GenCon 2015 Part 4: Saturday, in which I finally play a game

Part 4: Saturday, in which I finally play a game

Panel, what, 12? Sheesh.

Character Voice with Steve Drew, Kameron Hurley, Brad Beaulieu, Jay Posey, Aaron Rosenberg

Yes, some of the panel topics overlapped a bit. I'll try not to overlap the notes.

1)      Read your/other authors' dialog without the tags/actions. Can you differentiate who is speaking?

2)      Treat characters with dignity (Do your research)

3)      There is a lot of current concern about being politically correct and not appropriating  culture inappropriately. If you are wondering exactly what that means, don't feel alone. But treat it cultures with more respect than Hollywood gave Native Americans in most earlier westerns and you'll be ahead of Hollywood, if that gives you any solace.

4)      Empathy. Each character is the hero of their own story, we just don't know how long they intersect this story.

5)      Add body language, habits to build character/voice.

6)      Okay to vary POV distance, e.g. when noticing details or doing internal monologue use some voice/idioms but when doing more expository description use less character voice.

Panel Next (that which is skipped when numbering hotel floors): What Makes a Character a Hero (Kerrie Hughes, Steven Long, Sam Sykes, Patrick fills-a-room Rothfuss)

This was Rothfuss' first panel and he brought the attendees in from the gaming tables, the room was more full than any of the prior writing sessions I'd attended. And with good reason, he pontificates well and entertainingly.

Notes:

1)      Consistent moral core - line in the sand; let them bend, evolve but not cross/break

2)      Homer Simpson centers on Marge

3)      Good guys are heroes. The Greeks had great mean who fell due to a flaw, typically hubris

4)      (Considerable discussion of Superman/Lex Luther then Batman, Rob Roy, Harry Dresden (Jim Butcher) and Ned Stark (Game of Thrones)

5)      Need people to interact with or there is no story

6)      Need to have suffered an indignity

7)      Bathos - humor that undercuts tension

8)      Identification with a hero needs to be emotional

9)      Earnestness is easy to identify with: Han Solo and Luke Skywalker

I spent some more time on the dealer floor, I hadn't covered half of it yesterday. I saw some nice hardwood dice towers -- too expensive for me but I might try to build one, someday. Best I saw for the price were from Geek Chic Furniture (lots of great stuff, not cheap by any nuance of the word). The Cadillac of dice towers were on display from Wyrmwood, in your choice of seventy different woods.

I finally played a game!  I played "Code Names" from Czech Games. It's a more literary "Guess Who?" The fellow manning the booth explained the rules and then he and I played against a father and son that had also been watching the previous patrons play. It was pre-release -- they sold out several hundred beta copies, gone first day of the show -- but should be out about now, sometime in September, 2015. I plan to get one.

Fresh from my fun with Code Names I played another game at the Steve Jackson Games booth. They had "Mars Attacks: the Dice Game" set up for demo so even though I'm not a fan of Mars Attacks, I played a round of that. It was fun -- typically the only dice based games I play are Yahtzee and 10,000, but this was engaging without much mental challenge. After that it was time for the Guest of Honor session.

I was a bit uncertain about seeing GoH Terry Brooks, author of The Sword of Shannara. I read that book back in 1977 and it was clearly good but I couldn't get past the hubris or mimicry vis a vis J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. I wasn't the only one. Turns out Mr. Brooks is insightful and delightful and understands the burden with which he has been saddled. He answered questions from the 200+ person audience about the dozens of books that he has written and then they showed the MTV trailer from the forthcoming series The Shannara Chronicles (January, 2016) which starts with the second book, The Elfstones of Shannara. He then answered audience questions on that. I'll be interested to watch some of that. I'm reading the book now. In fact, I got a free copy and had Terry Brooks sign it on Sunday morning and I got a chance to apologize for not reading more of his work over the past 37 years. He was very gracious.

Panel 14: Character: Worthy Opponents (Elizabeth Vaughan, Matt Forbeck, Christopher Rowe, Geoffrey Girard, Terry Brooks)

Girard sat next to Brooks and was clearly in a bit of awe, especially as the panel introduced themselves; Girard has essentially one novel (and lots of short stories), while Brooks has dozens and a major TV deal, etc. Fun to see, both were good natured.

Notes:

1)      Need to balance villains against protags

2)      Try to understand the motivations of your villains

3)      Christopher Rowe: "I don't like The Joker. I don't even like Heath Ledger's Joker. How about that?" (This is going out on limb, deriding a famous bat-villain with this audience, especially the version played by a favorite son actor, deceased no less.) I believe Mr. Rowe was saying he wasn't believable, all persona and no depth.

Panel 15: Supporting Characters (Maxwell Drake, Elizabeth Vaughan, Geoffrey Girard, Terry Brooks)

Notes:

1)      Ask tertiary characters: What do you want from this scene? - Maxwell Drake

2)      "Plot drives everything." - Terry Brooks (the observant reader will not that this does not well align with an assertion in an earlier panel that plot is there to facilitate the characters, give them something to arc against)

3)      Have love and hate in every chapter

4)      Sometimes supporting characters can show up the main character -- builds character.

There was one more event for me (well, two, if you count out to dinner, which I do in this case) on Saturday, but I'm tired now and want to go, so I'll lump that into Sunday. TTFN.

GenCon 2015 Part 3 TGIF, with other acronyms to come

Part 3 TGIF, with other acronyms to come

(Before I forget, as I know some of this may border on tedium, you won't want to miss the final installment in this series detailing the events of Sunday morning wherein I undergo the most difficult moments of my writing endeavors thus far: a professional writing critique.)

TGIF ! Not really. I was on vacation, it was all good. I used Park Whiz to reserve parking in advance. I picked 3 different lots at an average cost of $6.00 per day. My favorite lot was at 323 W Michigan St, it was small, flat and had a row of trees along one side so I could park and have shade on my car in the afternoon. It was an easy 12 minute walk, three-quarters of a mile, to the convention center past the state capitol building and the Hyatt Regency.

Panel 7

Friday's sessions started for me at 9:00 am with Writer's Craft 101 (Steve Drew, Geoffrey Girard, Josh Vogt, Jason Schmetzer, Kameron "We Have Always Fought" Hurley)

Oh, I stayed out by the airport at the Baymont Inn and Suites. Nothing to write home about, so I didn't. But breakfast was passable and it was an easy 18 minute drive to downtown. Hotel costs remain the biggest burden at these events, $92 per night for 4 nights pushed it well over $400. Best if you have a roomie.

Josh Vogt is a good example of one of the authors writing tie-in novels for RPG developers like Privateer Press and Paizo, as well as his own stuff such as "Enter the Janitor" which sounds a bit like Ghost Busters, but I could be way off. Anyway I had a good convo with Josh on the dealer floor later at one of the game companies booths about how he got his stuff marketed.

Notes:

1)      Steve Drew: "There's no leveling up in a writing career." It was a good quip but they each then shared an anecdote of how they had, actually, leveled up through various actions, e.g. attending a writing workshop, joining a key critique group, etc.

2)      Jay Lake: "Do not start a new project until you finish the one you're on." (First pass, anyways.)

3)      Authors tend to be authority averse -- writing selects for that.

4)      Persistence

5)      How to do dialog? Do multiple stuff at once: authentic, tension, information, character -- do not write it the way people actually speak: b-o-r-i-n-g.

6)      Read dialog aloud though to see if it rings true, but remember the end of the above note.

7)      See Elmore Leonard for dialog

8)      Read movie scripts -- most are available on the web

9)      Recommended: David Mammot (Glengarry Glen Ross)

10)   Recommended: Rachel Aaron: "2,000 to 10,000"

11)   30 second fantasy editing: check a) character motivations b) Inconsistencies c) swords

Panel 8

Character Craft: Motivation and Obstacles

(Howard Taylor, Elizabeth Bear, Gwenda Bond, John Howard Jacobs, Lauren M Roy)

My first session with Howard! But he was moderating so he mostly tried to stay out of the others' way. He's a good moderator like that, but it doesn't let his wit shine through. There was later for that.

I think this is where I first ran into fellow Writing Excuses "Out of Excuses Retreat" 2013 alumni Christy, Alissa, Scott, and Kendra-who-goes-by-Kenny. Twas good to share with them again.

Notes:

1)      Make them want something -- then take it away.

2)      What's their worldview?

3)      Remember the old standards: man vs. man; man vs. nature; man vs. self

4)      Strip away character until essence exposed

5)      Revenge is a strong motivator; regret is not.

6)      Connections: Mad Max to dog, then to feral boy

7)      Training montage / flashback to build competence quotient

8)      Use other character reactions to main character actions to build competence

9)      Build empathy in dialog by mentioning similar experiences

10)   Put two things in front of character and make them choose -- need to be consequences; sometimes needs to come out negative

11)   "When in doubt have a man enter through the door with a gun." - Raymond Chandler

12)   The two-year-old's question: "Why?", "Why?"

Panel 9

Dialogue and Dialogue Tags

(Kerrie L Hughes, Robin D Laws, Elizabeth Bear, Chris Jackson)

Notes:

1)      On tags: inclined to leave them in for a novel but take out as many as possible in a short story.

2)      "No, are you certain?" The water glass was cool in her hand.

3)      Long back and forth should have a certain amount of tags.

4)      Remove 75% of "nodded" and ilk (smiled, grinned, etc.)

I actually scheduled myself a break in here for lunch. Was hungry. Also I had signed up for the "Foam Fighting Arena" but the weapons were heavy and my wrist and arm were sore and I was gonna feel silly, which was wrong. The folks competing were having a grand time and it was clearly definable as "research". Sigh.

I did wander around the Dealers Floor for a couple hours. It is huge. Hundreds of game manufacturers, collectibles dealers, furniture makers, and an authors and artists section. Everything is set up for easy interaction with the folks manning the booths. You can easily chat with game creators, science fiction authors and fantasy artists. And in most cases buy their wares. They also had scheduled autograph signings, mostly authors but I saw Summer Glau (from the Firefly franchise, etc.) signing for a couple of hours and was very cordial with all the fans that I saw her interact with.

Panel 10 (Not actually a panel)

My final scheduled writing session on Friday was a paid session with Michael Stackpole. This was him giving his prepared class on characterization and while there was a lot of useful information the tone was much more commercial than the panels and other sessions that I attended. You won't find this information on his website since, as he noted, he makes a portion of his living this way; and so I won't include it here for the most part. Maybe just a tidbit or four:

1)      Plot is a way to facilitate characters

2)      Convey info through characters, e.g. one says "All the trolls we've ever come across are eight feet tall."

3)      Sometimes it's okay to do blitzkrieg characterization: George was always well dressed and sang along with the choir but you never wanted to trust him with the collection plate.

4)      Roger Zelazney: "A short story is the last chapter of a novel that you haven't written." Get in. Define. Get out.

Panel 11

I hadn't pre-registered but there was a late panel called Advanced Kickstarter, not that I ever intend to run a Kickstarter campaign but Howard Tayler was on it and not as the moderator so I stayed to get a little dose of Howard. Rest of the panel: Susan Morris, Michael Sullivan, Brad Beaullieu, Stephen Hood.

I didn't take many notes, but these things, done well, are a ton of work. Clearly you would want to use the tools: kicktraq.com, backerkit.com, etc.

I did ask a question about setting the goal, e.g. is there a formula that if you know you have X number of fanatic fans and Y number of more casual fans that you could expect X*m + Y*n + C ? I think it was a bit too much math to get across verbally, especially this late in the day, but it did spark a discussion of how indispensable a good Excel spreadsheet can be.

A pleasant evening walk back to my car and then I hit Kroger from some fruits and veggies for dinner; oh, and cookies; some for Saturday, too.

GenCon 2015 Part 2

Part 2

So after what would have been a very tolerable 6 hour drive to Indianapolis my first observation was that the area was very flat. "The map is not the territory." Maybe, but it was certainly flat enough to be a paper map. Why wasn't the drive tolerable?  Mostly it was the cracked windshield caused by a truck-spewed rock just north of Nashville. But also the thunderstorm as I descended into a valley someplace in central Kentucky was just plain frightening. Armageddon-end-of-the-world, what-on-earth-are-all-you-drivers-doing-away-from-your-loved-ones frightening. But we all got through it -- as far as I know.

Second Panel: Atmospheric Writing

This one included Dan wells, Kerrie Hughes, Erin Evans and Elizabeth Bear.

Notes:

1)      E. Bear will step into a void and fill it with her opinions. That's not all bad, but wore on me in later panels. She quoted Emma boll: "POV is everything". Also word choice as mood lighting. Give some "telling details".

2)      Erin:  let characters mood show through the POV narration. E.g. for a rustic feel: "It was darker than 2 feet down a cow's throat."

3)      But not just snark. "So, no shit, there I am driving down the road and this truck..."

4)      Use "Just in time" exposition to create atmosphere

5)      When you're juggling, use both hands.

6)      Have someone describe your story back to you after they've read a bit -- they may get the plot right but if they don't mention it's set in the South then you may have failed to convey the atmosphere.

7)      Paragraphing: an art for changing atmosphere.

Third Panel: Editing your work (Susan Morris, Erin Evans, James L. Sutter, Howard Andrew Jones and Matt Forbeck

1)      Watch out for variance in voice, and inconsistent character arcs

2)      Finish your story, then polish it. Later events may shift earlier stuff and early polish is wasted.

3)      Put it away for a week/month then attack with fresh eyes.

4)      Read your work backwards -- not maybe word for word but scene by scene to avoid getting caught up in it.

5)      When a scene just isn't working, ask: what do the characters that are present want?

6)      Talk it out -- maybe draft an email explaining -- send it or don't. Or muscle through it.

7)      Again:  Finish your story. Write or die software makes you keep writing.

Panel 4 (Hell, yes, it's still Thursday, only 2 pm) Defining Genre and Why it Matters

I will recommend that you pull your itinerary together early for at least the first day and get those tickets mailed to you with your convention badge. Even though these writing seminars are mostly free, they still had tickets. There were about 100 seats or so in the rooms and usually far fewer people than that, like 35, but if you wanted a seat up front you wanted a ticket, non-ticket holders had to wait and enter the rooms last. And picking up a packet of late ordered tickets in the Will Call line on Day One meant waiting in a line that was hundreds of yards long. No joke. But it actually moved well, less than 30 minutes to wind through much of the convention center. Still not a fun time, but I chatted with my linies so not too bad.

Steven Diamond, Django Wexler (are people really named Django?), Brian McClellan, Geoffrey Girard, Steven Long.

Geoffrey Girard is an author I hadn't heard of. He's also an English teacher in New Jersey. He started as a short story guy, winning a Writer's of the Future a decade or more back. I enjoyed his flippantry and chatted with him a couple times between sessions. I'm currently listening to his novel "Cain's Blood", a bit gory but you can see the short-story-guy bleeding through -- some chapters could stand alone.

Notes from Defining Genre...

1)      Girard: Horror doesn't sell, Thrillers sell. My novel, "Cain's Blood"... running gag joke as he held his new novel aloft several times through panel.

2)      For marketing, once committed to a genre, need to hit it 90% (can't drift too much or be too mash-up-y and get good placement at Barnes and Noble)

3)      Steven Long has an article defining essentialelements of fantasy and 6 sub-genres. I haven't read it. I expect that statement to be true a year from now. Two. Three....

 

I did skip my 3:00 panel -- I hit the street outside the Center and selected a food truck for lunch, had some Moroccan shawarma. Good flavor, a bit chunky.

 

Panel 5: Killing Off Characters: John Helfers, Dan Wells, David Farland

 

Notes:

1)      Need to care about villains, make them real, or their death doesn't matter.

2)      Guides and sidekicks, too (Obiwan)

3)      "Fridging" a character: Green Lantern's girlfriend was stuffed in his fridge so he got motivated to be Green Lantern but was no emotional impact on reader.

4)      Killing a character can indicate danger to our protag: Indiana Jones and choosing a cup as Holy Grail (No frequency of Indiana Jones references did not seem greater than it would have been had we not been, you know, in Indiana)

5)      Good: instilling a sense of "is it safe to keep reading" -- the characters are in real and certain danger.

6)      Death can't be the only thing for main / recurring characters -- it just ain't gonna happen.

7)      Reference to Robert McKee who has theories about "Story"

Panel 6: Researching Your Story (Geoffrey Girard, Dan Wells, Thomas M. Reid, Delilah S. Dawson)

I've researched a little -- spent a night at a monastery for example. (Curiously also in Indiana).

Notes:

1)      Docents at museums. Some of these geezers will talk to you for hours. And they know their shit.

2)      Have something that you explain in unnecessary detail. Covers a multitude of later sins.

3)      Have something that you don't explain enough (boldly make them assume that you, too, know your shit.)

My final activity on Thursday was "An Evening with Patrick Rothfuss" (2 hours). I didn't know Rothfuss, only vague rumblings that he is a bit bigger than life. And has a beard. I still haven't read any of his stuff (although he read a couple snippets to us). This was in a bigger room. Packed. About 300 people. Some folks without advance tix did not get in. He regaled us with stories only tangentially related to questions asked from the audience. He was good at it. And we all promised that tidbits would not be repeated out of context. And so I won't. But if you get the chance, let him entertain you. Different than, but almost as recommended as any similar event with Neil Gaiman. Inspired me enough to buy his latest book and have him autograph it, "The Slow Regard of Silent Things". I've also bought the first book on audio, but haven't started listening as yet: "The Name of the Wind". It's a tome.

GenCon 2015 Part 1

GenCon 2015

Intro

GenCon had been highly recommended to me by the principals at Writing Excuses, specifically Howard Tayler, Dan Wells and Mary Robinette Kowal (authors all), but not as the mega gaming convention that it is -- not in my case, leastways -- but for the Writer's Symposium.

GenCon has been growing every year as the premiere gaming focused convention in the country, some 60,000 attendees strong at the Convention Center in Indianapolis. There is also a much smaller contingent of writer-wannabes. Some of these writers-in-development also love to game; or to write gaming adjuncts. There are whole novels set in Dungeons and Dragons land or in the card realms of Magic the Gathering. But here I know not what I speak of. I know more about the couple hundred who go to hear authors share their wisdom with us, mostly for free -- or more accurately "at no additional charge". (GenCon is fairly cheap as these things go, a full four day pass was just $88.00 -- but a fair portion of activities have add-on costs.)

But let's get back to the authors -- or in this case, the teachers. (I was quite happy when, one day on the dealers floor, Howard introduced me and 3 fellow Writing Excuses Retreat alumna as "some of my students.") There were names whom we may not have heard of like Josh Vogt, to some of the biggest names in the SFF genre such as Patrick Rothfuss and Terry Brooks (yes, for those of you as aged as I am that is Terry Brooks author of The Sword of Shannara. Turns out he's a very nice and insightful person and not the devil incarnate that some of us thought he must be to dare imitate our favorite J.R.R. Tolkien back in 1977. By the way, MTV is bringing Mr. Brooks' book The Elfstones of Shannara to the small screen in January 2016. I'm reading my personally autographed copy now.)

First Panel: Let's Get Emotional

The first panel I attended was on "Eliciting Emotional Response". And for the most part the sessions were the typical panel format: one moderator and 3 or 4 panelists. The moderator would spark the conversation for the first 30-40 minutes and then the audience would ask a few questions for another 10 or 15 minutes. John Helfers, Editor/Publisher moderated this first session. Gregory Wilson was one panelist, among other things he runs speculatesf.com, a podcast, with Brad Beaulieu, something I hadn't been aware of but that I plan to check out.

Here are some tidbits from this Thursday morning at 11 session:

1)      Beware the "audience insertion character" -- you may try to use a generic anyman character to get at your readers emotions but you will often be better served by creating a character that the reader wants to be, or wants to love -- or that is interesting (example: The Talented Mr. Ripley)

2)      Create 3-D villains -- they are easier to hate and possible to empathize with

3)      Readers love SFF worlds, but in the end the "dongle of flarnovar" is not what they ultimately care about.

4)      Useful characters run toward the sound of gunfire.

5)      Conflict among an ensemble cast can be fun. (Notice during the weekend, those of you who game, the people interacting at your role playing table.)

6)      The second Pirates of the Caribbean movie is less good than the first in part because Jack Sparrow is more caricature than character -- he's hard to connect to (a bit of a counterpoint to the watch-out-for-the-audience-identification-character above).

7)      Use voodoo: hurt/help the reader by hurting or helping the characters.

8)      Need highs and lows -- lulls in emotions allow the reader to recover a bit and then attain new levels: action, action, action (or emotion, emotion, emotion) tends to desensitize

9)      Movie recommendation: "Run, Lola, Run"

10)   Someone quoted Chuck Wendig: "Treat humor seriously"

11)   The cake is gone and I didn't get to eat it either

Science Will Be Truth For Life

This article, There’s so much that science will never be able to explain from The Washington Post, was sent to me with the inference that it implies that God is lurking in the crevices of our unknowns.

It is a concise and thought provoking piece. Here are my thoughts, as provoked.

I’m currently reading, with my ears, a story that posits FTL communication. Faster Than Light. Most modern scientists think that FTL-anything is impossible – they might categorize this story I’m listening to in the “fantasy” genre, rather than the “science fiction” one. As they would anything with time travel. Here’s a simple conundrum: the earth is hurtling around the sun and the sun is circling the center of the galaxy, etc. So if I get in a time machine and travel back 1,000 years, won’t I find myself in the middle of the deep void of space, having traveled in time, but not in place? So let us not travel, but rather use books to look back a more modest distance, a hundred years or so, to a time when most scientists thought heavier than air flight (HTA-Flight?) was of dubious scientific likelihood. Today we can “fly” in things like rockets that barely even have wings.

Then there was Dr. Bruce Lerner, with his somewhat ironic surname. He was a college computer professor of mine some 28 years ago. (Wow.) He told me, without a trace of doubt, that the new IBM personal computers in our university lab had more computational power than a family would ever need. After all, most of us never do anything more complicated than balance our checkbook or figure our taxes. Except these days, 28 years later, we also like to operate realistic flight simulators, and “chat” with our friends on the other side of the planet, and watch videos. All of these take more compute power than those original PCs packed within them, Dr. Lerner.

What we don’t know is a lot. But it’s less than it used to be. Is it a rainbow that ever slips away as we approach it’s base? For my part, I hope so. In any case, whenever I want to doubt science I look no farther than magnets. They can’t possibly attract each other without touching. Not anymore than two people can. Wait.... What?

Ever more,
- Chip

Review: The King of Pain by Seth Kaufman

The King of Pain: A Novel With Stories by Seth Kaufman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fun book; a bit unusual in bouncing back and forth between the wacky world of producing over-the-top reality TV and a variety of prisoner stories. The weave is compelling and the Hollywood stuff makes we want to re-listen to Lynda Obst's "Hello, He Lied" which I remember enjoying several years ago.

View all my reviews

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15783514-the-ocean-at-the-end-of-the-lane" >
The">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15783514-the-ocean-at-the-end-of-the-lane">The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil">http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1221698.Neil_Gaiman">Neil Gaiman

My rating: 4">http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/646190391">4 of 5 stars


You don't have to read this. Neil told me that I didn't have to read the Acknowledgements; that the story was over and that it was mostly names and thank you's. He told me just as he told everyone else, right there at the beginning of the Acknowledgements. I didn't stop there though, because some of the names I would recognize. I knew I would. So I read on. And I suspected there would be more meaning to pull out.  And I did know many of the names and I had been along (from a very great distance) on that journey of writing this book and the longer journey of his coming together with Amanda and the coming of age of his youngest daughter and all of it.  And in the end I was one of those "folk of Twitter", but by then I was already choked up again by my reading of the Acknowledgements that I didn't have to do (because Neil told me I could skip it, that I could be done now, before... before I read the names and the thank you's. But I choked up just as I did pages earlier, with the... well I'll avoid telling, but its allegorical and familiar and imperfect and nobody experiences the same experience the same. (I think Neil told me that too.) I've read the acknowledgements and now I am done with The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  (After I rant a little about how it made me feel, I felt I had to write about it, after midnight or not, but you didn't have to read it.)



View">http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21443651-chip-patton">View all my reviews

The Letter D: Alpha-non-Grata

I think it may be too pristine of a Sunday morning to work up a good rant, but since when did the letter "d" become alpha-non-grata? Everywhere I look, everything I read, final d's and ed's are getting dropped like winning young NFL quarterbacks that can't pass. "Some examples?" you say. Okay, Katy Perry lyrics: "...I would be your girl; we keep all our promises..." I'm no William Safire, so I may get the name of the construction here wrong, but in order to agree with the conditional past tense of the copulative verb "would be" you need the same form in the second clause, i.e. "we would keep", contracted down to "we'd keep" so that the syllable count holds the rhythm of the song: "...I would be your girl; we'd keep all our promises..." , but you can't just drop the 'd, because then one clause is past and the other present tense while they are talking about the same thing!

Here's another example I saw recently "He was award a prize". No. He might be "astride a prize", if it was, say, a prize bull, but here it's intended to be used as the passive voice past participle form of the transitive verb "award", not as an adverb (there is no "award" adverb). So it has to be "He was awarded a prize". I know we slur it when we speak it and the extra ed gets lost, but come on people, not when you're writing.

One more, that doesn't have the double-d and isn't tricky: "He gave back the prize that he receive." It happened in the past, "receive" needs the final d! If he hadn't received it already then he couldn't give it back. Come on, folks, it's an easy letter to type, it's right there on the left hand home row of your keyboard; use that middle finger (and not just to point it at me). Thank you.

Made a Review of Makers

"Perry though has the better sex scene in the book, with minor but well-rounded character Hilda." ... from my just posted review of Cory Doctorow's book Makers.

On talking to God...

"...you talk to God once and it changes your life. You talk to him every weekend and it's not long before you're both going, So what's new? Ehh. Yeah, same here. " -- Steven R. Boyett

Hawking No Heaven

Thoughts on The Washington Post's Stephen Hawking 'There is no Heaven...'

I haven't read Hawking's book, The Grand Design. I did read this book:
"The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" by Francis Collins

I don't really recommend it, mostly it made me more annoyed than ever at C.S. Lewis, whom the author quotes liberally. It was full of faulty arguments about how animals aren't altruistic, so people are special (there have been psychology experiments indicating the opposite) and other such propaganda.

The only one of these Washington Post essays that I've read so far is the one by Ramdas Lamb, the ex-Hindu monk. He's also got some weak arguments. (Always a red flag when an assertion includes the word "clearly": referring to the possibility of 'spontaneous creation': "but it is clearly not something that has been proven." It's either been proven or not, adding clearly is just like raising your voice, it's a threat action, not an elucidation.)

But worse is later when he tries to combine the first law of thermodynamics (preservation of energy) with the eternal identity of a soul. This is one of those kinds of arguments that only takes one counter example to invalidate: a clay vase can be shattered, and it's components all still exist as fragments of pottery, but the vase, as an entity, is gone.

If Mr. Lamb had simply started and ended with his final paragraph he would have been a winner: "... I do not care what people choose to believe, whether they are atheist or theist, whether they believe in a soul or not. What is far more important is how we treat each other. Some of the most giving and decent people I know are atheist and some of the most vile claim to believe in a God. ..."

That's the important stuff. Not as much fun as pondering about whether a Creator-God is necessary. So on that topic I'm inclined to trust Hawking that one isn't necessary. I also think that adding one only begs the question of who, then, created God? When it was a giant turtle that was said to hold up the (flat) earth, and a wise man was asked what the turtle stands on, the reply was "another turtle, and it's turtles all the way down". Gods and meta-gods all the way up, then?

These days I'm less interested in the Big Bang and more interested in the little ones. My favorite example of "magic in the small" -- sleight of hand type stuff, not disappearing the Statue of Liberty scale spectacles -- is magnets. Magnets just can't work. They can neither attract nor repel each other, there's nothing connecting them, no solid substance to push the force across. Yet they do work, they repel (or attract) across air (or space, if you can find a vacuum). Just not something that our minds can grasp, at least not mine.

And if little pieces of rock are possessed of magic such as this, then a brain and body, with it's manifold wrinkles and sinews and purposes, can surely act across distance and connect with other beings that may be unseen but are not unfelt.

So there may not be a Creator, but there is mystery aplenty.

My thoughts at 3:00 AM, somewhere in a police headquarters basement, a little north of the Hamptons, NY.

Marriages and Tornadoes and Terrorists, Oh My !

I certainly share the ambivalence felt by many over the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I heard the news, as many did, while watching baseball on ESPN, the Mets at the Phillies (Mets 2-1 in 14 innings). There was ninth inning irony in the players’ ignorance as the crowd chanted “USA, USA, USA” after viewing their phones and twitter feeds while the athletes just played ball.

My own twitter feed started bringing in satisfaction (@DanielPink “RT @markknoller: Cheering crowd outside White House estimated at 2500.”) and angst at the President’s delay (@HeatherOsborn “I love that it took approximately 10 minutes for people to start bitching about Obama being late. I'm gonna go ahead and believe he is BUSY.”) and jokes (@TheThomason: “Obama: ‘Anybody else wanna see my birth certificate?’ Drops mic. Walks away.” Or: @CaitKitt “Also, now that we killed the dude, can the TSA stop fondling all our junk? #prettyplease” 9:54 PM May 1, 2011)

Unlike a lot of other people who first heard of OBL’s death while watching TV, but like a fair number of other North Alabamians, I was in a hotel room dozens of miles or more from home. We were avoiding the 600,000 person power outage that resulted from the “April Fury” tornadoes. Our house was fine, other than one downed tree top and one leaky window, and some slowly spoiling food as our fridge and freezers lost their cool. We are very fortunate to afford to simply drive to a Nashville suburb and check into a La Quinta with hot showers, clean sheets and breakfast. Many of my neighbors took this option, or went to relatives in nearby towns. We’re “rich” Americans. It’s incredible. But it’s also incredible how fragile our way of life is. Without electricity and Internet and gasoline and open stores and cell phones we were quickly reduced to land line phones (those of us who still have them) and battery powered radios. Hello 1952.

But those weren’t the problems that haunted me in the La Quinta in Smyrna, Tennessee on May 1st that kept me from truly processing the news of the death of bin Laden. Nor were they the problems that had kept me from gagging on the syrup drenched royal nuptials of William and Kate two days earlier, marriage coverage that censored the anti-austerity protests pervading Great Britain. I’ve gone without electricity enough in my life not to sweat it much. What was nagging at my mind was the damage from swirling storms that don’t even get names but, acre for acre, do much more damage than hurricanes. And the stories from friends and acquaintances that kept spinning out to me through the phone, the e-mail and the web (yep, wireless internet in the hotel, too).

A colleague runs a swim club with his son as a side business and it got hit; he was at the pool between storms, but went home at the urging of son and girlfriend just in time. I’m sure the pool office and bathhouses are gone. We saw what’s left of the bordering trees, snapped and twisted, from the adjacent highway on our drive home. Next to the highway we saw a house with only rafters for a roof left, the next house was just the concrete slab and debris – nothing bigger than a few feet long. Across the highway and into a subdivision a newlywed couple we know from the running community lost their house, and so far their cat. She runs about my speed, when I’m in shape. Their brick house disintegrated around the young woman, one wall at a time and even the rug she was on got sucked away (the husband wasn’t home). Their car was in the driveway and is now a neighbor’s lawn ornament, but the woman is banged up but okay. They would be staying at her parents’ home in nearby Tanner, Alabama, except that their house was also destroyed by one of the tornadoes.

A local photographer, who we also know from running, has posted an offer to provide free disks of photos she'd taken for anyone if they lost theirs in the storms.

A friend family’s daughter was in Tuscaloosa, she goes to the University of Alabama there, at her boyfriend's apartment. They are fine, but the gas station directly across the street is gone, as is the sideview mirror from her car. The neighbor of another friend’s daughter also went to Alabama; she won’t be coming home. They cancelled finals at UA, students get the grades they had, or they can schedule a final with their instructor. Tuscaloosa had one of the biggest tornadoes and it was the one to hit the most populated area. 5,000 homes damaged or destroyed.

600 people attended the funeral yesterday of a 12 year old girl who was the classmate of another friend’s son. There were 8 family members in a trailer, none escaped injury, but it was the youngest who was taken.

My office is still without power. Internet came back at my house late yesterday and is still out for many people so I don’t yet know who else has a story to tell. So I’ve been brooding on these twisters, these nameless micro-hurricanes that last for minutes rather than days, and it has kept me from digesting the death of Osama. But I know I’m glad that he, and his twisted soul, are gone.

Steve Boyett on Copyfight and Writing

Author, DJ and general renaissance man Steven Boyett recently lead a couple sessions at the Southern California Writer's Association. Fortunately he posted the audio from these discussions and they're great for those of us who seem to spend a lot more time learning about writing than writing. Here Boyett talks about the changes happening in the publishing markets as driven by the ongoing digital revolution. He's walked this walk as a podcasting DJ in the musical realm and so is more prepared than most authors as similar issues hit the prose fiction and other written media. In the second part he talks about the debacle that copyright has become, and gives some great history. He echoes some things from Cory Doctorow but takes his own slant as well; plus he pays due reverence to Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons. Thanks, Steve.

Work of Art is a Work in Progress

Heard what turned out to be basically a bizarre advertisement on National Public Radio.  I suppose they'd call it a review, but it had the effect of me trying out the "product".  It was for Bravo TV's new reality show Work of Art.  It's a cookie cutter copy of their two prior shows Project Runway and Top Chef, neither of which I can stomach for more than a few seconds before flipping onward. 

 

But I was curious about the artists, and how the time pressure would work out; I generally think time pressure is both anathema and pretty necessary to the artistic process. And that part of the show was cool, seeing the artists get into their work, struggle with it, shift it and eventually become attached to it.  To the last one they ended up reasonably content with their "piece". 

 

Then there were the judges -- too much drama and negativity just for the sake of conflict and controversy.  They provided some useful insights, but Art is soooo subjective and here was everything from minimalist abstraction to realism.  I'm no art expert, but I did recently read Looking at Paintings: An Introduction to Fine Art for Young People after it was recommended by Cory Doctorow, so I'm aware of techniques and types and the "eye of the beholder" and that the artist cannot be held fully responsible for my experience of her art.  So how do you eliminate someone based on the "quality" of their work of art? That part is worse than watching iceskating competition... don't know if I'll stick around, but maybe, since I agree with Amanda Palmer: "...some artists try to do everything, which is impossible, I think those people are brave."

Why I read Ken Fisher's financial column

Because he speaks up when the emperor has no clothes. In his current column he strips Moody's and Standard & Poor's of much of their value:

"The big agencies have a way of warning of trouble spots (like Enron) only after the trouble is evident or of adding to a panic (like Greece's) that is already beyond any rational basis." (Mountains and Molehills; 5/28/10 http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0607/markets-brazil-companhia-saneamento-portfolio-strategy.html).