Happiness comes in small packages

Woo hoo!

Sounds of Sunday

Sunday mornings had a distinct sound for me, growing up in Los Angeles. There was Mrs. Ornellos next door, doing the breakfast dishes and wailing out Spanish ballads. Later, there was the oldies station K-Earth 101, which I never tuned my radio to, but if you were out riding your bike or hanging out in the neighborhood, you'd hear Beach Boys and Temptations coming out of garages and from boom boxes in back yards. In between, there was Breakfast with the Beatles on listener-supported KCRW. Two hours of Beatles, every Sunday, including rareities and solo work and stuff I just wouldn't have heard otherwise. These days, Breakfast with the Beatles in LA is on a commercial station, and there's no Breakfast with the Beatles show in Phoenix, but I'm determined to find a good one online with non-obnoxious on-air personalities and one that doesn't play too much stuff that sucks (like, er, Ringo's solo stuff, or anything Paul did in the 80's). So, if you've got a good Breakfast with the Beatles in your town, shout out, eh? Thanks.

***


Wrote 32 pages this weekend, which is pretty good considering my brains were leaking out my nose. Oh, who am I kidding? They're not Jasperian or Prattian or Lakensian numbers, but I don't think I've ever written that much over a weekend. It's all crap, I'm sure, but progress is being made on the novel.

But, man, I'm itching to write some short stories. Guess the sooner I finish the book (completion is still projected as months away), the sooner I can find out if I can still write a short story.

Octavia Butler

Locus Online is reporting via Steve Barnes that Octavia Butler died of a stroke yesterday.

She was such a fine writer, and by all accounts a fine person. I met her once, and I wish I'd gotten to know her. She made many important contributions to our field, not the least of which is her powerful, harrowing novel Wildseed.

A couple of years ago at WisCon I was taking a cab ride to a pharmacy, and I mentioned to the driver that I was in Madison for a science fiction convention. She asked me who some of the good writers were in our field, and I tried to come up with names that maybe someone not too too familiar with written sf might recognize, people with some mainstream cross-over. She hadn't heard of Gibson, Sterling, or Dan Simmons. But then I mentioned Maureen McHugh, and she knew of Maureen's work and had enjoyed it, and I mentioned Octavia Butler, and she was really ethusiastic about her work.

My sympathies go out to her friends, family, students, and fans.

Musings on writing and superpowers

It would be really good if I could write faster. I started writing after breakfast this morning, continued up to lunch, picked it up again after lunch, wrote on and off till dinner, then hoofed over to the coffee joint and wrote until about 9:00 pm. I don't know how many hours that was, but it was a bunch, and I needed all of them to make my goal of 20 pages today. That's one of the reasons that, if I couldn't have Superman's powers, I would want the Flash's. Because he's very fast, you see. That's his whole thing. If Barry Allen were a writer instead of a police scientist, I bet he could have written 20 pages in, like, three seconds.

Also, he can vibrate through walls.

If I were the Flash, I'd have written a trilogy before lunch, and then vibrated through a bunch of walls.

Green Lantern is pretty cool, too, but I don't know how having a power ring would help me as a writer.

I'm tired on account of writing all day. Maybe a bit punchy.

Also, I have a cold. I got it last night, one of those times that you feel fine one minute and then it's like, "Hey, wait a minute, all of a sudden ... yeah, I just now came down with a cold."

I imagine both Flash and Green Lantern were susceptible to colds.

Superman, not so much.

Superman's pretty fast, too.

It must be nice to be Superman, but I bet he thinks his poop don't stink.

Anywhere There's a Game - Excerpt

A fair chunk of my story "Anywhere There's a Game" is currently up on the Realms of Fantasy website, so you can read about a shooting guard who can fly, a point guard whose court vision enters the realm of creepy, and a really, really big center. If you want the power forward and the small forward, you'll have to buy the magazine.

Goose!

This morning as I was going out to the car I heard a funny honking from above. I looked up just in time to see a pair of Canadian geese sail overhead, the last light of dawn touching their wings as they flew toward the half-moon in the southwestern sky. Damned pretty.

Today's plea

Motion blur

Raced to LA after work Friday night, rolling into town around midnight. Saw K&A for brunch Saturday morning, then attended a big get-together of loveable loons from the college SF club, some of whom I'm fortunate enough to see a few times a year, and some of whom I haven't seen in, like, decades. It was a blast, full of goopy warmth and love and laughs, feeling connected to a continuum of friendship and nerdiness, all perched on a hillside overlooking a vast sea of Los Angeles lights. Really lovely.

Breakfast this morning in Playa Del Rey with the parents, and then back across the desert in time to catch the NBA All-Star game tip-off.

No writing done this weekend, which is a bit of a problem, but I'll deal.

Very tired. Could stand for it not to be Monday tomorrow, but I checked the calendar, and, yeah, it's Monday tomorrow.

Crazy-headed

You know things are crazy at the Day Job when I end up wearing a hard hat.

No sleep till 50!!

So, it turns out I can kinda work hard when I make myself. Tomorrow night I've got to turn in the first 50 pages of my book for the workshop I'm going to in May, and I'd been kinda hating everything I'd written for the book so far. This weekend, I decided that I absolutely could not bear to submit what I had. I mean, taking flawed work to a workshop is good, that's what workshops are for, if things go the way they're supposed to, you get help with the flaws and they start to flake away like dried guano. But sometimes the work just sucks, you know? The flaw with the story or chapters of a novel is that they simply suck in an all-encompassing ball of suckitude, and when things are that bad, I don't know that it's worth workshopping.

So, I gave myself the last two nights to rewrite the first 50 pages and hopefully get this book back on track. It was pretty tough today in particular, because I woke up at 5:00 AM with a migraine, struggled to make it through the Day Job, and when I sat down at the keyboard tonight, I wasn't really ready to give it that arithmatically improbable 110%. But I toughed it out, tough guy that I am, and fought through it, fighter that I am, and I made it to page 50, and a big bunch of it was entirely new stuff, and I'm sorry, but I just rock, is all.

Tomorrow morning and evening I'll do a quick clean-up, try not to despair at what will almost certainly be another round of "I suck, I can't write, I should take up neurosurgery," and send it off to my fellow workshoppers.

And then it's on to the next 50 pages. And the 50 after that. And the 50 after that ...

***

Tangent Online reviews the April/May 2006 Asimov's, and Kathy Sedia has some kind words for my story, "The Osteomancer's Son". Woo!

Anywhere There's a Game published

Came home to contributors copies of the April Realms of Fantasy, in which readers will find "Jane: A Story of Manners, Magic, and Romance" by Sarah Prineas (and only the addition of the words "quite wonderful" need be added to the title to fully convey what the story's about), as well as my story about an aging NBA basketball player and his oddball team mates, "Anywhere There's a Game".

I love getting contributors copies. Most days bring only bills and junk mail, but days like today are the reason I still reach into the mail box every day with fresh hope.

Whattaya know?

Question: Is Greg susceptible to blog trends?

A. No
B. Yes

Test your Gregspertise.

St. George & the Pterodactyl

Came across this cool illustration in Bibliodyssey:

Repeat performance pending

Kirsten and Aaron got me more bomb-making beer-making materials for my birthday! Yay!

And they also sent me bandaids that look like bacon, so not only do they know me, but they know me well enough to predict a repeat of the last time I tried to make beer.

And to sum up what happened to the ceiling last time I tried to make beer, I merely offer this reminder:



Thanks, guys!

My own fantastic vs. mimetic dynamic

I'm fascinated by people, and I love reading stories about them. The stories I write are filled with fantastic elements -- magic, witches, gods, aliens, talking dogs -- and people who read a lot of speculative fiction know that stories can contain such elements, and even derive much of their strength from those elements, yet still be fundamentally about people.

But I also like stories that are simply about people, that show us how strange and arresting people can be once we know enough about their day-to-day lives. I guess that's why I'm such a fan of This American Life and Open Letters. I've written some fantasy stories that make an attempt to convey the beauty and sadness of everyday lives, that try to find the magical in the mundane. "Tales From the City of Seams" reaches for that, and my sequence of stories about a basketball player, "Anywhere There's a Game", that'll be out in Realms of Fantasy takes a shot. But I'm not good enough at made-up people, not even close to good enough, to achieve even a small measure of the power of something like the X Letters.

My friend Randy links to a story that ran last month in Washington Post Magazine, The Peekaboo Paradox, which is about Eric Knaus, a Washington, D.C. kids party entertainer who goes by the monniker "The Great Zucchini" and pulls in about 100K a year by pretending a banana is a cell phone and putting a diaper on his head. But that's only part of what makes him interesting. It's a fascinating profile of a fascinating man, and if I ever write a piece of fiction that's a fraction as interesting as this piece ... well, it's unlikely I will, but it's something to shoot for.

More pseudoflesh for breakfast, Mom!

I'm behind in writing, in email, in household chores and errands. But I'm not too busy to post about this gross-sounding precursor to replicator technology:

Artificially cultivated meat is a USDA-certified science-fictional idea. In his slightly creepy 1969 novel Whipping Star, science fiction phenomenon Frank Herbert wrote about pseudoflesh, meat protein that was produced apart from an animal:

"Where would they get a real steer?"

"There are some around for story props in the various entertainment media, that sort of thing. A few of the outback planets where they haven't the technology for pseudoflesh still raise cattle for food."

From Frank Herbert to your breakfast table:

Ink-jet printing has come a long way; we used to use it for what was called "hard copy." Soon, you will be able to use a modified ink-jet printer to make yourself some breakfast.

Tissue engineers like Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina, and Thomas Boland of Clemson University, have been printing biomaterials with modified ink-jet printers.

The cartridges are washed out and refilled with suspensions of living cells; the software that controls the characteristics of the ink is reprogrammed and you're good to go. Boland and Mironov use layers of "thermo-reversable" gel to build up three-dimensional structures like tubes—capillaries, to use the medical term. When the tiny droplets, or clumps, of cells came together closely, they fused; the gel can be easily removed, leaving a tube of tissue.

Glamdring back in hand

After a few days in the shop, my computer is back. They fixed the white spots on my LCD by giving me a new LCD. They also did a couple of things that Ben at the Genius Bar wrote on the work order, even though I hadn't complained about them, such as replacing the keyboard and fixing the broken lid hinge. They even installed a new optical drive, even though neither me nor Genius Ben had noticed anything wrong with the optical drive. And as for the hard drive, they took it out and shot it and put in a new one.

Which means that, if I hadn't been able to start my machine in Target mode and back up my data, I would be sobbing big sobs of sobbing sadness right now.

As Jed says, it's back up time.

And this would have cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars if I didn't still have Apple Care on this machine. (If you have a Mac, I really, strongly recommend investing in Apple Care before your warranty expires.)

So, it's kinda weird. It's my computer, only not. The keys feel weird, probably because I haven't worn them down to a gloss yet. But considering how bad this could have been, I'm not complaining.

Or, rather, I'm going to stop complaining.

Hiccup, Blogger and otherwise

Hm. My two entries from yesterday seem to have disappeared, and Jason Lundberg tells me he couldn't post comments to them when they were still appeared. There was a bit of a Blogger hiccup, I recall, when I posted yesterday, so maybe their database is hosed. Hopefully a temporary thing.

Anyway, I guess I'll repost them.

***

The advantage to walking around an alpine town at 2:30 in the morning looking for an open store to buy Rolaids, without a jacket or sweater, just a thin long-sleeved t-shirt and no socks, is that it makes one feel at least as hardy as it does foolish.