Everything you need to know about novellas

I just sold a novella I wrote, "Feral Moon". It's a military SF piece about the invasion of Phobos.

In some respects, novellas are the best form for science fiction, long enough to contain a complete plot or a crisp exploration of an idea, short enough to not waste your time on a bunch of useless crap. But there is one thing that is bad about novellas, and that's how much you get paid for them.

Or, as I put it to my friend Greg Feeley at Readercon, while we were discussing that topic: "Novellas: all the work of a novel, all the pay of a short story".

That pretty much covers it. I still like writing them, though.

Book report: In the Shadow of the Sword

As I mentioned in my post On buying books at full price, a few weeks ago, I acquired a copy of Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, and was having fun with it.

It continued to be great fun, all the way through. I recommend it highly. But not casual fun, I would say, so be ready.

An earlier book of his, Persian Fire, for example, was a coherent, dramatic story, about the attempted Persian conquest of Greece, and the failure of that attempt. Shadow is, by contrast, the story of a gigantic historic turning point, one whose origins have been obscured, both deliberately and accidentally: the end of Persian and Roman/Hellenistic culture in the eastern Mediterranean and the emergence of the Islamic civilization that has dominated that region ever since. Be ready for a wide variety of Roman Emperors, Persian Shahs, rebellious Parthian noblemen, Jewish exegetes, and caliphs, most of whom have one reason or another for modifying history in support of their own legitimacy. Holland's ability to organize vast masses of contradictory and incomplete material and form it into a structure that is both fun to read and clear about what is known and what isn't is phenomenal.

This period, the fifth and sixth centuries, has become interestingly popular to write about lately.  Late Antiquity is hot. I'm not sure whether this says anything about our historical moment or not. In the early seventh century the Romans finally defeated their great opponent, the Persian Empire, only to have a third force burst out of the southern wastelands, annihilate the remnants of Persia completely, and come close to destroying the Roman Empire as well. Maybe Americans, having knocked out their own great opponent in the Soviet Union, ar looking around nervously for who might pop up unexpectedly to challenge them, and so become interested in another historical example. Or it might just be the result of the great amount of useful work in archeology, epigraphy, and a range of other disciplines that seems to be redrawing the intellectual map of this period.

Holland does use a similar structure to Persian Fire for this book, starting with a description of the crux situation, then going back to show how each of the players came to be in that decisive situation, and finally showing what the aftermath was. First he deals with one monotheistic bureaucratic empire, that of Persia, then he shows you the other monotheistic bureaucratic empire, the Roman (with its capital now in Constantinople, since the western part of the empire fell away in the fifth century), then he tells you something about Jewish intellectual developments. Then he shows you who those Arabs were, and how they came to challenge both those great powers.

And, all the way, he shows you how dicey, contradictory, and purely fictional the historical documents we have are. Relatively new temples and practices quickly develop a supposedly long pedigree. We should always be tentative in accepting our sources at face value.

Some of this is because the creators of a religion are not the ones who codify it. How much do you want an individual achieve? You want Jesus to both die for your sins and decide what to do with Gentiles who want to join the church? You want Mohammed to simultaneously bring a new revelation and give rules for managing the vast empire that spreads after his death? Transformative revelation and day-to-day life rules sit uncomfortably together, and the person who provides the first is seldom the one who codifies the latter. So someone comes along later, cleans up a few contradictory documents, grabs some useful practices from the conquered, retrospectively creates a tradition, and makes it all a neat package, useful for export. So it was with the new Islamic state religion. It turns out that there is little evidence of what the first centuries of Muslims actually believed, but plenty of things from later that claim to reflect what had been originally believed. There are a lot of interesting signs of where various early Islamic beliefs and practices came from, and it wasn't from Mohammed. No one seems to have issued a fatwa against Holland, however.

Holland takes a complex and difficult subject and untangles the strands so that you can examine each one individually before seeing how they all fit together. And impressive and intellectually satisfying accomplishment. Just be ready to do your work.

Readercon, and the past

Readercon is by no means an oldsters convention, but certainly many of us have been going for decades, and we show it. While the phenomenon I am going to discuss isn't exclusive to Readercon, it seems more noticeable there, because I see many of these people only there, once a year. That sampling rate makes all of us seem to age faster than we do.

I was on a panel with a writer who had a fund of good stories about his writing career. I don't know him well, but even so, I had heard some of these stories before. They were polished, and entertaining, and delivered with real verve. It wasn't anything like what you should do on a panel, which is interact with your fellow panelists and what they have said, but that's not such a big deal, or so unusual. I did note that the most dramatic incidents had happened quite a number of years ago.

Later that night, I had beers with a bunch of writers. One of us regaled the others with various entertaining stories. I had not heard many of them, and enjoyed them all, but most took place some time before the turn of the century.

There is nothing wrong with any of this, by the way. I just note it for my own use, which is to keep creating story-worthy incidents. As I've gotten older I've gotten more disciplined and work more. That is good for my income and my career, but it sucks as far as stories go ("want to see this spreadsheet of my task schedule?"). Yet another thing to work on. I'll have to work it into my schedule....

What's happened to you lately?

My Readercon - Friday, continued

The past slides behind me as I forge forward....

So, before I forget all about it, something more about the rest of Readercon. The astute observer will note that I spend too little time on the topics that got discussed, and more on the people I talked to. Readercon is a great place for ideas. But when I get home, they kind of get hazy. My brain is not as retentive as it used to be.

Friday night at Readercon is an event called the Meet the Pros(e) Party. Each of the writers puts a short quotation (sometimes not so short--I've seen dense essays in a microscopic font) on a sticky label, that fans and other writers can then collect. It sounds silly, but it's a great way to go up and talk to people you don't know.

My quotation was actually the first sentence of a military science fiction novella I'm shopping right now: "The corpses fell from interior of the moon like drops of water from an icicle." Nice and cheery.

But, anyway, just one picture from there, courtesy of James Patrick Kelly's Facebook page, of me and my friends Monica Eiland and F. Brett Cox.  That's pretty much all you need to know.

My Readercon - Friday

If I do this with enough speed, I will be done detailing the 2012 Readercon before it is 2013.  One must have ambitions, after all.

Friday I had to work, then zip to Burlington to moderate a panel on "Evaluating Political Fiction", a potentially fraught topic. We were essentially supposed to be helping readers make judgments on the appearance of politics in fiction, when you should just accept it as an amusing quirk on the part of the writer, and when that is impossible, and how writers try to put one over on you.

We had a range of political opinions on the panel, but that played little role, since everyone really did stick to the topic at hand.  Of course, I worked to make sure that was true. I may be fairly liberal politically, but as a panel moderator I am that most science-fictional of entities, the benevolent autocrat.

Or, at least, manager. I've managed staff, and know that most capable employees like their managers to provide resources, a view of the bigger picture, and protection against those who would do them ill. On a panel, I am the same way. A bit later in the convention, I went a few minutes late to a panel with a topic I was interested in, and the moderator had already opened the floor to questions from the audience. That meant that he was lazy and had given up fifteen minutes into the panel. So, no matter how interesting or thoughtful the individual panelists might have been--and there were interesting, even fascinating things being said--the whole was a disaster, DOA. Audience questions and comments are an important part of the deal, but only after the panelists have been permitted to rev the panel energy up enough to keep things moving, and to give the audience something relatively clear to respond to. I left that particular panel as soon as I saw how things had gone. Too bad. A good moderator is essential. I worked for quite a while to make sure I was one.

The panelists on the Evaluating Political Fiction were L. Timmel Duchamp, Rob Killheffer, Vince McCaffery, Anil Menon, and Ruth Sternglantz (this particular panel had many people without web sites, so you'll have to search them out on your own).

Then I had to zip over to a client meeting nearby, and back. I took in a panel by Ellen Kushner on how she put together her half narrated half acted audio books--Ellen is a radio personality as well as a writer, and adept at the technical issues.

Of course, one of the reasons I went was so that I would have something maybe to say on my next panel, Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction AUthor; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? Sadly I know almost nothing about this topic, and should have noticed that I was assigned this when I was asked to carefully review my schedule.  I thought I had. Really. I do have an audiobook out there, Nimbus, and like listenting to podcasts. I still sounded a bit uninformed.  Fortunately the panelists, Mike Allen, Claire Cooney, Jim Freund, Alison Sinclair, and Gregory Wilson more than made up for my deficiencies.

I did get to go out to dinner with Judith Berman (her web site lapsed and was hijacked while she was in Dubai for a couple of years) and her charming son, Sam. I had the panel to get to, so we couldn't go anywhere particularly interesting, but that's not really what matters at these events.

That night was a big social event, Meet the Prose...but I'll have to stretch this out a bit, since that's worth a bit of comment on its own.

My Readercon - Thursday

Jeez, it's been a week and I haven't reported on my Readercon experience.  I'll have to be quick before it all fades into the usual obscurity of things that happened more than a couple of days ago.

This year the con started on Thursday, which seemed absurd to me. But it was well-attended from the start, and I'd say the extension was a great success.

As a local, I could fill in the panels on Thursday night and Friday afternoon, and, in fact, most of my work was done by the time the weekend proper rolled around.

My first panel was about "Managing Motivation to Write", ably run by Steve Kelner, who interviewed me years ago for his book Motivate Your Writing! His wife, mystery writer Toni Kelner, and I are frequently on panels together. Also with us were two writers I had not met before, Matthew Kressel and Ben Loory. Everyone else on the panel was more, well, writerly than I am. I am rarely inspired, work to rules so rigid they probably violate some kind of OSHA regulation, and am often savagely mournful enough that I wish I could get to drinking more than my one or two evening glasses of wine--but, regretably, am too disciplined to do it. Everyone else followed their stories where they led and had all sorts of adventures. They did not outline. I always feel I am the inspiration on such panels. I did not grow up as a writer, and only fell into it later in life.

Anyway, a fun panel, and Steve managed it ably.

Immediately after that I was on a panel with the ominous title of "Is Realistic Fiction Useful?" It was a perennial topic, truth and fiction in "truth" and "fiction". The moderator was Liz Gorinsky, of Tor.com, who had clearly thought a lot about how to keep things moving.  Again, there were a couple of writers I had not met before, Nathan Ballingrud and Grant C. Carrington, as well as Daniel Abraham. I had met Daniel and his frioend and collaborator Ty Franck at a writing workshop in Taos, NM a couple of years ago. It was great to see them both, and Daniel was particularly amusing on the panel. He also writes a book every month or so, and so is a bit intimidating to trade "what have you been up to" news with.

OK, enough for tonight. Anyway, you get the idea--it's surprising how much fun writers are, at least SF and fantasy writers.  If you ever get a chance to buy one a drink, I suggest that you take it.

My Readercon schedule

Most SF writers in my area will be spending this weekend in Burlington, MA at Readercon, everyone's favorite literary SF convention.  If you live around Boston and have never tried it, you should, at least for a day.

This is my schedule, if you want to track me down.

Thursday July 12

8:00 PM    ME    Managing Motivation to Write. Alexander Jablokov, Steve Kelner (leader), Toni L.P. Kelner, Matthew Kressel, Ben Loory. Kipling (an SF writer himself) wrote: "There are nine-and-sixty ways/of composing tribal lays/and every single one of them is right!" Science fiction writers should know this better than most, yet most people don't realize just how different the creative process is for different writers. Join a panel of writers discussing how they keep themselves going, the underlying reasons for why a given tactic works for them, and how it might (or might not) work for others.
 

9:00 PM    G    Why Is Realistic Fiction Useful?. Daniel Abraham, Nathan Ballingrud, Grant C. Carrington, Liz Gorinsky (leader), Alexander Jablokov. In a 2011 blog post, Harry Connolly wrote, "If I want to understand the horrors of war, the pain of divorce, the disappointment of seeing a business fail, I don’t need to read fiction. There’s non-fiction on that very subject.... So forget about justifying the utility of fantasy. How do people justify the utility of realism?" Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried distinguishes between "story truth" and "happening truth"; O'Brien feels that fictionalizing some aspects of his own experience makes them more universal. On the other hand, reality TV, Photoshop, and CGI have proven how blurry the line between fiction and non-fiction can be. How do we tease out these distinctions, and what is realistic fiction's place in the literary landscape?

Friday July 13

2:00 PM    G    Evaluating Political Fiction. L. Timmel Duchamp, Alexander Jablokov (leader), Robert Killheffer, Vincent McCaffrey, Anil Menon, Ruth Sternglantz. This panel examines the intersections among story as political expression, story as entertainment, and story as art and craft. When an author takes a clear political stance within a work of fiction, how does a reader's perception of that stance--and the extent to which we find it compelling or intriguing--affect our sense of whether the work is entertaining or well-crafted? Given the diversity of opinions among readers and the ways that judgments of quality are necessarily influenced by culture and personal experience, should readers aim to achieve consensus about a political work's merits and meanings, or do we need to embrace a more pluralistic understanding of how literary works are both experienced and evaluated? What are best practices for critics, academics, and other professional readers as we navigate these tricky waters?

6:00 PM    ME    Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction Author; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? . Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Jim Freund, Alexander Jablokov, Alison Sinclair, Gregory Wilson (leader). Building on last year's talk at Readercon about promotion for the speculative fiction author and drawing from an upcoming SFWA Bulletin article, Gregory A. Wilson and discussants will focus on the pros and pitfalls of podcasting for fantasy and science fiction authors, looking at some examples of successful podcasts in the field, different types for different purposes, and the basics of getting started with podcasting.

8:00 PM    NH    Group Reading: Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop. Heather Albano, James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer, Sarah Smith. The members of the oldest extant professional writers group in New England give brief readings from their works.

Saturday July 14

3:00 PM    G    If It Doesn't Sell, What's the Point?. Jeffrey A. Carver, Bernard Dukas, Andrea Hairston, Alexander Jablokov, Barry B. Longyear, Nick Mamatas (leader). Fiction writing is usually considered an art but frequently judged in terms of commerciality rather than artistic achievement. Publishers want to know whether books are selling, and writers want an audience. These days, when rough economic times have hit writers particularly hard, "Why continue?" has become an important and frequently asked question. Are there reasons writers should continue even if their work isn't selling as well as they, or their publishers, would like? Are there times they should stop? Why do we write, anyway? The panelists will consider how writers can make these decisions, and what options are available in the current economic climate.

The war on the 50s

As I've mentioned before, PSAs about child abuse, substance abuse, spousal abuse, etc. tend to be lame and/or creepy, because there is no way of measuring effectiveness, there is free money from some charity or agency, and young designers like to do them to build their portfolios.

Here (via copyranter) is a PSA about child abuse that at first (in the "clever" twist invented by the Energizer bunny) seems to be about learning how to make model rockets. Watch it, then think about what it's real message is.

In his post, copyranter says the film makers found a real offender in a real correctional facility for this.

What does it teach? That you should never let your kids do anything anywhere with anyone, because the world is a disgusting and dangerous place? Well, pretty much. Leave your kids with their Playstations in the family room, for heaven's sake. Does it teach you anything useful?  I don't think so.

Because who the hell builds model rockets anymore?

To find something that seems innocent and useful that a kid might be doing, they had to reach back into the dark Heinleinian past. I suppose you could do it with a mountain-biking club, or something like that, but nothing comes quickly to my mind that has the same virtuous resonance as the rocketry thing. Plus 50s bashing is always popular. After all, we all know that the 50s were actually a dark tormented time that just hid its basic sickness successfully. The more innocent something seems, the greater danger hides beneath it.

This is not to assert that there is no danger out there. Recent church and school scandals show that there is.

But I don't think going after obsolete hobbies is the best way to protect our children.

On buying books at full price

Like anyone else, I get seduced by getting books at a discount off cover price, whether at Amazon, or with coupons, or at special sales. It's nice to save money.

There are two problems with this. One, how much money am I saving?  Given that I sometimes like to go out and get a drink at a local bar like the Saloon or Casablanca, which runs over $10. And sometimes I have more than one. It's not that saving money on books is thus irrelevant, or that I drink way more than I read (really!), but it seems proportionally less important.

And when books are on sale, I am often tempted to buy them. I mean, I buy books I otherwise wouldn't, because the price is lower. Yes, I know that's dumb. I do it anyway.

So I have books I sell to used bookstores, and books I leave on my shelves for some future date when I read them. Hello, three volumes of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. That vicious little court intriguer sounds just up my alley, from what I've read, but I can't say when I will finish them.

So, a couple of days ago, when I read a David Frum review of a new book by one of my favorite history writers, Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, I went out and bought it at my local bookstore, Porter Square Books. At full price. Who's going to tell me where my consumer surplus lies? Tonight I'll drink at home.

And I'll report on the book when I'm done. So far, it's great fun.

My first audio book: Nimbus

Quite some time ago, a gentleman by the name of Colby Elliott wrote me, said he was a fan of my novel Nimbus, and asked if he could an audio version of it. How could I say no?

Colby worked hard on the book, slowed down at almost every step by my unresponsiveness, my confusion, and my general ability to make simple things complicated. He never lost his humor or his determination, and now, at long last, we have an audio version, voiced entirely by Colby.

Nimbus is my brain surgeon/jazz musician future noir, and has always seemed like it could use some more attention. The audio version is surprisingly fun, because of Colby's ability to maneuver around the complex sentence I really liked writing in those days. If you are going on a long car trip or something, this is what you should take, particularly if you are headed in the direction of Chicago. Check it out.

Nimbus audio version, from Audible

Why is one tiny hand so funny?

I have no idea why I find the tumblr One Tiny Hand so fascinating, and hilarious. But I do.

And I'm not even sure what a tumblr is, or how it works, and will certainly never create one.

We are our symptoms

As I've mentioned, I had a retinal detachment, and have been in for three successive eye operations, none of them pleasant. Presumably, this did more damage than just one operation, but the results will not be clear for months.

Like most people, I immediately search online for the experiences of other people suffering the same physical disorder, since that is where you discover that the unique is actually fairly common.

Except, it seems, in my case.  In various iterations of my freedom-seeking retina, I have seen a field of translucent green, looking somewhat like beach glass formed from an old Fanta bottle. Light comes through it, and some vague shapes. It has a solid look to it.

But I find that decent narratives of retinal detachment are not that common, and no one mentions seeing blobs of vivid green between them and the world they are trying to see. In fact, when I searched on it last week, I did find a reference--this blog, a few days earlier.

My surgeon, Dr. B, is blithely dismissive of my concerns. It's all normal, he indicates. We've been partners in this struggle since early April, and I have become an affront to his surgical amour propre, as well as, I suspect, a financial drain on his partnership--the insurance company pays a global for the surgery and followups. As a result, every visit from me no represents unpaid labor. I doubt he consciously recognizes that his lack of joy in seeing me is at least partly based on a financial calculation, but I certainly feel it is there.

I have no interest in having weird, off-brand symptoms. I want a normal recovery, no more than a sigma or two away from the mean, because I fear that every odd symptom is a sign that I will need further surgery, or that my eye will never recover any function.

That's enough about my intimate physical decline for a while. I wish I had had some spiritual awakening, or some epiphany about the rest of my life during my enforced face-down inactivity, but no. That is not something that seems to come to me. I did some plotting and thinking, but no more than I would do on a decent evening at the Diesel.  Which is where I think I will head now, to start getting caught up on my writing projects.

The eyeball's return

I am finally cleared to read and write, though I don't want to overdo it.  My retina seems to have fitted back where it is supposed to be.  Thanks to all who have written me.  I hope to be back to regular communication shortly.

Out again

My eye had another detachment last week, and some failure in that operation means I have to go in again today.  So you won't be hearing from me for a while, since I will again be banned from reading and writing.  I'll let you all know when I am back up.

My annual science fictional final exam: signing up for panels at Readercon

Readercon is my favorite local science fiction convention. It has a considerably more academic/litcrit slant than most cons, and focuses entirely on written fiction.

That's all fine.  But it does have the longest, and most intimidating panel sign up I have ever encountered.  It takes me more than an hour to fill out.  Just reading and comprehending the dense paragraph describing each panel takes me back to the SAT.  I always feel a bit of relief when I get to the end and don't see lines of ovals to fill in with a #2 pencil.

Plus, it has you rate each potential panel A+, A, or B, but does not limit the number of A+ ratings you can give. The obvious strategy, if you want to be on a panel, is to rate them all A+, and then beg out of whatever does not appeal. Every year I try to be honest, and every year I end up on one panel about "Semicolons and Other Narrative Partial Stops" held at 10 am on Sunday. No more!

On the other hand, if I don't even understand the panel description, it seems bad form to get all enthusiastic about it.  There are a lot of people at Readercon who probably do understand it, and can say insightful things about it.

I'm a third of the way through sing up and am exhausted.  I'll have to get back to it some other time.

Another example of the poverty of historical explanation: Enigma

No matter what, we have to believe we know why things happened. Some people believe in vast impersonal historical imperatives, others in sinister conspiracies, yet others in divine providence. 

A couple of months ago, Greg Cochrane, in his interesting and crabby blog West Hunter, brought up an example of the poverty of historical explanation: for a couple of decades after the Second World War, historians wrote accounts of what had happened in that war, and why, without any knowledge of a significant influence on how events turned out, the breaking of the Enigma codes. But no one (as far as I know) said "actually, the defeat of the Germans, and the US victory at Midway, and a whole bunch of other things, seem unbelievably lucky. Is there something we don't know about them? Were there, maybe, some spies who have not yet come to light? Or some other explanation?"

I do remember a good friend saying, after the publication of Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, the first big public explanation of the breaking of the codes, and the effect that had on the war: "No one understood anything about it!"

Now, maybe, we do. Though the Soviet victory in that war, which really decided things, still makes no sense at all to me. No code breaking for them, no secret weapons, no across-the-ocean safe haven pumping out bombers and cruisers, nothing but beatings, starvation, mass slaughter, burning villages...and victory. Utterly incomprehensible, and utterly fascinating.

If I'm not timing, I'm not working

I've discovered something about myself--something I could have done with discovering a few decades ago.

I work best when I use a timer.  I have become a devotee of Pomodoro intervals: twenty five minutes of work, followed by five (OK, usually a bit more) minutes of break. Pomodoro Technique has a lot more to it, but I'm not really that strict about it.

But when I time, I work. That doesn't mean I literally don't work when I'm not timing, but the odds definitely go way down. I often delude myself that I'm working only to conclude, on mature consideration, that I'm not. Because the damn timer's not on.

Those twenty-five minute intervals are perfect for me. I work intensely, but that is about the time my mind would start to wander. So I get an official break. I generally follow the rule of sets of four (two hours), with a longer relax in between. If I do it strictly, without cheating, I get an immense amount done.

I often fail. But more and more often, I succeed. My mind is astonishingly disordered. I need external rules to get anything done. I'm fortunate I can dress myself. I am a triumph of technique over essential personality.

But now I am off the timer and should finish. The more strictly I obey the breaks, as well as the work periods, the more I get done. So now I'm done!

A fresh dinner in ancient Rome

In an intriguing review of an upcoming book, Rome: an Empire's Story, by Greg Woolf, Adrian Goldsworthy (author of a number of books about Rome in my library) notes something interesting about Roman diet and daily life:

Woolf notes that chickens appeared in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of the last millennium BC. Quick to breed and relatively easy to maintain, they provided eggs and a source of conveniently small quantities of meat—an important attribute in a world without refrigeration.

It's this kind of observation about daily life that can really bring a past time to life. People made practical choices, based on what made the most sense given their circumstances. One chicken = one dinner. Bigger ruminants make a lot of meat, impossible to store without refrigeration. That's why the ancients largely saved them for sacrifice and mass consumption.

I also didn't know chickens had reached the Mediterranean that late.

I'm always a sucker for another book that might help me understand ancient Rome, so I think I will eventually end up with this one too.

Ow, my eye! Part I

Retinal detachment is both weird and depressing. For me, it was a spontaneous failure of a part of my body I normally did not worry about. One day my retina was in place, sending signals to my brain, the next it had peeled off, and all I saw was a green, translucent blot. No impact, no external cause.

As soon as my optometrist saw it, she sent me to an ophthalmologist. A charming young guy from his office came and picked me up and drove me up to Andover, about a forty five minute drive from where I live. After a couple of hours of sitting around, the ophthalmologist popped in and injected gas into my eyeball to try to float the retina up in preparation for surgery, to take place two days later. This was less fun than it sounds.

Then the doctor disappeared. I had to sign a long series of sheets detailing the possible procedures he would perform on me in a couple of days.  I had never heard of any of them: scleral buckle, vitrectomy, etc. They might remove my lens, my iris, inject oil into my eye. It all depended on how things looked when he got in there. The sheets I was signing said the doctor had carefully explained things to me, and I was aware of all the risks and possible negative consequences.

Of course, he had done no such thing. To the doc, I was a bunch of supporting tissue dangling from a surgical site. I might have feelings about what was going to be done to me, but I certainly wasn't supposed to have opinions. It was just like clicking Accept on a software contract. What other choice did I have? To give him a little credit, I was an emergency addition to what was clearly a busy schedule, some of it presumably with other people who had serious conditions.

This was a surgery that shouldn't wait. The retina is an impossibly thin and delicate piece of tissue, thinner than plastic wrap. Waiting around could damage it beyond repair. Given a lot of advance planning, I might have reviewed a series of eye surgeons in the Boston area, considered the options for treatment, and chosen someone. But, again, time was tight, and a quick search showed that this guy had the characteristic of most use in cases like this: he does a huge number of these operations, on a daily basis. With any delicate surgery, you want a specialist, who does only that type of surgery, and has done it a lot, so that by the time he gets to you, every kink has been ironed out, every oddball condition seen, and every movement deeply ingrained into his nervous system.

And, of course, I wouldn't trade that amount of experience for a better bedside manner. I presume it's possible to get both.

This is where physician ratings by "consumers" become kind of meaningless. I could rate how well he explained things to me, but how was I to rate how well he did at the thing that mattered, the operation itself? I know how I am recovering (slowly, but steadily). If something goes wrong, was it because of something he did, or because things go wrong no matter how well he did? Could I be recovering faster? When my vision settles, will it be as good as it could have been? Really no way for me to tell. He can be rated only statistically, and I have no way of doing that.

So they sent me home, to sit up and bed and fret. The bubble floated the retina up a bit--there was a bit of translucency in the green, and it got a bit smaller. But not enough to be worth anything. A day later, early in the morning, Mary drove me up to a surgical center in New Hampshire