Heuristic hijacking

Humanoid robots were once universal in science fiction. They looked somewhat like metal people, and had narrow human personalities with programmed obsessive-compulsive disorder that kept them focused on their assigned tasks.

They were also charming. Now, as I've mentioned before, we tend to react emotionally to beings (fictional or real) that have constrained emotional and intellectual toolsets (autistic, mentally handicapped, animal, programmed). Robots certainly meet that requirement, and were usually written with a certain pertness or "speaking truth to power" attitude. The bombastic or prideful would meet their comeuppance from the clarity of a robot. Robots weren't deliberately contrary, had no emotional needs of their own, weren't petulant, snarky, or angst-ridden, and were in general easier to deal with than messy human minds.

In real life, people are still working on that charm.  In his article Robots That Care, New Yorker medical writer Jerome Groopman describes some attempts at therapeutic robots. The article is vague and bland, partially because robots still can't do that much, and using them to interact with people who have had strokes, Alzheimer's patients, and children is mostly unsuccessful.  The article does have some interesting things to say about how a robot can be programmed to interact differently with an extrovert than with an introvert, but has little hard information on it.

Because, of course, the article is about robots who might someday successfully pretend to care, not robots that care. The designers seek to hijack our hacked-up heuristics for interpreting other minds. Since we're capable of attributing personalities to computers, cars, and cats, we clearly are predisposed to see other minds even when they aren't there. Sherry Turkle, at the end of the article, thinks this is a bad idea. She wonders why people are so eager to cut humans out of the therapeutic relationship. The benefits would have to be extraordinary, she says for it to be worthwhile.

So beware heuristic hijacking (a concept that's been around, but Google indicates that I just now thought up the term--remember that you read it here first). Our makeshift analytics will inevitably be trickable by devices with the right programming and enough processing power. It hasn't happened yet, but it will.

Life is good: we have dentists

This morning I went in to my dentist for a routine cleaning.  Every time I go in to have my gums probed and my teeth examined, I reflect on this relatively unsung hero of our happy existence.

Improperly treated, teeth can cause incredible pain, both chronic and acute.  They rot, cause damage to the jaw, and fall out.  The remaining teeth then shift, and get loose in their turn.  Once you have few teeth, food is harder to eat, your diet suffers, and your overall health declines.  Soon, you are old.
Enlightened dental hygiene combined with regular dentist visits prevent this.

This is incredibly boring, isn’t it?  "Enlightened dental hygiene".  Something you would expect from your most blowhard relative over turkey.  How quickly the miraculous becomes mundane.  Good dental care adds healthy and pain-free years to your life.

Interestingly, I can think of no fairy tale where someone wishes for a new set of teeth (I am no folklore scholar:  does anyone know of one?).  Of course, no one asks for lifelong resistance to infectious disease, escape from death in childbirth, or a smokeless chimney either.  Were these things literally unimaginable?  Most likely it’s just that a fairy tale requires some element of believability to be adequately comforting.  One can imagine a bigger house, more food, or a nicer spouse.  Decent teeth were far beyond the realm of possibility.  It wasn't even something that would occur to anyone.

But so far from being unbelievable, these things are now routine.  So, this Thanksgiving, in addition to giving thanks for all you have, give thanks for dentists.  And vaccines, public health, and smokeless domestic heat as well, while you’re at it.

The benefits of silence

I just got back from visiting my mother, who had bypass surgery a few weeks ago.  She's doing fine.

There is no internet connectivity at her retirement community, and it proved difficult to get anywhere I could get some.

On the other hand, I'm not as comprehensively mentally connected as most other people.  I often read people complaining about shortened attention spans, distraction, etc., and I certainly feel that when I have connectivity.

When I don't, however, I'm perfectly happy.  Her apartment is looks out over the roofs of the other buildings into a Midwestern oak forest.  It is utterly silent.  So, while my mother napped, I read, alternating Middlemarch and Victor David Hanson's analysis of the Peloponnesian War, A War Like No Other.  No, I didn't discern any deep connection between the two works.

Now I'm back, and catching up.

Behind the boiler

Occasionally a magazine or web site will run photographs of writers' spaces.  Now, I presume they are tidied, fluffed, and art-directed before the photograph is taken--I've never seen one with a crumb-covered plate or even a decent layer of random paper.  But even taking that into account, they tend to look kind of artistic, with interesting curios, favorite chairs, antique desks, that kind of thing.

I work behind the boiler in my basement.  Now, this is not as grim as it might be--the basement is fairly dry, the walls are painted white, we removed the asbestos.  But...once I brought home a Taunton Press book on basements.  If you've ever looked at a Taunton Press book for ideas on how to redo your kitchen, or your attic, or your orangerie, you know that they don't really give you any information useful to a normal person.  In this case, none of the basements were actually underground.  They all seemed to be part of houses built into hills, so at least one wall actually had windows that looked out on something.  It was pretty annoying, actually.

I don't have windows that look down on anything.  I work by artificial life, day and night.  I've covered the walls with geologic maps of Canyonlands and the Grand Canyon (lots of nice colors).  I have books all around me.  My desk is a butcher block door on two filing cabinets that I've had ever since my first apartment, a long time ago.  I have to put on headphones when someone is watching the TV, which is in the other part of the basement.  There are worse things.

Still, I'd like a nicer space.  I'd like the kind of space a magazine might print.  Someday, maybe.

Brands and satisficing

The slogan of the Sycamore Hill Writer's Conference is "Adequate Science Fiction", based on the principle that "good enough" is, well, good enough.

The writers who attend Syc Hill (of which I have been one) don't believe this at all, of course.  They are aiming at something far beyond "adequate", the use of a litotes (a rhetorical word for "understatement") being a signature turn of the fancy pants literary SF writer.

But humans are not maximizing creatures.  We are "satisficing" creatures:  if seeking out the best takes too long or expends too many resources, then it isn't "the best", not from a resource-conserving standard.  Good enough, found quickly, beats really good, found with difficulty and effort.

Brands (and genres too--I'll get to that at some point) are search-conserving heuristics (to use some fancy pants rhetoric of my own).  They seem to compress a lot of information into a narrowband signal, because they evoke information you already have cached.  We perceive little and process less, and the best way to get to us is to tell us something we already know, disguised as something new.  Effortless revelation follows.  They enable us to find the adequate, quickly.

So a brand (like, say, a writer you may be thinking of reading) should be consistent, so that it can quickly inform you of something you already know.  Writers who think their brand can just be "quality literature" quickly learn that that's too vague--and, frankly, too difficult to deliver on consistently.  We all think we keep our quality high at all costs, but aside from someone like Ted Chiang, we are mostly fooling ourselves.  Better "military science fiction" or "the guy with the weird aliens".  Those are attributes whose quality can vary quite a bit before you get into trouble.  They can convey something you already know.

What is my own brand?  I'm still working on that one.

Westerns and space operas

Every genre writer's dream (or at least this genre writer's dream) is to write a work that attracts readers from outside the genre, without compromising its essential genre nature.  In fact, to bring them in, to show them what the point of the genre really is, and get them to appreciate it.

I've not read enough Westerns to know whether McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a representative Western, but it sure is a great novel.  It's pretty elemental:  men and women in rough, hard-to-survive country, hard because of the unsparing environment, and hard because of other human beings.  Some characters you have invested real feeling in get killed offhandedly, the way real people did, and do, die.  Victories are local and temporary, and savored all the more for that.  Defeats are large, and often final.  The characters are compelling, and often funny as hell.  They understand what many of us have forgotten:  our most important duty in this life is to entertain each other.

McMurtry does it without elaborate literary references, mythic structures ("mythic" in contemporary fiction means "unbelievable characters with tortured syntax"--run if you see the word used in a review), or "fine writing".

Now, McMurtry is not purely a writer of Westerns, though he is a Western writer, so it's not like he's clawing his way out of the corral.  But he's decided to play to what makes the genre appealing (particularly a stoic nobility brought out by the harshness of circumstance), commenting on it at the same time (Call, the most stoically noble of the characters, is disliked and suspected by all women, who tend to perceive too clearly what it is he had to give up to be who he is), while letting us share in the genre's inherent energy (you can see why the men respect Call, obey him, and instinctively want his approval, while understanding why someone who does not depend on his skill and authority might be less taken in--even Darth Vader eventually identifies himself to his son, and Call...well, you'll just have to read it and see what Call does with his own unacknowledged son).

Science fiction is a much bigger playground than Westerns, so it's natural that many more writers can play there and nowhere else, and have successful, productive careers.  But sometimes it's worth trying to take your ball and play somewhere else, using the skills you learned there.

That was my ambition with Brain Thief, certainly.

Genre as a community of practice

Genre writers of ambition sometimes start to wonder why the rest of the world does not take them as seriously as it should.  "Isn't my work as valid as some damn sensitive coming-of-age story?" they wonder. "Isn't a charge of Comanches or a crash landing on an ice planet or a body discovered face down in the koi pond as significant an event as an adulterous encounter during a grant-funded year abroad?"

I'd say they are, but not because all of those things exist in some kind of common literary space.  I think there really are genre boundaries, because genres are communities of practice, sets of agreed-upon techniques and tropes, and market segments aimed at audiences with certain already existing characteristics.  They exist, not in the same sense the chair I'm sitting in exists, but certainly as definitely as, say "left-liberal urbanites with a need to feel compassion" or "Red Sox fans" or "model railroad enthusiasts" exist.

There is lately a bit of buzz about this in my own field, shown, in one instance, by a book edited by my friends John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, The Secret History of Science Fiction, ably reviewed by Paul Witcover here.  Is science fiction part of a continuum of literature, or is it somehow separate?

Is "Thai food" part of the continuum of food, or is it somehow separate?  Is "big band swing music" part of the continuum of music or....etc.  You get the idea.  And I think you already know my answer.  These are communities of practice, sets of agreed-on techniques and tropes, and productions that appeal to a certain market segment.  Many of us like responding to our fellow writers, like being able to test ourselves against great writers of the past, like having some standard techniques available to us so that we can focus on experimenting in other ways, and like knowing something about who our audience is and what it cares about.  These are not pathetic weaknesses.  In genre there is strength. 

I was going to start this entry writing about Lonesome Dove, which I just finished--Western being another genre.  Some other time!

The Augustan History and The Onion

The problem with history as a source for fiction is that a lot of history is already fiction.  Or, rather, we have no idea how much of it is fiction.

Consider what we know about the Roman Emperors of the Third Century, that melancholy time of civil wars and usurpations.  Written sources are extremely rare and fragmented.  A lot of what we think we know comes from the Historia Augusta, a motley collection of tales that mixes what seem to be real documents with a lot of stuff someone might well have made up.  No one is even sure when it was written--it bills itself as a collection of six historians made during the early Fourth Century, but no one seems to believe this anymore.  The putative author of this weird work (which I've never read--but all authors on the period have to cite it) might make a good character in a historical novel.  What was he after?  Is the Augustan History something like The Onion?  Incidentally, The Onion would be a superb source on the spirit of our era, if you could pass its distortions and heightenings through some kind of reverse filter.

So would The Simpsons, for that matter.  These channels are sensitive to the zeitgeist in a way more deliberate journalism isn't.

Is the author of the Augustan History still mocking us after all these centuries.  Is one of those Emperors completely made up?  If so, which one?

Brand identity is what marketing people give you when they can't give you sales

So that's why I've always spent a lot of time "branding".  I've talked positioning, I've tweaked logos, I've reconfigured web sites, I've devised suites of collateral as multifarious as the seas.  It's a lot of work, but at least when you're done you don't have anyone asking you why sales are down.

For some reason, no one thinks rebranding has anything to do with sales.

Really, of course, it should.  But it's so indirect, it's impossible to tie together.  Unlike, say, the response rate on that last mailing or the stats on the sales pages on the web site.  Nowhere to hide there.  Marketing people will chew their own arms off to get out of that particular trap.

A few months ago my company was forced to change its name and all of its branding.  The orders came from above, and were not to be argued with.  We got an absurd logo and an eye-hurting color palette.  Our press releases had so much boastful boilerplate there was no room for content.  I had to describe the offerings of our parent organization before I could kiss my wife when I got home.

Then everyone responsible disappeared.

Now what?  The new administration indicates we can escape from our current identity.  For various reasons, going back to our original identity is not in the cards.  So I'm riding the rebranding train once again.  Wish me luck.

As an author, I have it pretty easy.  I have my name, such as it is.  I have my positioning--"amusing, snarky writer of SF with pretensions of literary quality"--and my message--"buy my book!"--all pretty straightforward.

It's my day job that does the brain damage.

Should a wonderful private moment be public?

Via Andrew Sullivan, I watched this moving video... No one can watch it without tears, I think. I certainly didn’t.

I was deeply moved. And then I thought. Not about pro- or anti-intervention positions, or the consequences and costs of sending troops abroad for extended missions. But about privacy.

I was moved by a private and personal moment. And I was moved, perhaps more than by great art.  Any artist who could stimulate emotion like this would be regarded as a genius.

This is probably one of the most significant events this girl has ever experienced. What right do I have to participate in it?

I think this girl had a right to feel this emotion completely and utterly in private. I don’t know what to do about the fact that she couldn’t, that she was compelled against her will to share it with millions of strangers, and that I participated in that violation, but I’m trying to figure it out. I think we all need to figure it out.

And I linked to it. And I encouraged you to watch it. I have participated fully in violating her privacy. Maybe she doesn't mind.  Maybe she's even proud, or will be someday. But that is all beyond the realm of her own choice.

We’ve been spared all sorts of ethical decisions simply because it was previously technically impossible to do any number of things, from examining fetuses at early stages to uploading videos of private moments. We didn’t have to take a position on texting while driving in the past, because there was no way to do it. There was no way to quickly copy and distribute music, or text, or images.  Now there is.

If the meek inherit the earth, it’s because they lack the power to do evil, not because they have decided not to do evil. Virtue implies the ability to do otherwise.  With power comes responsibility. We can’t duck the technology, and we can’t duck the need to decide what to do about its consequences. The answer may be “nothing other than moderate regulation, with an occasional hysterical overreaction to some egregious edge condition”. That is likely, in fact, to be the only possible answer.

But we have to make the choice consciously, with full knowledge of what it entails. We cannot evade it.
This particular little snippet is a useful place to start thinking. It is entirely positive. No one involved has anything to be embarrassed or ashamed about. It is really quite wonderful.  I think everyone should see it.

Should it be private? Or do we have a right to share?  Who decides, and how?  The fact that the questions are hard to answer does not mean they shouldn't be asked.

Update on 2009-11-11 01:23 by Alexander Jablokov

Mark-

All good points, and thanks for taking the time to think about it.  I'm not just ranting about our vanishing privacy in a kind of generic way--we've invented the concept only recently, and there was a time not too long ago where that girl's emotion would have been witnessed, and shared, by her entire family and village, with no idea that it would be any other way.

I don't really know why I responded the way I did.  I just felt so...intimate.  I felt like a voyeur.  And yet, even knowing what I know now, I wouldn't say I should have foregone the experience.

My main point stands, however.  What were previously limits imposed by physical reality must now be replaced with limits that are chosen.  This doesn't just apply to privacy, but to any number of other areas, from reproduction to large-scale manipulation of nature.  Who choses and how?

Always have something going for you

One secret to happiness in a writing career is anticipation.  When you get behind (and I spend most of my time behind), all you have to look forward to is a slog and a potential sale.  When you get a bit ahead, you have something coming out, you have something submitted, and your working on something else.

More productive writers have that feeling a lot of the time, but I do rarely.  Aside from the book, I have a story coming out in Asimov's, and two more out looking for a place.  Now, to really be ahead, I should have a story written for an upcoming workshop session.

We'll see.

But it's worth quite a bit of effort to get to this point, because it takes less mental energy to stay in it than it is to get to it.  The writing brain is a delicate thing, and needs some care and feeding.

This is, I think, why some other people play the lottery.  They want to always have something going for them.  There's always a chance that the numbers will come out right, and something good might happen.  All of us should try to make sure we've always got something going for us.  We deserve it.

Genre reading: Lonesome Dove

Do writers of Westerns have the same discussions about mainstream acceptance that (some) science fiction writers do?  That is, if there are any of them left--it's not exactly a jumping genre just now.

And I don't usually read it, though over the past couple of years I've learned to enjoy Western movies (with Rio Bravo a particular favorite).  But I'm reading Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, and enjoying it a great deal.  Is it because it somehow transcends its genre?  I don't know enough to say.  But readers of a genre like its particular flavor, and will consume even inferior examples to get it, while non-genre readers wanting to try the flavor need a dish that includes ingredients they're more used to getting, in terms of plot, characterization, or presentation of information.  McMurtry lets us in gently.

And it's a long book, usually something that irritates me.  But it gives me stuff I like, like this bit.  Call, a sober former Texas Ranger who is recruiting young men for a big cattle drive, has lunch with a mother whose sons he wants to hire:

"This is my varmint stew, Captain," Maude said.

"Oh," he asked politely, "what kind of varmints?"

"Whatever the dogs catch," Maude said. "Or the dogs themselves, if they don't manage to catch nothing.  I won't support a lazy dog."

"She put a possum in," one of the little girls said.  She seemed as full of mischief as her fat mother, who, fat or not, had made plenty of mischief among the men of the area before she settled on Joe.

"Now, Maggie, don't be giving away my recipes," Maude said....

Humor, disappointment, suspense, and ambition, with a mix of characters and eccentrics.  Just like what I try to achieve in my own genre.

Military strategy for the unmilitary

Someday I'll write a big, fat fantasy novel.  I say this, even though I don't particularly like reading big, fat fantasy novels.  Writers like to say that they write books they'd like to read.  I'm sure I could write a BFFN that I'd like to read--the question (and one that's come up a bit too frequently) is whether anyone else will want to read it.

But one thing I do know--BFFNs must have a lot of military activity, and at least one giant battle.  And it stands to reason that those battles will need to reflect the limitations and affordances of historical military combat.  Here is where I hope my deep reading in history will stand me in good stead.  I hope.

I'm not militarily minded and don't gravitate to explicitly military fiction.  But I do like to know how things got done.  Most history writers are either too fanatically detailed or too cursory for me.  What am I looking for?

In The Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather gives an account of military operations after large Gothic forces crossed the Danube and moved into.  He describes how the Rhodope Mountains

...are extremely difficult to cross from north-east to south-west...and movement north and south through the Haemus Mountains is channeled through just five major passes....

And bravo for Heather, there is a nice clear map without a lot of extraneous details, showing the geography and the routes of the armies between 377 and 382.

He goes on, about the Romans.

Heavily outnumbered as they were, the available forces had no prospect of defeating the Goths; so...they fortified the passes through the Haemus Mountains...Some of the passes...are quite broad, but they are all high.

Then he gives an account of how 4,400 Russians held one of these same passes, Shipka Pass, against 40,000 Turks during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.  For two months, the Romans were similarly successful, but then a force of Alans and Huns joined the Goths.  If one pass was forced, the soldiers at the others would be cut off.

Once the Goths and their allies were south of the Haemus, they could rampage at will.  The only geographic barrier beyond was the Hellespont itself.  This situation led to Valens's defeat at Adrianople.

It's this type of description of terrain and strategy that makes me feel that I understand something.  Using history as a crib, I could write some convincing strategic maneuvering, using what I know of geology, geography, and climate.  And I could make sure it was something I enjoy reading.  What about the rest of you?

Your day job is a real job

The most important fact for any of us who think of ourselves as writers or artists to remember is that the job people actually pay you for is real.  Your employers don't care that you're writing a novel, or a song, or making a movie, or really entertaining your Twitter followers.  Or, rather, they care, but not in the positive "we have a real artist working for us!" way you might hope they would.

They care because they think you're goofing off.  "Not doing the job you're getting paid to do" is goofing off, even if you're creating great art while doing it.  And are you actually creating great art?  Be serious now.

Having a job isn't some unique torment you alone suffer.  Poke your head up out of your cube and take a look around.  See all those other people?  They have other things they like to do too.  Maybe they play basketball, or take care of an aging parent, or cook, or play in a band.  Maybe they don't do much of anything, but whatever it is, coming in to work certainly interferes with it.

But they're all here, and they're all working (probably).  So you should be too.  Accept that you're one of us, the workers of the world.  I can't pretend it isn't sometimes bitter and painful.  But it's bitter and painful in a perfectly normal, human way.  You'll find you can accept it, achieve some success in your day career (promotions and raises go some way to making acceptance easier), and still get your own work done.

How fragile is technological civilization? We'll probably get a chance to find out.

Over at FuturePundit, Randall Parker spent some time a couple of weeks ago to go over all the large-scale disasters that shook the 19th century (everything from gigantic volcanic eruptions to solar storms).  His question:  what happens when one of these hits our more complex and interconnected civilization?

In a different, but conceptually related analysis, Charles Stross  asks How Habitable is the Earth, and answers "only in extremely limited places and times":  humans evolved under an extremely specific set of circumstances--circumstances that could easily change. (Amusingly, Stross fools around and uses decerebrate meat puppets as his planetary explorers, and discovers that many of his blog readers take even his jokes with grim seriousness:  clearly a cult in the making, though Stross seems unwilling to lead it).

Years ago, in his novel A Gift From Earth, Larry Niven postulated a planetary probe poorly programmed to seek "habitable areas".  On Mt. Lookatthat, a plateau rises out of an otherwise Venus-like atmosphere, and so humans are sent to settle what is really an island.

The farmers and city dwellers of the dry Southwest take the maximum rainfall ever recorded as the standard, and base their plans on it, though "plans" is an exaggerated word for what they do.

There are always Black Swans, big out-of-norm events.  But there are, more importantly, a larger number of gray swans of various darkness, mostly uncorrelated with each other. Our technological civilization seems to have grown rapidly in a period unusually empty of such events, and treats this unusually wide zone of habitability as normal.  And, aside from a catastrophic black swan (e.g., a major asteroid strike), it can now probably deal with any such event.

But what happens when there are a few gray swans in close succession?  Regular readers know I've been reading about the fall of the Roman Empire (as in this discussion of Ward-Perkins, and this one on Heather).  It's hard to really get clear, because a large number of negative events (plague, tribal reorganization, internal political chaos) came together, not one gigantic one.

We could get a large volcanic eruption and a major solar storm that knocks out communication, during a time of political instability and financial disruption.  Our civilization is not a fragile flower, but it certainly has its breaking point.  With one big disaster you have something to fight and unite against (and write disaster novels about).  Is a group (flock?  herd? --swans don't seem to have been hunted enough for a nifty collective noun to be agreed to) of gray swans a conceptuallly different situation than a black swan?

If we stay in the game long enough, we'll have a chance to find out.

More Shorpy

Shorpy continues to be one of my favorite blogs--"the 100-year-old photo blog" as it bills itself.  Here, a few recent images that struck me.  Each is linked to the larger original on the Shorpy site--to get the full effect (particularly of Winter Crossing, the railcar ferry), you should click through (new window).

A little person wearing a Coolidge ribbon (identified by readers as soprano Hansi Herman, of Rose's Royal Midgets).  What part of cigarette-smoking, fur-wearing, Coolidge-supporting, performing German midget seems politically incorrect to you?

Detroit, winter 1900.  The heart of the civilization of the great industrial age.  Steampunk has become a weirdly dominant subgenre, and this image shows why, even though no one would actually want to be standing out their amid the jagged ice floes and cutting winter wind, and even though most steampunk tends to the Victorian rather than the American Renaissance--somewhere at the other end of this stands a Stanford White palazzo, and....

This isn't Evelyn Nesbitt, despite my mention of Stanford White.  The original Gibson Girl?  Someday you'll see my mystery novel that takes place in the world of White, Saint-Gaudens, and the invention of the Adirondack style.

Or maybe you won't.  But it's fun to think about.

And, just to show that everything isn't in glorious black and white, a 4x5 Kodachrome from 1942

Are technothrillers science fiction?

On his temporary tor.com blog, Edward M. Lerner (more typically at SF and Nonsense) asks a question:  how does a technothriller differ from near-future SF, if at all.  Somewhere back there, I think, is the income/status issue I've been seeing a resurgence of lately--"why do they have more mainstream acceptance and why do they make so much more money?"--though, to be fair, Lerner never heads in that direction.

Just remember that, with a writer, "and how does that get me a bigger advance?" is the unspoken addendum to any question, kind of like "between the sheets" for Chinese fortune cookies.

My answer:  SF is about the transformation of order, technothrillers are about the reestablishment of order.  In an SF novel, a change, particularly a technological change, moves out into society as a whole, and transforms it.  In a technothriller, changes, even dramatic ones, are confined to the immediate area of the characters and the plot.  In an SF novel, if dinosaurs are recreated, their recreation and the technology behind it gets used in war, in labor, in abstruse spiritual transformations.  In a technothriller (Crichton's Jurassic Park books), they stay on their island.

The containment has several related favorable features, as far as a mainstream reader is concerned.  Reactions, mores, and cultural features are recognizable.  And, as a result, the writer isn't tempted to spend time and energy making up stuff (changing the way people pump gas, or giving them weird new bedroom furniture) just to show that we're in The Future.  And the writer can't hide behind the chrome, and has to focus on the engine--the plot.

Regaining a literary reputation is not for sissies

It would be easier not to lose it in the first place, of course.  To get a reputation back, you have to do everything.

But you have a full time job and other responsibilities.  You don’t have time to do everything.

So you pick a handful of high-priority projects and try to get them done.

The problem with working multiple projects is that you can always find something more interesting to do than the project you're currently working on.  That last 10 - 20 percent is tedious and unrewarding, and there is always some fresh young project sashaying by that just seems much more attractive.  This is as true at work (“another round of corporate approvals?”) as in your writing (“I can’t believe I need to edit that again”).

Within my hour a day, there is only time to focus on one thing.  So, which is it?  Revise that story?  Write a new story in time for the next workshop session?  Tackle the revision on that giant novel manuscript?  Or sit around and think up some great new concept that someday I might work on?

At some point, each of those needs to get done:  an SF writing career really does benefit from a mix of novels and short fiction.  You don’t want huge time gaps between published works, and keeping both pipelines filled is enormously difficult.

The real trick is to actually be working on something every day.  Dithering, fiddling, agonizing, and woolgathering are all time-consuming activities.  They can easily take up that hour a day.  They will, unless sternly fought back.

Despite my best efforts, they sometimes do.

Am I getting it done?  Not perfectly, but better than I used to.  I’ve dug through a stack of old and new written stories and revised several (discovering, to my dismay, that several of them had waited quite a while).  I’ve written several new stories (which, curses, must now be revised, and so have just migrated from one stack to another rather than leaving my office).  And I have a large draft of my next book, After the Victory, and an outline for revision.  I’ve put together a proposal for it, but haven’t quite dared start the major revision—this is a single-minded effort of quite a few months, and I wanted to get my story pipeline filled.

So, we'll see.  There are no large secrets, only many small ones, and maybe I've learned a few.

L. Sprague de Camp and the uses of history

Recently I was listening to Garrett Fagan's lectures on Great Battles of the Ancient World (a Teaching Company class--I recommend them highly for light education while sweating), when I learned that Assyrian methods of siege warfare entered the Greek world through encounters with Carthage, during the wars over Sicily.  A fun topic for a historical novel, I thought.

Then I did a little research and realized I had been beaten to the punch, by L. Sprague de Camp, a youthful favorite I had not thought of recently.  In his novel The Arrows of Hercules, he deals with exactly those events, through the person of an engineer in the employ of Dionysios I of Syracuse.

De Camp wrote science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and historical nonfiction.  He was one of those debonair globe-trotting polymaths that sometimes find a congenial home in genre fiction.  His historical novels are the complete opposite of bodice rippers--they are more about bodice inventors ("hey, do you think we could take that baleen stuff and use it to....?")  Like most of his books, TAH is episodic and doesn't have a strong plotline.  Like real history, this happens, and then that happens.  Sometimes there's a connection, and sometimes there isn't.

Even the characters described as passionate and impulsive are quite measured in their emotional reaction.  And de Camp's attitude is that engineers are pretty much engineers, now matter what era they turn up in.

So don't look here for a Stephen Pressfield-style description of maggoty corpses.  There is some brutal violence, but it is over quickly.  I'm not sure there's a spot in the market for de Camp's  charming, informative witnessing to interesting events, but something like it should still do.

Most historical novels where someone experiences great events or a specific culture are told from the point of view of a time traveler, even if he is not literally that.  Blackthorne in Clavell's Shogun comes easily to mind--he's described as a seventeenth century Englishman, but he's clearly from the twentieth century.  Similary TAH's Zopyrus.  In Lest Darkness Fall, one of de Camp's best books, it is explicitly a time traveler who pops into the Rome of Late Antiquity--the period I've recently been reading a lot about.  My interest in it might actually stem from that book, which made a big impression on me in my youth.

I've never written a historical novel, but I think this era, between the great era of Sparta and Athens and the advent of Alexander the Great, has some promise as a setting.