Where I am now--middle aged and laid off

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One of my points of (minor) pride has been that I have a regular job, not one of these squishy vague freelancer things that all the other writers have.

Well, I have to give thatparticular pride up. I am now a freelancer myself, with a technical marketing communications business and, so far, a couple of clients.

How did this happen?

Well, like many people, I did not like my job. And...I really didn't like my job. But no other job I could find to look at looked a lot better. My company had some serious issues, like the absence of any real business plan, but nothing psychotic or deranged. Just bad behavior. Nothing unusual. Over years in the workplace, you're going to run into a lot of bad behavior. If that makes you insane...you'll be insane.

I'm temperamentally unsuited for fulltime employment. I can't sit still and do the same thing for that long. But I've done it, and done it successfully, for more than a decade. When it comes to that, I'm temperamentally unsuited to marriage and parenthood as well. Mary, good wife that she is, occasionally thanks me for doing a such a good job despite my natural inclinations. Almost everythin I accomplish is in some sense contrary to my nature.

So, not liking my job, and not seeing another that appealed, I did start to think about doing what I do, marketing communications, as my main source of income. I have an engineering degree, I worked as an engineer for years. Surely someone must need a good writer with a technical background?  Add in my healthcare marketing experience, and it seemed like a reasonable bet, particularly in Boston's market.

So, evenings and weekends, I thought and schemed and planned. I wrote a new web site, I put my portfolio together, I even got a client by jumping on a chance conversation and turning it into an opportunity, though I didn't have much time to do the client's work.

But I lacked the nerve. I couldn't just leave. The outrageous (and non-tax-deductible) health care premiums alone were enough to deter me. Then there's that pesky mortgage and those hungry children....

My job finally saved me the trouble of making a decision. Having their own problems (that unfortunate lack of a business plan), they eliminated my position and laid me off. So now I am thrown into it willy nilly. If I find a suitable fulltime position I'll take it, but meanwhile I'm trying to add clients while continuing to work on my fiction.

So I've lost the pride that comes with being able to torment yourself 9-5 five days a week in exchange for a salary, health insurance, and a 401(k). I'll have to replace it with an amorphous spread of tasks and client prospecting, and the pride of eating what you kill. I'll keep you posted on how I do.

 

The mysteries of pizza boxes

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Last night we had pizza delivered, as, I suspect, many people do while preparing themselves for Thanksgiving.

All pizza boxes have a whole range of carefully printed choices on the outside, with boxes (or open circles) to check: extra cheese, sausage, meatball, mushroom, pepperoni, peppers, onions, anchovies, etc.

My question: as anyone ever seen any of these things checked? Or is merely decorative, or vestige of some now obsolete practice? Someday soon, I suppose, your phone will tell you what's in each box, useful if you're handling a large crowd. But I suspect these notations will remain, because otherwise it's just a flat cardboard box.

Hope you enjoyed your pizza, and have a good Thanksgiving.

What killed Tycho Brahe?

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The History Blog notes that Tycho Brahe's remains have been exhumed in Prague (and will be reburied on November 19, 2010). They want to investigate whether Tycho got either chronic mercury poisoning (through medication or his experiments) or acute mercury poisoning (i.e., was murdered).

The story on Tycho's death always was that he held his pee too long at a reception for Rudolf II, which sounds like a story a third grader would make up.

The researchers also hope to see if they can find traces of his famous fake nose, to see if they can establish what it was made out of.

None of the results will be particularly earth-shattering, I suppose. Still, minor mysteries like this have an odd fascination.

On my childhood visits to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, I found myself interested in some old wooden models of of his observatories Uraniborg and Stjerneborg (Maybe Stjernborg), which he had built on his island of Ven. I remember them being startlingly detailed. This didn't teach me a thing about astronomy, or even about the state of observational astronomy c. 1600, but they had a magical feel to them, of a kind of dark mystery--particularly Stjerneborg, which was mostly underground. Even the room they were kept in was dark.

I haven't been back to the Adler in years.  I wonder if they are still there?

 

A history of sinister Lunar conspiracies

Via the invaluable, if vowel-challenged BLDGBLOG, I have finally found out about the supersecret Unified Lunar Control Network.

It turns out this is only the latest in a series of Moon-girdling conspiracies.  In the past, the innocent Lunarians have been tormented by the AMS Lunar Control System, the DOD Selenodetic Control System, the heinous Kiev Lunar Triangulation, and the citrus-based Clementine Control Network. This history of Lunar conspiracies was extensively documented in one conspiracy buff's Chronology of Lunar Control Networks.

Unfortunately, this noble fighter for freedom disappeared during an eclipse and was never heard from again....

Is it really hard to balance the federal budget?

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There is a lot of discussion about how politically impossible it is to keep ourselves from destroying our economy by increasing our long-term government deficit to unsustainable levels. Everyone has an interest, no one wants to reduce entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and, in general, our financial meltdown in the next couple of decades is, as they say, "baked in".

Today's NY Times has an interesting interactive graphic that lets you play with possible budget cuts and tax increases to close the gap.

I had no trouble at all doing it.  In fact, I found that I had proposed a bunch of tax increases that I could roll back. If I didn't roll those back, I presume I could be running a substantial budget surplus by 2030. My "new" taxes arenow just Bowles-Simpson loophole reduction with an overall tax rate decrease, which would make sense anyway, out of a concern for simple fairness and transparency, and a small carbon tax (I actually favor a revenue-neutral carbon tax, with corresponding reductions in payroll taxes, particularly for low-income earners who are disproportionately affected by higher energy costs--but that wasn't one of the choices).

Almost everything suggested seems relatively easy. Do we really need to entertain ourselves by maintaining a gigantic, contrary-to-Founding-Father-principles standing military? Do we acknowledge that Social Security and Medicare cost huge amounts of money, or do we pretend we get them for free? Do we pay special interest groups to deform our economic production?

Any particular cut might injure our personal interests. But the need to make the totality of cuts is in all of our interest. Can we actually manage to do it?

Give me a laptop and an interactive chart, and I can do it today.

Biking by Google

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A few months ago Google Maps added bicycling to its methods of conveyance.  When it first started, its recommendations seemed a bit old-ladyish to an experienced urban bicyclist.  It would take you to a bike path in preference to any other way.

Bike paths are seldom the way to get anywhere in a hurry. If they are smooth and well-laid-out, they are crowded with pedestrians, dog walkers, and wildly weaving bicycling children as padded up as NFL linebackers. Otherwise, they are creased with roots and frost heaves, with gravel patches and potholes concealed by slick fallen leaves, and make sudden right angle turns before mysteriously vanishing in the middle of nowhere.

But the essence of Google is consistently getting better, and so it has. Today I went to have lunch with my old boss, Liz (catching up + looking for work) out in Burlington, a Boston suburb known almost entirely for its vast mall.  Google maps found me a route that did, in fact, take in some bike paths.  I almost rejected it, but than decided to try it. The other routes into Burlington are gigantic multilane monstrosities, way worse than any urban street.

The Minuteman Path, allegedly one of the most traveled rail trails in the entire country, was pretty well empty in the middle of a cold November day.  And the previously unknown-to-me bike path from Lexington to Burlington was, in fact, fairly creased, but snaked along in quite an engaging secret way, behind houses and along a stream, spitting me out just a couple of blocks of traffic horror on the Middlesex Turnpike away from my destination.

I may not accept the advice, but it's nice to have a resource for finding secret ways to survive the suburbs.

The writer's bait and switch: Tana French

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Some time ago, a friend lent me two books by the Irish author Tana French, In the Woods, and The Likeness.  I enjoyed them both--obviously I enjoyed the first or would not have read the second. Oddly, despite French's obviously popularity, I had never heard of her, so I'm grateful to Sherri for having introduced me to her. Who else am I missing?

Both are mysteries, the first ostensibly a police procedural, the second a kind of "agent in place" investigation. Both have problems (which I'll get to in a minute), but, on a sentence-by-sentence, scene-by-scene read move right along, with sharp description, dialogue, characterization, and pace. As I think I've said before, high-end mysteries have it all over science fiction in the area of pure technical skill. And by that, I don't mean some kind of arid mechanics. I mean the deliberate means by which prose induces emotional, intellectual, and visceral reactions in the reader. I'm reminded of a fine mystery writer from across the North Channel in Scotland, Denise Mina--though Mina is much meaner to her characters than French is. I'll have to deal with her elsewhere.

When you find problems in an otherwise extremely well done book, you have to question whether the problem is an inherent consequence of the same choices that made the book work in the first place. There is no perfect narrative solution to certain issues, and sometimes focusing on certain difficiencies just makes you look clueless.  You don't look to comedies for deep characterization, and epiphany-directed stories don't benefit from suspense.

So what are the issues?  In In The Woods, French presents a scarring past experience involving a couple of vanished children, which in the end, plays little role save as "character's secret hurt" and is never explained. This is just a tease, a selling point in the initial pitch, and the source of cover copy. It's always important to remember that books are not just discrete chunks of prose, but devices that need to operate in the market as well as in the individual reader's head.  This kind of bait-and-switch is annoying, but somewhat understandable.

The point of view character, Rob Ryan, needs that secret hurt to make him interesting, and to motivate him when necessary, so it's not just a tease. His relationship with his partner, Cassie, is an extended adolescent crush, which eventually gets tiresome, though his emotional retardation (he's in his 30s, and a homicide cop, for heaven's sake) plays a plot role too, because Rob has to be almost absurdly obtuse at a couple of points to keep the plot going. Tiresome, but the plot does keep going, so you forgive the kludges that let it do so.

The Likeness, in which Carrie is the point of view character, depends on a piece of melodramatic coincidence so absurd the experienced science fiction reader instantly reaches for explanations from our genre:  time travel, matter duplication, cloning.  Cassie's exact double is found dead, murdered.  If you're wondering whether you'll ever find out why they are exact doubles, forget it:  this is the given that generates the plot, and is never explained.  Pick a science fictional explanation, if you want.

Cassie takes over the other woman's identity in order to find out who killed her. That's a great suspense generator. She finds herself in a hothouse situation in a beautiful old house full of beautiful academics.  Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine likes this kind of forcing vat of interpersonal conflict. It's also clearly reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, as well as part of a P. D. James novel, An Unsuitable Job For a Woman, in which the reluctant detective, Cordelia Gray, must infiltrate a similar academic idyll.  That book also works with some of the class stresses that underlie French's work.  I enjoyed The Likeness too, on a page by page level, but found the contrivance more annoying than I would have liked. But, again, no contrivance, no book, so it's a trade I'm willing to make.

While there is clearly a limit, readers are willing to forgive a lot in order to get an entertaining, compelling book. In workshops we often pound on the logic of the story. Sometimes resolving all the contradictions resolves the book into nothing. Something I, addicted to rationality, will need to think about.

Good books.  Recommended.

Character and sugar water

We'd like to think of our personality traits as robust and defining. The characters writers create have stable and clear personality traits--that's what makes them memorable to the reader.  If you read a good novel, that certainly seems to be what real people are like.

But it seems that many of our own best traits are really tiny, weak muscles, like the little finger's wonderfully named flexor digiti minimi brevis, easily exhausted and thus useless when overused.

Sometimes a dose of glucose can revive them.  Our willpower can get stronger, as can our control over expression of some of our less acceptable personality traits, like racial prejudice, as expressed by various celebrities in stressed situations.

The latter issue, about racist tendencies becoming more pronounced with tiredness or other fontal lobe inhibiting states, has some interesting features. The linked article, "I'm only racist when I'm drunk" (from the excellent Mindhacks) says

The idea is not that all of these people are racist, but that we have absorbed negative cultural associations that tend to push our thinking in the direction of prejudice and we need to make a conscious effort to act even-handedly to counter-balance this tendency.

Is a character who uses the frontal lobe to inhibit some satisficing heuristics that happen to stereotype ethnic and racial groups admirable, or not? Remember, those heuristics just have to work somewhat better than random chance to be reinforced. Stereotypes certainly do make life easier.  In previous eras they were used unashamedly and openly. Refusal to subscribe to known prejudices made you, in fact, suspect and worthy of contempt.

So our characters struggle against this side of themselves--though it's tempting to make the admirable characters be the ones who do not have any such internal contradictions.  Sober, untired, fully glucosed, the character has the resources to devote to distinguishing individuals and judging them as such. Drunk, tired, hungry, the character uses lazy hacks and hurts and offends others by sampling too infrequently. Do we dare to portray someone that way?  Where does the actual "character" live?

Of course, yelling racist epithets--"spewing" is pretty much the de rigueur verb here, which is why I'm avoiding it--is something affirmative, not merely making errors of inappropriate categorization. Such a character affirmatively dislikes individuals who fall into a certain category.  Again, expression of that dislike is controlled, until that frontal lobe minimi brevis just gives out from the day's demands.

So, maybe celebrities who know that they might lose control while on camera  (which is now pretty much all the time) should keep an emergency vial of sugar water handy.  It just might save their career.

 

 

Dorothy Dunnett and the exquisite villain

This year, as last time, I took a Dorothy Dunnett book on my hike. Somehow I can't read her in real life, but I find her compelling on the trail. Some books require being sent back to a previous era--I only read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon because a dangerous storm at high altitude stranded me in a tent for twenty four hours. And I loved that too, once that was all I had to do.

Many people like the Crawford of Lymond books. I haven't tried them because I dislike dashing, devilishly charming heroes who women instantly fall in love with, which is how I imagine him to be.  Actually, the whole Scottish thing doesn't appeal to me. I don't even like Scotch--bourbon and Irish are my whiskeys. Not that I'm opposed to all things Scottish.  But I prefer David Hume and Groundskeeper Willy as representatives of the breed.  Nothing dashing there.

So I'm reading about an insanely intelligent, manipulative, and not quite sane Fleming named Claes. Of course he's great in the sack, but you can't really get away from that with your bestselling heroes, can you? The Niccolo series is a quick travelogue across the world of the late 15th century.

The best thing about the novels (at the least two I've read so far) are the villains. Both Simon (the big villain) and Doria (the smaller one in The Spring of the Lamb) are genuinely compelling. Doria was sly, manipulative, sexually voracious, vicious, charming, and dangerous. And the villains are assisted in their machinations by people emotionally close to Claes who don't actually care that he's the hero of the stories.

The least good thing is Claes's band of associates. They are described as having distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, but I have a great deal of trouble detecting specific personalities.  The books would be much stronger if they were as specific as the villains.

I do hope I get to read another one before I'm on the trail again.

Winner party trick: Napoleon's death mask

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As background research to a possible novel (19th century mystery involving a sculptor, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Catholicism, and homoeroticism: stay tuned), I recently read Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire, which purports to be about Stanford White, her paternal great grandfather, and his influence on her family, but is, as usual with such memoirs, mostly about Suzannah Lessard. It's pretty entertaining, actually.

The most interesting ancestor in the book did not turn out to be Stanford White, brilliant architect with a disordered private life ending in murder, but her maternal great grandfather's brother, Archie Chanler.  Both Archie and maternal great grandfather were famous as members of the "Astor Orphans", a group of children raised in a big Hudson mansion named Rokeby, all intelligent, all eccentric, perfect for stories. He married romantic and beautiful Southern belle Amelie Rives, who later became a bestselling author and then ran off with a Russian prince:

 

Archie believed that

...he could change the color of his eyes if he stood looking west out a window at a specified time, holding a pearl stickpin in one hand and looking deeply into a mirror he held in the other.

Nice choice of trick, actually, since almost no one can remember the color of someone else's eyes.

Then he went farther, and became convinced that he could go into a trance and take on the appearance of Napoleon's death mask.  Note, he didn't claim to be Napoleon, just that he could look like Napoleon. And not a living Napoleon.  Dead Napoleon.  Here he is doing the face:

 Looks just like the dear old Emperor, doesn't he? We all have our quirks....

Archie was later institutionalized in New York, escaped, and got declared sane in Virginia, his ex-wife's home state (and thus became famous as the man who was insane in New York, and sane in Virginia), and spent the rest of his life fighting his other siblings over the family money. When one of his brothers married an opera singer, Archie cabled him, "Who's loony now?" which became a universal catchphrase for quite a long while, even serving as the title of a comic strip.

Stanford White was interesting (and a brilliant architect), but my money is on Archie as a novelistic character.  Stay tuned.

 

We've tried bending the healthcare cost curve before

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Pretty much everyone agrees that healthcare costs in the US are out of control, way too high and getting higher. And pretty much everyone agrees that it's someone else's fault.

As nation's get more prosperous, they spend more on healthcare. This is universal, and healthcare costs have been climbing everywhere in the world, no matter what the system of reimbursement or set of controls on use.

But the US is a definite outlier. Its costs are noticably higher than that of other nations, as this graph, from The Incidental Economist, shows:

There are two basic types of solutions, according to The Incidental Economist:

  1. Each of us makes individual choices that lower these costs. We use less, we choose more wisely, we get "skin in the game", we maintain our own health through decent diet and exercise.
  2. The government forces us to use less, by rationing, controlling choices, disallowing certain expensive procedures.

How likely are either of these to happen? We each want others to minimize their healthcare usage, just as we hope other people with cars will stay off the road so we will have a quicker commute. And no one wants actual restrictions imposed on anything except what other people use.

Remember, we did have a successful and effective system of healthcare cost control, back in the 90s. It was called managed care. Remember HMOs? Remember that they controlled healthcare costs? Remember how pissed off everyone got?

Remember movies where desperate men got transplants for their children at gunpoint (2002's John Q), and mothers cursed managed care because their child had asthma (1997's As Good As It Gets--incidentally, the most depressing movie title ever)? These were easy applause lines. Everyone got how awful HMOs were.

It will all happen again, no matter what the reform. Individuals benefit, while the system becomes unsustainable. It would be nice to find a specific villain.  But, while there are always small villains that can be called out and punished, the only big one around is...us.

 

 

 

Spanking Woodrow Wilson

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Pure linkbait, that title. I mean, the guy is so hot right now, his name guarantees an avalanche of visitors.

But what do I say when they get here? That I don't get what's up with Woodrow Wilson? I think liberals try to defend him because he was...well, an intellectual, an Ivy Leaguer with big schemes and an unexpected skill for political infighting.  But his schemes were crazy, he resegregated Federal employment, and he dragged us into a war that there were good reasons for avoiding. Leftists have no reason to love him.

On the other hand, he's not responsible for creating the national state we now have. That was a cooperative effort of many people, on both the right and the left. Rightists just hate his annoying teacher's pet personality.

There's an interesting twist near the end of Robert Heinlein's novel Time Enough For Love, where the hero, Lazarus Long, who has traveled back to the early Twentieth Century to have sex with his mother (it's from that period of Heinlein's writing, so be warned), gets caught by America's entry into WWI because he's not really paying attention. He has every reason to keep out of it, knowing it's going to be a big mistake for everyone, but the women in his life want him to go, so he does.  This is portrayed as somehow heroic, rather than cowardly, at least as I remember it. It certainly isn't one of those books I insisted on keeping in my library for years, so regard this reference as less than dependable. But how can you condemn Wilson's overambitious internationalism without also condemning military interventions in pursuit of national power? (Addendum:  as I should have mentioned, "Lazarus Long" is a nom de methuselah: his birth name was...Woodrow Wilson Smith! Wouldn't a revelation of Heinlein's secret devotion to Woodrow Wilson really cause some trouble?)

Even Gore Vidal, who really should know better, offers a charming portrayal of Wilson in his Hollywood. Given Vidal's political position, Wilson's manipulations and gigantic schemes for reformulating the world should have appalled and disgusted him, but the fact that conservatives have been bashing Wilson since the time of their beloved Teddy Roosevelt (another overweening statist, as it happens) tempted Vidal into defending him--or at least his personal character.

The wise thing is to prefer Presidents who are pragmatists with clear and limited goals to those who are extravant theorists, no matter what their political coloration. To oversimplify, Wilson called Eugene V. Debs a traitor for his words and threw him in jail. Warren G. Harding let him out. Who looks more respectable? And what should that say about their postumous reputations?

 

"It was a dark and stormy night"

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I'm a big fan of the short story writer Ron Carlson.

Yes, I know he writes novels too. I've been hesitant to read them. While some writers do both forms well, it's not as common as you might think. Sprinters don't win marathons. I'll give in eventually and give it a try.

Meanwhile, I just read his Ron Carlson Writes a Story, a short book on writing that does exactly what the title says: it lets you sit next to him at his desk as he writes a story, "The Governor's Ball". That story is clearly a pivotal one for Carlson. His introduction to his combined story collection A Kind of Flying goes through the writing of that story as well, and says it was a start of a new period of productivity for him, writing a new way.

Ron Carlson Writes a Story is charming and quick. What's interesting is that he focuses, not on what makes narrative choices good for a reader, but what makes them good for a writer. He guides the writer in how to set up narrative options, ways of making the story open out rather than close down as you struggle for the next paragraph.

Sometimes when you look at the casing of an electronic device, you think something like "why is that notch there?" The answer is, it is there, not because of some current function, but because the machine stamping it out needed a place to hold it. Same reason your navel has no function. It's an artifact of the manufacturing process (placenta and umbilical).

Carlson doesn't use this metaphor, by the way, so don't blame him for it.

He shows the writer how to make sure narrative choices give you what he calls "inventory": stuff to work with.

Then he quotes another writer, David Boswell.  If I could find the original source, I would go directly to it, but I have been unable to. Perhaps this was what citations call a "personal communication":

The writer David Boswell says it perfectly: "'It was a dark and stormy night,' is not a terrible sentence from a reader's point of view, but it is a terrible sentence for the writer because there's no help in it. 'Lightning struck the fence post' is much better because there's that charred and smoking fence post which I might have to use later." I'm constantly looking for things that are going to help me find the next sentence, survive the story.

In case you got lost in the LISP-like stack of levels that was me quoting Carlson quoting Boswell quoting Bulwer-Lytton's infamous first line of Paul Clifford, so often mocked by the aspiring novelist Snoopy in Peanuts.

It think that is a brilliant bit of advice from Carlson. A writer's goal is to survive the story. Grab whatever will help you do that. You can come back later and edit, but meanwhile, survive is all you can reasonably do.

Close to the end of reading in the garden

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One great use of a garden is for reading, particularly in the afternoon, when the day's work is done (or has been put off).

This year I put a bench in a spot that gets the last afternoon sunlight.

Today I cut it pretty close, but it was warm enough to sit out there even without direct sunlight. Not much of that in the future, though.  Fall is well on its way in New England. Yes, that is a bathtub Mary peeking out from behind the bench. She came with the house, and for quite a while has been in the front yard. I'm redoing that (slowly), but we don't have the heart to completely banish her, so for now, she blesses us from the back corner of the garden.

The book is Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, perhaps the first great global bestseller, and a template for the portrayal of ancient Rome and early Christians on film. I'll write more on it in the future.

When sitting on my bench Monday afternoon (I had Columbus Day off, a rare treat), this was the view to my right:

And this to my left:

These shots are concealing how small my yard really is.  But you can see how autumnal it's becoming.

Green symbols and reality

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"Green" has become a potent symbolic term. But what does it mean? Less carbon for the same output? Less forest harvested, less water polluted, less solid waste produced? A less-damaged web of life, of which we are an integral part?

The word mostly seems to refer to a set of visible practices that announce the practitioner as part of a specific status community. Those outside that status community thus feel it essential to denigrate those same practices as useless or even pernicious, which makes even less sense.

As always, though, the visible practices are just proxies or indicators of the underlying benefits. Thus, if you can achieve the proxy without the underlying benefit, at lesser cost, you are rewarded. This is true whenever you try to incent some complex behavior by picking an indicator. You get more of the indicator, but not necessarily more of the beneficial behavior.

So you get such difficulties as the fact that, in printing, green is an environmentally hazardous color, containing damaging halogens or toxic metal ions. But a green brochure is an indicator of virtue, regardless of the invisible damages.

My local Whole Foods for a while used wood blocks to separate purchases in the checkout line, presumably because oversensitive customers had complained about the plastic ones. I don't recall ever getting splinters from the plastic dividers, but, for a symbol, the wood blocks were startlingly hazardous.  Eventually they disappeared, presumably returned to the wild.

I like to think of myself as relatively green. Once I save a bit of carbon by biking to work and by keeping my thermostat down, I get in an airplane and fly across the country to deposit my bodily waste in environmentally sensitive areas.

I do get some lovely photographs, though.

Failures of mental organization

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When I was younger, weekends were a time for entertainment. I'd hang with friends, go on long bike rides, go to movies (nothing better than a movie in the middle of the day).

Now weekends are when I organize my mind. I write, I consider a prospective novel, I plan career improvements. This, for some reason, takes hours. Slow, methodical hours.

If I miss having that time, as I did while hiking a few weeks ago, my life falls apart. Oh, I get my work done at work, and I fulfill my responsibilities around the house, but my writing career careens off the road and lies upside down in a ditch, wheels slowly spinning.

I don't know why this is.  Sure, work and family take a lot of time and energy, but it doesn't seem that it should require so much direction to keep everything else moving.

But it does. And I know it. Two weekends since I got back from the Wind River Range, and I am only now getting things in order--a book proposal for my agent, a new short story, and some freelance marketing work.

If I work it right, I can keep things going until family holidays disrupt it again. Wish me luck!

What is the real cost of clean energy?

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From yesterday's New York Times, an article titled On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules. Once again, when it comes to clean or green energy, someone is shocked, shocked! to find subsidies going on here.

As far as I can tell, there is no green energy without subsidy. At least right now.  If you dig, you'll find a grant, a tax break, some debt forgiveness: some sort of cash for the implementer that doesn't come from actual project savings. It's all lemonade stand economics. If Mom buys all the ingredients, it isn't that hard to show a profit on sales. And, right now, every form of green energy gets subsidies, whether solar panels, wind turbines, or even insulation.

Now, you'd think, that if it really saved so much money to insulate, or put solar panels on your roof, building owners could run the numbers and make the right decision. The problem is, when you do run the numbers, they don't look as great as you'd like. Returns are small, and take a long time to realize.

Now, just to be clear, I would love to find non-polluting, non-world-destroying sources of energy so that I could continue to live my comfortable lifestyle without occasionally fretting that I'm melting the ice caps or creating sterile deserts where there was once fertile land.

The problem is, I think too much about what's actually going on.  And all the hand-holding-leaf logos in the world aren't going to persuade me that things like electrochromic glass or sedum-covered roofs are actually going to do anything that matters.

If you need a subsidy to get the numbers to come out right, guess what: the numbers don't come out right. If your green project shows a benefit because of a subsidy, that just means that you're burning my money to keep warm, rather than your own.

So the short answer to the title of this post?  We don't know.  As with healthcare, too many people have an interest in making sure the answer is not clear.