In a lot of ways it was easier to get things into the mail when all I had to work with was outdated print resources speaking in general terms. These days I keep up with the deal news from Publishers' Marketplace and read all the high concepts of all the new deals and think: "Agh, that sounds awful! The person who bought that won't want to even look at my stuff," or sometimes, "Agh, that's the high concept of the book I'm trying to mail! The person who bought that has already bought the only lesbian western he's going to be allowed to buy this year!" about every single entry.
Which isn't true, or not always, and in many of those cases I need to suck it up and send the query anyway, but I know that in the same way that I knew, in high school, that I could get the research paper in on time, with all the footnotes placed correctly, and get a good grade. It was intellectual knowledge only. I didn't believe it in my gut, which was convinced the only way I was going to get an A was if I could write the paper amusingly enough that the teacher read it indulgently and overlooked the glaring errors in footnote formatting (which I was doing on a manual typewriter - don't miss that!), bibliographic depth, and interpretive subtlety.
Which was a pretty constructive misapprehension on my gut's part, now I come to think of it. Now I'm older I know that lots of people wrote stone-cold boring papers and got A's, while I was getting an A+, a red-pencil smile, practice in good writing habits, and the enmity of my peers (which would have been mine even if I'd written poorly so, to heck with it) for being a teacher's pet. My gut is much less useful in parsing the current market.
I guess we don't get better at everything as we grow older.
Which isn't where I planned to end up when I sat down, but it'll do, since I'm crashing kind of hard.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: The Sea of Air
The September Fortean Times (already superseded at the website; I'm always a month or more behind the English newsstand) has a feature article that describes a killer, underused science fiction setting: Earth's atmosphere.
The theory set out by Scott Deschaine in "The Sky is Alive" is attractively elegant. Many UFO sightings, "star jelly," "angel hair," flesh falls, and other Fortean phenomena would make perfect sense if the atmosphere has life-forms adapted to it analogous to the life-forms of the ocean. Because the upper layer of the ocean and the lower layer of air are porous, engaged in a continual exchange of life and nutrients, there could even be creatures adapted to the ocean and the air at different stages of their lives. Many UFOs, after all, are reported to behave just like curious animals, and many of them even look like jellyfish.
These creatures would necessarily be light and difficult to see, but given the astounding diversity and resilience of life in our ecosystem, the possibility cannot be written off.
This idea has of course been used at least once in fiction, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His "Horror of the Heights," however, only scratches the surface of the possibilities for the setting, suggesting an aerial jungle in which live fierce invisible predators among whom pilots go at their peril.
The rousing exploration adventure is not currently fashionable in science fiction. A modern reader expects more plot, character angst, and social commentary than anybody ever expected of Doyle or even Heinlein and Asimov. You can't just take off into the sky and record discoveries of flocks of aerial jellyfish, sentient clouds, semi-intelligent sprites living in thunderclouds. But the story of the first exploratory mission, centering on a crew variously eager to explore the upper atmosphere or disappointed not to be going to the moon, a Mission Control plagued by budget cuts and political posturing, and an intrusive subculture of UFOologists convinced that this is one more cover-up by the Great Conspiracy would be complex enough for any hard SF reader.
As long as you worked the science angle hard enough, and didn't let it turn into the same old plot as the last ten blockbuster movies you saw.
The theory set out by Scott Deschaine in "The Sky is Alive" is attractively elegant. Many UFO sightings, "star jelly," "angel hair," flesh falls, and other Fortean phenomena would make perfect sense if the atmosphere has life-forms adapted to it analogous to the life-forms of the ocean. Because the upper layer of the ocean and the lower layer of air are porous, engaged in a continual exchange of life and nutrients, there could even be creatures adapted to the ocean and the air at different stages of their lives. Many UFOs, after all, are reported to behave just like curious animals, and many of them even look like jellyfish.
These creatures would necessarily be light and difficult to see, but given the astounding diversity and resilience of life in our ecosystem, the possibility cannot be written off.
This idea has of course been used at least once in fiction, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His "Horror of the Heights," however, only scratches the surface of the possibilities for the setting, suggesting an aerial jungle in which live fierce invisible predators among whom pilots go at their peril.
The rousing exploration adventure is not currently fashionable in science fiction. A modern reader expects more plot, character angst, and social commentary than anybody ever expected of Doyle or even Heinlein and Asimov. You can't just take off into the sky and record discoveries of flocks of aerial jellyfish, sentient clouds, semi-intelligent sprites living in thunderclouds. But the story of the first exploratory mission, centering on a crew variously eager to explore the upper atmosphere or disappointed not to be going to the moon, a Mission Control plagued by budget cuts and political posturing, and an intrusive subculture of UFOologists convinced that this is one more cover-up by the Great Conspiracy would be complex enough for any hard SF reader.
As long as you worked the science angle hard enough, and didn't let it turn into the same old plot as the last ten blockbuster movies you saw.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Half an Inch, Half an Inch, Onward
Pride goeth and all that. After congratulating myself on my improved sewing skills yesterday, I returned to the piece, repinned to make everything tighter - and found that I'd made an error of about half an inch on one piece. Which, if I can't match the fabric, or locate a similar-textured contrast that makes sense in that location - I suppose I could recut the collar in the contrast - will waste about half the fabric.
Nobody is ever good enough at anything that they never screw up.
Certainly I never will be!
Nobody is ever good enough at anything that they never screw up.
Certainly I never will be!
Thursday, August 23, 2012
A Habit's as Good as a Strength
We all have strengths we need to play to and weaknesses we need to make up for. In writing, my strengths are character and dialog - characters are always there when I need them, and all I need for dialog is to listen to them talk. My weakness is plotting. If I didn't have an audience to think of, I could happily follow these characters around listening to them talk and watching them live their lives all day long, whether it got me anywhere or not. Which has caused me to build up a lot of muscle in the art of Cutting to the Chase, for which I have neither natural aptitude nor inability.
In sewing, my only strength is patience. I have never been able to see straight lines, assess distances, or translate two dimensions into three; I'm not intrinsically interested in clothes much (though when I'm sewing I become more interested); my mind is apt to wander during the numerous tedious bits; and if I don't focus hard I will always, always put the bobbin in upside down. But patience and perseverance can make up for all that, eventually. I'm accustomed to pinning every pattern layout twice, to leaving several hours or - if the fabric's really nice and/or no longer available - a whole day between pinning and cutting, to ripping out the same seam many times, and so on. I don't enjoy all that, but sewing my own is the only way to get clothes to fit, so I do it. Eventually.
So today I was doing my second pinning of a complicated set-up involving two different patterns and one fabric, and I noticed something. I was pinning the patterns perfectly on-grain the first time more often than not; and when I folded two pieces that hadn't been folded before in order to shorten the waist, I was doing it freehand and finding, when I checked against a piece that had been folded the last time I used that pattern, that I'd done it perfectly first time.
This is huge. It meant I not only eyeballed the correct length, I got my fingers to perform the operation properly. I've finally got enough experience at altering patterns to fit my figure to skip a lot of the do-overs.
I was almost as proud of myself as I was the first time I realized I was leaving out all the scenes I'd have to cut later anyway during the first draft!
And, since I was still pinning and my back brain was free to keep turning up connections, I thought about this thing I've been doing on my sims newsgroup lately. People who get their sims into some sort of soap operatic pickle and are unsure how they want to proceed from there often solicit advice, and of course I'm never shy about offering it. My basic plan is always the same: a) pay attention to your sims' behavior and extrapolate from that what they would really do if they were people instead of pixels (this is essentially my approach to the plotting problem, too - plot is what the characters do, so playing to my strengths means letting them solve their own problems instead of trying to make them follow some plan of my own) and b)think about what would be most fun for you to play. Because after all, they aren't writing a novel, they're playing a game, and if they aren't having fun they might as well go wash dishes or something. I then will append some concrete examples of possible ways the game might go depending on circumstances, giving their situation the Garage Sale treatment.
What I realized while pinning was, that this is plotting. Rudimentary plotting, sure; but since most of the time I don't know much about the sim in question at all, and in no case do I have the intimate character knowledge on which I rely to make up for poor plotting skills, it really is plot work I'm doing, and moderately successfully, too. I never used to be able to do that without miring in a quicksand of Too Many Ideas, Too Little Logic, and I never mire anymore; though how much that has to do with improved plotting skills and how much with improved ability to apply the brakes before I lose control is a hard question. Not one that it's important to answer, either. The point is - I can do now what I couldn't do then.
I'll never be Agatha Christie, but I don't need to be. All I needed was to improve that skill to the point where I'm not hopeless at it anymore. And I've done it.
All it took was decades of practice, developing a habit of mind.
Just like lining up with the grain and shortening a waist.
In sewing, my only strength is patience. I have never been able to see straight lines, assess distances, or translate two dimensions into three; I'm not intrinsically interested in clothes much (though when I'm sewing I become more interested); my mind is apt to wander during the numerous tedious bits; and if I don't focus hard I will always, always put the bobbin in upside down. But patience and perseverance can make up for all that, eventually. I'm accustomed to pinning every pattern layout twice, to leaving several hours or - if the fabric's really nice and/or no longer available - a whole day between pinning and cutting, to ripping out the same seam many times, and so on. I don't enjoy all that, but sewing my own is the only way to get clothes to fit, so I do it. Eventually.
So today I was doing my second pinning of a complicated set-up involving two different patterns and one fabric, and I noticed something. I was pinning the patterns perfectly on-grain the first time more often than not; and when I folded two pieces that hadn't been folded before in order to shorten the waist, I was doing it freehand and finding, when I checked against a piece that had been folded the last time I used that pattern, that I'd done it perfectly first time.
This is huge. It meant I not only eyeballed the correct length, I got my fingers to perform the operation properly. I've finally got enough experience at altering patterns to fit my figure to skip a lot of the do-overs.
I was almost as proud of myself as I was the first time I realized I was leaving out all the scenes I'd have to cut later anyway during the first draft!
And, since I was still pinning and my back brain was free to keep turning up connections, I thought about this thing I've been doing on my sims newsgroup lately. People who get their sims into some sort of soap operatic pickle and are unsure how they want to proceed from there often solicit advice, and of course I'm never shy about offering it. My basic plan is always the same: a) pay attention to your sims' behavior and extrapolate from that what they would really do if they were people instead of pixels (this is essentially my approach to the plotting problem, too - plot is what the characters do, so playing to my strengths means letting them solve their own problems instead of trying to make them follow some plan of my own) and b)think about what would be most fun for you to play. Because after all, they aren't writing a novel, they're playing a game, and if they aren't having fun they might as well go wash dishes or something. I then will append some concrete examples of possible ways the game might go depending on circumstances, giving their situation the Garage Sale treatment.
What I realized while pinning was, that this is plotting. Rudimentary plotting, sure; but since most of the time I don't know much about the sim in question at all, and in no case do I have the intimate character knowledge on which I rely to make up for poor plotting skills, it really is plot work I'm doing, and moderately successfully, too. I never used to be able to do that without miring in a quicksand of Too Many Ideas, Too Little Logic, and I never mire anymore; though how much that has to do with improved plotting skills and how much with improved ability to apply the brakes before I lose control is a hard question. Not one that it's important to answer, either. The point is - I can do now what I couldn't do then.
I'll never be Agatha Christie, but I don't need to be. All I needed was to improve that skill to the point where I'm not hopeless at it anymore. And I've done it.
All it took was decades of practice, developing a habit of mind.
Just like lining up with the grain and shortening a waist.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
And the Kindle's Done
Those rudimentary buy links need to be upgraded with pictures and generally made more attractive to the buyer. Plus, turns out there's a Kindle edition of Ghost Sitter, which I either didn't know about, or had forgotten. I should check my contract, as I'm not positive I sold electronic rights to that. Ugh, I hope I did. I hate arguing with corporations. Not fond of reading my old contracts, either. But it's all part of the job.
I have this desperate feeling that I didn't proofread closely enough, which means at the end of the week I need to go back over both editions and double check everything. It's way too easy to miss the kinds of scanning errors I was getting, the "in" turned into an "m," the "I" read as a "1", and so on. But two proofreading sessions too close together are no good. You miss all the same things.
Off to read a contract.
I have this desperate feeling that I didn't proofread closely enough, which means at the end of the week I need to go back over both editions and double check everything. It's way too easy to miss the kinds of scanning errors I was getting, the "in" turned into an "m," the "I" read as a "1", and so on. But two proofreading sessions too close together are no good. You miss all the same things.
Off to read a contract.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Adventures in Proofreading
I was eating blueberry pancakes, aware in the back of my mind that I didn't have a Garage Sale Idea on hand yet, and not caring because hey, blueberry pancakes, when I read the following sentences:
The polyglot Bible kept thirteen presses and fifty-five men occupied, not to mention the job of proofreading, which was done by several expert linguists as well as Plantin's own teenage daughter. It was said that she could correct the script perfectly accurately, but without understanding a word of it.
Say what? The polyglot Bible in question, produced in Antwerp between 1568 and 1572, contained parallel text in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic. Those don't even use the same alphabet. Who was this teen-age daughter? Was she really working from shape recognition, with no knowledge of the languages? Or was she playing dumb and learning all these languages in secret as she worked? How did she feel about being saddled with this (potentially monstrously tedious) job and not even having a shot at inheriting the family publishing business (which was eventually taken over by her brother)?
What was her name, for crying out loud?
Unfortunately, the book in which those sentences occur (Books: A Living History, Martyn Lyons, Getty Publications, 2011) has no notes of any sort, or even a proper bibliography, just a "Further Reading" section full of modern secondary sources. Not cool, Mr. Lyons and Getty Publishing!
Proofreading is not a charismatic, action-packed job; but the teen-age girl who could do this job is an intriguing character; the more so since most of the information on her, even in primary sources, will probably be of this elusive character. Teen-age girls have a tendency to peek out around the margins of history books, come and gone in a flash, their real selves kept private by the indifference and limited gender concepts of those producing most surviving primary sources. This is one reason why historical fiction features them so largely - they provide a screen barely marred by any shadow, onto which an author and an audience can project their own concerns while wrestling with the unfamiliarity of her historical moment.
There are two ways to write a book about such a person. One involves inventing a character who makes sense to the author, doing enough research to dress up her story in convincingly period clothes, and writing it. I don't much approve of that, but such stories have their appeal as long as no one mistakes them for genuine historical writing.
The other, of course, is to dive into everything you can find on sixteenth-century Antwerp, hunting for pearls of information about this particular young woman (one should at least be able to learn her name, and a few details of her subsequent fate) and filling in the gaps between with as much context as you can find. When everything you can find is fit together, believe me, there will still be gaps plenty big enough to write your story in. You'll know what conflicts your heroine would really have faced; the context in which she undertook (or was forced to perform) this job; a little something about the family and social dynamics she grew up in. And once you have that, you'll know what the story is.
This is a big job. I know, I've done it before. You probably don't have to actually read Dutch (or Syriac or Aramaic; I'm sure Latin would help) in order to do the right amount of research - but it wouldn't hurt.
I can't do this particular one because I've never been to Antwerp. That sort of thing doesn't stop other people, but it does me.
The polyglot Bible kept thirteen presses and fifty-five men occupied, not to mention the job of proofreading, which was done by several expert linguists as well as Plantin's own teenage daughter. It was said that she could correct the script perfectly accurately, but without understanding a word of it.
Say what? The polyglot Bible in question, produced in Antwerp between 1568 and 1572, contained parallel text in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic. Those don't even use the same alphabet. Who was this teen-age daughter? Was she really working from shape recognition, with no knowledge of the languages? Or was she playing dumb and learning all these languages in secret as she worked? How did she feel about being saddled with this (potentially monstrously tedious) job and not even having a shot at inheriting the family publishing business (which was eventually taken over by her brother)?
What was her name, for crying out loud?
Unfortunately, the book in which those sentences occur (Books: A Living History, Martyn Lyons, Getty Publications, 2011) has no notes of any sort, or even a proper bibliography, just a "Further Reading" section full of modern secondary sources. Not cool, Mr. Lyons and Getty Publishing!
Proofreading is not a charismatic, action-packed job; but the teen-age girl who could do this job is an intriguing character; the more so since most of the information on her, even in primary sources, will probably be of this elusive character. Teen-age girls have a tendency to peek out around the margins of history books, come and gone in a flash, their real selves kept private by the indifference and limited gender concepts of those producing most surviving primary sources. This is one reason why historical fiction features them so largely - they provide a screen barely marred by any shadow, onto which an author and an audience can project their own concerns while wrestling with the unfamiliarity of her historical moment.
There are two ways to write a book about such a person. One involves inventing a character who makes sense to the author, doing enough research to dress up her story in convincingly period clothes, and writing it. I don't much approve of that, but such stories have their appeal as long as no one mistakes them for genuine historical writing.
The other, of course, is to dive into everything you can find on sixteenth-century Antwerp, hunting for pearls of information about this particular young woman (one should at least be able to learn her name, and a few details of her subsequent fate) and filling in the gaps between with as much context as you can find. When everything you can find is fit together, believe me, there will still be gaps plenty big enough to write your story in. You'll know what conflicts your heroine would really have faced; the context in which she undertook (or was forced to perform) this job; a little something about the family and social dynamics she grew up in. And once you have that, you'll know what the story is.
This is a big job. I know, I've done it before. You probably don't have to actually read Dutch (or Syriac or Aramaic; I'm sure Latin would help) in order to do the right amount of research - but it wouldn't hurt.
I can't do this particular one because I've never been to Antwerp. That sort of thing doesn't stop other people, but it does me.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Happy Birthday, Ms. Jones! + Miscellaneous
Today is Diana Wynne Jones's birthday. I suggest you celebrate by reading - Archer's Goon, say. Or Drowned Ammet, which does some things in the plot and character interrelations that'd make Dickens gasp in admiration for the way she makes none of it feel at all contrived.
Speaking of birthdays - the older I get, the less I want to pick up the phone. This bugs me. For instance, since our Paypal and Amazon accounts were set up by Damon, I need to protect us from confusion and potential legal and financial difficulties by getting a separate e-mail account to anchor my business use of those companies. The simplest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask our internet provider what the easiest way to do that is. But I keep putting it off.
And, a house-repair mystery: In the mud and powder rooms downstairs, we have developed two sets of absolutely straight, parallel seams of paint bubbling. It looks like a bad tape and float job along the borders of a drywall panel. But when the workman took the paint off, he revealed no tape and no abutting panels, but an amazingly straight and consistent crack in the drywall. He suggested that the crack and the paint bubbling were due to a leak; but the plumber finds no trace of such a thing.
So what the heck have the Borrowers been doing in my walls to create this effect?
I have concluded that real life exists to keep us from being too productive.
Speaking of birthdays - the older I get, the less I want to pick up the phone. This bugs me. For instance, since our Paypal and Amazon accounts were set up by Damon, I need to protect us from confusion and potential legal and financial difficulties by getting a separate e-mail account to anchor my business use of those companies. The simplest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask our internet provider what the easiest way to do that is. But I keep putting it off.
And, a house-repair mystery: In the mud and powder rooms downstairs, we have developed two sets of absolutely straight, parallel seams of paint bubbling. It looks like a bad tape and float job along the borders of a drywall panel. But when the workman took the paint off, he revealed no tape and no abutting panels, but an amazingly straight and consistent crack in the drywall. He suggested that the crack and the paint bubbling were due to a leak; but the plumber finds no trace of such a thing.
So what the heck have the Borrowers been doing in my walls to create this effect?
I have concluded that real life exists to keep us from being too productive.
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