Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: let’s not and say we did

I stopped by a bookstore on my way home tonight to look for The Einstein Syndrome by Thomas Sowell. I’d been doing research about another childhood psychological problem with which I’d callously afflicted one of my novel’s main characters when I surfed into Sowell’s book. I’d read one of his books before - The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy - so I was intrigued to see him writing on such an unrelated topic. Like the other book I bought, Gifts Differing, it was something I would have borrowed if the Boston Public Library hadn’t managed to “lose” all its circulating copies of both books. I could have bought a whole shelf at Buck-a-Book for what those two books cost, but they’re not the sort of book that gets remaindered.

I had to work to get the book, too. I found it listed in the kiosk computer catalog as being in stock in the bookstore, but there was no shelf that fit the location given (Psychology - Family - Child Psychology). I asked one of the staff - let’s call her Retail Girl - and she went back to the staff kiosk and asked another of the staff (Retail Guy). I followed a little behind, but I was just in time to hear Retail Guy tell Retail Girl that the section was upstairs. She, however, wanted to look it up for me in her special staff kiosk computer catalog, and her computer said it wasn’t in stock.

When it comes to a choice between what I retrieved from a computer and what some random Retail Girl retrieved from a computer, I trust myself. It may sound snobbish, but considering that I was writing Basic before Retail Girl was writing English and that I had noticed the not-yet-published paperback version of the book listed under an entirely different section (Family and Education - Child Psychology), I decided to give Retail Guy’s directions a shot. So I went away in apparent despair, but turned at the escalator and checked out the second floor. There was indeed a Family - Child Psychology section there, and fortunately I knew to look around the autism books. Presto! So I got to blow $25 on the book despite the best efforts of Retail Girl to help me.

But I digress. Einstein syndrome refers to smart children who start talking significantly later than other toddlers, to the point where some can even read before they can talk. Sometimes they’re misdiagnosed with autism or attention deficit disorder. (It sounds to me like it’s related to Asperger’s Syndrome.) Sowell had a son with the Einstein syndrome; he wrote an earlier book about his son and others like him (Late-Talking Children) which was criticized for being anecdotal. This work is his scientific evidence.

I love comparative genetics and weird cognitive science; if I could only work more of that into the novel I wouldn’t be 5,000 words behind.

Word count: 30,000 (three-fifths done)

Last night when I was hard up for subplots, Dr. Deb suggested the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: vanity, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, avarice, and sloth. I got a subplot immediately out of envy, or possibly jealousy. I’ve already used gluttony for the main plot. I don’t really know what people mean by pride, and when you call it vanity instead it seems more sinful, but less deadly.

The sin that afflicts my characters most seriously is the author’s sloth. The poor things don’t even have hair colors yet. It’s very unwise to get behind, and here I am, 2,000 words behind going on 4,000 in about ten minutes. Yet I’m suffering a severe attack of laziness and chronic sleepiness.

I vote for procrastination as the eighth deadly sin. It’s the sloth that keeps on giving…

Lori and Seema led me to some cool links. Check out i used to believe - it has a lovely clean site design, on top of the inspired theme. I added my own weird childhood belief to the language - speaking section: until a few years ago, I believed this was a doggy dog world, rather than a dog-eat-dog world.

Seema found the cool Advertising Slogan Generator; here are some results for various words:

• We Do Jemima Right.
• Because Jemima Can’t Drive.
• Wouldn’t You Rather Be Jemima?
• Say It With Jemima.
• Just Like Jemima Used To Make.
• Mama Mia, That’sa One Spicy Jemima!
• Watch Out, There’s a Jemima About.

• Don’t You Just Love Being In Fanfic?
• Reach for the Fanfic.
• Good To The Last Fanfic.
• We’re Serious About Fanfic.
• You Deserve A Fanfic Today.
• We Do Fanfic Right.
• Nothing Sucks Like A Fanfic.

• Pure Muse.
• Come Fly The Friendly Muse.
• Muse - The Freshmaker!
• A Muse Works Wonders.
• If You Want To Get Ahead, Get A Muse.
• It’s That Muse Feeling.
• This Is Not Your Father’s Muse.
• Ding-Dong! Muse Calling!

Must. Stop. Now.

Word count: 27,000

I was going to go watch the Leonids then write some more, but it turns out that the Boston Leonid chart recommends 5 a.m. over 11:30 p.m. I don’t trust myself to get up that early, no matter how impressive they’re supposed to be. And what’s more important - catching up 3,000 words or watching space dust?

Writing sf gives me all sorts of science guilt, but the worst by far is comet and meteor guilt. I had a bad comet experience in my youth where an astronomical event advertised as once-in-a-lifetime was a total let-down. I just can’t get excited about the sky falling anymore. Besides, the city lights here are a killer.

Just one peek, then back to the novel…

Word count: 25,012 (halfway!)

I’m halfway done, but I’m still behind. I’ve decided to resurrect one of my characters because I’ll need him later to blow something up, so I have to go back and rewrite his death scene, substituting a new corpse. I also redesigned the starship, but most of the rewriting for that change is already done.

I’m beginning to contemplate the ending. Blowing things up is always a good bet, and there’s always the cheap flash-forward-forty-years ending. I don’t have a concrete idea yet; there’s still no outline and my novel is beginning to dissociate. I hope I’ll have it all reined in by the two-thirds mark on Wednesday.

Back to catching up…

Word count: 22,912

Sometimes, everything comes together at the end in a way you never saw coming, even though you saw the hints and you knew that they were hints. I just saw “The Sixth Sense” tonight, and I was blown away. I’m sure everyone else on the planet has seen it already; besides, I don’t know what to say about books or movies that are good.

The Greeks thought that the highest art was the drama, acted live on a stage. In principle I believe that, especially when I see M. Night Shyamalan movies. In practice, however, the novel is still my favorite art form. I go through periods when I think I’ve read all the good writers and there’s nothing left out there. Some books cannot be topped - no one is ever going to beat The Lord of the Rings at its own game. Tolkien was the sort of mad medieval throwback Oxford don genius who should have died in the Great War with the rest of his generation, but didn’t. Whether or not you like JRR, you have to admit that no one is going to create another Middle Earth with six or seven original languages and write poetry in them. Tolkien was a human vacuum fluctuation out of which an entire universe was born.

Last time I read Greg Egan, I enjoyed him despite the science and math overdose. This time I was blown away - there are still good writers out there, waiting to be read. Distress is about tabloids, politics, anarchists, intimacy, gender, isolationism, solipsism, autism, disease, bioengineering, physics, metaphysics, ethics, the eye of the observer, and the Australian psyche. The topics glide in and out of one another in the eyes of a jaded Aussie journalist whose videocamera is in his navel.

Like The Sixth Sense, Distress fooled me for most of the book into thinking it was just your average sci-fi adventure. There were themes, and I saw them and knew that they were themes. I was even sorry that one of them wasn’t more central, and then I reached the end and found out that it was more central than I could ever have imagined.

I admire Ayn Rand for writing novels in which she brought her philosophy to life, and Distress is a book that gives scientific materialism a name and a habitation. I’m surprised that it wasn’t even nominated for a Hugo or Nebula (as far as I can tell). The theme of materialism (that is, that there is nothing but matter in man and in the universe - no gods, no souls, no external meaning) is such a common one in science fiction that you would think that a novel which did for materialism what Rand did for objectivism would become the cult classic that Atlas Shrugged is.

Instead, it seems to have turned some people off, including the person who made this list of math-fiction. I guess materialism is all well and good until someone illustrates it a little too vividly.

Word count: 22,439

I was going to answer the religion Friday Five, but Chimera 0.6 crashed again in the middle of my MT entry. So I’m back to Chimera 0.5, which, although lacking 0.1, is much more stable. I could check the bug tracking over at mozilla.org to see whether the issue has been fixed in the code, then build from source myself, but I get enough gcc at work, thanks. I bought a mac so I could have a low-maintenance computer at home to offset all those high-maintenance Windows and Solaris boxes at work. My job has changed since I got my Powerbook G3 way back when, but the high-maintenance Windows and Solaris boxes remain the same. Honestly, how many times can one Sun Fire need to be fscked? Next thing you know, I’ll be buying it jewelry.

I don’t think I’m going to make my NaNoWriMo goal tonight because I have an article due tomorrow. I haven’t started that either, though I do know what I’m going to say. I’ll have to NaNo more over the weekend to compensate. No rest for the bloggy, I tell you.

Word count: 21,024

I have a thousand words to go before I sleep, but for my thousand-word break, I thought I’d reflect a bit on Seema’s lovely interview with Kelly Chambliss. The title says it all: Hurting the Ones We Love. Kelly is highly qualified in two genres I don’t care for at all: smut and angst. That’s not to say I haven’t read her fic and appreciated it, but when I like angst I like it despite its being angst, and not because of it.

When, on the other hand, I read science fiction, I like it because it’s science fiction, and not despite the technobabble. It’s an issue of genre. In the interview, Kelly talks quite a bit about the genre of smut. Smut is queen in fanfiction largely because, as Kelly mentions, there isn’t much smut outside of fanfic. It’s popular as an up and coming new genre. Fanfic makes smut easy with its short-story format - you can’t, in general, base an entire commercial novel on sex acts - and pre-fab characters. The same goes for slash.

None of the above is meant as a critique of smut or slash - I don’t have time for that because it’s getting late. I’m only concerned with them as genres, and why different people like different genres. It’s a simpler mystery than why different people like different books within the same genre - that is, it’s easier to understand someone disliking all fantasy novels than someone not caring for The Lord of the Rings.

Sometimes it comes down to personality - science fiction is the province of the geeky type (or N’s, for the Myers-Briggs fans). Fantasy is related, but doesn’t quite cover the same fanbase, as it were. Angst, on the other hand, is never fantastic. Angst is only angst if it’s on the human level of flaws. Tragic flaws are a bit too much for angst; they end too splendidly. Romance is the opposite; romance must be about the virtue of the beloved and can, if not weighed down with too much smut, be fairly idealistic.

Smut, like angst, has to be at the nitty-gritty human level. There is nothing fantastic to part A and slot B; it is realism, impure and simple. Realism never interests me as such, though I can admire the plotting skill or the lovely language. Other people feel the same way about idealism. It’s nothing personal; it’s just genre.

Word count: 19,006

You are a muse.
What legend are you? Take the Legendary Being Quiz by Paradox

No new words yet - I just got home from a Buffy marathon. All I can say is Depresso-ep! And that line should have been 33.33% of the Legion of Doom were flayed alive the last time they were in Sunnydale. Maybe that was an intentional mistake.

So, the geeking - there’s a new release of Chimera, the Cocoa Mozilla browser for MacOs X. I downloaded it this weekend, and it’s been crashing up a storm. I’m hoping it’s broken itself in now. The last version rarely crashed for me, so if this one keeps it up I’m going to have to downgrade.

For NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided on a new daily word count of 2,000 to counterbalance the upcoming holiday and my bad habit of getting behind. I may slack off tonight and just round myself up to 20,000.