Idea Garage Sale: Nonfiction Requests

I am so tired from gaming (hey, it takes a long time to come down from the adrenaline and sugar when the boss fight turns into a double boss fight and you play two to three hours longer than usual with no supper, but you finish off your ice cream and get halfway through the week's supply of candy bars) I couldn't even finish my blueberry pancakes this morning, so today I will just toss out a few general concepts of non-fiction books that need to exist. They particularly need to exist for the high school and middle school library markets, if only so that teachers get some variety when they assign research papers.

We need both the definitive, and the youth-accessible, biographies of Brenda Howard and Sylvia Rivera.

How about a collective biography called: Ten Scientists You Never Heard of (Because They were Women) ? It could be part of a series, with other professions and overlooked demographics in the noun slots. Make it for the middle school market, and middle school librarians (assuming any have survived budget cuts) will spam you with thanks.

How to Conduct Formal Business on the Internet - Nobody does inside addresses and all that in e-mail, but - should it start "Dear Madam?" How about formatting? Is there a standard type style? How do you distinguish yourself from spam? How do you know you're not spamming? What do you do if you're tired and reach for the "save" button so you can proofread in the morning, but hit "send" instead? It's time to codify the rules!

I had others, but now I'm blanking and they'll keep. I am so tired; and there's still the annual screening of the laser disc version (accept no substitutes! It's past time this got a DVD) of 1776.

Idea Garage Sale: For the Entrepreneurs

Not all ideas are for stories. I often have a vague wish to be able to put a painting, a business, a program, or something else that I haven't anything like the dedication to make reality out there into the world.

For instance, last Sunday Damon and I were watching what we thought at the time was the finale of Crisis, which we started watching because it had Gillian Anderson in it and kept watching because it is, in fact, a pretty good script. (I have one or two specific beefs but that's not here nor there.) Last Sunday was also the decisive game in some sort of championship thing for the NBA, which the San Antonio Spurs won.

I love San Antonio. I think that, as professional sports teams go, the Spurs are largely inoffensive. They are at least not a bunch of crooks, whiners, abusers, and entitled self-important bullies like some teams I could name (and the entire player base of some sports I could name). But if we'd cared about the damn championship we'd have been taping Crisis and at the arena with the rest of the locals, now, wouldn't we? So we were fit to be tied when, fifteen minutes from the end of the show, when the kidnapper giving Gillian Anderson instructions through her earbud told her to shut up and sit still, and the drugged superweapon soldier she'd gotten into the courtroom stood up behind the guilty CIA director's wife, and started revealing things the CIA director was willing to commit murder to keep everyone (especially Congress and the President) from knowing, and the station overrode the signal with the news that the Spurs had just won and started switching us between commentators saying nothing, nothing, and more nothing, and promising us interviews with people who had even more nothing to say, we were ready to blow a gasket.

So here's an idea for you tech wizards out there. No a story, just an app. One which, if it were available, would be worth the price of any device it was loaded on. (I currently own no devices.) I want an app which allows you to override pre-emptions, so that when stuff like this happens, the moment I realize that the "breaking news" has nothing whatsoever to do with the world I live in, I can go back to what I was watching. Also, so that when something I want to watch overlaps with some stupid game or other, whose length is unpredictable, I will be able to start my show on time! Somebody out there, please, make this happen!

Thanks to the marvels of internet technology, I did get to watch the final 15 online the next day; but it would have been so much better to have been able to watch it straight through. (Also, it turned out that wasn't the finale, though it felt like one; two more episodes aired back-to-back last night and brought it to a mostly satisfactory conclusion. Though I don't buy that the icily competent, unflappable Alicia Dutton was in it for Tahiti or that red-headed jerk. I feel cheated that she died before her character was properly revealed.)

Another enterprise I'd like to see is the Omnivore Cafe, a restaurant with two mix-and-match menus: Carnivore, and Herbivore. (If that sounds familiar, I assure you that a) I thought of this years before Cyn Smith wrote Tantalize and invented Sanguini's "Predator or Prey?" menus; and b) I'm thinking in terms of a place serving office workers in the middle of the day; a very different atmosphere.) Nutritional information would be supplied on each dish, which would be prepared as nearly saltlessly as practical, with choices of salt types (iodized or sea salt) and other seasonings at the table, dressings and other trimmings on the side rather than dumped onto the main course (and no nasty lemon wedges on my tea glass, waste of lemons, grumble). There'd be a Dairy counter (so you could get dairy products a la carte, for the convenience of the kosher as well as the non-Vegan) and a Bakery counter; and the bakery counter would have nutless versions of everything that came with nuts. Some items, like hamburgers, would be available in Low-Fat and Extra Greasy incarnations. And every day there'd be two iterations of Anything Soup available, made up of the previous day's leftovers, one meaty and one meat-free.

In short, I want a restaurant absolutely everybody can eat at, without these endless negotiations that make some of us such a pain the neck to eat out with.

These two things seem to me to be obvious, urgent needs. But I wouldn't know how to go about making either happen.

Ducks Discover America

When I was researching 11,000 Years Lost, specifically when I was looking into the floral and faunal assemblages of the period so my hunter/gatherers could be hunting and gathering, avoiding and encountering, the right range of living things, I saw a book on a top shelf called Ducks Discover America. Oh, boy! A natural history of ducks in the Western Hemisphere? How and when and why they evolved, migrated, emigrated, immigrated, mingled with Old World Ducks around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, interacted with other species including humans - what could be better?

When I managed, with much labor, to elevate myself to the top shelf (short in a tall world; life is rough), that wasn't what it was. I don't remember what it was; only I had misread the title and it was no good to me at all.

But I wanted to read the book that belongs to that title. And my desire has not diminished.

Some ornithologist/paleontologist go write it, please.

I'll wait.

Not patiently, but I'll wait.

Idea Garage Sale: The Cave Art Kids

For those of you who missed it, individual children making art can be tracked in Dordogne Cave, especially a particular 5-year-old girl.

This makes me very happy.

For one thing, it illustrates my main thesis, that creativity is a normal human activity, not something special set aside only for the elite.

For another, the individuals who can be identified and glimpsed at Dordogne - and other ancient sites - are natural solid reference points around which we - and by we I mean all of us storytellers, whether we're scientific archeological storytellers or artistic fiction-writing storytellers - can build a story. First we collect the traces of the individual; then we interpret them according to what we know in our selves about people and what we know from the evidence about their environment, and extrapolate a reasonable story about who this person was, why she was there, who was there with her, and what challenges she faced.

Obviously, a cave art picturebook is long overdue.

A novel would require more conflict than is implied by the harmonious and happy picture created by this research; but one can always start with that harmonious, happy picture and work either away from it - happy art-making in caves has to come to an end, the youthful artists have to grow up and face adult challenges - or toward it, with the families of the youthful artists overcoming various hardships to arrive at the happy art-making.

And for the scientist, the image of the happy art-making makes an excellent centerpiece for the reconstruction of Pleistocene culture, a cohesive, relateable context that enables the scientist to put all the disparate and fragmentary bits of evidence together in a meaningful way.

I don't see any way to go about any of these project that don't involve researching till blood comes out your ears; but I can tell you from experience, the reward is worth the work.

Okay, maybe not the monetary reward. 11,000 Years Lost hasn't made that much money. TheEarth's Children series has. This sort of thing is always a crapshoot and there's nothing to be done about that. But the emotional and intellectual rewards of doing the research and writing the story - those are hard to overstate.

Plus, research for any of these projects would involve visiting Pleistocene art sites. Which would be a good in itself.

We cannot have too many books about the Pleistocene. We just can't.

Idea Garage Sale: Crying in Restrooms

When I achieve ultimate wisdom and figure out how to perfectly balance emotional, economic, and social reality, I will write a self-help book and I will call it Crying in Restrooms.

I used to do a lot of that.I'd be trapped in an office eight hours a day with a bus ride at each end, and I'd be doing stuff that didn't matter a lick to me and in many cases didn't matter a lick to whatever entity was writing my checks, but I couldn't leave and I couldn't do anything constructive and nobody in the office would be anybody I could talk to honestly about anything and it would build up and build up and build up and somebody would be a jackass and I'd be losing control of my voice and hands and posture with the force of internal pressure and I would be in entire sympathy with those people who come to their workplaces and commit mass murder and the only possible way to deal with this state without getting fired (which I would have preferred but couldn't afford) would be to go into a restroom stall and hit the wall and scream and cry until the pressure let up enough that I could control it.

Even this was enough to get me lectured, censured, and occasionally treated as a vandal (Look, I am not physically strong enough to break a metal stall door and I never could see what they thought was wrong with it anyway - it still locked, for crying out loud) by self-important tinpot dictators who appeared to be under the impression that the proper treatment for a stress fracture is more stress. The ones who pretended to be sympathetic weren't any better, because they never were. All my life I have been surrounded by people who didn't care if I was bleeding, as long as they could get me to stop bleeding on the carpet. If I did that, they could pretend nothing was wrong and even feel good about having solved the problem by getting me to pretend to feel better.

Actually addressing anything that might be wrong in the workplace - such as contradictory imperatives, bullying (in a workplace, the noogie-givers of the playground are restrained but the nasty queen bees get managerial positions), inequitable rules or rules applications, dishonest practices, counterproductive policies, malfunctioning equipment, or inadequate training - is never, in my experience, considered as a solution. No, if a worker is unhappy enough that her work is disrupted, the worker is to blame; and half an hour spent telling the worker this is much to be preferred to five minutes spent in addressing the source of the problem.

So a self-help book providing something more useful than the usual platitudes and unconsidered conventional wisdom about dealing with stress would be a public benefit. In order to be useful, it would have to include diagnostic tools to help the afflicted figure out why she is the only person in an obviously malfunctioning office whose physical stress symptoms are so bad she has to resort to crying in restrooms; because this does vary. Some people could handle the existing level of stress and frustration better by eating the correct thing at the correct time. (It sounds silly, but truth often does.) Other people are handling the stress less well because they're getting more of it than those around them, because they have somehow gotten the position of office omega - the one person everybody else relieves stress by dumping on. It is vitally important to distinguish between those two cases and adopt a strategy appropriate to the real situation.

Such a book wouldn't sell as well as the platitude/conventional wisdom books do, because the most successful self-help books are always those that allow the largest number of people to feel that they're being active and insightful, without actually requiring them to do any work. But if it could reach its target audience, and enable them to deal constructively with their problems, it would do all kinds of good in the world.

Alas, I have no such wisdom. The only thing that worked for me was getting out of the soul-sucking day job business entirely, which unfortunately leaves my poor husband trapped in one. And that's why I keep having to give myself permission to be unproductive on days when I don't feel I've done enough. The workplace problem looks to me as insoluble as crime, poverty, and war, and for similar reasons.

Because the problem is insoluble, I don't use it for fiction much, either. One of the satisfactions of fiction is that, at the climax, the core problem of the story is resolved, one way or another. The big exception to this is the horror genre, which is allowed to be purely cathartic and to resolve the core problem by escalating it into primal inevitability and scorching the earth behind it. A modern corporate workplace is the natural abode of monsters, and it puzzles me that we don't see more horror stories addressing this directly.

I have used it successfully once, myself. It took me over 20 years to do so, horror not being my natural genre. The story is "The Restroom Murders," and it appeared in Realms of Fantasy in August 2008, though I first conceived the basic plot while temping for a certain bank in the early 80s. It took me that long to understand enough about workplaces and workers to get the story into the hands of the correct viewpoint character, to gain the narrative ruthlessness to work the premise out to its necessary conclusion, and to be out of the workplace long enough to write about its horrors with equanimity.

If you can write the self-help book envisioned here, please do so. If you can't, but rather need to consult it yourself, consider the horror option. Mystery might work, too, if you can thus gain the satisfactions of messily killing the worst person in your office and sending the second-worst person in your office to jail for it. Just don't put a word of it onto the company computer or leave your notes for it lying around, as security personnel are likely to take such things seriously and unlikely to have any policies that allow them to grasp the difference between fictional catharsis and planning.

And if you can't handle the fictional options because the situations you'd have to tap into are still too raw to handle, please, start today devising the plan that makes quitting your day job practical. You'll function better as soon as you feel less trapped.

Idea Garage Sale: Life Among the Carnivores

In 1998, I realized that I don't like meat, so I stopped eating it. I did not stop preparing it, as I was living at that time with two people who did like meat, one of whom would not eat crunchy vegetables and one of whom would not eat food while it was hot.

Not only did I start enjoying my food more (hot, crunchy vegetables! Yum!), I suddenly got healthier. It wasn't cutting out the meat per se that made the difference; it was the increase in fiber and nutrients and decrease in sodium that happened when I felt at liberty to cook food the way I prefer it, as fresh as possible. However, the degree of interpersonal conflict in my life rose. Where before I was only in the petty political struggles of a household - cook vs. dishwasher, dishwasher vs. dishwasher, consumer vs. cook, in all of which conflicts I, as sole cook, was invariably the loser - now I found myself constantly at loggerheads with society. People took offense at my vegetarianism no matter how little it impacted them, behaving as though my selection of one dish over another was a personal attack, assuming that I was attempting to one-up them in a kind of conspicuous moral consumption, and launching into scathing criticisms of positions I hadn't taken. Prospective hosts would apologize for not knowing what to feed me, and act surprised when I pointed out that most of what they ate wasn't meat, either, and I could dine well on what they considered to be side dishes.

So I started writing a book in my head, and have been writing it ever since. I call it Life Among the Carnivores, but the subtitle keeps changing. At the moment, it's something like Cooking, Housekeeping, and Hosting in the Real World. American schools don't teach nutrition well and don't discuss the micropolitics of food at all, so the emphasis would be on giving the reader - envisioned as a young adult on her own for the first time - the tools necessary to make the choices that suit her best and negotiate the irrational responses other people have to those choices.

Yeah, because there's nothing young adults love more than having a wise older adult pass on her hard-earned wisdom. :rolleyes:

Oh, sure, there is a need for such a book. Judging from the historical performance of advice books the need even translates into a market. But I'm not a professional nutritionist, or chef, or caterer, or even a home ec teacher. I have no platform on which to build this book.

That doesn't mean that, if I ever got this book out of my head and onto a page, it wouldn't be a good and useful book. But - in the real world of publishing - in order to sell it to other people as a good and useful book, I would have to spend time positioning myself as an expert and convincing people that they want to take my advice. I'd rather spend time writing fiction. Besides - alas - in the real world no one values my advice enough to make me think that any degree of positioning would profit me. Some of the things I want most desperately to be in the book, I haven't figured out how to do! My best efforts to make my dietary requirements easy and untroublesome keep failing on the rocks of other people's complete lack of desire to understand. One person who has been making a huge fuss every time in the past 11 years that there's been danger of her having to feed me, without actually taking any trouble to present me with edible food, asked me recently whether I would eat ox-tail! When I get enough wisdom to teach that person the definition of "vegetarian," or to handle my reaction to her effectively, I'll have enough wisdom to make the effort of producing and marketing Life Among the Carnivores.

But that's not happening, so I'm making the idea available cheap.

The book would have "The Cook's Bill of Rights" and "The Consumer's Bill of Rights" in it; but after 11 years I can only come up with one right each: The consumer has the right to palatable, healthy food, and The cook has the right not to have her dishes greeted with a suspicious glare, a couple of pokes, and the accusatory query "What is it?" in a tone indicating near-certainty that something poisonous lurks within this travesty of a meal. That comes down to trust, really. The cook must strive to be worthy of it (not just make a fuss) and the consumer must then give it; or the fabric of society breaks down.

I envision it as containing few or no recipes, only definitions and descriptions of the basic cooking techniques that are the building blocks of meals. If you know how to boil, broil, fry, sauté, braise, roast, bake, and make a sauce, and have some basic information about the properties of foods, as well as a sense of taste, you can improvise a meal whenever you need to out of whatever you have.

There'd also be all the nutritional information we need to make good decisions for our own particular livestyles; outlines of the various methods of cooking; discussions of why and under what conditions various extremes of diet (Vegan, omitting all animal products and the traditional Arctic diet, consisting almost entirely of animal products) are healthy; advice on hosting a diverse group of people; advice on being a guest with a dietary restriction (voluntary or otherwise); and an entire chapter, or possibly a subsection, on sharing space with other people, none of whom - I promise you - will have the same standards or goals as you. The reason I always lost those interpersonal conflicts mentioned earlier is that I thought the important thing was that the work got done, while the other people I lived with were arguing from the position that the important thing was who did it.

If I ever figure out how to ensure that everyone in an argument is in the same argument, I'll be sure and tell you. It would be a crime to charge for a breakthrough that vital to the history of the human race.