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like pulling teeth
the ones that have to be smashed up first and then pulled out in pieces. better be on drugs.

320 words.

outliney sort of thing, and last line, so at least i know where i'm headed, and some of featured landmarks.

www not?
Is it necessary to specify 'www' in URLs? Much of the time I've noticed it seems to work without, and it looks so much nicer to write them that way. If I test an address without www and it works for me, can I assume it will work for other people, or is it browser or system dependent?

Rouge Queen

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011876.html

It was the typo that had to happen. And happen it did, at CNN, just now today. The story is,

November 14, 2009
McCain Campaign Adviser pushes back on Palin book
Posted: November 14th, 2009 02:22 PM ET

	As you know, Bob, Sarah Palin's book is called Going Rogue. The title is on the cover and everything.
But observe on CNN just now:

The full page is here as a graphic, or read the original; maybe they haven't corrected it yet.

Whole Earth Discipline dilemma
The annotations for the next chapter, Gene Dreams, are

The annotated version of this chapter will be completed after I get off book tour—in November and December, 2009.

—SB

Should I keep going or wait until the annotations are up?

Guff candidates are

James Shields and Douglas Spencer. Online ballot available from Monday

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

When strikes the penguin!

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2009) — Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

I'm bereft! I didn't want this book to end! Even worse, it's a book I wish I had written. It seems like the type of book I would write if I only had the talent and gumption -- dreamy but full of precise details; homey but forlorn; arch but warm-hearted.

In a previous post I came close to pitching it as Dunsany meets Peake. More specifically, it's The King of Elfland's Daughter meets Gormenghast. Like Dunsany's equally great 1924 novel, it is about a human town on the border of Faerie, and about the place of magic and imagination in a commonsense, bourgeois world. Like Peake, it is full of eccentric, oddly tormented characters with eccentric names such as Endymion Leer and Polydore Vigil, Mumchance and Portunus. Yet of course Mirrlees is a far different writer than Dunsany or Peake, and the comparison shouldn't be taken too far.

One difference from Dunsany's book, for example, is that we barely see Fairyland (as it is called in Lud-in-the-Mist), while Dunsany takes us across the border a number of times. Mirrlees instead creates a geography in which a river from Fairyland, the Dapple, runs through the town, and the mischievous inhabitants of the land beyond the Debatable Hills try to sneak their magical influence past the bans placed on them by the burghers who have displaced the fairy-friendly aristocracy of old. The Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nathaniel Chanticleer, is haunted by a strange, magical-musical Note that he heard in his youth, and the plot of the novel is driven by the threat that Fairyland magic poses to his family, particularly his son. (His daughter, too, but one of the odd structural aspects of the book is that her experience is mostly treated as secondary until the very end, where it suddenly erupts into a heart-wrenching resolution.) There is a murder mystery at the heart of the book as well -- a cold case that happened thirty years in the past. The various plot elements intersect at a cozy farm on the border of Fairyland where the murder happened and where Master Nathaniel's son is taken to rehabilitate after ingesting fairy fruit.

Another difference from The King of Elfland's Daughter (and a lot of other great fantasy novels, including Lord of the Rings and Little, Big) is that it's not about the dying away of magic. It's almost the opposite, in fact, and this may reflect a slightly sardonic take on magic on Mirrlees' part. It is explicitly called a form of delusion many times in the book (possibly playing off the common etymology for "fairy"), and her bourgeois characters are nothing if not deluded. Thus their very attempt to banish magic is a delusion, or form of magic, itself. But Mirrlees also compares magic to narcotics, dreams, and to imagination itself, and she does not see modernity making an end of those things, far from it. So while she (the daughter of a wealthy sugar merchant) has a slightly wicked love of the banished aristocracy, she does not share Tolkien's yearning for a return of the old order. Duke Aubrey, the last aristocratic ruler of Lud-in-the-Mist, who is said to have vanished into Fairyland, is a complex figure, both noble and rapacious. The burghers who replaced him are more magical themselves than they care to recognize.

Well, I guess that's enough for now. I do, however, want to comment on the edition of the book that I read, which is from Cold Springs Press. I thought it was an incredibly poor production. Not only are there far more typos than is acceptable, but there were at least two places where a paragraph break came in the middle of a sentence. That's just embarrassingly shoddy work. The introduction by Douglas A. Anderson also contains at least one questionable statement, when he says that Mirrlees lived to see the 1970 reprint of her previously neglected book in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. While it's true that she was still alive, from what I've read elsewhere Lin Carter only made a perfunctory attempt to contact her, since the book was in the public domain. It's very possible, therefore, that the British Mirrlees was unaware that her magical novel had found new life and a new audience in America.

Whole Earth Discipline: Green Genes
Brand's annotations

Actually, this chapter might annoy environmentalists even more than the previous one did.

( Read more... )

It's more better than it looks

results under the cut ( Read more... )

Question for seat-of-the-pants writers
So, in the shower this morning my plot-focused brain handed me the direction it thinks the current story should have been going all along. The change would simply eliminate the mystery that's been driving the main character so far -- a mystery that I don't yet have a solution for -- replacing it with a different motivation for the main character's actions up until now, and providing a nice tidy ending. (This is the way my brain usually works: setting first, then ending, then characters.)

At this point I have about half of a draft, maybe two-thirds, and I could fairly easily change it to work in the new way. But if I do that I'll never find out where I would have wound up if I'd just kept following my headlights from where I am right now -- I'll never find out the answer to that mystery.

If you're a seat-of-of-the-pants writer, and you get an insight like that partway through drafting the story, how do you handle it? Do you go back and edit the existing words to match the insight? Do you finish the story in the current direction and then go back and change the completed story to match the insight, if it turns out to be better? Do you change horses midstream, write the second half to match the insight, then go back and make the story consistent after it's done? Something else?

Clean Sweep Saturday

One hour of steady funging & decluttering starts--

now.

migraine WTF?
Okay, having had a headache most of the day yesterday, I think I ought to be immune from having one today.

arg

And over at tor.com
Jo Walton's enthuses about Fred Pohl while K Tempest Bradford does much the same for Dollhouse's deserved cancellation.

How is it Kevin Bacon didn't get a role?
Poll #1485343
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 62

The statement "in 1966 the British government banned rock 'n' roll on the radio" is

View Answers

true
6 (9.7%)

false
38 (61.3%)

some other alternative (see comments)
11 (17.7%)

I wish to complain about this poll
7 (11.3%)

Guff candidates to be announced tonight

At start of Steve green's Taff talk at novacon.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Uh, "Proud Mary," uh ... um...

I'm still picking my jaw off the floor after watching the end of the current episode of Glee.

ETA: not only did they go there, they discovered water ice, and built a colony.

This entry was originally posted at http://whump.dreamwidth.org/31176.html, so there may be comments there you haven't read. If this is a "friends-locked" entry, you may need

talking about steampunk movies
I gave a talk about hollywoodian steampunk at the local SF club tonight. It went very well and not only did some people say it was funny, it was even called witty. This all makes me feel strange. A good kind of strange.

I'll try and post the whole darn thing up, words and pictures, within the next few days.

I think I now believe in dragons

This is the first photo (more or less) that we took on our road trip, somewhere on I5 just north of Yreka.
Just as we passed this welded metal sculpture of a dragon on the side of the highway.
Do you see why I now believe in dragons?

Image of the Day

-- Gaslight (1944)

Quote of the Day
YOU MAY, PERHAPS, have wondered why a man so full of human failings, and set in so unheroic a mould as Master Nathaniel Chanticleer should have been cast for so great a role. Yet the highest spiritual destinies are not always reserved for the strongest men, nor for the most virtuous ones.

But though he had been chosen as Duke Aubrey's deputy and initiated into the Ancient Mysteries, he had not ceased to be in many ways the same Master Nathaniel of old -- whimsical, child-like, and, often, unreasonable. Nor, I fear, did he cease to be the prey of melancholy. I doubt whether initiation ever brings happiness. It may be that the final secret revealed is a very bitter one ... or it may be that the final secret had not yet been revealed to Master Nathaniel.

And, strange to say, far from being set up by his new honours, he felt oddly ashamed of them -- it was almost as if he was for the first time running the gauntlet of his friends' eyes after having been afflicted by some physical disfigurement.

-- Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

Ur Doin It Rong
Today I was about to go for a walk -- I hadn't yet quite put my shoes on -- and then I opened Justine Larbalestier's new YA novel, Liar, which

bibliofile had left conveniently on the coffeetable book pile. A hundred pages later I looked up and remarked to her that this was indeed a goood book.

Rather late in the afternoon I did get out for my walk. And then I came home, and have just finished reading it. Stunning. It went by so fast, I am not sure how the author did that, although I would desperately like to know so I could do it too. The sentences are generally shorter than mine, I am pretty sure that is one thing.

I don't know if this total re-thinking of the last few days, of everything I am doing, from point of view to beginning and endpoints to narrative purposes, is (strictly speaking) catwaxing and idleness, when there are words to be written, or entirely essential resistance: my subconscious digging in heels again to say, Ur Doin It Rong, All Rong.

In the afterward, the author recommends the writing software Scrivener, for those of us with non-linear type creative minds. This sounds like something I have heard favorable things about before. Unfortunately I find it is still not available for Windows computers, but only for Macs. Word processing alone was a great enough gift, when I think of the ribbons of typewritten pages I had to tape together in college in order to draft a three-page paper.

Booze report.
J.K.'s Scrumpy Organic Hard Cider.

I'm normally a fan of dry cider, which is to say that I don't like sweet ciders in the least. This stuff, however....yum. It's as amber as beer, it smells like apple juice, and it tastes like apple juice that grew up and got a job in the big city. Fall in a glass. My fridge is never going to be without it again. (And oooh, I bet it'll be good with a nice pork loin in my crockpot.)

(PS to

pnkrokhockeymom: it's from Michigan.)

Death Comes to the Archbishop
Background: On November 12, 2009, the Archdiocese of Washington DC
announced that it would be forced to cease its charitable services
unless it were exempted from certain provisions of the proposed equal
marriage rights legislation before the City Council. On March 1,
2010, the law, passed in December of 2009, took effect. On the
morning of March 2nd, the Archbishop was found dead. No cause of
death has been determined, although foul play has been ruled out.

Dramatis personae:

W.   Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, previously of Washington DC and spiritual
guide to millions of Catholics.
J.   A certain deity.
G.   The archangel Gabriel.

( A One Act Play )

Atmospheric river, take my mind
Cliff Mass reports: "The numerical forecast models are consistently calling for a major pineapple expresss/atmospheric river event starting Sunday and extending through early Wednesday." Prepare the life rafts!