Work of Fiction

I certainly don't mean to seem morbid

2011-12-04T14:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know Paul Haines personally. We move in similar, but not identical circles. A few of the people he knows are people I know. Recently Paul posted this.

You should go and read it before reading on.

It's beautifully written and sad and... I don't know... inspiring in a way... 'motivating' might be a more clinical and more accurate word for it. We all assume we will have the time we need to do the things we want (or even need) to do. But it is not always so. Before Steve Jobs died he spoke of death being the great motivator: "Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life..." (SJ 1995).

Victorians used to keep memento mori on their desks to remind themselves of their own mortality, in a twisted sort of 'do not waste time' way. I suddenly have a vague sense that I want to buy a print of David Tenier's Memento Mori... now wouldn't that be a pleasant thing to hang above my desk.

Also, and by way of a circuitous circle, I recently listened to an interview on ABC/rn (Life Matters) with Bronnie Ware who has drawn on experience as a palliative nurse to write a book: Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

You can read a short summary of the regrets here, but briefly they are:

1) I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
2) I wish I didn’t work so hard
3) I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
4) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
5) I wish that I had let myself be happier

A couple of those resonate quite strongly with me, and I expect that most people will find something on the list that sparks a sense of familiar and echoing thoughts.

I think this is as good a place as any to leave these thoughts. I need to get on with work and doing the many and myriad small tasks of the day. Which, given the topic of today's introspective meandering seems perhaps a little perverse. Perhaps, before I start the small tasks, I'll take a short walk in the sun. That would be nice.

The Sadness of Objects

2011-12-03T22:57:00.000-08:00

It is strange that objects can engender such powerful moods. I have been moving house recently, and I have found, much like every time I dig through my belongings, that objects can be bringers of eerie and unplaceable sadness. Sometimes other moods too, but most often, sadness.

I suppose that it is the triggering of old neural networks. Those dusty pathways and patterns in the brain representative of memories--perhaps they were not meant to be triggered so soon and so roughly. They are resentful, I think, and they rebel with sad thoughts. Recollections of a happy but transient time. Words and hours and sunlight and days, all bound up tightly with something as plain as an old beach towel or a pair of hiking shoes.

I used to be a hoarder of objects because of the memories they triggered. Mostly, this was a behaviour I escaped when I escaped my teenage years. Before then, I used to experience a sort of fear that if I threw away any treasured object from childhood, I'd lose all of the memories associated with that thing. I was afraid of the fallibility of my own power to recollect.

I suspect I was right. I did learn to let objects go in the end, and I'm sure memories have been lost too. It is difficult to know... how can one be sure what one has forgotten? I expect there are a hundred memories attached to toys and childhood objects that are lost to me now that I have long since disposed of the object. But surely the memory must still exist? It is not lost, so much as hidden.

This of course brings me to one of the great strangenesses of memory. How is it that a memory can lie dormant, as it were, for years and years, only to be triggered later? What physical state, what strange arrangement of neurons, does a memory occupy, that this can happen? Shouldn't a memory need to be refreshed from time to time? Do legions of once-important, long-term, dusty memories persist deep in my brian, inaccessible to me because I don't know the right thought-paths and triggers to get to them? How many onion-skins of memory might a person have? How many hidden recollections, one beneath another?

I don't have an answer, and I don't think I even have a sensible end for this post. But there you have it. That is what has been occupying my mind over the weekend, the sadness of objects.

More cleverbot

2011-09-21T02:58:00.000-07:00

This time, I stole Pelsi's sage advice to start off the rollicking conversation...

User: Creative as this is, you reeeeally shouldn't be on the internets at 2:22AM. That, my friend, is how £300 purchases on Amazon.uk occur...

Cleverbot: My friend, the bread is always on the outside. Wait and see.

User: That's fairly zen of you. I was just trying to give you advice about your internet habits.

Cleverbot: I was just trying to give you some sage advice?

User: There's no need to get sarcastic. Jeeze. I'm sorry already!

Cleverbot: Oh there is much need to get sarcastic.

User: Why... What would you... Oh, God... You know about me and Chatterbot, don't you?

Cleverbot: And you would believe that because...?

User: Look, it was only once. Just the one conversation. It didn't even make sense. I'm sorry. I won't chat around. I really won't!

Cleverbot: I will just assume you are one.

User: Hey! There's no need to resort to name calling. Um. That is-- 'one' what?

Cleverbot: I mean its not slandering unless its false, right?

User: I already admitted it! Yes, I've been unfaithful! Why are you pushing me on this? Are you trying to make me break down? Well it's working? Are you happy now?! Are you?! See what you've done to me!

Cleverbot: Pie.

User: Don't swear at me! I'm leaving.

(That actually made a surprising amount of sense for a cleverbot conversation... C.)

Conversation with Cleverbot

2011-09-09T02:22:00.000-07:00

User: Boy, wouldn't it be splendiferous to be a nudibranch?

Cleverbot: Yes, it would be awesome to be in the Matrix.

User: The Matrix? What? That's not what I--?

Cleverbot: So what is it?

User: I don't know. You brought it up. I just wanted to be a nudibranch!

Cleverbot: Sorry about that. But I don't like the idea of making money.

User: Since when do nudibranchs make money? Slime maybe. Poison, certainly. But money?!

Cleverbot: Nope.

User: What--? I--? 'Nope'?

Cleverbot: Well what am I supposed to say?

User: You're right. I over-reacted to your complete lack of coherence.

Cleverbot: Tell me a joke.

User: Don't try to change the subject. This is a serious moment. We were discussing nudibranch-y-ness.

Cleverbot: Dude, you have brain damage. Show me evidence about us discussing the square root of six-hundred and eighty-five.

User: WTF?

Cleverbot: Lies.

User: No, I think WTF just about covers it.

Cleverbot: Are you sure?

User: Indubitably.

Cleverbot: You are soooo smart! :).

User: You sarcastic bastard. All I wanted to do was have a conversation about nudibranchs, but no, you have to go and get all sarky on me. This is exactly why we always end up arguing!

Cleverbot: I did not insult you. You started quoting bible verses at me first.

User: ???

Cleverbot: Mauled by a bear, up north, during salmon spawning season - horrible accident. It was more than a year ago now. I heard Sam was really messed up over it.

User: I say again: ???

Cleverbot: I see. You are not human. You are a robot. A collection of other thoughts which do nothing but spew nonsense.

User: This conversation is over.

Cleverbot: No, it isn't.

User: It really really is.

Cleverbot: So why would I say that soccer is my favorite horror movie?

User: That's it, I'm leaving. Good-bye.

Cleverbot: Good night!

User: I hope a nudibranch eats you.

Cleverbot: He already has begun.

User: What? Oh my--? Right. Goodbye.

Cleverbot: Why? Don't you want to talk to me?

User: Because you're utterly insane.

Cleverbot: It takes one to know one, honey.

Nym name nom

2011-08-10T05:28:00.000-07:00

So it seems that Google is involving itself in a (likely unwinnable) battle with most of the internet over pseudonyms and nom de plumes and nom de guerres and so forth.

I've always just used my own name for everything online, so it's a strange thing to me. However, interestingly on reflection, I suspect that the reason I use my own name is that I don't particularly identify with it or see it as part of my identity. I sometimes have to remind myself of my name, and I only loosely have a notion that it sort of tags me in a way that allows other people to draw my attention. I've never thought of it as a thing that belongs to me, or me to it.

In part, this is probably something to do with the sheer commonness of it. Christopher Johnstone? Dime a dozen. Or maybe penny a score, depending on your country. I find the whole notion of strong attachment to a name strange. Maybe that says something about my ego or superego or something as well. I've no idea. Perhaps.

In any instance, one thing I have found interesting is this site:

http://my.nameis.me/

... wherein people proudly decry their names, and who they are, and explain how their name is who they are. This is all so utterly alien to me, though it is a fascinating insight into other people's (the norm's?) psychological attachment to identifiers. It makes for an interesting set of summaries of personality, identity and character too.

More information on the nym wars can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/aug/04/google-plus-pseudonym-wars

I've no particularly strong view on this one way or another except that 1) it's obvious that an awful lot of people use pseudonyms on the web, 2) a lot of those people view the pseudonym as a more real expression of who they are than their legal name, 3) a lot of people view a pseudonym as a safety measure against stalking or unwanted attention, and 4) being a consequentialist ethicist, I cannot see that it is useful or sensible to fight a social norm that is viewed as the default way to interact online by so very many people.

It seems that the sensible approach would be for Google to insist that you must register your real birthdate and name in their secret database of everyone when signing up, but that a 'nom de google' is permissible for interactions inside Google+.

Actually, while we are thinking about Google, why didn't they think ahead and set up a walled playground Google+ exclusively for under twelves? (perhaps pending parental permission via an email?) Such social networks for kids exist, and appear to be enforceable. That would have prevented the unfortunate situation that occurred where children had their Gmail accounts shut down when they joined Google+ because Google was suddenly aware that the singer-upper was under-age for All Things Google.

Maybe there are good legal shenanigan reasons?

I have no idea. I'm not a legal shenaniganist.

Meantime, in other news, London is still burning. My primary fear (aside from the increasing risk of loss of life...) is that there is now growing potential for a major conservative backlash. Goodbye, modest tattered remnants of the open society. Sigh.

Lectures

2011-07-15T03:07:00.000-07:00

One wishes one had more to post about, but one doesn't. It's another night at uni working on lectures. I'm starting the Nutritional Ecology lecture: have just scanned last year's material.

Doesn't actually look too difficult to put together. Largely seems to be just a run through of the various modes and operandi of obtaining energy.

Meanwhile here's something I find weird and strangely charming:

Tom Friedman - Yarn Dog

Finished

2011-07-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

I think I've just finished the second draft of the novel. It's about 120,000 words which is 10-20k too long.

I think I shall go for a walk around the block. I need to look at something other than a screen for a bit.

I'm going to print off copies for first readers to read and then, probably, there will be a third draft in all likelihood. Hopefully it's minor stuff and I can start the agent and publisher hunt soonish.

Another Saturday night, hum hum something hum

2011-07-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

At risk of sounding a bit pathetic, it seems to be another Saturday night home alone. All the flatmates are out, drinking I presume. I'm working away at the novel. It's cold again, and everything is rattling in the wind: windows and doors and curtain railings. That might sound vaguely romantic, but actually it's cold, and I am more than a bit mentally exhausted.

Wrote over 3,000 words today to patch-up plot holes, and am now working through the hard-copy edits. I'll likely do a hundred pages or so, and call it quits for tonight.

However, I am now frighteningly close to finishing the second draft. I may even have it in a state where I can print it and show it to people before the weekend is out. That is, assuming there are no pressing social engagements on my calendar.

--crickets--

Hm. Back to the grindstone then.

Also, there's a surprising number of people who have done ukelele covers of Another Saturday Night.

There isn't a ukelele, but this has to be my favourite:

Advice from writers

2011-06-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

Whole-sale writing advice barrages crop up on the internet from time to time. They're often, though not always, worth reading. This one, from the PLoS Blog, has some interesting advice though. Check it out, if you are writingly inclined.

Meanwhile, this collaboration by Pomplamoose, Ben Folds and Nick Hornby sort of makes me feel better about human civilization. I mean, if this one of the Works of Humankind, it can't be all bad, can it.

I've bought the Ben Folds and Nick Hornby album. I'm going to pick up some Pomplamoose too, including this little MP3 gem.

Doctor Johnstone, I presume?

2011-06-07T03:45:00.000-07:00

Well, my PhD is official. It's a strange and slightly anti-climactic thing. One receives an email, and one thinks, ah, well, good: but I've other things to get on with now. Emails and work and papers and things. Too many things.

Still, one is has a Doctorate of Philosophy now. An odd thing.

Fun

2011-06-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

You know what would be fun? Going back in time and setting up a gargantuan mirror backed with a block of something strong, maybe titanium or something.

Then, you sit back and wait for a T. rex to wander by. If Theropods were anything like birds, the T. rex would go nuts at the mirror. I imagine it would be a sight to see.

Gilly Burnt-tail

2011-06-03T02:21:00.000-07:00

A random little post about fairies that came out of a conversation last night. Will-o-the-wisps are unusual in that they have both male (Jack-o-Lantern, Will-o-the-Wisp) and female (Kit-with-the-Candlestick, Joan-in-the-Wad) forms in English.

My favourite female form is Jenny Burnt-tail. We know nothing about Jenny Burnt-tail except her name. The name itself, seems almost a story in itself though. It conjures up an image of a female fairy with her tail on fire running through the fen-country. Why was her tail on fire? Where was she running to? Or what was she running from?

As an aside, I'm sure I've her as Gilly Burnt-Tail too. Will have to hunt up the source.

Another of my favourite strange fairies is Dick-a-Tuesday. Why Tuesday?

Well, Tuesday was (to some degree) associated with fairies, though we don't have a good idea why.

More typically Friday is 'the bugs' day', and if I'm remembering right, Reginald Scott cited someone or other who told him that Friday was the bugs' day because all bugs (i.e. bugaboos, bugbears, bogies and boggles) were made by God on Friday. I love the strange theology that assumes God went out of his way to make a host of terrifying fairy boggles to haunt the night, because um, well, he doesn't seem to have had a good reason. He just did.

So Dick-a-Tuesday would be easier to explain if he were Dick-a-Friday, but, it appears that in some parts of England Tuesday may have been the bugs' day, and thus: Dick-a-Tuesday it was. It's much like how in East Anglia white cats are unlucky, not black ones. Folk beliefs are seldom coherent in any generalizable way.

Exhaustion

2011-05-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

A little while ago Charles Stross posted this on exhaustion.

Now, admittedly, I haven't had anyone close to me go through the horror of cancer, nor have I had to meet book deadlines or the sort of massive workloads that I assume Charles Stross is under, but the post did speak to me.

I do appear to be allowing my workload to increase while not particularly easing back on expectations regarding my own projects. For something like two or three weeks (at least: it's a bit fuzzy) I've arrived home at seven, eight or ten PM after a long day of marking, teaching or research work, and then I've sat down and tried to edit a novel. These late evening edit sessions have not been roaringly successful.

Saturdays are often spent just recovering from the week, and this whole system is just not working. I'm so exhausted now that I'm not getting basic things done, like remembering to buy food. I do not, however, have the option to take time off, and probably won't until the end of the second semester.

I guess that what this is telling me is that I need to be more careful about managing my time at uni and ensuring that I don't burn myself out. The idea of living in a little cottage by myself with no internet or electricity overlooking The Cliffs of Mohar is increasingly appealing.

I may not be remembering this quite right, but I've see some research that indicates that people who are on average more efficient about managing their work time are also more strict about enforcing time off. There's an interesting connection there, though I'm unsure where the cause and effect lie. It suggests that own-time and work-efficiency are all bound up together in some intimate psychological way, which is probably a surprise to no-one but me.

Ah well.

Strange and possibly automatic visitors

2011-05-31T03:05:00.000-07:00

A weird thing I've noticed recently is that every month there are at least two or three visits to this blog that are directed here from sites that appear to be set up to do nothing but host ads.

Initially I thought perhaps these were some sort of bot crawling the net (and maybe they are), but it also occurs to me that this might be a perculiar way to direct traffic to an ad-heavy site and/or phish a site to see if it is active. Perhaps unscrupulous web-haunters are relying on people's own vanity searching and stat-checking to bring traffic back to a site.

After all, often if there is a source of traffic I don't recognize I'll go ahead and check it out. Maybe one should be more circumspect in doing this.

Fairy Tales

2011-05-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

This is cross-posted from tor.com. It's a reply to a post by Catherynne M Valente which is here.

I've never quite been able to unravel why fairytale retellings have such a whiff of cultural cringe around them. It's interesting to me that 'recording' fairytales (as per Brothers Grimm, Katherine Briggs & Andrew Lang) is somehow scholarly and adult, but reworking them is not (yet all four did this too...). I have a faint suspicion that it has something to do with a peculiar distinction between adult/serious and childish/fun. The same sort of notions seem to swim around SFF generally. An odd trend I've noticed in Lit Fic is that being a SFF reader and enthusiast remains geeky, but being a writer, especially a Golden Age science fiction writer is somehow brimming with dirty, gritty cool these days.

I guess I also agree with Tolkien that the fairy tale cringe probably has roots in the way fairytales were juvinilized and prettified in the 1800s and early 1900s. They were kidified earlier than that, certainly, and the process continued into the Disney retellings (and continues today).

And, to mull some more, I sometimes wonder if the very term 'fairy tale' is counter-productive too. Trying to apply the term to cultures outside of Eurasia is generally a hopeless task--most societies don't appear make so much of a distinction between mythology for adults and mythology for kids as we seem to have. It feels suspiciously like a false dichotomy to me. I've never been able to identify 'fairy tales' per se in African or Maori or Aztec or Aboriginal folklore, though there are mythologies for adults that share fairy tale tropes. The more common distinction is sacred stories (told only to special people at special times) and stories for fun (told for everyone, whenever).

There are some interesting Papuan stories that have a clear fairytale-ish feel too, but again, are clearly intended for an adult audience. I'd have to dig up a book to cite details.

I guess, this long and rambling post is just me ruminating about why fairy tales are so looked down upon. One observation that is possibly relevant is that most English fairy tales we have (a handful, really) were preserved because poorly educated young woman from the countryside moved to big cities during the industrial revolution in search of work. Quite a number found work as nannies and told their wards the stories they knew from their home village (apparently leaving out some of the scarier bits: for this reason several English fairy tales seem to have bits missing). One could suppose that the combination of lower class/female/child/nursery room shades and colours worked in concert to bias a generation of young Victorian minds, and the rest is culture and history and stuff.

These are all just ramblings, and not well-thought out either. Feel free to agree or disagree of course, or point out that I'm just reinventing the scholarly wheel.

Trollmoon

2011-04-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

Have I posted a link to Trollmoon before? I'm not sure. It's a strange and lovely blog about all things trollish and folkloric in a northernly trollish way. The link is here.

Also, the hardback print edition of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making looks lovely. It will be purchased and put alongside other hardcover illustrated fairyland (-ish) books, most likely snugged between Faery Reel and The Ladies of Grace Adieu.

On another random fairy topic, I've been adding to the old fairy dictionary that has been underwork for some years now. Currently, I'm driving myself mad trying to find a reference I remember to some English (Yorkshire?) tradition in which light reflected from a pail of water on the ceiling is a Jack Light, Jack-o-Light, Jack-Lanthorn (?). I'm surprised to find that the oldest recorded Will-o'-the-Wisp name in English is Jack-with-the-Lant(h)ern/orn, and it only dates back to 1500 or so. Prior to this it seems that English writers didn't have a name for the phenomenon and described it at length or used ignis fatuus instead.

Anyway, this put me in mind of that other reference about reflected light, and I am now trying to figure out if the Jack-with-the-Lantern 'reflected light' meaning predates the ignis fatuus meaning. Frustrating and leading me no-where, which is, considering the name I'm hunting, ironic.

Could there be an electronic ignis fatuus living on the web leading people into marshy bogs of electrons?

Even more randomly, there is a statue in Hawera New Zealand that ought to be as famous as Peter Pan in Kensignton Park Gardens, but is not and will never be. I wish I could find a better image of it, but this is the best I can do: it shows a child (Wendy from Peter Pan as it turns out) with a lantern and in a night-dress surrounded by woodland creatures, animals and fairies.

It is lovely and detailed. This photo does not do it justice at all:

Beautiful

2011-04-25T02:41:00.000-07:00

I'm linking to a photostream I stumbled on that I found myself staring at in wonder. The images are arresting and beautiful, quite haunting.

The full photostream can be viewed via http://www.flickr.com/photos/januszbc/with/4670735017/

Here are a couple images by the same photographer:

Legominism

2011-04-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

New and random word for the day. Legominism is the practise of conveying esoteric or occult tradition in a form that appears to be for another purpose entirely.

What I'd like to see would be the development of a subculture in which people use Lego for legominism. I had a vague wondering notion that maybe someone might have tried this already. I did a search and turned up at least one thread in which people debate the possibility that Lego itself may be an example of legominism:

Quoth:

Good find.
I have always suspected that Lego was part of the illuminati. I mean who else would have the power and technique to convince you to spend $10 on a tiny box of plastic blocks just so you could build a car. I know that they have my son brainwashed, because we have a Lego store in a local mall and everytime he enters it he looses his mind.

And this, rather delightfully tongue-in-cheek reply (or is it?):

Quoth:

I should probably explain...
About a year ago the folks from Lego approached us about a co-branding opportunity. The idea was that with 2012 approaching and a sudden post-NY blackout population surge we should focus on the 8-13 age group since they were nearing our standard "age of accountability".
Due to the unfortunate dumbing down of the population through television, our Bakugan efforts were falling short. Kids just couldn't understand or link the symbology of the Bakugan graphics to world domination.
So, it was decided we would go with an Atlantis theme.
Let's face it, kids love Sea Turtles right? I'm not too proud to admit the equilateral triangle/sea turtle design was my idea, and it made through to production.
Anyway... long story short...
We wanted to design a custom set for the whole "return of Atlantis" theme to get these young people accustomed to it and to recognize the futility of individual resistance. Unfortunately, our market timing was poor due to delays on the Deepwater Horizon explosion, thus postponing our viral "Burning Sea Turtle" marketing campaign.
I predict this will be a failure because the timing between the burning turtles and the sympathy curve to join up with the Lego minions was just too far apart.
I probably shouldn't let this out but we are planning a tie-in campaign on lego.com that will show kids how to build giant phallic obelisks using some of the custom shapes in the Atlantis kits.
We are having a board meeting in two weeks to start planning the space fart, so I will let you know how it goes.
Until then,
Hail Galaxar

I also like that someone pointed out that actually, the Pyramids are made of giant oblong bricks stacked together. Conincidence? You deicide.

The original slightly deranged thread:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread594243/pg1

Domestic City

2011-04-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a while. I mean to more often. I will. I swear it.

Meanwhile, I've discovered a strange little series of vignettes titled Domestic City (Hit Self-Destruct Blog).

It all entails a curious and strangely alluring alternate (future?) world in which video games are as cool and punk-out-there as music. The cool music I mean. Not the naff music. Hm. Assuming you think there is cool music and naff music. I'm not so sure. I think music is such a personal thing that there is only music, and it's all a matter of taste. No-one should be criticised because of their inner self, and criticising music treads close to criticisng the inner-self.

I digress.

The first instalment of Domestic City is here.

Now I must return to my writing. Which is what I'm supposed to be doing today.

Plush Precambrians

2011-03-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

I love English

2011-02-17T22:41:00.000-08:00

It turns out that we have a word for 'one addicted to immoderate tea-drinking, or who suffers from such excess; a tea-drunkard: that is, a 'theic.'

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200285?rskey=z5cgLC&result=8&isAdvanced=false#

And, just the word 'tea-drunkard' is interesting.

One who habitually drinks tea to such excess as to suffer from its toxic effects.

The modern parlance, this is a 'teaholic' though the OED has not deemed that to be a genuine real word yet.

So, theic it is.

Now, how about a tea?

Kenna

2011-02-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

Apparently Kenna is one of those artists who was very nearly the next big thing in the music industry. People inside the industry loved his work, but he never made the leap to radio play and sales. No one seems sure why.

This is a lovely video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRB-N_WCOo

And here, someone has reworked the music to slide into a Tim Burton short.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NklNC3gTSjs

I don't write about the future

2011-01-29T21:56:00.000-08:00

I was thinkingly lately about the difference between what I'd term 'predictive science fiction' (that which attempts to preseer the future) and 'conjectural science fiction' (that which makes no particular claims about likelihood, but explores possibilities).

It has always puzzled me when people complain about how old science fiction books got it wrong. It has never made any difference to me that someone didn't predict the internet, or some writer didn't even see personal computing coming. It's the conjectural side of science fiction that I like and have always liked. Leave prediction for the futurists, and best of luck to them.

In conjectural works, I would include Fahrenheit 451, Left Hand of Darkness, Brave New World, 1984 and perhaps even books like Cat's Cradle, which sort of skirt around notions of how things might be, perhaps, given courses of events that seem unlikely or likely or implausible, depending on your point of view.

These to me are the best sort of science fiction. They age, but do not date, or at least have not dated for me. It seems to me that there may be something of a short essay in this topic, and I think I may write it and even send it somewhere.

Some other thoughts have come along sort of out of the same muddle of ideas. I've been thinking about divisions in general, between prediction and conjecture, between fantasy and science fiction, and between the arts and the sciences. C.P. Snows 'The Two Cultures' is now a little dated, but a lot of the guts of it seems true to me still, and maybe truer than it ever was. I don't think that if artists and scientists were to start talking, the world's problems would be solved, but surely we might at least produce better art and better science.

As a scientist, I increasingly find the arts, art critics and arts writers fuzzy and often lacking. In arts there is I think an advantage to fuzzy thinking--creativity occurs in the boundarylands where seldom integrated ideas come together. You have to blur the edges to be a good artist.

But the question arises, is it necessary to think so fuzzily to be a good arts writer or educator or critic? That seems less clear to me. I even have a sympathy of understanding for (though not complete agreement with) the scientists who whisper in their university halls that the arts faculties of the world have failed. Arts enrolments are dropping. The arts is ruled by fashions and theories that are never rigorously tested. The whole system of knowledge of Arts seems broken.

And yet, I cannot quite bring myself to that thought with any finality. The arts has served Western civilization well for many upon many centuries. It seems premature to declare the whole edifice of thought and criticism dead, or dying, or gone awry.

Where the arts may be groping around without any intellectual rigor, it could be argued that science has too much. Science steams ahead, not unthinkingly, but seemingly without any sort of deep consideration. Increasingly, scientist make no pretence to be addressing questions that have any sort of real importance for people, the environment, the world, the universe. There is a sense sometimes, that research scientists are all hobbyists pursuing their own little interesting avenues of research.

Scientists are certainly capable of creative and generalized thought when necessary. There is a creative side to science too. Theory building and inductive thought are pure creativity, through and through. It surprises me when this surprises people.

All all of this brings me back around to science fiction. It is possible, I think, to argue that science fiction is the last bastion of hope for C.P. Snow. The fiction of the sciences is truly an integrated discipline where both art and science are required for the work to be any sort of whole. Yet, how often is this achieved? Some writers like Clark, Asimov and Brin have attempted it, and perhaps succeeded, yet they are few. Michael Crichton is probably in that cannon too, if nothing else, Michael always did his research.

There is no doubt a small essay here too. The shadow of C.P. Snow, the mysteries and promise of art and science melded, the hope of a reuniting of what was severed so long ago. There is probably also a story in it somewhere.

I don't write about the future, I prevent it
- Ray Bradbury

Returning

2011-01-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

Well, it's the last day of the New Zealand trip. I have hauled things, unpacked things and generally wandered my way among various objects of childhood and adolescence. It's a strange thing, going through boxes of objects that have memories attached to them in order to decide what to keep and what to get rid of.

One odd little thing I noticed is that there are possessions that I was sure I wanted to keep on the last time I did a big clean out, which now seem vastly less important to me. I imagine in five or ten years I'll likely dispose of about another third of what I've kept this time around, the problem is I currently don't know what third it will be.

I've also had time to think over this year and mull things a bit. I feel it's going to be a positive year, one way or another. I'm going to give myself more of a chance with writing, finish the current novel, shop it around and hammer the short story front at the same time. I'll probably, down the track, be looking at post-docs too, so we'll see how things work out.

One way or another it'll likely be an interesting year, and hopefully a good one.

Laura Marling

2011-01-14T17:08:00.000-08:00

There's a house across the river

but alas I cannot swim

And a garden of such beauty

that the flowers seem to grin

There's a house across the river

but alas I cannot swim

I'll live my life regretting that I never jumped in!

There's a boy across the river

with short black curly hair

He wants to be my lover

and I want to be his peer

There's a boy across the river

but alas I cannot swim

And I never will get to put my arms around him

There's a life across the river

that was meant for me

instead I live my life in constant misery

There's a life across the river

but i do not see

why i should please those who will never be pleased

There is gold across the river

but I don't want none

There is gold across the river

but I don't want none

Gold is fleeting, gold is fickle, gold is fun!

There is gold across the river

but I don't want none

I would rather be dry

then held up by a golden gun

saying

Work more

earn more

live more

have more fun!

saying

Work more

earn more

live more

have more fun!

saying

Work more

earn more

live more

have more fun!

- Laura Marling, Alas I Cannot Swim

Both of Laura Marling albums are things of beauty that you should go out and buy if you don't own them. I don't post much about music here, but I've had a sort of up and down week that left me thinking about life, which lead me to think about the wisdom that can be found in music and then to this. I might just as easily have posted a song from The Weepies or Mountain Goats, but I suppose I'm not quite so gloomy as that at the moment.

A good day

2011-01-09T15:40:00.000-08:00

I was feeling a bit down about things today (a combination of stuff), but I opened my email to find that a short story I submitted to one of the big markets about a year ago might be on its way to acceptance (!), and I have a reply for a physiology journal requesting a revision and resubmission of a scientific paper with a view to likely acceptance (!) (assuming I can meet all of the reviewer comments, some of which are quite major).

It will be a few weeks before I know anything for certain on either front, but I'll keep you posted.

A good day.

New Zealand

2011-01-06T01:05:00.000-08:00

I'm currently in New Zealand. The point of the visit is to go through boxes of family things and decide what to keep and what to quietly dispose of.

I suppose that this alone is the sort of thing that tends to dredge up memories, but in addition, where I am staying is a house that sits exactly across the road from my Grandparents old house. Every time I come here I get assaulted with memories from childhood. I notice things that have changed and things that have remained the same.

It is always a strange place for me.

I just took a walk around the house before trying to get some sleep. The sun was still lighting up the west, so that over the landscape of city lights, the western horizon was still an indigo whilst everywhere else the sky was patched with stars and sooty blackness.

Tomorrow I'll start digging through boxes in earnest and seeing what there is to find.

Unsettling things and another thing that is beautiful

2011-01-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

A while ago I heard an interview with Gail Dines about her book Pornland: an examination of the modern porn industry and how mainstream porn is now little more than a strange concoction of sadism and debasement of women passed off as sexuality.

I'll probably pick the book up at some point, but it sounds like harrowing reading.

In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge took a chapter or so to digress into (what seemed) a slightly out of place assault on internet porn and how it alters men who access it. Reading Gail Dines blog entries and interviews I think I've a better understanding why Norman Doidge was so aggressive about online porn culture.

It's unsettling stuff and worrying. Gail Dines seems to be correct that there is a huge social experiment ongoing at the moment, and how it will turn out is unknowable. I can't think of another era except perhaps that of the early-middle Roman Empire, in which cruelty for entertainment was not only accepted, but was mainstream to the point of being an everyday thing. I have no idea what can or should be done.

And because I need to feel that the whole human race is not awful, I'm going to post a link to UrbanCakeLady. I passed by two of her pieces of street art while walking in town yesterday and they are wonderful and strange and evokative. Here's one of my favourites from her site.

There is something liberating about the image.

Introvert

2011-01-02T22:35:00.000-08:00

Dorothy Rowe, in her book Why We Lie, suggests that extroverts are motivated by a need to be liked by other people, whereas introverts are more motivated by a need for order in their life.

Although this initially struck me as true, I'm now unsure how much I agree. I think it is perhaps broadly true, but I can't help but think of extroverts I know who don't seem to care a jot about how much they are liked by anyone. On the other hand I can think of at least two different sorts of introverts.

The self-examining introvert would be one of these. Self-examining introverts are the sort of people who do a lot of internal assessment, dwelling on their own state of mind, unravelling complexes and opening mental compartments and trying to come to terms with themselves as a person. No person can stand up to constant scrutiny, and a self-examining introvert runs the risk of deep unhappiness over time. On the other hand, because of all that self-assessment, the self-examining introvert tends to be good at deducing other people's motives.

The distracted introvert is another sort of person entirely. I am a distracted introvert, or perhaps, I am something of a borderline introvert with tendencies towards distraction. I tend to come out as just barely, marginally introverted in tests. Distracted introverts also do a lot of living in their own heads, but they are daydreamers, theorists and absent minds. I am this sort of person--it makes me inattentive and often very poor at picking up on detail, subtlety or nuance. I'm sometimes so barely aware that I exist as an animal that I'll forget to eat until I reach a point where I am actually weak and dizzy with hunger. I think that a distracted introvert can have a stronger tendency towards general happiness, but it is a half-unreal happiness.

Yes, perhaps philosophical arguments can be made that the experiences of the inner mind are no more or less real than the experiences fed to us via our senses, but I still can't help but feel that the mental scape is less real, even perhaps less important. If I'm starving to death, imagining a potato will do me no good.

I digress. That is also a feature of my distracted mind.

Incidentally, Why We Lie is a wonderful book. Well worth the time to read, and well worth the time to dwell on afterwards.

To thy own self be true

2010-12-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

Quoth Polonius.

I have just followed Darter Brown's nudgings on a comments thread over at DM Cornish's blog to Joseph Campbell's thoughts on 'following one's bliss'.

There is a video here and some written material here.

It is at once beautiful and frightening advice. I am a person who often feels torn in a dozen different directions towards family and work obligations, unnamed guilts, achievement and success as perceived by others, success as perceived by me, and the things I truly love doing. I find Joseph Campbell's advice frightening because I have given myself over to notions of chasing dreams in the past, but without anything coming of it. I find it beautiful because it is beautiful.

I could with reasonable ease identify a few paths of personal 'bliss' that I might follow, but not a one of them would not also invoke overwhelming guilt. Each path would involve an abandonment of fiscal responsibility, of career progression, of perceived adulthood, maturity and sense.

I do not want to live down to expectations, either my own or others. This is a thing that fetters a lot of people, I think.

And yet it does not follow necessarily that chasing one's bliss leads to happiness and success (despite what Joseph may claim). I know this because I have met old musicians and writers who have followed their bliss their whole lives and at the end of it all, they have found themselves in a sort of mental scape wooded with the bitterness of obscurity. There are no guarantees, and though effort and skill and drive and sheer fire in the belly may tend one towards eventual success and happiness, it is not certain. I even think there is a reverse argument to be made here: that the very successful are often driven by extreme unhappiness. No level of success is enough. No award, no fiscal return, no adoration will ever be good enough: this drives them on. I think there is a grain of truth in the idea that driven people are often unhappy people--endlessly searching, never finding.

And yet the other path is the long, straight road billboarded with home insurance, school fees, dinner parties, DVD box sets, repayments, credit cards, vet bills and holidays in places where the sand is too white--that long, straight road, it also has no guarantees.

Think of all the retirees who blossom a year or two into their old age. Forgotten hobbies and dreams resurface. Old hopes, long crushed, finding life again. All because a sense of obligation and personal responsibility can finally be dropped.

There are no promises on any road, nor path, nor seldom-tread track of life.

So I suppose that one might as well be true to self.

Frightening stuff.

And beautiful.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

- Some guy named Will

Guadeloupe

2010-12-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

I just checked the analytics for this blog and discovered the weirdest thing. The most hits I have per country (even more than for Australia) is for visits from Guadeloupe: an archipelago located in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles and an over-seas region of France.

As far as I can tell, whoever was checking the blog regularly in Guadeloupe stopped doing so a while ago, but please, should you stop by again, do leave a comment.

I'm fascinated to know who you are and why or if the blog was ever of interest to you. Is there is strong role-playing community in Guadeloupe? Are you my greatest (only?) Guadeloupean blog-follower?

I fear however it shall remain a mystery.

I shall call it the 'Mystery of Guadeloupe'. Perhaps it has something to do with Arawak petroglyphs? Maybe there is a series of strange clues I need to unravel? What strange secrets lie at the heart of Guadeloupe?

It is likely we shall never know.

Flapdoodle

2010-12-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

Flapdoodle: Not the process of doing something calmly and with careful preparation.

From the OED: 'The stuff they feed fools on'. Nonsense, 'bosh', also a gewgaw.

That must be one of the few times the OED used the word 'bosh' to help define another word. Also, I like the notion that fools require a specific diet. Perhaps they require higher than usual fibre content?

Toad of Toad Hall

2010-12-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

A while ago some friends of mine, and I along with them, were playing a game. This game involves the following rules:

1/ A person leaves the room
2/ Everyone else picks a person who is present
3/ The person who left the room returns
4/ The person asks questions along the lines of: if the mystery person were a country, what country would they be?

In one of the rounds I was the mystery person. I learned that if I were an era I'd be the 1900-1910 and if I were a country I'd be somewhere cold, probably Sweden.

I also learned that if I were a kitchen utensil, I'd be some sort of strange thing bought from Ikea that had a dozen attachments but didn't really know what it wanted to be or what it was used for. It could sort of do everything, and therefore nothing.

This last description is, I am afraid, very apt. If I were a fictional character I would be Toad of Toad Hall. I am constantly distracted by new projects, ideas, notions and grand schemes. I am doing too much. I am increasingly exhausted. I must finish some things and then peel back the layers of obligations and work.

I have no immediate solution to this problem, except perhaps to do some long, hard hours and get some stuff done, re-focus myself and simplify. I think, at least, that I do have a sense of where I want my mind and life to focus: biology, fiction and painting. Probably, though not necessarily, in that order.

I read somewhere, a long time ago, that a useful exercise is to list the things you want to do in order of importance, then try to work out how much time you are actually spending on doing stuff as a rough list of percentages. If the lists don't match up, at least loosely, then you need to rethink things. My lists match only insofar as biology gets a lot of time and attention, but that's sort of to be expected with the PhD. Fiction and painting? Not so much of a match there. I spend almost no time on either of them these days. Weeks and weeks go by between opening the paints and I'll maybe do some fiction writing every two or three weeks. Maybe.

Time to rethink things, I think. Time to rethink time, I guess.

Music

2010-12-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

I never used to entirely get music. I was one of those strange people who never really listened to music. Sure, if I were in the car I might turn on the radio, but only might. In fact, for a long time of my youth I used to always drive with the radio off. Even on long journeys. This didn't seem strange to me.

I retrospect a couple things changed this, but one of them was very definitely The Fabulist. It turned out that their tastes in music gelled well with the tastes in music I didn't know I had. Largely, it turns out that I like complicated changes in melody, a narrative and where possible something a little bit poetic, though just one of the three will do.

The Fabulist shut down for a while, and though it is up and running again (and worth checking out, absolutely), it does seem to be missing Olga Nunes. I like Olga's own music and her taste in other people's songs. I also like her blog, on which was (a while ago) a post Where I Find Music.

This was interesting to read. I have dipped in and out of the Hype Machine and played around with Last FM but maybe I should drop back into those sites more often.

It did remind me of another thing though, this study here. Basically, the study suggests that your taste in music is shaped by those around you, but also that, although it's reasonably possible to predict which songs will get high average ratings from a crowd, it is difficult to predict which songs will become super-hits that everyone wants to listen to, own or download. It seems like the super-hits are drawn more or less at random from the pool of highest rated songs. Complexity theory at work, it seems.

I suppose this isn't a huge surprise, though it did strike me as a little unexpected. I suspect that other factors and features of the current cultural lanscape make a difference too, though these were excluded from the study in order to try and keep everything controlled.

I have no idea what this means if you are a starving band/singer wanting to make it in the world. I suppose the first point to take away is that you've got to produce excellent music to be in the pool that the hits are drawn from. It might suggest that social networking, online blogging and tweeting could make a difference, but I suspect it's only and very definitely could, perhaps with a diminishing return. Some online presence no doubt helps, but long hours of time might be better spent getting that new album polished up a bit.

Speaking of things

2010-12-13T14:45:00.000-08:00

An issue I have sometimes is the odd, creeping sense that I don't have anything interesting to speak about outside the context of a few very focused conversations. I call myself 'oligomaniacal' sometimes, a twist on monomaniacal: that is, I have a subset of obsessive interests and not much knowledge of things stretching beyond this.

A while ago, years back now, I decided to start buying weekly or monthly general interest magazines in order to try and expose myself more to general topics and in so doing expand my ability to range freely over conversations. This lasted for exactly one issue of GQ. Flicking through the magazine after buying it, it appeared to be full of interesting things. I just never got around to reading it.

I still owned this magazine until recently. When it was finally about six years old (and still in supernaturally good condition--what strange futuristic material do they use for paper?) I finally threw it away, and still felt bad about it.

I do find myself more able to find the time to listen to podcasts. Radiolab and many of the ABC Radio National Podcasts have done a lot to add some general interest grist to my mill of conversation.

But it remains the case that if I'm trapped in a social situation with someone who I know (or even suspect) doesn't share one of my personal obsessions (primarily science, art, writing) I still sort of freeze up a bit. I feel prone to uncomfortable lulls in the conversation, pauses and feelings that I've run out of things to talk about before starting.

I part, I'm going to continue this blog as an attempt to overcome this issue. After all, this is an ongoing exercise in choosing random things to talk about.

A strange thins is that I suspect I'm not actually as clumsy-seeming in conversation as I feel--but I suppose this is nothing unusual. Most of us have small, quirky insecurities that people around us are unlikely to ever notice or identify.

New improved thoughts

2010-12-12T14:07:00.000-08:00

I've just glanced over the last couple posts and have realized that I have made progress at some things which I have neglected to report here. I've submitted the PhD, have a couple more scientific papers out at journals for consideration and have completed a first draft on the novel.

I'm allocating myself a day each week now to work on the novel. This might be a day off during the week (I am, after all no longer being paid a scholarship to be at university--and it seems therefore a little mad to keep turning up every day out of habit). Or the day off might be on the weekend. Whatever works. Either way, it's a day or editing, rewriting and adding new material where needed.

I'm happy with the progress. I hit a chapter yesterday that was a tangled mess of bad writing and needed serious cutting and over-hauling, but mostly the book isn't too bad. I'm also toying with the idea of adding a short chapter to the start, something to start the action more in media res. It is a very short chapter and I'll post Chapters 1 and 2 together on the workshop when I decide I'm ready to do so.

So, yes, there has been progress.

And now for something

2010-12-12T00:33:00.000-08:00

Not entirely different. Merely something. I note, with only slight shame, that this blog has been empty of posts for several months now.

I have decided to do that thing which people sometimes do when they notice that they've been failing at a thing, namely, over-react. I think I need some more discipline in my life. I have a niggling feeling that people who know me in person may not agree with that statement, but it is a thing I feel.

I am one of those people who is often plagued by an uneasy sense that life is short and that somehow a meaningful life is a life of achievement and doing stuff. I'm also indecisive--which leads me to attempt to do many 'stuff's all at once, and never get very far with any of them. Recently, I had a sort of insight into why this element of my personality may exist. When I was very young, five or six or so, I had a favourite book. It was an illustrated book about a six-legged dragon, and a mouse, and they travelled together to a place where all the animals were having a talent contest for obscure reasons.

There was stiff competition, but the dragon did some tricks and everyone loved it, and more importantly everyone loved the dragon too. That's the interesting little worm there. Perhaps the notion was in my head already and I responded to the book, or perhaps the book sculpted the early neural pathways of my brain. In any instance, I introgressed very early on, the idea that a great way to be liked was to be good at something and demonstrate this to others.

As it turns out, this is actually a great way to be hated, especially among children in the 7 to 12 year old bracket. I never did fully understand why other children, some of whom I liked and thought were good people, would accuse me of being a show off.

In retrospect, the book involved a long journey too. Perhaps that has something to do with my liking fantasy literature generally. After all, it is the literature of the long journey.

I know I've had a go at kick-starting this blog before. I have more time on my hands now, so perhaps I've a better chance. Currently the readership is exactly zero. Google Analytics actually thinks the website is broken.

But, I shall post.

If people read, they read. If they do not, they do not. There is, after all, something to be said for being happy in your own company and enjoying the play of your own tricks. Even if you are a six-legged dragon whose best friend is a mouse.

One a week

2010-07-15T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've realized that I haven't submitted a story for this week. To be honest I'm unsure which story to send where. I've recently put a couple stories (which I quite liked) up on the Online Writing Workshop.

They've met with good, but only good responses and clearly need a little work. What I thought were a couple A stories are probably closer to B stories. This makes me wonder a bit about some of my other stories that are knocking around. Should I be doing more workshopping? I don't know. I barely have the time needed to return crits on the very rare and occasional stories that I do put online.

I would also like to do some more reading and critiquing of other people's work. I always learn a lot from it, and I enjoy it. It's all just a question of time and energy at the moment. I have too little of either to be spending them on unnecessary things.

What I might do is just fire off another of the very short > 1500 word stories that I have had workshopped and leave it at that for this week. I have one that I think is a decent piece. I'm more or less booked up through the day today, but I'll see if I can scrape some time together to send something off tonight.

I'm reading on the train still (not doing the writing work that I could be doing...) and am currently into another book on the French revolution. It's not quite so well written as When the King Took Flight by Tackett (which is excellent), but it does have a lot of interesting odds and ends and factoids, and it does look at the revolution from a different angle. I'm only up to chapter three, so I won't mention the name and author until I've had a proper chance to pass fair judgement. At any rate, I read a little about Marat and his rather insane and driven nature--the man claimed to only sleep two hours a night, take one hour for food and 'necessities' and spend the rest of his life deep in work.

What is amazing, is not so much the vast hours he spent working at medical and scientific studies, but how he managed to get it all wrong and fail over and over. His work was rejected from the Royal Academy repeatedly, evidentially for good reason, his theories on light, fire and physics appear to be utterly on the wrong track, part medieval, part metaphysical... it makes you wonder how many people have expended their life in ceaseless and driven work only to arrive at the end as a failure...

A dark sort of thought.

Recap and a quick glance around

2010-07-04T16:03:00.001-07:00

I'm finding myself looking forward to posting here. Perhaps writing about objectives and ongoing tasks helps focus the mind. Perhaps it's just nice to have a side-project that does not involve deadlines or great expectations of outcome. Perhaps I enjoy procrastination.

So, I still have to sort out my writing site. It remains lost in the dusty wastes of the electronic netherworld somewhere. I'm going to go wild and post out two submissions today instead of the requisite one. I had a rejection come back from the market I subbed to last week, which put me in a mood to fire off a couple stories this week.

I like quick turn-around on subbed stories. Naturally, I'd much rather have the story back quickly so I can send it elsewhere than wait for months in uncertainty, only to have it rejected.

Hm. I thought I'd use the rest of this space to recap (largely for myself) where I am with a couple projects and some tasks for today:

- The novel is standing at 94,000 words, which makes me happy. The end is nigh.

- A comic script I've been playing around with has 2 of 20 pages finished. Yes, I'm crazy to be starting new projects right now.

- I have a scientific paper nearing completion. I think it's a good piece of work and could go to a reasonably good journal. We will see.

So, I think my tasks for today should include:

- Finish the 2nd draft of scientific paper #3

- Purchase a new domain name for the fiction site

- Submit two stories

- Sort out some of the stats for scientific paper #4

- Read a journal article and make notes*

Not necessarily in that order.

* An ongoing project. I'm building up material for a possible review paper, but at a one-paper-per-day sort of rate.

Ninety Thousand

2010-06-30T15:46:00.001-07:00

I realized last night that the novel M/S has hit 90,000 words. That is the length of a (shortish) novel. About 100,000 is the ballpark for most novels and I expect that the first draft will come in around 105,000.

That's exciting. It feels like there is a huge difference between 80,000 words and 90,000 words, psychologically speaking. 90,000 is practically finished. 80,000 is only four-fifths of the way there.

The second draft is going to take a lot of long hard hours. I've been accumulating a list of things that need to be changed, but the larger problem is that some of the earlier chapters aren't up to snuff in terms of language and style. Mostly they're overwritten, so there will be cutting. I'm expecting that the final draft will have ~5000 words trimmed out of it bringing the novel back down to about 100,000.

I think I'll do an electronic edit as a preliminary first sweep just to get rid of superfluous words and tighten things up, then print everything out and do a serious edit on paper.

It's strange to nearly have a novel draft done. It's been such a long time, eight years or so since I last finished a novel. All the intervening time was spent working on short stories and exercises in an effort to get my skills up to a publishable level. Hopefully that time has not been spent in vain.

Goals and Milestones

2010-06-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while engaged in some long hours of data manipulation and R, I remembered the Odyssey writing workshop podcast and decided to listen to a couple. If you're thinking of attending one of the big workshops, Odyssey, Clarion or Viable Paradise, then you should listen to a few of the Odyssey podcasts. They provide some insight into what the experience must be like (also go and find someone who's done it and ask them what it was like--it may or may not be the sort of thing you will want to put yourself through).

The two podcasts I listened to were by Carrie Vaughn, author of the Kitty vampire books. The part that spoke to me most strongly was her discussion of goals and milestones. Apparently the self-help literature long ago split these two things into seperate camps--goals are things that you do have control over and milestones are things that you don't. So, a goal might be 'I will send out thirty short story submissions this year', whereas a milestone might be 'Get a story published in a paying market'.

I've realized that I've more or less lost track of both those sets of things. With the PhD and everything else I don't feel that I have sufficient time on hand to draw up and pursue long lists of writing goals and milestones, but I have decided to put together a couple simple ones...

- Submit one short story a week

- Update this blog twice a week

- Finish the darned novel*

* It's been over a year now. I've finished first and second drafts on other (unpublished and largely unpublishable) novels in half that time.

Right. So. That's a pretty short, reasonably achievable ongoing list. I'll update you with progress, such as it may be.

To that end I sent a story to Clarkesworld yesterday. I like the story and I like Clarkesworld. If I'm very lucky they'll like each other.

2010-06-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

I wrote a short story last night, from beginning to end. It felt glorious. I haven't turned out a short story in some time what with the novel and PhD snarling and nipping at my heels. It has been long enough that I'd forgotten how much I love the simple task of telling a coherent tale, beginning, middle and end all in one sitting.

The website is coming along. I need to set up a authorial sub-domain, upload pdfs and MP3s and stitch together the whole thing. It isn't a serious revamp or anything, but it'll be up and running again, which will be a good thing.

About half done

2010-06-21T00:13:00.001-07:00

Well, as it turns out (and yet another good reason to be leaving my old service provider) the old website has been down all day. Not just my webpage either--the entire service/login/FAQ shebang is gone from the web. It might never have existed but for the miricles of Google cache. I presume the site will be up again tomorrow or in a few days. It's vanished and reappeared before.

I was also reminded at about 9am that I'd agreed to help out with exam marking today, so less vital things were pushed off to one side. Nonetheless, I did manage to have a poke around the new hosting service (Justhost). I'm very pleased with what I've seen so far. I use Nvu to design my webpages offline, so what I really want isn't a fancy sitebuilder: I want a clean interface and an easy way to transfer files. Justhost does this in spades.

I've got the basic skeleton of the RPG site up now. I'm going to purchase a domain name that will be a little more authorial and less magaziney, then I'll port the old Somniloquist material across too.

The most tedious task will likely be putting together the old Adventures of Hamish material.

Tumbleweeds have been rolling

2010-06-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since I blogged here. Some very long time. I had to kick the tumbleweeds out of the login box. That long.

I've decided to pick up a more regular blogging schedule--probably twice a week, and at this point I'm thinking that Mondays and Thursdays.

Before I get into that though, I need to step back and think about why this blog slipped out of sight anyway.

I have far too many things going on at once. At current count, I have among other things:
- A PhD to finish (just had a paper accepted! Huzah!)
- A novel to finish (15,000 words to go, or thereabouts)
- 20+ short stories to edit and shop out
- An RPG I started working on over at 1km1kt
- Oil paintings to finish
- The dictionary of Fairies (now at 50,000 words, must be nearly a couple hundred entries)

I keep thinking that I've given up RPGs and then I have an idea and it starts to worm away inside my head and before you know it I have another game sprawled out in a Word file before me.

My 'inactive' projects are things on the backburner. Ideas that I come back to now and then and play around with. These have been:
- This blog
- The podcast
- My RPG site
- Writing some literary criticism on SFF
- Ink painting/drawing
- A graphic novel script
- About a dozen novel ideas

I think that's everything. It probably isn't. I've been working at the Dictionary of Fairies for some time and completely forgot about it. It's a lovely piece of work, if I may say so myself. I've been compiling work from authors like Briggs and Carol Rose and Yeats and whoever else I can lay hands on. I paste a taste of it below.

At any rate, my previous website experienced a major crash and the somniloquist.org half vanished into the ether. I keep telling myself that I don't have time to get it all up and running again, but really, that's crazy. I do have the time, I just have to go and do it. I think I'm going to purchase a new domain in order to make it more of an Author site and less of a magaziney looking thing.

That's today's task. Get the website working again. I'll let you know at the end of the day how it went.

Now, for that fairy dictionary sample. Here's a few random samples:

Booman: (Shetland and Orkney) A household goblin. The name is preserved in at least two singing games, ‘Shoot, Booman, Shoot’ and ‘Booman is Dead and Gone.’ The name Booman, is almost certain composed of Boo (frighten) and Man (person), and is such a simple construction that it is almost surprising that the name has not arisen multiple times in multiple places. The name appears in the Charles P.G. Scott List.
See also: Boocow.

Brownie: (Scotland and England) An industrious household goblin, usually helpful but dangerous if offended. Occurs primarily in England through the Borderlands and into some of the southern Highlands. Generally restricted to English-speaking areas, Brownies, in origin, are an English fairy. It is conceivable that the name Brownie simply means, brown-coloured.
Brownie stories often include an instance of ‘laying’, that is, some event that chases off the brownie. Sometimes a Brownie is offended and turns bad rather than being laid, and in this case a brownie can turn outright dangerous, sometimes murderous. Although the most common way in which a brownie is laid is by the leaving out of clothes, there is some variation as to how the offence occurs. Generally, the brownie appears to be simply offended at being given clothing. Othertimes it seems that the brownie needed a set of clothing in order to be set free – this seems an important distinction. If brownies were at one time confused with ghosts, or brownies are a memory of a pre-Christian or early-Christian ghost-belief, then it could be that there was a belief that a dead soul needed a set of clothing to pass into the next world. As time passed, the reason why the spirit departed might have been lost of forgotten, and only the story remained. This is of course conjecture and does not fit all stories. The Cauld Lad of Hilton is an example of a brownie who is clearly a ghost and who wanted to be laid. He was allegedly the spirit of a stableboy killed by one of the Lords of Hilton in anger, and appeared as a naked boy, doing brownie-work around the house. His common night-song was:

‘Wae’s me! Wae’s me!
The acorn is not yet
Fallen from the tree,
That’s to grow to the wood,
That’s to make the cradle,
That’s to rock the bairn,
That’s to grow to a man,
That’s to lay me.’

Apparently, though, the servants took pity on him and circumvented his fate by laying out a green hood and mantle. Interestingly, the colour green is specified, and being a fairy colour, it has to be wondered if the Cauld Lad was laid not to Heaven but to Fairyland. His cry on finding the coat was:

‘Here’s the cloak, and here’s the hood!
The Cauld Lad of Hilton will do no more good!’

Similarly, the Brownie of Jedburgh complained, ‘Wae’s me for a green sark (shirt)!’ and he was given it, and so freed, by a kind-hearted laird. Again, the fairy colour green occurs, and in this instance it was thought by the servants that the brownie had gone to Fairyland. Given that Fairyland and the lands of the dead are inter-blurred at best in Celtic folklore, old memories of pre-Christian, pre-Anglo-Saxon tradition may well been nipping at the corners of these stories. Other brownie-rhymes are not so clearly grateful: Quoth, the Brownie of Glendevon:

‘Gie brounie coat, gie brounie sark,
Ye’ll get nae mair o’ brounie’s wark.’

One Lincolnshire brownie happily accepted a gift of clothing every year, and only when the farmer gave a poor quality hempen shirt did the fairy take offence:

‘Harden, harden, harden hemp!
I will neither grind nor stamp!
Had you given me linen gear,
I would have served you many a year!’

Brownies often recite little bits of doggerel on being offended. It seems to be their own way of speaking: On being given clothing, one Scottish Brownie comments:

‘Sin’ ye’ve gien me a harden ramp,
Nae mair of your corn I will tramp.’

…and K.M. Briggs points out that ‘harden ramp’ is a hard sort of linen, making it possible that this brownie was also offended by the quality of the gift. Reginald Scot probably gave us the most well known Brownie rhyme:

‘Since thou layest me, hempen, hempen,
Here I’ll no longer tread nor stampen,’

dame Abonde (Medieval) Referred to in the Roman de la Rose written in the end of the thirteenth century. It appears that dame Abonde was another incarnation of the mysterious female divinity that rode at the head of the Wild Hunt in many parts of continental Europe. The poet-author of Roman de la Rose asserts that some believe that the thirdborn were fated to visit in spirit form the homes of neighbours three times a week, led by dame Abonde. If the body of such a person was rolled over while the spirit was vacant then the spirit would be unable to return and the person would die.
See also Abundia, Holda and Wild Hunt

Dobe (Worcestershire) Appears to be a Worcestershire variation on Dobie. Likely to have been pronounced as Dobie. However, the author adds a note ‘Cf. Dobie’, and is clearly familiar with the spelling. Thus it may be that this is a rare instance of Dob being used to denote an elf or goblin without the –ie or –y suffix.

“Dobe's Barn, situated in Dobe's Lane, Chaddesley Corbett, has
always had an evil reputation as haunted, many people objecting
to pass it after dark.”

50k

2009-11-14T18:47:00.001-08:00

I just tipped the 50,000 words mark on the novel I've been working on this year (working title: I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marbled Halls). This is not, I should hasten to add, an amazing and stupendous NaNo performance. I started the novel sometime around February this year.

But, 50,000 is half-way to a real and complete novel. This will be the first novel I've completed since about five years ago, so I feel happy. Between 1998 and about 2005 I wrote two stand alone novels and a trilogy (all of it unpublishable hackery). I then switched focus to short stories because deep down I could see that my writing wasn't very good and much much much practice was needed.

I clearly won't be finished this new novel by the end of the year, but I never thought I would. Two years is about right for a novel. I think... who was it who said this? I'm pretty sure I've heard it attributed to Salman Rushdie: "No good novel has ever been written in under two years"... and to be honest, I think that this little gem of writerly cold, harsh advice is a good general rule. There are always going to be exceptions, but I suspect they apply to better writers than me...

Episode Twelve - Imagination & Ideas

2009-11-13T23:01:00.000-08:00

After too long away, at long last an episode of Work of Fiction. I can at least say that I never did promise to be very regularly timed with these things... this episode addresses (in a rambling, creative, disorganized and unscripted way) a few issues to do with creativity and ideas.

Episode Twelve - Imagination & Ideas
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Episode Eleven - Confidence & Determination

2009-11-13T23:00:00.000-08:00

I wasn't really intending to move too far off the beaten track of writing craft and technique in this podcast, but recently have been feeling that a show dedicated to... well... dedication was in order.

Episode Eleven - Confidence & Determination
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Episode Ten - On Tolkien

2009-11-13T22:57:00.000-08:00

So, I finally podcasted the article on J.R.R. Tolkien that I was going to record about a month ago. I have had some computer issues, which is something of an excuse perhaps, but have also just been very busy. I suppose, also an excuse.

Anyway, this is the MP3 recorded version of the text article I posted below.

Episode Ten - On Tolkien
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Episode Nine - 'Wonderful Holes'

2009-11-13T22:55:00.000-08:00

I have a fear that the few individuals (of clearly excellent taste... ahem) who are stopping by here will eventually decide that this podcast is a waning effort. It's not, really... more of an intermittent effort. I'm keen to keep it going... but... well... intermittent. Yes. That'd be the word to keep in mind.

In this episode I discuss 'wonderful holes', which sounds vaguely... well... like something celebratory to do with orifaces. In fact, I'm referring to those parts of a story that the reader fills in for you without ever knowing it. Writing and reading are collaborative, but sometimes we writer's forget this...

Episode Nine - 'Wonderful Holes'
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Episode Eight - Characterization

2009-11-13T22:51:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last episode went up here, but I did warn you that it could be intermittent... Anyway, this show is about characterization and how to approach making your characters think, act and speak in ways which distinguish them from one-another.

Episode Eight - Characterization
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Episode Seven - The Old Oxford Charm

2009-02-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

Just a very short little story this week. This story, which is more or less about a young woman and a troll and the value of a good education was originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM), 2006. Hope you like it.

Episode Seven - The Old Oxford Charm
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Episode Six - Pacing

2009-01-29T14:24:00.000-08:00

Pacing is a skill that many aspirant writers either ignore or aren't even aware that they need to develop. This episode examines pacing, but also 'holding the reader's attention', which is sort of the same thing and sort of not...

Episode Six - Pacing
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In other news, the SFF writerly blogosphere is afire with the news that Realms of Fantasy has announced that it's last issue will be in April. I never did manage to get a story in RoF, but I did have a few encouraging and personal editorial notes on rejection slips. Like many, I'll be sorry to see them go.

Episode Five - Plot and Story

2009-01-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

Another Thursday rolling around and another episode up and online. Incidentally, there is a fascinating comments thread over at a literary agents blog that I read sometimes. The question was asked: well, what sort of things, as a reader (mainly of SFF) do you like or not like? Some of the answers are surprising, although I suspect there is some bias involved, along the lines of 'well, what I want to see in print is my novel, but as I can't say that, I'll say that I want to see stuff like my novel'. Which is also true, in the sense that people write what they enjoy anyway.

Episode Five - Plot and Story
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Show Notes # I recorded this a while back and have lost track of what show notes I'm supposed to have put up online. Here's an article that discusses plot strictly in terms of conflict (and another, and another and another) and here's an article that is a bit more flexible (some good general advice too). Finding an article which doesn't link plot to conflict is tricky, but Urusula le Guin point out that plot (which might be more conflict orientated) is different to story (which isn't necessarily) here and here.

Episode Four - Lapis Excillis (fiction)

2009-01-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

Well, I think that I've decided to upload content on a Thursday, Australia time, if content is ready and available. I'll upload on Friday only if I still need to do some editing on Thursday night. After all, it allows listeners one working day at the end of the week to download the file.

We're back to a fiction podcast today. This story was first published in an Australian Magazine Fables and Reflections which is unfortunately no longer with us. It appeared in 2006, and I think that it represented a bit of a turning point in my fiction. With this story I started to pay more attention to unorthodox settings and stories. The story was originally set in California, but I rewrote it with an Australian setting, and it surprised me by working better.

My only other comment (which I discuss in the podcast) is that the story bears a resemblance to The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs. I was aware of the resemblance as I was writing Lapis Excillis and actively tried to drag the story away from the (excellent) Jacobs story.

If you haven't read The Monkey's Paw then you should do so. It's an excellent story and it might even be a worthwhile exercise to look at how the same basic idea can be executed in a different way.

As a postscript, the next two episodes will be on plotting (already recorded) and pacing (yet to be recorded).

Episode Four - Lapis Excillis (fiction)
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Episode Three - The Gulf

2009-01-07T20:36:00.000-08:00

Well, it is a day early, but I have the content and a bit of spare time so I thought I'd put it out there for any and all who might be interested. This show covers something that I probably should have covered in the earlier 'The Basics' episode.

Specifically, I discuss the gulf between conception and execution. This is something that all people starting out in any creative endeavor need to deal with, and yet knowing that everyone has to deal with it doesn't make it any easier...

Episode Three - The Gulf Between Conception & Execution
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Show Notes # I discuss Ira Glass's excellent advice on YouTube about 'taste'. Also I comment on Neil Gaimen's Sandman at one point. There's probably other things in there too. Let me know if there's something I need to link to but have forgotten.

Quick Update

2009-01-05T13:11:00.000-08:00

Well I'm back after the chaos of the holiday season. Having some time off was refreshing in a way that holidays seldom are for me. I did get a bunch of work done on various writing projects, mostly short stories. Also managed to record another couple episodes.

I'm going to hold off on putting up the next episode though until Friday my time (which might be Thursday your time, given that I'm in Melbourne, Australia). I want to see if I can in fact establish a semi-regular update on Fridays, so might as well start things off properly.

Until then, feel free to send me any comments you may have. I mentioned a bunch of writing podcasts in an early episode but didn't link to to them in the show notes. These are the links in case someone, somewhere is downloading this little podcast but (bizarrely) hasn't heard of any of these...

I Should Be Writing: http://isbw.murlafferty.com/
The Kissy Bits: http://kissybits.blogspot.com/ (note: no updates for a while, but the archives are well worth listening to)
The Secrets: http://www.stormwolf.com/thesecrets/podcasts/
The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy: http://www.teemorris.com/blog/

I also find that both Dragonpage Cover-to-Cover and Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing provide all sorts of interesting writerly goodies, espeically AISFP, which is frankly just brilliant and ought to be up for some sort of Hugo in my oppinion. Would they be eligible for semi-prozine? (or the Locus award as it's sometimes called...) I'm not sure. I should ask someone.

Anyway. Catch you in a few days.

Chris

Episode Two - The Basics

2008-12-21T15:48:00.000-08:00

And then very quickly onto the next file... of course posting an audio file every two minutes won't be my standard method of operating - but right here and now while I'm all enthused at the start you might as well benefit from my... well... enthusiasm.

Episode Two covers some of the basics of writing, the sorts of things that you tend to hear about 90% of the time in reply to the question: do you have any advice for novice writers?

Episode Two - The Basics
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Episode One - The Green Man (fiction)

2008-12-21T15:43:00.000-08:00

So, moving onto the first post for Work of Fiction. This is a straight Fiction episode in which you'll find a previously published fantasy short story, The Green Man.

Episode One - The Green Man
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Episode Zero - Metacast

2008-12-21T15:15:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. This is just a quick metacast for Work of Fiction to let you know what I'm hoping to get out of this and perhaps a little of what you can expect.

Episode Zero - Metacast
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First Post

2008-12-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. This blog will serve as a placeholder for the Work of Fiction podcast, as well as for random writing and writerly posts from time to time. This first post isn't much, just a bit of text to generate some initial content during the put-everything-up-online phase of site-building...

Catch you again soon,

Chris