretch my writing abilities a bit here).  His actions are quite ruthless, but through his conversations with the other characters, we discover that his motivations aren’t actually ruthless – he’s not that terrible a person (at least from his point of view, but the character is very persuasive).  He sees the protagonist and wants to possess her.  She initially “sells her soul to the Devil (the antagonist),” but eventually leads a rebellion against the antagonist, freeing her people (long story, but I don’t really want to do a plot synopsis here).  She basically holds him responsible for the deaths of her mother and friend and sees him as the ultimate source of the suffering her people have endured – and to a large extent, she’s right.

The epiphany is this: She doesn’t just sell her soul – she really falls in love with him.  And he with her.  So now we’ve cranked the conflict up several notches.  The whole novel is exploring the idea of trying to carve a better life for yourself versus creating a better life for your society at large.  This is both an externally- and internally-manifested conflict, but there was something missing.  Now she has to face that conflict in its ultimate form.  She will head up an attack fleet that will start the war of independence that will free her people.  In order to accomplish that – something she’s not totally sure she believes is her responsibility anyway (hence the conflict) – she will have to destroy the enemy’s manufacturing capability – and the antagonist will be killed with it.  I’ve been crafting the story so that you really will see both sides of the issue.  You’re going to have a hard time deciding which side is right – exactly the same conflict the protagonist feels. In the end, you won’t be sure which choice she will make until the moment she makes.  It builds to what McKee defines as an ironic ending, something I had no intention of doing at first, but now seems to be the only way this story could possibly be told.  Similar stories have been told, but then again, I firmly believe every story has been told in some way.  I think the approach to this through two strong characters will make it unique right up until the end.  After all, conflict has to hurt.  This is going to hurt the protagonist pretty badly.

I didn’t bring the AlphaSmart on this past trip, so I’ve been holding off writing more on the story.  I just couldn’t bring myself to add more that would have to be retyped.  I am totally itching to get to the keyboard!  My new Neo arrived just after I left for the airport on Wednesday, so I’ll give a full report on that tomorrow!

The Controlling Idea

I'm in Hampton, VA, today giving a talk on Mars and doing a teacher-training workshop. I'll be headed home this afternoon. I had to take four different airplanes and two different airlines to get here, but miraculously, I got here without any problems at all. Of course, that means that I'm doomed when I go home, particularly since I have to go through Chicago. Ah well, I'll get home eventually. The hotel has high-speed Internet access, so I'm able to get email, upload to the blog, etc. Internet access is getting more nad more common in hotels now. I've gotten to where if they don't offer Internet access, I'll stay somewhere else. Ah, the modern life we lead...

I was reading Robert McKee's Story on the plane out here. His writing style is a bit ... opaque ... but he does have some very profound ideas about story structure. One of the topics that particularly struck me was the concept of a "controlling idea." The controlling idea is what drives your story forward. It's always a short sentence that contains a value change (positive to negative or vice versa) and a cause for that change. For example, the controlling idea of Dirty Harry is "Justice will prevail (negative to positive value change) because the protagonist is even more violent and ruthless than the criminals (cause)." Every scene should be interpreted in terms of either the controlling idea or its opposite, the counter-idea. By showing the audience how the counter-idea could win the day, you reinforce the drama of the idea succeeding. Of course, in a downbeat story, it's the other way around, and in an ironic story both idea and counter-idea win in the end. It's an interesting way of looking at it. I found I really had to think about it, and using this as a yardstick immediately pointed out some scenes I had in mind that don't really support either the idea or the counter-idea. Unless they become part of a sub-plot (which has it's own controlling idea), then under McKee's structure, they should be cut. I can see where you can a much stronger story by going through the process of explicitly writing out the controlling idea for the story. Can you write the controlling idea for your latest story?

Terror

I have a habit of recording particularly vivid dreams in my writing notebook. While most dreams really aren't coherent enough to be a story in their own right, you never know when some of the elements in those dreams might provide a germ that can grow into a finished story. Last night I had rather disturbing dream, a nightmare, I suppose, though it wasn't the irrational terror that accompanies most nightmares -- I certainly didn't wake up screaming.

But the dream involved terror, nonetheless. Like many dreams, the plot didn't totally make sense, but the important part was that my son and daughter were lost in a national park similar to the Grand Canyon (in the dream it was a huge dam with Grand Canyon-like walking paths built along either side. My family and I had gotten lost as well and somehowwe became separated. My daughter is 2, and though my son is actually 16, in the dream he was about 5, so now you have two small children lost and wandering around this national park (that includes a thousand-foot drop just off the path). As search and rescue teams were deployed, I began to feel the terror that only a parent, I think, can feel. As a writer, though, emotions like this (especially in the "safe" environment of a dream) are better than gold. We need to pay close attention to what we are feeling so that we can later convey that to our readers. I woke up shortly after the kids were recovered (safe and sound), but I lay there for a bit trying to hold on to the feeling of terror. It went something like this:

The feeling starts as an electric-ice tingle just below your solar plexus. It's uncomfortable. It's as though it were the source of the adrenelin that you can already feel beginning to spread through your veins. The feeling begins to spread, straight up your breastbone. Just below the top of the breastbone, you begin to feel that icy sensation in your lungs. You breathe out with force, but breathe in only shallowly. Your heartrate begins to increase. Faster, harder. You can feel your heart pounding under the breastbone, directly under that icy feeling, amplifying it. The icy feeling gets stronger, spreading acrossyour collarbone, making your heart pound even harder. You try to tell yourself to stay calm. You aren't panicked -- but you are in deep terror now. (What will happen to my kids? Are they suffering? Are they hurt? Are they scared? Where are my kids?!) You ache to hold them, you try to keep control, but you can feel it slipping. You're breathing much faster now, starting to hyperventilate. You're getting light-headed, and that just adds to the feeling of terror. The electric-ice feeling has spread through your arms, your whole torso. You can't think -- you're scared. Someone please help!

You wouldn't want to include this description in your story, as that would be pretty pointless. But if you can capture the details of the senstation of strong emotion, you can use elements from it to bring your characters' emotion alive, to make it real for the reader. By the way, the feeling of joyous, sobbing relief when I pulled both toddlers into my arms was just as strong and just as powerful.

But I think I'll treasure that one myself for a while.

The Saga Is Complete

As most of you probably know, Star Wars: Episode III was released on DVD today. With this release, we know have all six Star Wars films on DVD, so my son is planning a Star Wars marathon with some of his friends -- they are going to watch all six movies back-to-back, and maybe watch the Clone Wars animated series as well, although the jury is still out on that one. I'm probably going to join them. :)

Star Wars, the original movie, now called Star Wars: A New Hope, was a very important film for both science fiction fans and the general public as well. Think about what special effects were like before this film came out. In most cases they were cheesy plastic models hanging from strings that you could sometimes see in the shot. When we walked into Star Wars, however, for the first time everything seemed real. Yeah, we can do even better with today's CGI effects, but watch the original film again. Even today it's pretty darn good, and when it came out it changed the way we see and make movies. The story is good and there is a lot a budding science fiction writer can learn from the elements of the saga (even though what we thought was Luke Skywalker's story has turned out to be Anakin Skywalker's story). But it is the wonder of being transported to "a galaxy far, far away" that made the original movie special for us. In the case of Star Wats it was really the special effects, cleverly integrated into the story, that brought about that feeling. Nevertheless, this feeling is exactly what we should be trying to evoke as writers. And we've got the best special effects company ever created: our readers' imaginations!

Ph.D. Thesis

I had to drive down to Tempe to meet with the chair of my Ph.D. thesis committee to talk about my comprehensive exam paper and my thesis topic. Both of these steps have to be completed by the end of the semester (in about six weeks) in order for me to be admitted to candidacy next spring. I had been having a pretty rough day, but the meeting really picked me up. I had given the committee chair a few extra hard copies of my comp exam paper (it's about 25 pages). he asked if he could keep it so that he could show it to his other students, saying, "THIS is how you should be writing your comps!" I needed that! Being a writer really helps, even in writing academic papers, since I long ago learned to write clearly and persuasively. I still have to defend the paper orally, but he seemed to think that after the work I'd done on the paper itself that would just be a formality. Much rejoicing!

The other news is that we successfully narrowed down my original thesis topic to something is a bit more manageable -- and interesting, from my perspective. The question is this: Can visual memory span be improved by teaching students how to recognize and extract (disembed) the fine geological details from a picture of a landscape? Basically, we're asking whether we can improve the cognitive abilities of science students by explicitly working to improve their ability to use visual classification. We have a battery of tests to measure their visual and spatial skills and their visual memory span. After they have been practicing with the geology content, we'll see if they can use their new knowledge to actually improve their visual memory spans. This is akin to the way Sherlock Holmes could solve crimes by pulling the important details out of a crime scene and remember them later. We'd like to teach this skill to real people. It should be fun!

Synesthesia

I read an interesting article the other day on synesthesia, the melding of the senses so that the person affected perceives smells, sounds, touch, and/or taste as colors. Others see letters and numbers as having a specific color. One of the people with this condition described chocolate as purple and made her breath smell dark blue. Interestingly, she also reports confusion as "orange." If people with synesthesia can perceive emotions as colors, does this give us a clue as to how colors affect emotions?

This could be a major breakthrough for writers. If you want to describe a character in, for example, a state of confusion, would the scene seem more vivid and real if you colored many of her surroundings orange? Is this another Universal Channel that we writers can use to tap directly into the human psyche? The possiblities are endless -- and endlessly fascinating. Aside from the potential real-world application for writers, I can see the germs of several science fiction stories here. This is one reason why science fiction authors need to be reading the science news websites -- you never know when you'll turn up a gem like this!

Look At Me!

I spent most of today at the Civil Air Patrol's Unit Commander Course, learning the things I'll need to know if I ever become a squadron commander (which won't happen in the near future, but will probably happen eventually). It's been pretty interesting so far, though I think tomorrow will be even moreso. It's especially been interesting putting faces to all the names of the Wing brass, so that's kind of cool.

As soon as I got home, we took my daughter to her pre-school for their "Trunk or Treat" party. This consisted of parents and teachers with (literally) trunkfuls of candy and all the cute preschoolers going from car to car saying "Trick or Treat!" My daughter was dressed in a full-body fuzzy Care Bear costume -- too cute for words! She was going up to strangers saying, "Look at me! I a Care Bear! I a purple Care Bear! I soft!" She's such a hoot! There's not a shy bone in this child's body (I wonder where she get's that from? :) ).

I sometimes wonder if writers aren't the utlimate exhibitionists. My daughter isn't afraid of anything or anybody and definitely speaks her mind. I know a lot of writers are social introverts (at least, that's the Dickensonian stereotype -- Lord knows I'm an extrovert and half). But in what other profession do you literally bare your soul and hope people will pay money to read about it? And then we do it again. And again. Even actors on stage don't have to be that extroverted -- they're playing a role, after all, it's not really them. Writers, on the other hand, have to put all of their emotion into their work. I'm not sure you'd be any more exposed if you suddenly got the urge to run naked outside (oh, wait, I think I've done that...).

Is every writer secretly saying, "Look at me!"?

Mobile!

Today I decided to finally take advantage of the freedom inherent in freelance writing and went out of the house to work. I grabbed my AlphaSmart, a print out of the novel that I've written so far, and my background notes on the current setting and headed to Barnes and Noble*. I picked up a cup of hot chocolate at the cafe and made myself comfortable in the large reading area. It was great! I got a huge amount of writing done, and it was great to have a change of scenery. I was able to work right up until I needed to leave to pick up my son at school -- no shut down time on the AlphaSmart, just flip the switch and turn it off.

The bad news is that when I got home, the AlphaSmart once again refused to talk to our PCs. I haven't totally given up, but I may end up having to retype everything from the AlphaSmart's tiny little screen. I hope not, but that's what it's looking like. My wife and I are taking a swing dance class on Friday evenings, so afterwards she and I talked about the situation with the AlphaSmart. I am hugely productive with this thing, but I need to be able to reliably retrieve my work. So, my wife and my two kids are going to get me an early Christmas present: a brand new AlphaSmart Neo! I'm totally psyched. Not only does this do everything my AlphaSmart Pro will do, it's got a larger screen, much more memory, USB connection (!), spell check and word count, etc. It runs Palm OS, and while it doens't have a graphics-capable screen (which is fine) I can write little text-based applets for it if I so desire. I doubt I will, simply because one of the main attractions is the focus on writing without distractions. Still, it's nice to have the capability. I'll post a full report when it arrives, probably around the middle of next week.

Here's to the writing life!



*I personally think Borders is a better bookstore, but Barnes and Noble has a better area to sit in.

Third Article Submitted

I finally figured out the appropriate blood sacrifices to make to convince the AlphaSmart to send my text file to my wife's PC (still no luck getting it to talk to my laptop, but at this point I'll take what I can get). I uploaded the article I wrote yesterday to the PC and spent most of today editing it and getting it ready to submit. The final article came in at just under 5,000 words, which is the limit for this particular magazine. It's a good article and works well as a follow on to the one they already bought. It also bridges well to the third and final article I'm planning to write on the subject, although I'm being careful to make sure that each article will stand on its own. The problem I foresee with this one is that it is not as close to the "usual" articles this magazine prints as are the first two I submitted. If they are interested in the topic, I think they'll buy it, but I'm not as confident as I was about the first two. Still, I figured it was a risk worth taking, and I know of a couple of other markets that I'm pretty sure would buy it if this one turns it down. It's a worthwhile experiment.

That was the "up" part of today. The down side of today was that as I was getting this article ready to submit, I realized that I didn't include my Social Security number and U.S. Mail address on the second article I submitted. While they have that info from the article I submitted before (the one they bought), they are pretty clear in the writers' guidelines that they need that info for each submission. Stupid, stupid thing to do. I thought I had included it at the end of the article, but apparently not, according to the backup copy I keep of all my submissions. Grrr. So, they are perfectly justified in rejecting it out of hand without even reading it -- which is too bad, since it's a really good article. I think I can resubmit it in this case, but I'll have to think about the ethics of that. The moral of the story is don't get in a hurry. I have a checklist for submissions to most of the markets I send things to, so I've now created one for this market as well. A professional doesn't take short cuts. I know that, and I'm kicking myself for violating that rule. Ah well, we don't learn from successes, only from mistakes, right?

Right. Just keep saying that. :)

A Productive Day

The article that JTAS bought was the first in what could easily become a series of articles. I didn't want to write any more in the series until I was sure they were interested in the first one. Since they bought it, they're obviously interested, so I sat down today with my AlphaSmart and cranked out the next article on the topic. The first draft came in at just under 6,000 words, so I'll need to cut that down in the edit phase tomorrow, as the magazine has a limit of 5,000 words. It shouldn't be a problem, as I already think I see where I can trim it fairly easily. Still, 6,000 words in a single day is pretty darn good.

I'm developing a love-hate relationship with my AlphaSmart. I love writing on it. It is the single most perfect writing tool ever developed, as far as I'm concerned. It exactly matches my writing style and habits, and obviously I'm quite productive when I'm using it. I thought I had worked out a somewhat clunky, but effective, way of getting the text from the AlphaSmart to the PC, but now, mysteriously, that technique has also stopped working (this is the second technique that I got to work just one time). I'm at a loss as to how to get the text out into Word where I can edit it. I guess I'm going to end up retyping the whole article from the AlphaSmart screen (along with another 2,000 words of the novel, as well). I'm not very happy about that, but I suppose it's no different from having written the article in my notebook in longhand to begin with. I'm very seriously considering getting an AlphaSmart Neo as an early Christmas present. Have to discuss that one with the wife and see what she thinks, since it would be a gift from her. :)

All in all, though, an extremely productive day.

So Now I'm a Successful Professional Writer!

Big news!

The first article I wrote for the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society, Steve Jackson Games' official magazine for the Traveller role-playing game, was bought and appeared in the issue that came out today! Woo-hoo! That's a quick $150 bucks for an article that was actually a lot of fun to write. I've got another article in to them already, and will have a third by the end of the week, and I think there's a very good chance they'll buy these as well. The reason I feel so confident is that I've been reading this magazine for a long time, so I know the kinds of things they publish -- there's no substitute for market research. If you want to sell an article, give them a new article that is in the exact same style as the ones they typically publish. While that applies to fiction as well as non-fiction (and being a gaming article, there's a little of both in this one), I think it's especially important in non-fiction articles.

A few months ago, I wrote an essay about Heinlein's definitions of a professional and a successful professional writer. Briefly, that went like this:

• In order to call yourself a writer, you must write, and you must finish what you start.
• In order to call yourself a professional writer, you must put it on the market.
• In order to call yourself a successful professional writer, you must keep it on the market until it is sold.

So, given that, I'm now a successful professional freelance writer. :) Oh, I've been getting paid to write for years now, in truth. But I was working full-time and getting paid a salary, not getting paid for each piece. Being a freelancer is much more challenging, since each piece has to compete on its own. There can't be any "this one was okay, but not the best thing I've ever written." If it's not the best thing you've ever written, it won't sell -- and you won't get paid. $150 for an article is not something you could live on, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either. 3 cents/word is a professional-level rate, so that definitely counts for something. I'm pretty psyched!

Doin' the happy dance...

Diagramming Sentences

This month's issue of Writer's Digest has an article on diagramming sentences. Now, I realize that almost everyone hated doing this in school -- at least, I know essentially every one of my friends complained loudly and at great length about it. It does take some measure of time to diagram a complicated sentence, I will admit. But I have a confession to make:

I always loved it.

Now, this was long before I decided to be a writer, and I don't think the fact that I actually like diagramming sentences had anything to do with my career choices. But there is something almost magical about how a hideously complicated sentences can be presented in an orderly, precise form. Oh, sure, there are practical advantages. For example, knowing where to place commas is easy if you know what phrases are of what type. Diagramming the sentence forces you to determine this. If you have diagrammed the sentence, you have a deep understanding of the structure of that sentence, of how it does it's job. This Writer's Digest article even pointed out how the resulting diagram can reveal strong and weak points in your prose, something I've never really considered, but after reading this article I can certainly see how it would work that way.

In the end, though, diagramming every sentence in your story is impractical and not really worth the effort. For me, diagramming gives the same satisfaction as solving a good crossword puzzle. There's a magic in seeing everything fit together. The fact that it also gives me greater insight into the tools of language -- and unarguably necessary thing for a writer -- is just a bonus!

Breaking In

Today our church held their annual "Fall Festival" (I wonder if they are aware of the pagan associations with that? Probably not...), so we kept the baby up past her naptime in order to go participate in the fun and games. It was a good time, overall. Music was provided by a pair of sisters from the church who are trying to break into the music business as singer/songwriters. They're actually quite good, but even so, the odds of their making it are very, very small. They had made a CD with some of their songs and were selling it at the festival (with part of the proceeds going back to the church). Self-promoting is not only a good idea for budding musicians, it's also one of the only ways that you'll ever get noticed by the big shots who run the record labels.

I was struck by how alike and yet unlike ths is to writing. Like music, it's a very competitve business and the odds of really making it big, aren't very good. Self-promotion -- CD's for them, readings and book signings for us -- is essential to both of us, since that's the only way to get that crucial word-of-mouth advertising. But that's about where the similarity ends. You see, the big difference between the music and publishing industries is that the publishing industry is actively looking for good, new writers. Not so with the music industry. You could be quite good and still not manage a yawn from the record producers. That's a huge distinction. That openness in publishing means that we've got a chance to make it, if only we perfect our craft. It's all in our court. In music ... well, in music you've got to count on hard work and talent, but also luck and getting noticed by the right people. Your chances of breaking out are just not that good.

I've got a lot of respect for these girls, and I wish them the best of luck. But I don't envy them the road they are going to have to travel. Even though we complain about it sometimes, it really makes me appreciate the path we as writers have to trod.

Co-opting History

I took my family to the library to look for some books for my daughter (she's very into the Berenstein Bears right now). They went to look for books, while I sat down with my AlphaSmart to do some writing. I got quite a bit done, although the scene I wrote is pretty weak, I think. Still, re-writing is easy; getting that first draft done is the hard part, so I'm not terribly worried about it.

While we were there, I poked around in the history section. I'm a big medieval history buff; I even took a couple of medieval studies courses in college twenty years ago (which is a big thing, considering I was an engineer and had exactly three electives my whole college career). One of the things I've always been interested in was the "The Order of Poor-Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon," better known as the Knights Templar. As likely most everyone knows, Dan Brown wrote a fun fiction book called The DaVinci Code that features the Knights Templar fairly prominently. I've read the book, and it's really quite a good story. What annoys me is this: Any time I go to do research on the historical Knights Templar, everyone assumes I'm interested in finding the Holy Grail, or the family of Jesus, or some other such nonsense. The Knights Templar had nothing to do with any of that. Nor are they in any way related to the Knights Templar branch of Freemasonry. They were, however, an extrememly fascinating organization that was very important in shaping the medieval world. They really don't need the trappings of a few authors' fantasies to be interesting, and while I certainly don't fault Brown and his ilk for giving this interesting group of knights an expanded role in their fantasies, it does make things a little more difficult for people interested in researching the historical Knights Templar. It's reached the point where I'm embarassed to let people see me with reference works on the subject, because they automatically assume I believe the mumbo-jumbo in DaVinci Code. It's fiction, folks! Really, really good fiction -- I enjoyed it a great deal. But I wish it'd hadn't been quite so convincing to so many people.

Which brings up an interesting moral and philosophical question: To what extent are fiction authors obligated to maintain the historical accuracy of their subjects? Are they obligated to maintain any accuracy at all? I don't have an easy answer to that. In theory, fiction can do whatever the heck it wants -- it's fiction, after all. On the other hand, Jacques de Molay was a real person. He's dead, so he's not likely to sue for slander. What is a little worrisome is that the general public seems to be a bit ... gullible, for want of a better word. They seem to forget that convincing fiction is still fiction. Are we contributing to gullibility of American population? I'd like to think not, and yet, here am I feeling embarrased about a perfectly legitimate realm of research, one I've been pursuing for two decades now. That's not a feeling I'm terribly happy about.

Return of the Uggghh

Well, it looks like I've contracted round two of this flu we've had going around. My wife got it, a bit different from what we had before, then gave it to me. As a result, I've been flat on my back all day today, mostly sound asleep the whole time. It's a real shame, I had a lot I wanted to do today. Oh well!

I've never really understood what makes us get sick. Oh, I know about the body's immune response and all that, but mechanically and physically, what makes us sick? What makes us ache like we do? What makes your temperature go up when you have a fever? For a lot of medicine, we know that "if you do this, this will happen," and that forms the basis of a good deal of our understanding. But why does it happen that way? I think we're still a long way from understanding how the body works from a mechanical standpoint. It seems to me that so much of medicine is descriptive. That's probably why there's so much to be memorized in medical school (lists of symptoms, etc.)

If, at some point in the future, we really understood how the body works, would we then be able to do anything we want with it?

Mugging the Muse

Some of you may have noticed that my posts have been coming later in the evening than before. When I was working at NASA, I found that getting in early and posting to the blog was a good way to get my brain working and get me ready to start the day. Since I've started writing full-time, I've found that I'm ready to get busy writing the minute my butt hits the chair (or couch or whatever) -- I don't feel the need for a lot of preparatory work. As we all know, you must never, never thwart the muse, so I've just jumped in and started working on whatever project is up for the day, putting off the blog post until later. I've not even been taking much in the way of lunch breaks, maybe 15 minutes or so. Not intentionally, mind you, it's just sort of worked out that way. At some point, I'm sure my work habits will flux again and all this will change, but right now I'm pretty happy with the groove I'm in.

The title of this post is blatantly stolen from Holly Lisle's wonderful collection of essays on the writing life. If you haven't read them, get over to Holly's site right now and do so. Really. Right now. Don't worry, she's got a link to get you back here.

Back?

Writers have kind of a mysterious relationship with our creativity. We personify it with names like "silent partner" or "muse," but really, it's just us. If we could figure out how to control our creativity, life would be much, much easier on all of us, wouldn't it? Instead, we fall back on pre-scientific techniques such as making gods out things we don't understand. You can't blame us for it -- we have to do something! I think, though, that the science does exist somewhere, we just haven't found it yet. Maybe that's why psychology fascinates me so much. There is a lot about the human mind that we simply have no freaking clue about. It's the last realm of black magic, really. Yet, if we could only pierce the veil, it wouldn't seem any more magical than lightening or fire. There are those who say this would take away from the "art" of writing. Poppycock. We'd just be understanding the process of art, is all. It wouldn't take anything away from it. I think that those who feel this way like the mystique that surrounds their success at the art, and they are loathe to lose that.

I honestly don't know how my creativity works, I just know that it always has. To the point that I actually rely on getting those flashes of inspiration. When I was at NASA, there were many times when I'd be assigned a project that I had no clue how to perform. But I wasn't really worried. I'd always come through in the past, so there was no reason to expect it wouldn't work this time, too. (Disclaimer: I think I also developed an instinct for what really was impossible, too -- I did turn down projects that I didn't think could be done.) This is nothing special. Almost all writers do this every day. But what I want to know is how do we do it?

Wouldn't you like to know, too?

Reading Day

I finally got the AlphaSmart to talk to one of the computers in my house. It's actually working off of the USB port, but only intermittently, and only on the slowest transfer speed. As a result, it's taking hours to upload the text I wrote in Kansas -- but at least it is uploading. I was not relishing the thought of having to retype all of that from the AlphaSmart's screen.

I've said many times that in order to write science fiction, you need to do two things: 1) write science fiction, and 2) read science fiction. I saw the latest issue of Asimov's sitting on my wife's desk, and I guiltily realized I've not fulfilled the second commandment in quite some time. So, while my text uploads (and hence I can argue I'm getting some writing work done), I'm reading the stories in this issue. Now, historically, I've not liked Asimov's very much. Gardner Dozois' tastes were, apparently, radically different from my own. I actually generally prefer the the stories in Analog quite a bit better, but so far I've been pleasantly surprised by this issue. Perhaps Sheila Williams and I will get along. :)

If you have not read the Decmeber 2005 issue, you should. Williams' editorial is about her experience teaching at Clarion West and Odyssey. It's short, but well worth the read if you're at all interested in either of those schools.

Back to work!

In Kansas ... Still

[Tech Geek Note #1: I'm writing this on my AlphaSmart Pro in the airport. I'll upload it to Blogger as soon as I get home.]

[Tech Geek Note #2: I'm (finally) home, but the PS/2 cable which allowed me to upload text from the AlphaSmart before I left is no longer working. Damned if I know why. So I'm transcribing from the AlphaSmart screen. I hope I get this fixed so I can retreive my novel text... Grrrr.]

Well, "Jack Kilby Science Day" was a big success. The kids all seemed to get a lot out of my keynote address, so I that helped get them fired up for the day. I did two activity sessions, as well. The first, the Marsbound! card game I created, went over extrememly well. The kids were totally into it. The second, a competition to build both a rocket and an airplane out of a soda straw, went over fairly well. The kids seemed to have a good time -- and learned a little about the aerodynamics of a stalled wing, I think -- but it was right before lunch, and I think they were all a bit hungry. They were into it, just not as into it as the morning group. That's okay. Apparently the evaluations were very positive, so that's gratifying. Most importantly, the organizaer that hired me to speak was extremely pleased and satisfied, so that was the real kicker. I made a thousand bucks on the deal (which is actually on the low end for keynote speakers, believe it or not), so I'm certianly not complaining!

What I am complaining about it that I'm still stuck in Kansas City. Coming out here I was worried that I wouldn't make it, since I only had about 40 minutes or so between flights and had to change planes twice and airlines once. Even though I had to go through security again between flights in Kansas City coming out here, I still made it with no problems. Coming back, I was take a US Airways flight out of Great Bend to Kansas City and then catch a non-stop on America West from Kansas City back to Phoenix. I had an hour between flightss, and as it turned out, we got here 20 minutes easrly (and since I was the only passenger to fly out of Great Bend, I got great personalized service!). You'd think I'd have it made coming home, wouldn't you?

Ah, but the key words in the above are "America West." They lost our baggage a few years ago -- we never got it back, including my wife's new glasses, disk drive, and a bunch of other stuff. They never even paid for it, either, saying they only cover clothes (and only a depreciated value at that). When we asked where we were supposed to carry the other stuff, they said, "Oh, that should go in your carry-on luggage." Never mind that they overbook flights and there's no room for carry-on luggage anyway. I swore I'd never fly on America West again. My wife even made up a little song:

Oh, don't fly America West Airlines!
They'll screw you for everything you've got!
Oh, don't fly America West Airlines!
They'll take your money and leave you there to rot!

Well, I broke that vow, tempting God and fate. Never a wise move.

America West decided to cancel the flight to Phoenix, leaving me here to rot. I was pretty pissed off when I saw that the next flight to Phoenix didn't leave for three more hours, but I was even more pissed when the America West agent said, "Oh, that flight is full. Sorry." The best they could do to get me home tonight was to put me on a Southwest flight that leaves at 9:45 PM. So instead of rocking my baby to sleep right now, I'm sitting in an airport terminal fuming. What fun.

On the plus side, I've written about 5,000 words of my novel today. I have to say, this AlphaSmart [ed. note: IF I can get it to upload] has definitely been the bright spot of this trip. The ability to simply switch it on and start typing is huge. No batteries. No cables. No need to save files. No waiting two minutes to boot up and two minutes to shut own. It really is perfect for writers. And at $13 on eBay, you really can't beat it. I still want an AlphaSmart Neo for Christmas, mainly for the slightly larger screen (six lines instead of four) an for the larger memory size (128 pages instea of 64). Being able to transfer files over the USB port instea of having the AlphaSmart type into Word (or whatever) in a minor convenience, but a welcome one [ed. note: And become less of a minor convenience at the moment]. The Neo is $250, but I think for a lot of us, the AlphaSmart Pro is hard to beat.*




*Here's a quick tip when you're looking at AlphaSmart Pros. If you can find one that has the 2.1.3 or higher chip in it (most are 2.1.2), you can use the "Get Utility" to send files to the AlphaSmart as well as read them. That's worth having, but probably not worth paying a lot more for, since you'd have to buyt he Get Utility as well. Most of us are just going to use the AlphaSmart for first drafts, not for editing, anyway.

Great Bend, Kansas

I got up at 4:00 AM this morning to catch a flight to Great Bend, Kansas. I am the keynote speaker for the "Jack Kilby Science Day" being hosted here. Jack Kilby, for those who didn't know (I didn't until recently), was the inventor of the integrated circuit, which is fundamental to all modern electronics. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000, so as you can see, this is not a small thing. Kilby grew up in Great Bend, so in a very real sense, most of the modern conveniences we take for granted -- including the laptop I'm writing this post on -- had their origin right here in Great Bend. I think the town is justifiably proud.

The town itself is very much your stereotypical small-town America. They have a population of about 20,000, but that's spread over a pretty broad geographical area. As I was flying in, I was struck by how few and far between the buildings are here in Kansas, due to the huge land area given to farming. The main drag through town, right outside my hotel, probably hasn't changed much in character since the 1950's. Oh, there's a Wal-Mart and a Radio Shack and a McDonald's that probably wasn't here fifty years ago, but the feel of the place hasn't really changed. I get the impression the locals like it that way, and I think I can understand why.

Time capsules li