So it's a lot of back and forth right now. I get lots done, but it doesn't seem that way. Not until I hit that final third of the book will the words start falling into place the way they did in the first third. At least, that's what I hope.
Art. I actually like art, which is a bit of an embarrassment for someone who takes pride in being a philistine. I never know what I'm looking at, never understand why I'll stand for five minutes looking at something, while others bring on boredom and/or nausea. And I'm not anti-modern, either. It's just that the modern stuff hasn't been filtered by time yet.
Which is all my long-winded way of saying that I occasionally go to galleries on my lunch hour, while hoping that I don't lose my cred as an anti-culture right-wing dinosaur. Today's was the main campus gallery. And the show was titled "Censored."
Of course. My eyes were rolling even before I read the artist's statement--two pages of single-spaced, 8-point times roman, explaining how all these pieces had either been removed from other displays *or* were inflammatory to groups such as the Klan and woman libbers. Yes, this stalwart of progressivism used that term. He went on to explain how corrupt and anti-speech our society was, and how for thirty years he'd been fighting the good fight against the Man.
Brave, brave, artist. Was his stuff any good? Or even in the slightest bit inflammatory? All I could tell from it was that he liked breasts. Big breasts. And he thought defacing the American flag was a pungent comment.
I wonder if anyone has the heart to tell him that his art was banal, that there were no outraged libbers or reactionaries firebombing the gallery. I also wonder if he really thinks his freedom of speech is being infringed by other people refusing to propagate his speech? Does he really think he's being brave and transgressive, or has he learned that this is the only his boring art would ever be considered for display?
Hah. I've made my word count. Now I get to stop!
cal
I’ve been noticing that my most popular blog entries are writing advice related, and I’ve been blathering away here for, well, years. While watching TV of late I’ve been browsing my archives during commercials and copy/pasting any interesting nuggets into a file to collate and capture all the thoughts and writing advice into one big file.
It’s a way from being done, I have 4 years of archives yet to comb through, but while I was still doing it, I wondered how interested people would be in a collection of writing advice. I’m not exactly a best seller, but a lot of people seemed to have enjoyed my ‘Joe Blow Neopro’ series, in fact in some circles I’m better known for that than my writing! There’s already 30,000 words of mulling and thoughts and I imagine another 20-30K will get added. So, would any of you reading be interested in a book form of this?
Also, what topics what you expect to find in it?
Originally published at Tobias Buckell Online. You can comment here or there.
ABC is going to remake "Life on Mars"? On what planet does that sound like a good idea?
(Although the idea of Colm Meaney playing Gene Hunt is intriguing.)
They've never made crepes before, but that didn't stop them. They had a broadband connection, and they had Wikipedia.
Now they've got crepes.
- Mood:
impressed
1.) I know it's possible to hook a laptop into a DVD player and display the screen on the TV, as I've seen it done. What equipment would I need to do this with a Mac?
2.) What superfabulous wonderful thing should I wear to Club Vivid? Where should I shop for superfabulous wonderful things? What have you always wanted to see me in? Dress me up!
3.) So, I'm very confused about comparing ratios. That is, a ratio is already a comparison, and I never know which element you should be comparing to which when the point of the comparison is the difference between the differences. If that makes sense.
So, say that you've got a lime and an orange. And the lime has a volume of X cubic centimeters, and a surface area of Y square centimeters. And the orange has a volume of 2X cc-- it contains twice as much juice and pulp as a single lime-- but it doesn't produce twice as much zest; it has a surface area of less than 2 Y square centimeters.
The lime clearly has more surface in relation to its volume than the orange does.
So which one do I say has the larger surface-to-volume ratio-- the one with more surface, relatively speaking, or the one with more volume? It seems arbitrary to pick one or the other as the thing compared, when it's the relation between the two that's of interest.
I'm aware that you're supposed to consider them as fractions and compare them that way, but trying to do that just confuses me, because (1) the units for area and volume are different; (2) I don't know which one goes on the top and which one on the bottom-- logically, the surface-to-volume and volume-to-surface ratios ought to be the same thing, but fractions don't work that way; and (3) a ratio is two things and a fraction is one thing and they can't be the same thing because that would just be freaky and wrong.
Can anyone talk me through this so it makes sense?
3a.) Also, anyone have the link to that story that was going around a week or two ago about how concrete examples make it harder for children to learn mathematical concepts? Because I know I used to be able to do problems like this in high school, as long as it was just ratios of numbers to numbers, but I don't remember the steps I used, and trying to reason it out from citrus fruit is just making my head spin.
- Mood:
confused
For those who aren't big fans of the bellydance posts, fear not, I shall continue to use bellydance-themed icons for them.
Today was one of those starts from scratch.
THE PLAN:
4 minutes warmup walking
5 repetitions of 1 minute running/3 minutes walking
4 minutes cooldown walking
WHAT HAPPENED:
Succeeded, though I mucked around with the timing to get more downhills. Most of it resulted in shorter intervals, though, so I think I came out ahead. It's getting warmer, too. Wishing now I had stayed more into the habit while the weather was still cool, so I'd be more used to it by now. Ah well.
PODCASTS:
Stack Overflow (may unsubscribe; starting to think Joel Spolsky is a bit of a blowhard)
[poll closed]
ETA: I didn't put an option for "I'd rather read it here, but I will friend a new journal" because I'm trying to determine how many people I'll lose if I move the talk elsewhere.
Also, a perk of creating a new journal for it is that I'll be able to do more bellydance networking with a journal that's specifically bellydance-oriented than with this hybrid journal. But it may be premature to be thinking about that since I'm just a student and not a performer.
-------------------
Why did the chicken cross the road?BARACK OBAMA:
The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a CHANGE! The chicken wanted CHANGE!
JOHN MCCAIN:
My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON:
When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure -- right from Day One! -- that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn't about me.......
DR. PHIL:
The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on 'THIS' side of the road before it goes after the problem on the 'OTHER SIDE' of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he's acting by not taking on his CURRENT' problems before adding 'NEW' problems.
OPRAH:
Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.
GEORGE W. BUSH:
We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.
COLIN POWELL:
Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road...
ANDERSON COOPER - CNN:
We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
JOHN KERRY:
Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
NANCY GRACE:
That chicken crossed the road because he's GUILTY! You can see it inhis eyes and the way he walks.
PAT BUCHANAN:
To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.
MARTHA STEWART:
No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS:
Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY:
To die in the rain. Alone.
JERRY FALWELL:
Because the chicken was gay! Can't you people see the plain truth?' That's why they call it the 'other side.' Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal
media white washes with seemingly harmless phrases like 'the other side. That chicken should not be crossing the road. It's as plain and as simple as that.
GRANDPA:
In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.
BARBARA WALTERS:
Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its life long dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE:
It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
AL SHARPTON:
Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.
JOHN LENNON:
Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.
BILL GATES:
I have just released eChicken2007, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your check book. Internet Explorer is an integral part of the Chicken. This new platform is much more stable and will never cra...#@&am p;&^(C% ........ reboot.
ALBERT EINSTEIN:
Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
BILL CLINTON:
I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What is your definition of chicken?
AL GORE:
I invented the chicken!
COLONEL SANDERS:
Did I miss one?
DICK CHENEY:
Where's my gun?
- Location:In front of the big speakers
- Mood:Spacious
- Music:Scree scree, etc
and in the department of things-that-are-shatteringly-trivial-by-c
Another bad climbing night yesterday. I managed two 5.7s I'd done before (One of them is overhung and I spend the whole damned time dogging on the rope, but I get there.), but my left big toe has been giving me trouble, and the damned thing started to hurt so badly after two routes that I bailed on the third one about ten feet up. Also, the left shoulder is not giving me the love, and my ankle is a little sore, I think from favoring the toe.
Blah. I really want to go for a run this morning, as it's still cool and pretty out there. But the smart thing is to stay home and give my foot and ankle a break. Blah!
I think I need to step up project less-of-me, because it would not hurt my joints to get an extra forty or sixty pounds off them before I expect them to manage this stuff I'm throwing at them. There's some sort of delicate balance between exercise, joint pain, serotonin reuptake, caloric intake, and how much owie I can reasonably expect my body to absorb with in the process of trying to keep it healthy that I need to strike here.
Hmm. I wonder how stupid it really would be, to go for a run. Screw it, we'll give it a try, and if it hurts too much, we'll stop.
- Mood:
frustrated - Music:NPR - Morning Edition
Books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them.
... and I will leave you with that thought while I go figure out what happens next in my short story. I wish you all a happy writing day filled with lots of adventures and compelling characters!
Character sketches Mondays
Prophesy is a funny thing. So when Prince Lawrence was visited by the local seer on his thirteenth birthday, he was dismayed to find out he is not the Chosen One, or a Hero, or the Savior. He was destined to be a good and fair king during the time of peace his mother, Queen Ophelia, orchestrated. His biggest problems would be taxes and trade. It would be a golden age of his kingdom.
And utterly, completely boring.
So he runs away. Leaves his kingdom, becomes a traveling bard. Attaches himself to adventuring types. Encourages the husbandry of monsters. The country begins to slide into chaos, the queen is assassinated, and no one knows where this selfish prince is.
The News From Poughkeepsie is a daily blog post featuring an idea for you to take and do with what you will. Read more about it here. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can take this idea, change it, make something new, and even make money off of it. All I ask is if you create something - anything! - that this post inspired you to make, please link back here.</p>
Originally published at The Murverse. You can comment here or there.
Fennel, Orange and Arugula Salad
( recipe behind the cut )
Very tasty. And it helps that we're using tangelo/tangerines, upon which I am completely hooked.
No picture could do its tastiness justice, so I won't try. There is a variant at the Colavita site, which contains a poor picture.
The place: a dance studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The protagonist: a tall, nervous brunette in full-on tribal goth bellydance gear.
The protagonist volunteers to dance first. She hands the CD to the instructor, mentally rehearses the dance, then gives a short intro speech on the goddess Nemesis.
Cue music. Our protagonist finds she's a little shaky out of nerves, but she makes it through the opening music just fine. The first stanza goes well. The second goes well, although the swooping hand movements are a bit shaky. She completely forgets what the hell to do at the third stanza and waves her arms around as she fishes for what the fourth stanza is all about. At the last second, she remembers and dives into the move, and upon finishing it she promptly does the second half of the chorus first by mistake, which means she has to do the first half second, which isn't the world's best lead-in to the musical interlude, but tough shit.
The musical interlude, thankfully, is straightforward, although our protagonist's legs have gone shaky, so her slow descent to the floor while doing snake arms isn't as slow as it ought to be.
But she regroups, and gets the entire second verse right, then does the final chorus and fade-out in the right order.
Her fellow students profess amazement when she says she forgot half the dance and had to fake it. They are either genuinely amazed, or very good liars. At this point, she doesn't care.
It takes her five minutes to remember what the hell she was supposed to do for the third stanza, then kicks herself, because it had really cool arms and she wishes she could have shown them to the class.
She goes home, crumbles some Reese's minis into dutch chocolate gelatto, and is grateful she doesn't need to dance in front of anyone again for a long time.
Winning entries are here: my poem "When They Woke," along with a cool and melancholy flash and a neat Pantoum.
Mother's Day Weekend was pretty fantastic!
Saturday morning we rose and got brunch at the Blackberry Bistro. (A Mother's Day brunch for Heather... but a day early so we'd actually, you know, get seated in less than an hour.) We sat outside, sipped blackberry bellinis, ate good food (I had challah french toast with carmelized bananas...), and enjoyed the lovely weather. The Bistro is still pretty good, though it's gone downhill in the last few years -- I think there was a change in management or something. The food used to be perfect, and now there's always something wrong (I had a pretty severely underdone piece of bacon, this time, but it's always something), and there's a vague air of sloppiness that used to be absent -- dirty silverware, disorganized waitstaff, etc. Ah, well. Still yummy.
After that we took River for his next swimming lesson, and I got in the pool with him and Heather this time. He seemed to enjoy it a lot, though he got a little grumpy at the end (he was hungry). He likes making bubbles by blowing in the water. It's so cute!
Otherwise Saturday was pretty mellow. I did some grocery shopping and wrote an article for the Spectra Pulse magazine called "Heroines I Have Known" about inspirations for strong female characters. Otherwise it was just playing-with-baby, watching-TV, cooking-dinner type stuff.
Sunday (after I wrote a couple-thousand-word short story called "On a Blade of Grass" about parasites and slow interstellar warfare -- my first story written this year) we had a Mother's Day picnic! Loaded up our basket with sandwiches and potato salad and macaroni salad and juice and potato chips and went to the little park across the street. We spread our blanket under a tree and had a nice lazy afternoon of eating and playing with the baby and watching boats on the lake. River tasted avocado for the first time, and sat on a tree branch (with support, of course), and rolled around. We got some awesome photos we'll post later this week. Eventually River fell asleep and Heather and I lounged about reading. A very sweet life.
We're still working on Flytrap #9 layout -- Heather posted the table of contents, and it's an awesome issue. Just got the last piece of non-fiction I was waiting on, so it should be off to the printer in a couple days, and in our hands in time for Wiscon. Whee!
Also, the broadband is acting up again . . . neither up nor down, just declining to load every third or fourth page. I'd check Verizon's web page for info, but ever since they sold off their residential business to Fair Point they've been less than helpful, and Fair Point so far doesn't have anything much on their own web site except for a couple of splash pages explaining how wonderful they are, and how dedicated they are to improving our service.
(A general rule: any company that spends a lot of PR money on telling you how it's going to improve your service . . . isn't going to. Companies that actually do improve their service don't need to waste paper and electrons on telling people about it, because -- oddly enough -- the people notice it all on their own.)
- Mood:
lethargic
We'll see how I feel after the 12K (7.5 miles) on Sunday! But it will be my first Bay to Breakers. I never did it the 12 years I lived in the SF Bay Area. Shame on me.
- Music:birds chirping outside my window
"I'm at school this afternoon, grading Elements of Fiction unit tests from my upperlevel
freshmen. One of the tasks was to identify the narrative POV in Saki's famous
short-short, "The Open Window." One bright young man has pointed out a previously
unidentified POV: He calls it "third person submissive." "
cal
My two favorite non-writing activities related to writing are research and building playlists of music.
The current project -- a decidedly time-limited distraction from the novel -- requires an enormous amount of research, a lot of which is difficult. Good difficult. I know I'm getting close to where I need to be because of the dreams I had last night. Saturation dreams, the kind I have when my brain is putting together all the pieces and making sense of a bunch of stuff. It's not totally different from learning a new game (especially a mmporg). It feels strangely like swimming. At the moment I can't touch bottom, but I know it's there now.
The even more fun part for this story was putting together the playlist. I habitually do this for short stories. I suspect it's actually more important for short-form stuff than it is for longer works because short stories live or die by their hold on mood and music is an extremely effective way for me to get into the feel of the time and place. The times and places of this story are extremely particular.
Sometimes my playlists are heavy on music with lyrics. This playlist is largely instrumental, or with chanting. I even fit in a couple of Wimme's solo yoik pieces.
I'm being coy about the story itself because it's for the Haunted Legends anthology and... well, I feel like being coy about what I'm doing. If ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
nihilistic_kid or ellen_datlow want to know what I'm working on before I send it, I'll be glad to tell them. I'm guessing not, though.
Also, I'm at that phase of story ideation here I get superstitious about saying what I intend to do, lest I pin down things that should be mobile.
- Music:Dead Voices On Air - Tounge Like Scree
Page Summary
- bogwitch64 : Second Draft Update [+0]
- capomes : modern art [+0]
- tobias_buckell : A pamphlet on writing? [+0]
- jenwrites : WTF?!? [+11]
- malkingrey : The Twins Got Bored. [+8]
- ellen_fremedon : Three questions make a post [+31]
- jenwrites : No separate journal for now [+3]
- sfeley : Exercise Log 5/13 [+0]
- jenwrites : Should I make a separate journal for my bellydance posts? [+10]
- e_underwood : Why did the chicken cross the road? [+0]
- hirez : Scree scree blop scree [+11]
- matociquala : i am the eggplant. i am the LOLRUS. Koo koo katchew. [+20]
- e_underwood : Thought of the Day [+1]
- sailormur : The News From Poughkeepsie - Day 21 [+0]
- jeffsoesbe : a most marvelous salad [+1]
- pxcampbell : Teaching [+11]
- jenwrites : Anatomy of a dance [+20]
- samhenderson : Squeeeee!! [+7]
- tim_pratt : In the Grass [+1]
- malkingrey : (no subject) [+2]
- samhenderson : Can't Buy Me Faded Love [+4]
- jeffsoesbe : running against the wind [+3]
- lindakays : Lessening the Cell Phone Annoyance Factor [+1]
- capomes : A new POV [+2]
- voidmonster : Starting a new story. [+2]