I survived

The Maze (in Canyonlands NP) is always pitched as one of the most remote areas of the lower 48.  I wouldn't say it was as remote as all that, but once you climb down into it, it would take a long time for help to reach you.

We made it seem more remote by being cheap.  The road to the trailhead requires high-clearance 4WD, and my friend Paul's car is only 2WD.  So we drove as far as we safely could, and walked the rest of the way in.  This included a steep climb down the one gap through the Orange Cliffs, the exposed and hot North Trail Canyon, followed by a brisk six-mile walk along a 4WD road we should have been driving down, circling the increasingly ominous Elaterite Butte. By the time we did 14 miles and got to the Maze Overlook trailhead, it was too late to make the difficult and dangerous climb down, so we dry camped in a side draw.  Did I mention that we had to carry over a gallon of water each, since this is serious desert?

The rest was hairy climbs up and down, and long hikes either on canyon bottoms or on exposed ridges with incredible views. There were only three springs along our routes, so we were constrained on where we could stay.  A two-inch deep pool of water seeping from the earth is a magnificent sight when you've been hiking under dry cliffs all day. And the dripping cascade in Water Canyon was a miracle.

It was great.  Nothing is more enlivening than getting to the far side of a dangerous challenge, and we faced plenty of challenges for our old bones. Now I'm home and Mary is sifting incredibly fine sand out of everything. I thought I'd shaken it all out on the driveway, but it's impossible to get that stuff out.

Anyway, I recommend it, but only if you have a lot of easier canyon and desert hiking under your belt first. And travel with Paul, who makes an incredible camp green chili.

Travel prep

Apologies for the light posting. Tomorrow I'm leaving on a long hike in the Maze District of Canyonlands, and have a lot of work to finish up, so that people aren't cursing my name in my absence. I can't guarantee that they aren't, but I can at least do my best to lower the odds.

We can talk on my return.

Has Richard III's body been found?

How did I miss the fact that Richard the Third's body might have been found under a parking lot in Leicester? (from The History Blog) You probably already know all about this. An excavation at the spot in a church where Richard was supposedly buried has uncovered a male skeleton with perimortem trauma to the back of the head and an arrowhead lodged in the back--a skeleton showing distinct signs of a back abnormality (probably scoliosis) that would have left one shoulder much lower than the other.

Still, it might not be him. The investigators are getting a cheek swab from a Canadian whose mother was the 16th great-grandniece of Richard's oldest sister, Anne of York (this man gets called a "descendant" of Richard III in some stories), for a look at his mitochondrial DNA for a possible match.

This is fun archeology-as-spectator-sport stuff. What other things am I missing out on?

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" as SF

Mary and I recently saw a great science fiction movie: Beasts of the Southern Wild. It was about a bunch of settlers in an alien world called the Bathtub. They create functional devices out of the remains of old technology and squeeze out a living however they can: they have learned to live in harmony with the world they have settled in, while others still try to maintain the no-longer-meaningful structures of the world they came from. They have a vivid and entertaining popular culture. As such stories often are, it is told from the point of view of a child, Hushpuppy, who has to deal with her ill, somewhat deranged father, a missing mother, and an oncoming disaster. She talks to the native fauna, a power not possessed by others. When the disaster strikes, she has a variety of adventures, and experiences loss.

OK, so it's not actually a science fiction movie. There are, however, many books set on alien worlds that don't make them as simultaneously strange and vivid as this movie does.

That I liked it as much as I did is testament to the humane skill of the writer/director Ben Zeitlin, and his fellow writer Lucy Alibar (the movie is actually based on a play Alibar wrote). I tend to dislike movies about "free spirited" outsiders who are misunderstood and abused by the existing power structure. But this one manages to evade any overt oppressed/oppressor agenda. The inhabitants of the Bathtub are not particularly functional, though they get by. And the power structure is desperately trying to keep them from dying, both collectively, when their community floods, and individually, since Hushpuppy's father is ill, and refusing to be treated. It's just that they come from a completely different world, and there is almost no communication between them.

Hushpuppy (who has a wonderful voice) compares the clean, well-lit refugee shelter they end up in as "a fish tank without water", which coveres both its smooth surfaces and the fact that she and her people are flopping around in it, unable to breathe.

And the movie does have big, mysteriously boar-like horned "aurochs" from the "Iced Age" that Hushpuppy learned about from her cool local schoolteacher. Aurochs, extinct giant cattle that appear in cave paintings,  have a weird role in European hunting psychology (Hermann Goering wanted to backbreed them from domestic cattle with "primitive" features and stock a hunting preserve carved out of the Bialowieza Forest with them), but those don't seem to have much with the semi-porcine inhabitants of Hushpuppy's imagination.

Anyway, one of the best SF movies I've seen in a long time. Well worth your while.

My story in The Other Half of the Sky

A few months ago, my friend and neighbor, Athena Andreadis asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was putting together. The theme was space opera, a female protagonist who doesn't feel guilty about juggling work vs. family, aimed at adult readers, no "big ideas" or used-up cyber-or-steampunk tropes.

Athena clearly didn't know that I never get asked to contribute to anthologies.

Then I demonstrated why. I was vaguely dissatisfied, pissy, uninspired, and whiny. I couldn't think of anything. I was sick (my eye, for heaven's sake!). I had other important things to do.

Time was getting short. Then, just before the excellent Readercon panel on the anthology, Athena suggested that she would like to see a story about Miriam Kostal, a character in both Carve the Sky (as an older woman) and River of Dust (as a younger woman).

And that did it. I thought about Miriam, and a story occurred to me. Miriam had always been seen by men, particularly men with whom she was sexually involved. This time I showed her from the point of view of a woman, Dunya, a kind of social worker with political refugees, into whose life Miriam erupts.

Athena charitably gave me some extra time, and I just managed to get something in: "Bad Day on Boscobel", set in an asteroid just mentioned as part of the background of Carve. Maybe people should ask me to be in anthologies after all.

The anthology looks fun. Here is the Table of Contents Athena recently posted:

The Other Half of the Sky

Athena Andreadis, Introduction

Melissa Scott, Finders
Alexander Jablokov, Bad Day on Boscobel
Nisi Shawl, In Colors Everywhere
Sue Lange, Mission of Greed
Vandana Singh, Sailing the Antarsa
Joan Slonczewski, Landfall
Terry Boren, This Alakie and the Death of Dima
Aliette de Bodard, The Waiting Stars
Ken Liu, The Shape of Thought
Alex Dally MacFarlane, Under Falna’s Mask
Martha Wells, Mimesis
Kelly Jennings, Velocity’s Ghost
C. W. Johnson, Exit, Interrupted
Cat Rambo, Dagger and Mask
Christine Lucas, Ouroboros
Jack McDevitt, Cathedral

And here is an interesting widget, from Kate Sullivan of Candlemark & Gleam, the publisher of the book, which gives a teaser version of the book:

Some problems with the procrastination literature

Like most people who want to become more effective, I goof off by reading books and blog posts about how to stop wasting so much time.

And you can spend a lot of time doing that, since there are entire blogs devoted to the topic, and a vast library of books.

I am currently in a situation where I have a lot of work in addition to my writing work, and am trying to keep up with all of it, so I'm thinking about how much waste there is in even a productive day. As I've said before, I am not much like the authors of these books ("...and then, as head of Sales, I achieved our first $10 million sales year...." "...and after that, I became the first person to kayak across the Sahara..." etc.) I'm just trying to get a little more writing done, not waste time on irrelevant stuff, and make sure I still have some fun.

One thing these books seem to shy away from is the simple "too boring" problem. What if the task you need to accomplish is really dull? It's necessary, it will take a long time, and it is mind-numbing. OK, maybe you should outsource it to some place in the world with a lower salary rate than yours. This may be a solution for some people, but when the task is, for example, moving handwritten manuscript comments into the electronic version with all the other comments, I'm not sure that's the solution. This is an example of a dull job that requires specific skill and knowledge. There are many such, and most of us have them in our task list.

There are techniques to make it easier, of course--break the task down into small sections, for example. But, ultimately, it is not your self-worth or fear of success that are the stumbling blocks that you need to overcome. It's the task itself.

I guess one meta-solution is to work to make sure your life has a minimum of such tasks. And that's a worthy ambition. I could order commenters to make all their comments in Word. But people work best when they work the way they prefer, and if a commenter likes to sit in an easy chair and make comments with a blue pen on a printed manuscript, that's their call.

Anyway, enough goofing off. I actually do two time-sensitive important tasks today before people come over for dinner, and I suppose I should do them. Neither is boring, but both require some specific performance quality on my part, and a fair amount of time.

Have a good Labor Day weekend.

How many fun ideas are there?

Tonight I was eating with my daughter and telling her about an article I had read, about what an airline did to stop people from complaining about a long wait for luggage (if you like to read this kind of "why your brain is totally screwed up" article, you already know the answer didn't have anything to do with shortening the wait).

I do like reading this kind of thing, and Faith enjoyed hearing about it. But I read stuff every day, and I like to be entertained every day. Does someone, somewhere, discover something both useful and entertaining about human behavior every day? Somehow, I don't think so.

But we still demand it. So is it any wonder that people like Jonah Lehrer, having to shovel intellectual tidbits into the maw of the great beast on a regular basis, might use neutral filler or past-expiration scraps to fill out a shovel load now and then? Can he really say "sorry, got nothing today, go read Proust"? It's pretty much the same reason the talking heads on TV keep talking even if they have to repeat what they just said. If they tell us to go get some coffee and come back in half an hour when something might actually be happening, we might not come back.

There are certainly some superhumans out there, who seem to generate endless interesting content. But that is not most of us. And even those people could probably stand to shut up once in a while. But as long as no one is allowed to shut up, ever, we'll see more and more intelligent, productive people self-destructing as they try to keep up the unrelenting pace.

You can tell I'm not one of them.

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.