Why there's no such thing as marketer's block

I write for a living. Mornings, I work on my fiction--right now, a YA novel about teens discovering the existence of alternate realities.  The rest of the day, I write marketing pieces. For now, I have a steady contract with a place that provides information on the medical device market.

A writer can get writer's block. A marketing writer cannot get marketer's block. Sure, a day or so might go by when you have trouble organizing your thoughts and tasks, but it better not go on much longer than that. Because your clients kinda notice that.  You have press releases every week, pieces to go out, edits to respond to....

It's useful to take the mindset and move it to the fiction. It's a job, after all. A job I chose, a job no one needs for me to do. But a job.

So, if you're a writer and wondering whether a day job writing would use up fiction resources, don't worry. It may take some energy, but the skills you learn can be immensely useful.

My crush on Cordelia Gray

Cordelia Gray was a detective PD James wrote about in the 70s and early 80s. James seemed to be experimenting with breaking away from her elegant, self-contained series detective Dalgliesh (though Dalgliesh plays a bit part in the first Cordelia Gray book).

But it never worked out. James wrote two Cordelia Gray books, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and the much longer The Skull Beneath the Skin. It must have seemed like a good idea, creating a young, spunky woman with a detective agency mostly specializing in lost pets, who gets involved in murder.

James's heart never really seemed to be in it. She discovered that a private eye has few resources for actually solving crimes. Much of the post-murder part of Skull is told from the point of view of cops (anonymous, though extensively described), though Cordelia is eventually the one to figure out who the killer is. James was a professional administrator and bureaucrat, and her heart is with systems. Dalgliesh is a man of system. Cordelia was on her own, and, in the end, I don't think James could come up with plots that worked with that situation.

The stress shows in Skull. All the characters are more schematic than James's usual, despite the length of the book.  It lacks the easy charm of the first Cordelia book, Unsuitable Job.

Plus, Cordelia was kind of Dalgliesh's little sister (though there were hints of a potential romance betweent them). She had the same self-sufficient personality, the same literary education, the same cool attractiveness. James hadn't really traveled very far, and so decided to just go with Dalgliesh, the original model.

Sometimes, as a writer, you try to break free, only to find that your restrictions are also your strengths.

I miss Cordelia, though.  Maybe because I can't work up a crush on the dark-and-literary Dalgliesh, but have no problem doing so for the catlike Cordelia.

The resurgence of Unspiek, Baron Bodissey

One of the startling things to come out of the mass murder in Norway is that a source for the killer's manifestos was a blogger who writes under the name of "Baron Bodissey".

This is insider baseball indeed, akin to naming a housing development Undle Square. "Baron Bodissey" provides the epigraphs to various chapters in the works of Jack Vance, most particularly the Demon Princes novels.  The first two of those, The Star King and The Killing Machine, were particular favorites of mine in my youth. Given the Baron's pompous, elephant-picking-up-a-pea style, he seems an odd choice for someone supposedly providing real political commentary.

But, behind his own light and frothy style, Vance often engaged in fictional mass murder and even genocide--the event that starts the long vengeance of Kirth Gersen in the Demon Princes novels is, after all, the Mount Pleasant Massacre. So perhaps this points a way to seeing the way style can direct the uninformed eye away from content.

Like anyone else, the Baron has a Wikipedia page.

No one wants to throw away information: the case of the SATs

A couple of days ago, the Boston Globe had an interesting story: Colleges drop SAT, but still buy names of high-scoring students.

It seems that even colleges that have, with high PR and visibility, dispensed with using SATs as a criterion for admission, quietly pay College Board, the owner of the SATs, for the names of students who have done well on the test, in order to recruit them.

Why, if the tests are meaningless?

Because, of course, the tests aren't meaningless. They just give results that people don't like. They aren't perfect, at least in the sense that they absolutely predict academic success, but they remain one of the few pieces of unmanipulated information available. Everything else, from grades to recommendations, are spun, manipulated, and gamed in pursuit of an image a large number of people have agreed to pretend is the one that actually exists. But when someone sits down with a sheet covered with those little fill-in ellipses, and starts doing a math problem, they are alone. There is no one there to put a thumb on the scales.

Not-perfect information trumps no information every time. Information is seldom perfect.  So it's no wonder college admissions offices want to use the metric they know is correlated with decent academic performance. Too bad they try to pretend they are doing something else.

This is exactly the kind of thing that irritates high-SAT-scoring science fiction fans.  They are smart, and want people to know it. And they know that, when it comes to massaging appearances, they are the ones who would have lost out.  I would bet that even science fiction fans who are political liberals would tend to be more pro-SAT than their political affiliation would suggest.

I don't know if they still have the old analogy section (long time since my last SAT). That's exactly where any SF fan would shine. After all, that's the entire basis of our literature.

Alcoholic loners and parentless children

Hard-boiled detective novels and police procedurals rely on alcoholic divorced men who are hard to get along with, obsessed, and have some specific taste, like jazz or late-Medieval altarpieces. Books and movies that have adolescents as protagonists have usually killed the parents off.

These are not "content" choices.  That is, the writers of these novels don't actually favor alcoholic loners or dead parents in some abstract sense. They make these choices for mechanical reasons. They make the books easier to write.

The divorce and hostility eliminate tiresome spouses, children, and friends.  If the cop had those, they would have to appear in the story. If they appear in the story, you then have to have a psycho threaten them or kidnap them, and that's not appropriate to every story, and certainly not for a series. Otherwise the family just takes up time for no purpose.

Non-hardboiled detective books can certainly allow spouses, as in Rendell's Inspector Wexford books, or Reginal Hill's Dalziel/Pascoe books. There, spousal life serves as counterpoint to the relationship-oriented crimes.

But that's "literary", death in a more bare-knuckle book.  What about the alcohol and the outré hobby? Just as overprocessed grain products will be "fortified" with vitamins and minerals, these are ways of adding back in the personality that got milled out during plot creation.

This is on my mind now, because I am writing a novel with adolescent protagonists, what is known in the trade as YA: Young Adult (working title: Timeslip). It involves travel between alternate universes. And the parents are still alive.

How can my character, Doug, and his two friends go on a rescue mission to an alternate world where the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot? What parent would allow that?  And how can they be back before curfew?

I did have to incapacitate Doug's parents in certain plot-significant ways. But what about the parents/guardians of the other adolescent characters?  I'm the parent of an adolescent. I'm sure I don't know everything he does, but he gets in trouble if he's home late, or goes somewhere unusual without telling us. Now, my son claims that the parents of his friends aren't concerned about these things, so maybe those kids get to travel to worlds with steam carriages and spend several days there with no difficulty.  Somehow I doubt it.

Now, in an extraliterary way, you know something of the arguments we have around our house. Without the steam carriages, unfortunately.

Anyway, it has been an adventure, maneuvering the plot while not eliminating the parents. Do I get points for degree of difficulty?  And do my proposed adolescent readers even see this as positive? Maybe, like many kids that age, they wish their parents dead or vanished anyway.

I just found it too often the default position, and thought I'd give it a shot. 

Why I've never moved back to Chicago

I grew up near Chicago. In the suburbs, to be clear, one called LaGrange Park.

I went away to college, and never moved back.  Mary, who grew up near Toledo, sometimes agitates for us to move to Chicago. We both love the city, and could easily move to some hip area like Bucktown. Or, at least, so we would like to think. When I visit my brother Pete, who lives in Evanston, we often spend a day walking through the city, looking at buildings and stopping in at bars. The city of Chicago has some of the best urban structures in the world.

But a city isn't just its urban core.  It's everything around it, the whole vast metro area.  Chicago has one of the vastest metro areas in the country, and, not to put too fine a point on it, it sucks.  According to the linked newgeography article, it is the third largest urban agglomeration in the world, after Tokyo and New York. It is less dense than Los Angeles.

Aside from Lake Michigan to the east, there is nothing to block its growth.  The land is flat and easily dug, and the lake supplies an increasingly rare resource, one that will eventually be the limiting factor in urban development worldwide: fresh water.  The buildings range from undistinguished to ugly and the distribution is almost entire automobile oriented. And--not the fault of development--there really aren't many scenic features. Exactly what made it great farming country makes it uninteresting to look at.

The great thing about the Boston metro area is that you can leave it, and pretty fast.  And the areas around it vary. Going up the rocky North Shore is noticeably different than traveling through the glacial outwash plain to the south, or the hills to the west. Snooty zoning restrictions  in older towns keep me from ever being able to afford a house there, if that was the life I wanted, but provide me with picturesque landscape to bicycle through.

I keep seeing articles about the new urbanism, and people moving back to the urban cores. I have no idea what world they're talking about. What's needed is a New Suburbanism, since that's where almost everyone in the world will eventually live.

So despite the fact that Chicago bars are some of the best in the country, I'm going to remain a visitor. And I think people who live there will be sorry someday about the choices they made without even knowing they were making them.

Readercon wrap up

Readercon is my favorite local con...actually, that makes it my favorite con, because I rarely travel to go to conventions that require travel, and staying at the hotel. I have a limited tolerance for fluorescent-lit, over-air-conditioned hotels and meeting rooms. Readercon tends to happen on a beautiful summer weekend, which this one certainly was. That makes staying inside even more difficult.

On Thursday, I was on a panel called How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction created by Barbara Krasnoff. Barbara has hosted this panel topic a number of times, and says she gets very different discussions every time. I got to sit next to my friend Elaine Isaak and talked about my marketing copywriting business. It's not an easy subject--there are a lot of possibilities, but most of them demand a degree of hustle and job search that is too stressful for most people.  I know it is sometimes too stressful for me, satisfying though this way of making a living can be.

Then I went to a reading by my friend John Kessel, from a novel he's working on. It is set in the same Lunar world as some of his recent stories, including "Stories for Men". Afterward, John and I had a beer in the bar, which had hired a singer to entertain on what was supposed to be a slow night. John and I yelled at each other over the noise music. Eric Van later joined us. Unfortunately, that was the last time I talked to John during the con, though I saw him several more times.

On Friday I had a reading.  No one showed up.  I should have mentioned that it was my alien sex story, coming out in F&SF.  It's funny, and I was looking forward to performing it.

I had beers and food with my good friends Paul Di Filippo and Deb Newton, as well as John Crowley and Paul Witcover, and several others.  So, you see, I sometimes travel in exalted circles indeed.

Friday night was the Meet the Prose party, an Readercon tradition.  I caught up with several people, including Judith Berman (warning: she has not posted recently, and her site seems to have been taken over by an Italian journalist of the same name).  I didn't see Judith again either.

On Saturday and Sunday I got together a couple of times with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Geary Gravel, and Rosemary Kirstein.  Ann and Rosemary I got to see at Boskone earlier this year, but Geary I have not seen in a long time.  We all make up a kind of Coalition of the Unappreciated, and so can commiserate with each other without fear.

Saturday night my neighbor Athena Andreadis had me over to dinner with Joan Slonczewski and Anil Menon, both of whom I enjoyed meeting, along with Athena's partner, Peter.

I also got to see Walter H. Hunt, Greg Feeley (whose great blog has not been updated in quite some time), Vandana Singh, and Madeleine Robins.

If I skipped you or forgot your name, please forgive me.

Greece and debt ceilings: the normalization of deviance

Like most other people, I am watching with bewildered apprehension as our fragile economic recovery faces incredible, if hard-for-me-to-understand challenges. Greece threatens to default on its debts, peeling off its rock face and dragging the linked rock climbers of the Eurozone down into the abyss.  All their chock stones have long since slipped out, and their fingers are getting tired....

The Eurozone was set up by people who told everyone they were really smart. I never got what big advantages the Euro was supposed to bring to people, but I'm not a politician. The system was set up with certain rules about debt and spending that were supposed to make it safe. Then they started violating those rules. Nothing bad happened. So they let things slip a bit more.

Meanwhile, here in the US, everyone is playing chicken with the debt limit.  The S&P 500 doesn't seem to even remotely reflect the terrifying possibilities. It seems routine, just another bit of partisan game playing. Stuff like this happens all the time.

This is the result of what Dianne Vaughan, in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, called "normalization of deviance". You get used to violating tedious and annoying safety precautions. Nothing happens, because safety events are rare. So you violate them more, and start ignoring important procedures. Nothing happens for a long time. You relax. This is great. You have a lot more free time than you thought. Stupid rulebooks. What do those guys know?

Then the crisis strikes. Your reactor gets hit by a tsunami. Your shuttle blows up. People lose their jobs, their savings, their support from their government.  We're supposed to be smarter than that. But, of course, we were smarter than that in 2007.  And in 2001. We still bought houses or pets.com.

It's hard for science fiction to catch this kind of thing. SF is about smart people. And smartness is defined as acting on events in such a way that they change in a favorable direction, and then detecting and feeling proud of that change.  If you are a smart individual, what do you do now? Sell all your stocks and make sure you have enough bottled water? Chain yourself to your Representative's desk until he or she helps in a solution? Write a sternly worded blog post?

I live in a science fictional universe, but am not a science fictional hero. I don't know.

My Readercon schedule

As usual, I was insufficiently enthusiastic in my responses to Readercon's complex panel signup process, and only got one panel--on Thursday, tonight, before the convention even starts. The signup has you rate panels by A+, A, B, and I get the impression that a lot of writers who are savvier than me say A+ to everything they have even the slightest interest in. In my initial run through, I was honest...and then forgot to go back and inflate my scores.

And I knew I had to do that. This happened last year too.

Of course, unlike most conventions, where anyone can gas on about almost anything, Readercon panels tend to require actual knowledge if you are not to make a fool of yourself, and waste the audience's time.

My obvious ignorance is not the reason I did not get on any panels!  That is not the explanation! So don't write and tell me so.

Please.

I do have a couple of other events that don't rely on my knowing anything except my name, and what I have written.

If you want to catch me, here is my schedule:

Thursday July 14

8:00 PM    ME    How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction. Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Barbara Krasnoff (leader), John Edward Lawson, Terry McGarry. You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.

Friday July 15

1:30 PM    VT    Reading. Alexander Jablokov. Jablokov reads from The Comfort of Strangers.

This is an alien sex story. Nothing too graphic, but consider your sensibilities before attending.

Saturday July 16

10:00 AM    Vin.    Kaffeeklatsch. David G. Hartwell, Alexander Jablokov.

David has been editor for most of my books. And, surprisingly, after the miserable sales figures for Brain Thief, he still talks to me!  We're actually just at the same time, not together, but there may be some overlap as a result.

Sunday July 17

11:00 AM    E    Autographs. Walter H. Hunt, Alexander Jablokov, Rosemary Kirstein.

I got lucky, and am autographing with two people I know and like.  Because we'll have plenty of time to talk!

12:00 PM    NH    Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop group reading. F. Brett Cox, Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer. Members of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop read selections from their work.

This is the spot for short-shorts, which I seldom write.  But I do have one I wrot a long time ago, which I wil have to remember to pull out.

Tough clueless cop: Nesbo's Redbreast

Scandinavian mysteries had been on a roll recently, and so I have read a few. Recently I read a book by the hot-even-by-Scandinavian-standards Jo Nesbo, The Redbreast, with his detective Harry Hole. As the works of Sieg Larssen show, these writers are all courageous enough to grit their teeth and finally admit that they dislike Nazis. Very daring of them.

The Redbreast actually has real Norwegian fascists fighting the Soviets in WWII.  In the modern day, Hole pursues one of those soldiers, as he bumps off a bunch of people in pursuit of...well, there's no reason to tell you, although I guarantee you will find his goal odd.

What's particularly odd, though, is how incompetent Hole and his fellow cops are. After an early scene where he demonstrates his knowledge and deductive skill by describing what someone must have done with a gun, he pretty much goes to sleep and gets whacked around the rest of the novel like a pinball. He never figures anything out, and never really understands anything.

Despite this, it was a fun book to read--a page turner, as they say. So Nesbo has a gift for promising things--he just doesn't have as much of a gift for delivering them.

Now, I don't need my detective to be Sherlock Holmes, but I do think I deserve one with a bit more on the ball than Hole has. Nesbo is also frustrating because he raises issues, like a juicy case of sexual blackmail by a character close to the case, which gets terminated quite unsatisfactorily, at least for me.

It's instructive for me, since I sometimes think about writing a mystery. You can get away with a lot if each individual scene is suspenseful and exciting, even if the scenes, taken together, don't make a tremendous amount of sense.

Book review: Death at the Crossroads

I love reading mystery novels. Someday I would like to write one myself.

There is a handicap. Not only can't I think like a mystery, I never figure out who did it in the books I read. Actually, I seldom even care. Since mystery novels are about restoring the damaged world, you'd think I would.

Maybe it's because I see mystery novels, or at least the kind I like to read, as a way of investigating a world, a milieu, a culture. What is important to me is not the structure of deceit and justice, but the revelation of character and relationship that comes from the impact of the crime. People's world is disrupted, someone digs through their lives, and everyone behaves more dramatically than they perhaps otherwise would. In disrupting the structure of life, the crime reveals more about that structure than any other approach could.

So didn't mind (much) that the samurai detective in Dale Furutani's Death at the Crossroads doesn't really do much detection. Furutani uses the crime, the discovery of the body of an anonymous merchant found at the crossroads with an arrow in his back, as a way of investigating the tensions in early Tokugawa Japan. There are some entertaining characters, clever stratagems, and an underlying sense of growing oppression as the new regime, which will rule Japan for the next two and a half centuries, tightens its grip.  The detective is a ronin, a masterless samurai, who happens on this crime while pursuing a larger mission, trying to find a lost girl. He is alone, his world and structure of loyalties destroyed.

It's light, quick, and deft.  There are two more books after this one, where the ronin pursues his mission, and I will seek them out.

2011's most irritating word combination: "controversial tweet"

If you scan headlines on something like HuffPo, you eventually find some kerfuffle about something someone tweeted, about a car accident, or sex, or race, or some other topic that usually takes more than 140 characters to express yourself about. People respond that they are hurt, or offended, or enraged. Apologies are tendered, careers disturbed or ruined, commentary follows.

Of course, it doesn't take an actual tweet.  Lazar Greenfield had to resign from the presidency of The American College of Surgeons because of a joke about semen he made in an editorial.

Now, sometimes the tweet or statement is the issue, and sometimes it's just the excuse. It looks to me like people were gunning for Greenfield, as they were gunning for Larry Summers when he was president of Harvard. So what looks like "controversy" is really the public manifestation of a concealed power struggle.  I'm just guessing about Greenfield, but that was clearly what happened to Summers.

But usually they are completely without reason or consequence. People like these things. They are like mini speculative bubbles. Everyone can get involved, generate comments, and read what everyone else thinks. The topic seems more and more important. The bubble swells up then pops in a matter of days. No one loses their retirement fund or their house, but it's a bit of the same thrill of simultaneously making a mistake with a whole lot of people you don't know.

I still think "controversial tweet" is dumb, but then, I rarely change stock positions and have owned a house for years without ever feeling the urge to pull any money out of it, so I'm scarcely representative.

Plotting and planning

I am in the middle of the book. Ah, the dreaded middle, when all those brilliant ideas in the outline suddenly look like infomercials for grout cleaner; when your main character sits down on the floor, says he's tired, and refuses to move; when that clever plot twist sounds like a third-grader's knock knock joke.

Good times, good times.  You know what they say:  when you hit rock bottom, start digging.

Maybe they don't say that.

The book has been going quickly, but is still somewhere between half and two thirds done.  So I'm in the midst of a quick reevalution, trying to forget how far I am in the book.  It should be just as interesting here as when it started, if not more so. If the main character has satisfied some initial goals, he has certainly learned enough to establish new, more realistic goals. How about instead of getting that important question answered, he is met with resistance? If the the author didn't think of something initially that now shows up, isn't that more unexpected than if you'd known in the first place?

Through experience, I know that if these problems aren't solved quickly, momentum will be lost.  More news as it happens.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet": David Mitchell's Neal Stephenson novel

Historical novels are a genre, like mysteries and science fiction. They do have some presumptions. Books like War and Peace and Middlemarch are historical novels, deliberately set in an earlier era.  But the differences between these two books are instructive in thinking about the vastly larger genre we have in our era.

W&P deals explicitly with the big events of the day: the invasion of Russia, the defeat of Napoleon. And it has big shot historical figures as actual characters, like Napoleon himself, General Kutuzov, etc. Middlemarch is set in an era with specific social and economic relations, but (as far as I know), deals entirely with invented characters, dealing with intimate personal issues--more properly large social issues as expressed through personal situations.

And, as I suppose must be mentioned, W&P was written by a man, Middlemarch by a woman, though I didn't consciously think of that when I picked them. Boy's historical novels (battles, kings), girl's historical novels (loveless marriages, frustrated ambitions).

In this taxonomy The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is clearly a boy's historical novel: trade, battles, kidnappings, sinister monasteries. I enjoyed it a great deal.

But, while I was reading it, I felt I was reading a Neal Stephenson novel. It had all those Stephenson features: detailed explications of proto-modern phenomena like bookkeeping, mysteriously well-organized cults with ridiculous obsessions, plucky underarmed heroes defeating well-armed forces through pluck and guile. I love Stephenson (aside from that great Long-Now clock weight of a book, Anathem), but had never thought of him having influence on other writers. He seems too idiosyncratic for that.

Stephenson-style historical novels involve a bunch of people in the past trying desperately to figure out how to be us. They mirror our obsessions and our interests within the physical constraints of their environments.

In that sense, Jacob de Zoet is not entirely a Stephenson novel. Many of the characters do, in fact, think about their world the way someone who actually lived in it would.

But the most Stephenson-like aspect of the novel is that weird monastery cult. Mitchell spends an inordinate amount of time on this science-fictional organization. Like all Stephenson cults, both good and evil, it is well-organized, secretive, and obsessed. In this case, it has an organization of captives, and one of captors. No need to go into any more detail than that. It involves elaborate plots, meetings, rugged geographies, betrayals, and illusions within illusions.

All of it is great fun. I lack the faith in organization (or the mental organization, for that matter) to write a Stephenson novel, but I sure do enjoy reading them.

Like a green roof? How about just a sponge?

Green roofs are always touted for their ability to insulate and moderate water run off.  This is only the most recent manifestation of everone's enthusiasm for them.

Green roofs involve a soil-like substrate, and plants.  The plants are green, and are a living symbol of nature and sustainability.  But what percentage of green roof benefits come from the plants, and how much from that soil substrate?

I've never done a formal study, but several green roof vendors have told me that most of it is from the substrate.  Plants can transpire water, making the substrate dry more quickly after being soaked by rain, but they don't store much. Almost all of that "minimized runoff" is due to that substrate.

How appealing would it be if someone said "hey, we want to strap a giant sponge to your roof?"  You don't have to be a marketing expert to recognize that that is a nonstarter.  It would make no sense at all, and no amount of argument about runoff or cooling in the summer would be persuasive.

Put high-maintenance plants into the substrate, and it is suddenly something appealing, except to anyone who really needs to manage repairs for a large commercial structure. Particularly since what you gain in summer insulation, you lose in the winter. As one vendor said "Are you warmer in a wet coat?" You can get lots of additional heat loss.

I'd like to see a green roof and a sponge roof compared side by side.  I think the results would be enlightening.

Confessions of a lazy workaholic

Lately I've been working really hard. I work on a novel from 5:30 in the morning or so until about 8 or 8:30.  Then I work for a client who has a lot going on, doing everything from writing marketing pieces and press releases to running webinars. The rest of the time on their clock I try to get work out of people I don't manage and who don't need to do what I say. Fortunately, I have a teenager, so have learned authoritative persuasion without real enforcement capability.

Then I have to do things like exercise or cook dinner for the kids or manage my finances or keep the garden from drying out or being overrun with weeds. Not to mention doing the reading that will be the foundation of the book after this one.

None of this is natural to me. I have a great talent for leisure. Sitting in the garden reading a book, drinks with a friend, a bike ride--it doesn't take much to make me happy. So work has a high opportunity cost--I've always half thought that extremely hard-working people fear the challenge of unstructured pleasure, and so stick with that which can be clearly defined.

But instead of goofing off and doing those things, I'm working. So I figured out how to manage that, finally, at this advanced age. We'll see how it works out.

Self-improvement and self-help

I have long thought that the only personal program worth pursuing is figuring out who you are, and being the best version of that that you possibly can.  Figuring out who you are takes up the first part of your life, turning yourself into the best possible you takes up the rest, sometimes only after some bits and pieces of you have already started to come off.

That's self-improvement.

But you're not alone in this world, and you don't make sense without taking everyone else into account.  I, for example, have a wife and children. And our oldest is having serious problems in school, all self-inflicted. He doesn't have the slightest idea who he is yet, and desperately enraged at the necessity of finding out. So I spend a lot of time trying to understand, coach, and encourage, while not giving up on mutual understanding of my authority.

I sometimes feel like I have to defuse an unexploded munition daily. Every day the little numbers stop before they hit zero is a good day. Some weeks don't have that many good days.

Being who I am, I'm reading a lot of books. Some are good, many are indifferent or useless.  But the good ones speak with a real clarity. After all, we do have a lot of experience in dealing with adolescents. It would seem that there would be a lot of useful rules of thumb, and kind of flowchart reasoning: "when you do this, does A happen? Does B happen? The most effective approach differs between these two."

Many books are inspirational, intended to let you know you are not alone, that you are still a worthy human being, etc. Those don't do anything for me. I am looking for that distilled information on how to keep your child from failing Algebra, off drugs, and not screaming at his mother. And I'm finding it. That's self-help, and, at its best, it is an astonishingly useful genre. People know this stuff.

Most people who mock self-help books (myself among them) are smug in our assumption that we undertand ourselves and can figure out what to do if the situation is difficult. I can tell you here that I don't have the slightest idea of what to do, except continue to love, and am incredibly grateful that intelligent and dedicated people have chosen to pour their wisdom into text for me to benefit from.

Historically inexplicable: crime falls again

I've mentioned this before, but I might as well do it again: we don't know anything about historical causation.

The crime rate has fallen again. And despite sophisticated statistical models, camera-equipped cell phones everywhere, less mendacious police stats, and a general application of a huge amount of skilled brain power, nobody knows why.  This is happening right now, right here, all around us as we go through our day.

How are we supposed to explain why the Roman Republic fell? What the economic effects of the Black Death were? Why one group of people prospered while another languished? How the Industrial Revolution started? The amount of information available about those things is miniscule compared to the crimes stats of one medium-sized town in Pennsylvania.

It's not that I'm saying it's not worth trying to answer these questions. It certainly is. It's just that I can't believe anyone would say "this is the explanation".

But, of course, the incentives of academia are not the incentives of the rest of the world, and these incentives don't encourage ambiguity or degrees of confidence, and certainly not conclusions that violate predefined norms of ethnicity, sex, or religion.  And most historical work is now done in the Academy. What do we miss because the pursuit of tenure is not the same as the pursuit of truth?

I'd like to think we'll figure some things out. But some will be forever unknown.  And others will have only a relatively small degree of confidence. We'll just have to live with that.

The madness of the engineer

I was once an engineer.  My advanced academic degrees are all in engineering. I loved engineering, but something in my mind just is not suited for it.

I suppose that's also why I haven't come up with a spuriously precise date for the end of the world, like Harold Camping just did. Engineer.

Or why I don't believe in Young Earth Creation Science, like a number of members of that movement. Engineers.

Or why I don't seek a solution to political and economic development issues by hijacking planes and crashing them into large buildings. Many of the 9/11 terrorists were...engineers. One could argue that, if you want to have effective profiling of potential terrorists, an engineering degree should weigh as heavily than ethnicity or religion.

There is a mentality to engineering, a belief in closed systems, predictable outcomes of complex processes, and rationality. All of these are tools. They can be harnessed to reasonable ends, like designing bridges, electronics, and power plants. Or they can be used for insane purposes, constructing plausible structures on foundations of madness, confusion, and falsehood.  Theologians are just engineers without capital budgets.

To an engineer, everything should fit in the box, without leftovers. Tab A fits in Slot B. If you have the money, and a material with the right physical characteristics, you can build a tower to Heaven, and a translation device to handle the resulting multiple languages. Rationality cannot cure madness, but it can certainly make it more powerful.

I'm not going to claim I was a bad engineer because of my inherent negative capability. I was a mediocre engineer because I'm just not that smart.  Too bad, I really did love it.

But now, from outside, I can see how a useful mental process can run rampant outside of its natural habitat, like kudzu or Asian carp. It's worth keeping an eye on.