Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Back in white (almost) Bid on a computer Sunday. No luck. Bid again yesterday. No luck. An hour later, the seller e-mailed me to say they’d take it (they resell a lot of laptops so I guess they saw the opportunity to move an extra one). $440. More than I’d hoped, but within budget. So, yay! Regrettably, the sale goes through PayPal, so it won’t ship until the money goes through, which will probably take a couple more days. But it’s on the way!!!! Though I admit that being forced to operate completely differently than usual is probably good for jarring me out of my routine.
May 16, 2009 Fiction first?
Well, the weeks writing started sluggishly as I adapted to my loaner iMac and began chipping away at the mass of Enemy Within. Then, at the end of the week it picked up. I started working on short stories and found the flash fiction Heads Up! is in really good shape and Kernel of Truth is coming along well. What’s relevant to this post is that I also felt more energized about the work; after hours of background reading and nonfiction it was wonderfully refreshing. So despite the demands it makes on my time, keeping up my fiction production is definitely a must. My prioritizing is vindicated!
May 14, 2009 Good advice
If cooking with ginger root, chop it finely and distribute it throughout whatever dish you’re using it for. Trust me, you do not want to bite into a solid piece. I like ginger, but not at that concentration.
May 12, 2009 Come to think of it, that might make a difference
As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I’ve found myself getting more stressed out the past few months than usual. This week it occurred to me that there’s actually a reason. During the first few years of this century, I worked predominantly on nonfiction and squeezed fiction in when I could. When I realized that nonfiction wasn’t generating much in the way of extra income (the fact two steady sources of sales slipped away within a few months of each other didn’t help), I switched to writing fiction full-time. Now I’m working on nonfiction again, but I’m absolutely determined not to shove fiction back into a subordinate role. Which means to get The Enemy Within and the occasional article done, I have to put in much more time than I was prior to last year (when you may remember I had a ton of paying projects fall into my lap). More time writing=less time for me. Suddenly, it all makes sense! Unfortunately, since I do like the extra money and I’m not going to cut back on fiction, there’s not much I can do about it. But as they say, knowing is half the battle.
May 11, 2009 “A fact so dread, he faintly said, extinguishes all hope.” (Title courtesy of Lewis Carroll)
My laptop’s new hard drive came in the mail and my friend Mike Boretsky began the installation Saturday night. And in so doing, discovered it wasn’t a hard drive problem, it was a logic board problem. As in, the logic board has ceased to live. It has joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-board. So he’s checking out some other repair-people he knows for a possible replacement, and if that doesn’t fly, I’ll be looking for a replacement laptop—not much more expensive than a replacement board—on eBay. If we can reactivate my laptop, everything on the old drive should be salvageable; plus, since it’s four years old, having a new drive is a good thing. Still it’s a good thing my annual car checkup didn’t turn up any expensive problems, huh? Fortunately, another good friend John Leake, loaned me one of his desktops (he collects old macs) so I have something to write on and check e-mail from home until a replacement laptop/logic board is found and installed, which will take at least two weeks. Not that I couldn’t devote my time to research, but I’m much happier being back at my keyboard. But man, it’s hard to adjust to using a mouse after several years on touchpad.
May 08, 2009 Odds and Ends
Original Synergy came back again. And McFarland is fine with giving me a year to finish The Enemy Within. Which is good: I honestly don’t think I’ll need that much, but the first two books have taught me to prepare for surprises (you know, like a hard drive crashing).
May 08, 2009 Things about research
•It’s a good thing to do. I’d read some years back that the US was prepared to launch its own satellite before Sputnik, but Eisenhower held off so that the Soviet launch would commit the USSR to the idea outer space above foreign countries was open to fly through; unfortunately, the public was too panicked by the Soviet success to realize this. Red Moon Rising blows that idea out of the water. Nobody in the American government realized the Soviets had the know-how to accomplish the launch (though Werner Von Braun said he knew it wasn’t impossible), and what delayed our satellite was interservice rivalry: The Army’s superior rocket was passed over in favor of an untested Navy vehicle (which had the backing of several officials connected to the contractors who’d be building it). I’m not sure how this history will change in Brain From Outer Space, but it’s good to know the true facts I’m constructing my alternate timeline from.
•Nobody likes an info dump. The more I read, the more I want to work every little detail into my story. But there’s no way I can fit them in, and even if I did, most readers aren’t going to know enough to go “Oh, what a plausible alternate timeline for Sen. Symington of Missouri.” All I need to do is bring in enough material (above what’s needed for the plot) to make the setting sound believable and suggest that the world exists beyond the confines of the story.
May 06, 2009 Powerless! It must be green kryptonite!
Actually, no. But my hard drive has given up on Appleworks too, so I’m not actually able to write just now. For the moment, therefore, my priority is research, research, research, mostly for Brain From Outer Space: I read one book on Oppenheimer that gave me some very useful ideas, and one on art and design in the fifties that will help flesh out a few scenes. Now I’m on Red Moon Rising, about the Soviet space program. I also finished Rising Sun, in preparation for watching the movie, which will be covered in The Enemy Within. Crichton’s book is very much an infiltration/paranoia story, presenting Japan’s economic triumphs of the 1980s as a deliberate war being waged against America, and showing that at the time of the book (early nineties) those Sinister Orientals controlled our government, media, police and colleges (when the heroes use a college lab to investigate one piece of evidence, the Japanese have enough clout to shut it down overnight).
Thursday, April 30, 2009 Some days you get the bear
And some days, even though they weren’t really bad, it feels like the bear got you. Thursdays are often like that: I feel the deadline pressure to get as much in as possible before we put out the paper Friday, but there isn’t the release of being done with the week. And I’m off tomorrow (Mensa and TYG in South Carolina–yay!) and have a looong daytime meeting to attend Monday, so I had to do a little extra work to hit the ground running next week. So no terribly insightful posts about writing or reading just now. And due to my hard drive on my iBook dying, my Internet browsers are corrupted and I can’t post from home (new drive is on the way, though). But what the heck, this Thursday is the end of the week for me. So huzzah!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 Killer in the Rain
Recently I noticed that I had a large omnibus of Raymond Chandler novels on my shelf that included three I hadn’t read. Rather than start in write away, I figured I’d work my way through Chandler’s entire body of hardboiled detective fiction (he’s one of the genre creators) starting with the short story collection Killer in the Rain. The book reminded me of what I like about Chandler. His language is wonderful (”She was the kind of woman could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” and “He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel’s food cake” are two of my favorites) and writing before hardboiled fiction became a genre, his work feels much more real than later authors who followed in his wake. However, reading the collection over a few days, I couldn’t help being annoyed by the repetitive tricks Chandler used over and over: In every story, for example, the PI (John Carmady or John Dalmas—Marlowe came later) gets knocked cold from behind; in a couple of stories, he got drugged unconscius as well. I don’t remember Chandler being that repetitious in novels of the same length as the collection. I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t reread more than one book by a given author a month, or their particular stylistic touches or plot twists start leaping out at me. Ruth Plumly Thompson’s Oz books (she was L. Frank Baum’s official replacement on the series) are pleasant if read one at a time (though not match for Baum’s), but when I reread them all in a few days for The Wizard of Oz Catalog, her fondness for having characters stumble across some random magical item they can use to save the day got very, very annoying. Even Ramsey Campbell, perhaps my favorite horror writer, had that effect when I last read a story collection: The persistent hint-but-don’t-show presentation of the supernatural menace works very well in each individual story but felt tedious by the time I’d finished. The funny thing is, I know I didn’t use to have this problem. I’ve read lots of anthologies, and lots of single author anthologies and it’s only the past few years that I’ve been distracted this way. Is it that my writer’s eye is becoming more alert to technique? Or that my reader’s eye has built up lots of experience? Either way, I think when I next read a collection I’ll try spreading it out over a couple of weeks and see if that keeps things fresh.
