Chrononautic Log

June 30, 2006

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June 29, 2006

You are turning me into a night person. With a day job.

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“. . . but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting.”

— Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

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June 28, 2006

— and I didn’t put this in the title because I don’t mean it literally and I didn’t want to scare anybody — that maybe that “Screwfly Solution” dream was prophetic. (And before you freak out, it was a dream about the story, not a dream of the story.) No, I haven’t been having sudden irrepressible urges to rape and kill, and no I don’t think I’ve noticed any uptick in the global rate of other guys having them, either.

Like I said, I don’t mean it literally.

But if somebody was to present me with evidence that in a more general way, some sort of space alien terror weapon was fucking with our collective emotional state . . . let’s just say I wouldn’t be entirely suprised.

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June 27, 2006

Unbelievable thunderstorms here from some time before two this morning till some time after three, or maybe it was some time after four. Seriously, you should have seen, heard, smelled this thing, it was tropical.

When I woke up it was out of a dream of working on the William James steampunk adventure novel that I’m half-convinced Susan and I need to write some day. Only in the dream version of the novel, Louis Agassiz was being carted around in a big glass fishtank full of dirty water like a Guild Steersman from Dune. And I remember thinking “Uh-oh; this is one of those ‘gun on the mantlepiece’ things, isn’t it? Guy living in fishtank + Amazon expedition = we’re going to have to write a scene were somebody kills Agassiz by dumping a load of piranhas into the tank, aren’t we?”

(And now you know where I get my ideas.)

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P.S. No, Jeremy’s not crazy: when I first posted this there was an analogy about sleeping through the Blitz. But I decided the Agassiz story was more interesting.

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Not you guys! You’re totally my peeps, no question. These guys. (To clarify: that’s the people being talked about there, not the people doing the talking. Well, some of the people in the comments section are also not my people. But the “Brights,” definitely not my people. ’Cause I know some people who don’t believe what they believe who are pretty damn bright, and to not realize how bright those people are, you’d have to be pretty damn Dim.)

Next time I go to a mainstream SF convention, I’m getting myself a T-shirt that says FANS ARE NOT SLANS.

(And if I was less easygoing, I might get one that says JUST BECAUSE WE’RE BOTH ATHEISTS DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT A NARROW-MINDED BIGOT. But I’m usually not that confrontational. Maybe I just need one that says STEVEN JAY GOULD HAS A POSSE.)

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June 26, 2006

Okay, when three attractive, intelligent, and discerning women tell you the facial hair should go, it’s probably time for the facial hair to go.

Abstract art installation or not.

(And the rest of the skull?)

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Update (26 June): So that’s one clear “no,” one “I’m scared,” and one suspect piece of beard advocacy from a known beard advocate. Maybe I should go back to the Colonel Kurtz look. (Not like I need to be any more fixated on Apocalypse Now, but even so.)

And then here’s another option.

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Everyone knows that mirror-universe facial hair is, as Wikipedia so kindly puts it, “a satirical symbol of evil and normality run amok.”

Which might explain a lot about the last couple of weeks.

Figure 1. Good. Clearly. (Reprise.)

Figure 1. Evil? I’m just sayin’.

Not sure what I think about this. On the one hand, it’s so damn sparse I think it might actually make me look younger. On the other hand, there’s something disquieting about waking up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, having the glass touch your upper lip, and going Aaah! There’s hair on my glass!

Special bonus photo extravaganza: the phase you missed.

 
Figure 1. “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror.”

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June 25, 2006

“Iraq Amnesty Offer Upsets U.S. Lawmakers”: Apparently our Congress now believes that a counterinsurgency war ends not when the insurgents stop fighting but when every insurgent who fought is dead or in prison. Yeah, lots of luck with that, guys.

Maybe it’s time to take another look at emigrating to Australia.

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In what way is it not completely insane for someone to be selling All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories for fifty-four dollars?

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Basel, late April through early June.

Figure 1. So that’s where they keep it.

Figure 1. May day.

Figure 1. Monsoon season.

Figure 1. This poster kills fascists.

Figure 1. Poor misunderstood Peter.

Figure 1. Striking fear into every heart in Germany, I’m sure.

Figure 1. Live Cup action.

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June 23, 2006

(Also, another good argument against the Best Dramatic Presentation award.)

[Leigh] Brackett was awarded a Hugo posthumously for her work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in 1981.  . . . What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay for Empire based on his story outline.  . . . However, the exact relationship between Brackett's draft script and the revised shooting script is not agreed on at all.  . . . According to [one] scenario, Lucas’s assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy or homage (or, less charitably, an attempt to improve Empire’s critical reception by associating it with a well-respected screenwriter). Support for this view comes from Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, who has read Brackett’s script, and claims that — outside Lucas’ storyline — nothing of Brackett’s personal contributions to the script survives into the finished movie.

Brackett’s screenplay has never been published. According to Haffner, it can be read at the library of the Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, but may not be copied or borrowed off-site. [Emphasis added.]

(From Wikipedia.)

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Two recent discoveries:

1. In a comment thread on a non-friendslocked LiveJournal post: I’d like to link to this. In other words, the implied social norm is: just because something is displayed in public view, that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to draw other people’s attention to it.
2. In a robots.txt file: User-Agent: * Disallow: /. In other words, it’s LiveJournal’s fault, not Google’s, that LiveJournal is largely unsearchable.

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June 22, 2006

Memo to self: Just because you had an idea for a story in the middle of the night does not mean it’s a good idea to go googling “The Screwfly Solution” before breakfast.

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June 20, 2006

Okay, clearly setting my Skype status to “Skype me!” was not sending the message I thought it was sending.

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Nice, thoughtful, albeit long piece from John Gruber, on his Mac blog Daring Fireball, on how people make choices (specifically, in this case, computer choices) and on how those choices tend to attract essentially misguided criticism.

It’s often said that you shouldn’t compare apples and oranges — generally used figuratively, but even looking at it literally you can see that it’s not true. You need to compare apples and oranges when you’re deciding what to pack in your lunch. What you can’t do is compare apples and oranges and somehow conclusively prove that one is better than the other.

Or ask yourself this: what would you rather read: a well-plotted but poorly-written potboiler or a well-written novel with a rather nondescript story line? A quick look at the best-seller lists tells you how most people would answer. The point is that you don’t choose one novel over another because it is somehow universally “better”, but rather because it is somehow more appealing, better for you, as an individual, based on the innumerable inscrutable tastes and desires and opinions that make you the unique snowflake that you are.

The reason this Pilgrim situation is so hideously complex is that all modern operating systems are complex. It takes a lot of work and investigation and expertise just to understand and form opinions about one of them, on its own; comparing one against another can’t be done by reducing the comparison to some single metric because they’re different in so many different ways. It’s easy to choose between two things that differ from each other in just one way — and it’s easy to explain your decision. Not so when choosing between things that differ in hundreds or maybe even thousands of ways.

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June 19, 2006

Back in Basel. Showered, shaved, clothed, and fed. Awake, for the moment, but I doubt it’ll last. More sometime after midnight, I suspect.

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Sitting in the Costa Coffee in good old Heathrow Terminal 4. Got about twenty minutes before they start boarding my flight to Zürich and the last airborne leg of my journey back from the desert. I recommend the Chicken & Bacon Club Feast, although it is not in fact a feast.

Apologies to anyone I didn’t call last week, or didn’t get through to. Thunderstorm came through a couple of days in, knocked out the one cell tower my Euro-phone would talk to, didn’t get fixed till right before we left. But my DSL modem did turn up right before I got on the road (broadband, bitches!) and I’ll be getting my Skype on soon as I get back to Basel.

New Mexico was a blast. Fabulous writers, fabulous scenery, fabulous food. (I particularly recommend Walter’s gumbo, Maureen’s vegetarian coconut shrimp, and Jay’s momos.) Opinion was divided on my story, but people seemed to like my tomato curry. (Maureen and I were the only cooks to leave no leftovers. We win!) Had possibly the best eight-dollar meal of my life at a little bar / grill / convenience store in Arroyo Seco: one styrofoam pint green chile stew, three perfectly fried chicken taquitos. Drank my share of Negra Modelo with lime and also Kameron Hurley’s since she wasn’t there and the beer was. Also, lemongrass ice cream is Da Bomb.

And the writers, did I mention the writers? Walter, Mikey, Howard, Maureen, Gavin, Kelly, Jay, Daniel, Paolo, Carrie, Nina, Ray, Ted — best critique group evar. I could feel myself getting smarter all week long.

And the scenery. God, I miss the desert already. And the mountains. They just don’t make ’em like that anywhere else.

I’m not supposed to be thinking about what I’m doing after Switzerland, but I hear there’s a lot of bioinformatics in Santa Fe.

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June 10, 2006

Didn’t drink at the airport. Did drink on the plane, a little. I think they put something in those airline Bacardi bottles that makes you sober up again fifteen minutes after you finish one. Did watch a scratchy tape of X-Men 2. (Airline version. Patrick Stewart: “Oh, my Gosh, William, what have you done?”) Did read Babel-17 and Empire Star. Did lose one of the little rubber thingies on my fancy Sony earphones. Didn’t sleep, much. Didn’t write, much.

Thought about drinking here at DFW but I’d probably miss my flight. Hoping that if I sleep from here to Albuquerque I might actually function for a few hours after I get in. Looking forward to a nice early jet-lag morning tomorrow.

P.S. Send more drunk emails.

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Not convinced, eh?

Me neither.

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Update: There’s a young guy here in the departure lounge with a rock festival T-shirt and a big glass of beer. Because that’s what you drink at 9:30 in the morning, I guess.

I can’t tell if that would be a good idea or a really bad idea.

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Speculation should not be a separable part of a composite system.

Speculation should not be identifiable as earth, air, fire, or water, nor as earth, fire, water, metal or wood.

Speculation should not be irreducible by chemical reaction.

Speculation should not be organized into periodic tables.

Speculation should not have isotopes.

Speculation should not be made up of leptons and hadrons.

Speculation should not be heavy or light.

Speculation should not be produced through supernova nucleosynthesis.

Speculation should not be the short-lived product of a high-energy collision, detectable only by its aftereffects.

Speculation should not be contained within sets, classes, or collections.

Speculation should not be a feature, nor a habitat, nor a base, nor a basis, nor a circumstance, nor a situation, nor the be-all and end-all.

Speculation should not be the thing that is ours that we are in.

Speculation should not be the thing that we are in when we are out of what is ours.

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Update: Added extra quotation marks.

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June 9, 2006

I may be an idealist, but I believe if we’re constantly holding something like this up to the light, maybe we can break it down a little, and make room for a greater variety of fiction by a greater variety of people writing about a greater variety of characters and there will be more good books and also world peace.

— Meghan McCarron

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June 5, 2006

1. Jesus Christ, I am in such fucking denial.
2. Sleep, jetlag, writing, something about laundry
3. No, like, I didn’t leave the house yesterday. I just sat around writing email and watching Battlestar Galactica and eating Top Ramen.
4. Really, was it crazier than usual this year, or was it just me?
5. Alan “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” DeNiro is a god-damned genius.
6. You know, I really don’t want to be one of those apocryphal fans who has no contact with their fellow human beings outside the con scene. Even the WisCon scene. Maybe I should have gotten that Ph.D. after all. Or moved to New York.
7. Okay, half of Rio Hondo’s already sent out RTF copies of their stories. I really should get to work here.
8. DENIAL! God!
9. Love,
10. Scary Editor Moles

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June 3, 2006

So, as expected, my DSL modem apparently arrived, was found undeliverable, and was shipped back while I was at/around WisCon. They say they’re sending me another one. One hopes it will get here before I leave for Rio Hondo.

But! I think I finally figured out how to get my unnecessarily fancy computer to connect to the internet through my unnecessarily fancy cell phone. I’m sure it’ll be dog-slow, but at least now maybe I’ll be able to write email as well as read it. (The phone, by itself, will log into my Gmail account. The phone will display my mail, in postage-stamp sized chunks. The phone will let me laboriously thumb in a reply of up to 2000 characters. The phone will let me press the send button. The phone will then chew the reply up, spit it out, and laugh at me.)

Which is good, because the chairs in this internet café get kind of uncomfortable after the first three or four hours, and I’m always convinced that everybody over there wakes up and starts talking right after I shut down.

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Kelly Link says what I’ve been trying to say for a year or two now, only much better, ’cause she is, after all, Kelly Link.

The only thing you have to offer an editor, and readers, is you. Your voice. Stories and characters and narrative twists that only you are strange enough to want to write. Take risks. Some of you are in critique circles that have been going for quite some time. You know each other well enough to have built trust. And it takes trust to show a workshop the kind of ambitious work I'd like to see. Take chances. Write stories whose characters and the endings surprise even you.

All y’all (and y’all know who all y’all are), listen up!

(Courtesy of Charles Coleman Finlay, via Greg.)

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Update: It occurs to me that maybe next time I join a writing group I maybe should think less about being a nice guy and more about getting everyone in the group to do better work. Be warned.

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Via Gwenda, Liza Palmer explains why Spider-Men 1 & 2 and Batman Begins were better than X3. She doesn’t use the word realiness, but that’s what she’s talking about.

And I know this is the delicate line these summer blockbusters, as do all makers of fiction, have to tread. How far and how unrealistic do you go? And yes, we’re talking about X-Men, but the beauty of Batman Begins and the Spiderman movies is that throughout the unrealistic actions and events, the characters stay real and human. The dialogue, while, yes they’re talking about Green Goblins and people with oddly recurring alliterative names (Peter Parker, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington III . . .) they speak like normal people would. But, there's a line . . . and X-Men couldn’t stay on the right side of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I loved every mutant, Golden Gate Bridge moving, Hugh Jackman shirtless moment of it. But, just kind of a heads up — if you end your movie with “Way to go, Furball.” And you’re not Han Solo — I think there's been a misstep somewhere.

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June 2, 2006

This came up in the aftermath to the Strange Horizons Tea Party, and it looks like Hannah’s now using it as a critical term of art, so:

• Realiness is to realism what truthiness is to truth. Only realiness is a good thing.
• Realiness is what’s left after you suspend all the disbelief you’re supposed to suspend.
• Realiness is what makes Air (or Have Not Have) more plausible than The World is Flat, even though Air is science fiction (arguably, even, fantasy) and The World is Flat is alleged not to be fiction of any kind.

Make sense? Like, I accept that a thirty-story lizard is attacking the city, but I don’t accept that the “greatest investigative reporter of all time” can be this dumb. Yes, Godzilla is just as implausible — well, almost as implausible — as Buck Williams, but Godzilla is a speculative element and Buck Williams is just not a believable character. Godzilla lacks realism, but Buck Williams lacks realiness.

Better definitions? Better examples? Anyone remember what we were actually talking about when it came up?

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June 1, 2006

What the matter is with Hegel:

He [Hegel] would have had a comment policy that read something like: you are not allowed to leave any comments until I have written my last post, in the light of which you will see that your objections to my earlier posts were mistaken.

(Insight courtesy of Dr. Holbo.)

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