Hard SF and Hyperrealism

I had a good time at Readercon, and saw several old friends.  I did not come up through SF fandom, and the field is not the center of my social life, but I have such a good time whenever I do go to a convention that I should it more.

As I mentioned last week, my one panel was on the narrative voice of hard SF.  Of course, the discussion wandered all over, though I tried to keep it back on the ostensible topic, not to be a control freak (I wasn't even the moderator) but because I was interested in the topic:  does hard SF derive its authority from its content, or from its form?  For those of you not conversant with the various subgenres in science fiction, hard SF is that variety whose writers pride themselves on playing by the known rules of the various sciences, though physics has always been the most obvious one.  That this does not banish faster-than-light travel is just one of the problems with any vigorous definition of this branch of SF.

I brought up a Nabokov quote, from Pnin: "Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood."  This manages to slam both Dali and Rockwell at the same time (when the novel was written, both were working and popular).  Both practiced an absolute fidelity to the specific details of representation, at an incredible level of technical skill.  Both (as I read Nabokov) used that skill to provide a completely false image, Dali obviously, Rockwell less obviously but perhaps more dangerously.

So I said that hard SF was socialist realism kidnapped by fairies in babyhood.  Getting the scientific details write provides a presumptive authority to convey an image of a social reality that is usually false.

Why go on a panel if you can't cause trouble?

My one Readercon appearance

Our local literary SF con is this weekend, at the exciting Burlington Marriott.

Readercon specializes in panels like "Hegelianism in Golden Age Space Opera" and "Adverbs: Threat or Menace?"  It requires not just a willingness to bloviate and a couple of writing credits from the 80s, but some serious understanding of the field and its literary tropes, understanding I don't really have.

Maybe that's why I'm on only one panel, at 11 AM on Saturday, June 11:  "Is Hard SF Just a Narrative Voice?", inspired by an essay by Paul Park.

But I think the fact that you can rate how badly you want to be on a panel, but can rate an unlimited number of panels as "A+, must be on panel or will die miserably" is the problem.  If participants had been given, say, a limit of three A+ chits, I might have gotten another choice or two.  I did my best to rate my level of interest honestly.  Of course, you might say (my readers tending to inappropriate levels of both perception and expressiveness) that if I didn't really want to be on a panel I shouldn't whine about not getting on it.  And you would be right--my readers tend also tend to be annoyingly challenging to the author.

Still, if they don't minimize panel choice inflation, I'll reconsider my tactics next year.  But if you're in the Boston area this weekend, come and attend the convention.  It's great fun, and an excellent place to spot those writers who say "I don't just write stories about elves and spaceships, I'm also an intellectual heavyweight".  I'm lucky it's around here.  It's hard to bike to from my house, because of a busy stretch of Route 3, but certainly doable.

When bad henchmen happen to good villains

I saw Up the other night, with my wife and daughter. I liked it fine, but certainly did not think of it as one of the great works of art of our era, as others seem to have.

I’ll deal with some of those issues later. Right now, I want to point out a recurrent character arrangement that is characteristic of most children’s films, and seems to have crept into books as well. It certainly appeared in this one.

It’s this: the evil character, villain, criminal mastermind, bully, whoever, always has two moronic, clueless sidekicks. The leader doesn’t have sinister henchmen, resentful slaves, or co-opted intellectual ideologues. He has buffoons, always two.

I first noticed this in the weirdly complex and deranged Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000). The evil Diesel has doofus locomotives to admire his evil, provide comic relief, and execute commands poorly and incompetently, giving the heroes a chance to succeed. Its plot ease and comic relief that are the real functions.

In wartime propaganda, the enemy leader’s minions are often portrayed as incompetent toadies, cowards, sexual perverts (not common in children’s versions, at least openly, though sometimes appearing as fetishistic attachment to some object or procedure), cross-dressers, and sufferers from obscure and embarrassing maladies. Think of Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering in WWII propaganda.

What’s interesting about this scheme is not whether or not it makes sense in real life (Goebbels and Goering were evil, but far from comical and incompetent), but how stereotyped and unvarying it is. It ranges from Crabbe and Goyle in the Harry Potter books to the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo, with his hammerhead and mako companions. You could lift the pop-culture-laden, befuddled dialog from one movie and plop it down in another and not even notice.

Happy birthday mom

I was away this past week celebrating my mother's 80th birthday, at the Lakeside Inn in Southwestern Michigan, near New Buffalo.  Alla has made it through the purges (her father was arrested in the Red Army purges of 1937), the German invasion, traveling alone to America, getting a degree in cytology, raising some difficult children, and a successful career as a watercolorist.  Not that we felt that she had to "earn" her celebration.

The inn had a huge front porch, though you could not actually see the lake from it.  Trees.  Lots of trees in Michigan.  And the beach was many steps below.  My mother climbs up and down from her fourth-floor apartment daily, disdaining the elevator, so she made it up and down better than many people half her age.

We all had a great time, and she did too.  Here's to many more.

Who do I pay for news?

This morning Megan McArdle mentions the shortage of hard news from Iran in the wake of its election.  She does mention that The New York Times, my regular morning reading, does have full coverage.  But almost no one else does, because newspapers have been forced to cut their foreign bureaus.

I know that newspapers are going to vanish, to be replaced with some other means of conveying the news.  I also know that keeping expert staffers in various locations around the world, often at great risk, is expensive.  I know that developing stories over long periods of time is expensive.  I know that research, fact-checking, and editing are expensive.

I'm willing to help pay for this.  I'd gladly pay for more news that I get.  I'd pay to find out more about the situation on the ground in Belarus, in West Africa, in Central Asia.  I'd pay for more non-sensationalist news about science too.

My question:  in the future, who do I pay, and how?  I prefer a few well-edited words to many more flaccid ones, and I want a channel I can trust, so I don't have to keep worrying that what I'm learning is wrong.  I don't want to be the only one paying:  I can't support a news channel on my own.  But if there are too many free riders, no one will work to supply me with what I want.

I'm sure I'm not alone here.  I want other people to undergo months of discomfort and danger to bring me the story, and I'm willing to pony up for it.  When the newspapers are gone, who will step up to take my money and give me what I want?

The universal appeal of Jack Vance

As I mentioned below, I grew up as a big fan of Jack Vance.  I found him so eccentric that I'm always surprised to find how many other fans of his there are.  Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, on one of my favorite blogs, Less Wrong, praises him, in a blog entry on whether awfulness is a requirement for intense fandom.   His point:  Vance was not awful, in fact was a real craftsman, and still has intense fans.

Well, I don't know how intense.  And there always comes that terrible question about one's youthful loves:  can an adult read them?  Vance's prose, widely praised, is ornate, bookish, and arch, very much a specialized taste.  One of my favorite passages, still resonant after all these years, is from The Palace of Love, the third of the Demon Princes novels.  Edelrod, a poisoner from a planet of poisoners, explains a poison that looks like a lump of gray wax:

Observe this deadly material.  I can handle it without fear:  I am immunized!  But if you were to rub it on an article belonging to your enemy--his comb, his ear-scraper--he is as good as gone.  Another application is to spread a film over your identification papers.  Then, should an overofficious administrator hector you, he is contaminated, and pays for his insolence.

The exclamation mark is also a characteristic of the dialogue of Bruce Sterling, now that I think about it.  Not an obvious successor, but there is a connection when you look.

Vance's plots are collections of coincidences and misunderstandings, his favored women seductive and remote,  his cultures each built around some key obsession, his aristocrats pompous and bumbling, his aliens genuinely weird, and his novels journeys through beautiful and elegant puzzles.  I see Gene Wolfe as the closest thing to an adult Vance.

And, of course, he has been an influence on me.

The hero of David Copperfield's life

The problem with a bildungsroman is that the protagonist eventually grows up.

There are several interesting entries on About Last Night about David Copperfield, about the brilliant beginning, of Copperfield's sad and poetic early childhood, and the inevitably more mundane life he leads afterward, for all its Uriah Heeps and Mr. Micawbers.  I recently reread it, and though I would not have put the boundary down as sharply as Carrie Frye (CAAF) and Graham Greene do, but there is a lot of activity in the book, including a weird doubling of fallen women, elaborate scheming, and shipwrecks.

Such depictions of childhood have a unity that the adult world lacks, and the potentialities of that time can never fully be realized.  I am put in mind of a book from my own genre, SF, called Emphyrio by Jack Vance.  After a somewhat melodramatic preface, it depicts the odd and somewhat ominous childhood of a boy named Ghyl Tarvok (Vance's made-up names always have a specific rhythm to them) in a city called Ambroy.  He is raised by his mysterious father, Amiante, a brilliant craftsman in a world where mechanical reproduction is banned.

The first part of the book has a tender and melancholy mood that is rare and hard to maintain.  There are mysteries to the half-ruined city, and Ghyl, amid all the activities of his youth, tries to puzzle them out.  Then, in the latter part of the book, he goes offworld, has adventures, finds some things out...none of it has the sombre energy of the first part.

But such complaints just show how demanding we are when a writer raises our expectations.  Dangerous, to be too good at the beginning of a book.  Make your protagonist's childhood mundane and somewhat tedious, and we will find his young adulthood much more interesting....

Dream on: a sin of fiction

Over on her blog, Nancy Kress asks whether you should start a story with a dream.  And I see plenty of stories, particularly those meant for younger readers, that do so.  It's an easy way to introduce quick drama (it's not usually a dream about waiting in line at the DMV) and maybe some background information, and then start the story with a "waking up" that is both metaphorical and real.

Two problems.  One is just a matter of building reader trust.  When I read a story starting with a dream, my first thought is that the writer couldn't figure out a better way to start the story.  I started the first draft of my next book After the Victory with my main character having a dream and waking up.  It does start in the middle of the night, with an emergency alert.  But my suspicion of the trope, rather than any inherent lack of sense to it, made me remove it.  Too sensitive to being called a lazy genre writer?  Maybe.

The second problem is that real dreams make no sense whatsoever.  It's like building a narrative based on the names of cars that pass you on the highway.  Any coherence is imposed retrospectively, but a conscious mind that doesn't have any privileged access to the sorting and discarding processes of REM sleep.  A sensible dream that conveys useful information to the dreamer, or even predicts the future, is another piece of...let's say casual workmanship on the part of the writer.  Of course, dreams have served divinatory purposes all through history, so I'm kind of swimming against the current of human expectations in general here.  It is not unreasonable that a character in the story would think that a dream conveyed useful information.  But that's the different between what the characters think, and what the reader is supposed to think.

Dreams can't bear the weight that has been put on them by fiction.  Any writer should be wary when a dream presents itself as a solution to a narrative problem.  And any reader should be wary when they come across one in fiction.  Make sure the writer is giving you good weight.  Your time is valuable.

Double threat edits

My morning/weekend job (writing fiction) and my day job (running marketing for my employer) have both thrown up gnarly deadline requirements simultaneously.  I have the intensively copy-edited manuscript of Brain Thief to return in a week or so for the one, and a significant rebranding, web site rewrite, and collateral redesign for the other.

I seem to be doing okay on both, but wish me luck.

Definite article

If you think we writers just throw a bunch of words down on a screen and then send them off and get them printed that's...sometimes not true.  Sometimes there is editing.  Sometimes there is agony.  And sometimes there is obsessive devotion to detail.

My next book is called Brain Thief.  It almost wasn't.  It was almost called The Brain Thief (it was originally titled Remembering Muriel, but that was a lot of drafts ago, so forget about that).

The title The Brain Thief was a suggestion of my editor at Tor, David Hartwell.  I liked it.  Then, at a reading, my friend and workshop member Brett Cox suggested, delicately, that the rhythm would be better without the definite article.  The three thudding monosyllables seemed wrong to him.  In addition to being a fiction writer and critic, Brett is also a poet and songwriter (and this does not exhaust his descriptors).  I realized he was right.

But, for some reason, the title change never got noted in the right place, until I noticed that blurbs were coming back with the old title.  I asked David.  And then there was much discussion at Tor.  I have no idea how many people had to spend time on this.

In the end the title change was approved.  Brain Thief it is.  I love my family, but there is no way anyone here would understand why I fret about things like this.  Fortunately, my editor does.

Whenever you read anyone's prose, feel glad that you can't actually see the little droplets of blood all over it.

Metafictional Ferrellism: Stranger Than Fiction

A few days ago, I watched the movie Stranger Than Fiction with my son. It’s a metafictional story, where a person recognizes he is the character in a work of fiction, and struggles to escape. It was pretty OK. The character, an IRS employee, is played by Will Ferrell, the writer by Emma Thompson, ragged-haired, chain smoking, un-made-up. The literary theorist Ferrel goes to for help is played by Dustin Hoffman, somewhat reprising a similar role in I (Heart) Huckabees, a movie I enjoyed a great deal more than this one.

There was a lot to like, though I was disappointed by how superficial Hoffman’s analysis and critique are: there are all sorts of questions of genre, audience expectations, and issues of characterization (“it’s weird, but I’ve really started noticing what brand of pen people use”) that he could use to figure out the author’s identity, but he focuses on the phrase “Little did he know...”, a wooden piece of foreshadowing that makes the writer seem pretty industrial grade.

But let’s talk about Thompson’s writer. She hasn’t published a book in ten years, and, from Hoffman’s professorial admiration of her, you figure she’s a literary writer, not big on sales. Nevertheless, her publisher sends an enforcer, played by Queen Latifah, to get her to finish her book. This smooth woman gets paid a fulltime salary to bring highbrow midlist authors to parturition, a character who could only have been invented by a writer who knew nothing about the writing business. Or maybe it is a blocked writer’s greatest fantasy: “my unwritten book is so important that everyone’s greatest interest is that I finish it”. Latifah doesn’t get enough to do, either as a character, or in the plot. She’s mostly someone for the writer to explain things to.

But what story is Ferrell in, if he’s not in a metafictional one? Thompson’s book seems immensely dull without the character’s revolt, down to the irritatingly self-righteous baker, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom Ferrell audits, and whose life-affirming joy warms Ferrell from his useless, enclosed life...well, you’ve been there a hundred times before. “Why am I suddenly meeting only wooden, stereotyped characters? And why do I feel compelled to explain everything to you, even though I barely know you?”

Charlie Kauffman is the master of this kind of thing. For real metafiction fun, Synecdoche, New York is the movie to see, probably more than once.

Sins of the writer: popular characters

If, as I discussed yesterday, writers can try to destroy your pleasure in reading by teaching you good writing technique, and thus get you to realize how rare it is, how can I not join in?

Here's a simple one.  You have a character who is a performer, an artist, or...a writer.  Since this is your protagonist, or a character you really like, or even, maybe, a thinly disguised version of you, this character is good at what they do (yep, singular "they".  The guys on Language Log say it's okay, and it's just too convenient).  Of course?  There are only two kinds of artists in fiction, failed and brilliant.  Sometimes both.  "Pretty good", "just okay", "occasionally interesting" are seldom used to describe the work of a character we want to be admirable.

Okay, so how do you show that this person's work is more than just pretty good?  That's right, you have them create something, and you have everyone else think it's great, and it becomes incredibly popular overnight.  Simple.

There might be reasons I take this personally, but this isn't the time.

With the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, we all hope to be recognized someday.  But be wary of the writer who takes the easy way out.  If a character's work has quality, it's up to the writer to convey that quality to you.  I tried to do that in Carve the Sky, by telling the story through the perception of a connoisseur.  It proves to be easier to convey the skill of a critic than that of an artist.  Go figure.

Beware the writer who teaches writing

I observe that other writers love to teach readers about writing.  I "observe" this, because I don't share the urge to run writing workshops, give seminars on writing, write books about how to write, or even give blog tips on pronoun usage.  Truth in ranting:  I do belong to a peer writing workshop, where I give criticism in order to receive it, so, at some level, I am complicit in the system.

In other entries, I've talked about the sins of writing:  the ways writers consistently and persistently convey reality incorrectly, either through the inherent problems of fiction, or their own mental inadequacy, or (ahem) the unreasonable demands of their readers.

To the extent that teaching writing does the same thing, and is effective at doing it--explain to the would-be writer how to convey reality, or inner states, or fantastic situations, or suspense better in functional and elegant prose-- to that extent does it risk ruining the reading experience.  Why?  Because most writers aren't much good at most of that stuff.

I've become an enormously sensitive reader over the years.  I don't mean perceptive, or anything else virtuous.  I mean princess-and-the-pea sensitive.  Bad sentences leave me queasy, even if the plot is suspenseful.  Characters introduced to exemplify some flaw, and be bested by the virtuous protagonist, infuriate me.  And this last is used way too frequently in my field, speculative fiction.  I won't go on.

But most readers of writing manuals, most attendees at writing workshops, most readers of blogs with writing tips, will not become writers.  They will stay readers.  But they will be more demanding readers.  This may seem good.  Moving the demand curve upward for better-quality writing will increase supply of same.

But I fear that all it does is make you unhappy with what used to be simple pleasures.  I read many popular books in my field and see what makes people like them, without being able to share in that pleasure, because I don't see why the writer couldn't have done the rest of the job up to the same quality.  But the cheerfully clueless readers are made happy by the books, because they don't care about those other issues.

So, beware, you writing students.  Your teachers are actually teaching you to read.  And once you learn how to do it, you can never go back.  Do you really want to make most science fiction and fantasy seem like unreadable dreck?  Whatever will you do with your time?  And how will you talk with your friends?  It will all seem like a lover after the end of the affair, all irritating snorts, bad habits, missed birthdays, and unbearable self-righteousness.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Sins of literature: the general popular with his troops

Having taken a tour of Civil War named streets in my neighborhood, I'm thinking, naturally, of George B. McClellan.  The Seven Days battles happened on his retreat down the Peninsula, and marked the advent of Robert E. Lee.  Second Manassas (see?  I'm not unreasonable about the name itself, just seeing it in my neighborhood) happened when McClellan was temporarily replaced by Pope, successful in the West, who then got creamed by Lee.

McClellan was a superb manager and a terrible leader.  We most value those who rise to the top in a crisis, even though most time is spent in non-crisis.  McClellan was at his worst in a crisis, and at his best with the routine.

McClellan's men loved him.  And why not?  He kept them fed, supplied, and, as far as he could, safe from combat.  He would only put them in harm's way when he had overwhelming superiority of numbers.  Vain, self-important, and paranoid, McClellan would make a poor hero of a work of fiction.

But writers often use "popular with his troops" as an index of admirability.  And, I suppose, it is.  Lee was popular with his troops too, and Lee is a classic fictional hero.  But humans can love, en masse, people they would not admire or even like individually.  Can fiction handle a popular, pompous narcissist?  History certainly can.

Unreasonable rage at a street name

Near my children's school, here in Cambridge, Mass., is a short street with a name that, for a long time, irritated me.  The street is called Manassas Avenue.

Two things bugged me.  In 1861 and 1862 two battles took place at a creek in northern Virginia called Bull Run.  The first was the first battle of the Civil War.  So, the first thing:  we northerners call those battles the first and second battles of Bull Run, since we favored geographic features while southerners favored the nearest town when naming battles.  But Manassas, I have to say, seems to be winning out, and I see the battles referred to more often that way than I remember from my youth.  I can kind of deal with that, though I always suspect the loyalties of the National Park Service.

But, the stranger thing:  we lost.  The North got its butt handed to it in both those battles.  Can historical knowledge have fallen so low that a street in the heart of the heart of the North, Cambridge, got that awful name?  Any Gettysburg Streets in Charleston or New Orleans?  Somehow, I doubt it.

Well, come to find out, Manassas Ave. is named after a person, Manasses P. Dougherty.  The name was changed in 1907, from Sparks St. Court.

I'm still suspicious.  Why the spelling change?  A southern sympathiser in the Registry of Deeds?  Rewriting history is those people's favorite hobby.  You can't take anything for granted.

Butcher knives and other improper signifiers

The Boston Globe had a story recently about people being honored for saving a woman from being murdered by her husband with butcher knife.  They did a dangerous and brave thing, but that's not what struck me.

It was "butcher knife".  This what might be called a "headline signifier":  that is, something, probably not accurate, that catches the reader's eye and conveys the meaning, rather than the actually reality, of events.

Most people do not have anything called a "butcher knife" in their home, mostly because no one butchers meat at home.  But saying someone was attacked with a "utility knife" or a "chef's knife" would seem to be minimizing the risk, while at the same time being inappropriately finicky about terminology.

We accept this, though, I admit, I always think "well, what kind of knife was it?"  When someone attacks someone else with an item found in the kitchen, do they grab the boning knife or the santoku?  A writer's mind wants to know.

Related (albeit distantly) to this is the event, found in even sober history books, of someone being "torn limb from limb" by a mob.  Or, even more dramatically, "torn to pieces".

Maybe this literally happened.  But seeing these phrases in place of  the more mundane "killed by an angry mob" makes me wonder what actually did occur.   The medieval and early modern practice of "quartering" usually involved cutting the body into parts with (wait for it) a butcher knife, or, in French style, attaching horses to to the limbs in a coordinated effort.  The human body is pretty well constructed.  Beating someone to death and tearing a few pieces off (what I presume is what usually happened when someone was attacked by a mob) is relatively easy, the other things relatively hard, particularly with a tightly packed group of people who probably can't move freely to begin with.

This is actually sounding kind of gruesome.  But "torn limb from limb" is a seemingly meaningful description that raises a number of questions when you think about it.  I'm not currently planning to describe the death of a character at the hands of a mob, but if I do, I'd like to get it right.  Where should I turn?

Biblical marketing

I'm a big fan of the Shorpy. Every day it posts interesting historical photographs, often in high definition. Commenters remark on various almost invisible aspects of the photographs--and if they miss something obvious, they are mocked by the ominipotent Dave. Being mostly male, it seems, they get quite excited over photographs of attractive women, and discussions about tooth-straightening, style, and cosmetic surgery ensue.

A comment on this image of a Washington D.C. drugstore in 1921 caught my eye. It points out a number of bottles of a popular grape juice called, believe it or not, Naboth. The commenter links to a postcard from the Naboth bottling plant.

Am I alone in finding this name for a juice company crazy?  If you remember the story, Naboth owned a vineyard near King Ahab's palace.  Ahab wanted it for himself, Naboth wouldn't give it up, so Queen Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be stoned to death on false evidence.  Ahab got his vineyard, but Elijah told him he would be slain in the spot where Naboth was executed, and the dogs would lick his blood and eat Jezebel's body (1 Kg 21:1-20).

Who could pass up a marketing hook like that for wholesome grape juice?  Along with the Gibeah Motor Court, Jehu's Driving School, and Joshua's Walls and Masonry, not to mention the annual Jephtha Father Daughter Dance, a way of linking our daily life to uplifting Biblical events.

It's amazing how often people grab the first top-of-mind connection for their marketing, no matter how little sense it actually makes.  Naboth:grapes.  Sure, perfect!

My favorite non-Biblical clueless marketing link is a holiday hotel I read about called "Nessun Dorma".  Opera is just as good as the Bible for vague connections no one is entirely sure of.  This is one of the most famous arias around, from Turandot, particularly through Pavarotti's rendition.  Very romantic.

It means "None shall sleep".

After the Victory: finished draft

Today I finished a big draft of my next book:  After the Victory.  It's big and hulking, not because the eventual book will be, but because that's the only way I've found to get my drafts done.  I see this version as the ore that will eventually be refined into the final book.  It's easier for me to write four lines and pick the best than write the best one by itself.  If I try that, nothing gets done.

Some more precise people (like my friend James Patrick Kelly) find this appalling, like building a house by piling up rocks and then carving rooms out of it (my simile, not his).

After the Victory is the story of Alba, a girl who grows up on an Earth in the aftermath of a successfully defeated alien invasion.  Even though victory has been won, the Earth is a mess of burned cities and devastated landscapes, littered with the dangerous and valuable remains of crashed alien spacecraft.  Alba is an Invasion orphan, living with a tight group of other kids in a refugee camp/school run by a mysterious Invasion vet, Nunc.  One night, out on alert, she and her friends find a hint that at least one of the invading aliens may still be alive and on the run....

Unsold, unseen, and unfinished!  I have to let it rest for a while before I turn back to it.  Don't expect any detailed description of my writing process, however.  When I reach the next milestone, I'll let you know.

Clear explanations of complex things

As I've mentioned, in my day job I am a marketing director.  One of the things this means is that I fairly regularly have to learn about and understand a new product, a new service, or a new customer type.  This involves a lot of fairly unsystematic research, because the intersection between customer needs and product is hard to define.

It's always a pleasure to find someone who can explain the customers needs in some clear, easily understood way.  And, as it happens, finding someone like that is fairly rare.

Right now, I am planning to market a physical capital planning product to healthcare clients--hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and others with complex buildings and physical systems.  Where their money comes from, where it goes, how they plan, what they worry about most--these are the issues I'm struggling with.

So I was happy to find a useful introductory document from The Access Project at the Harvard School of Public Health:  A Community Leader's Guide to Hospital Finance, Evaluating How a Hospital Gets and Spends Its Money, by Sarah Gunther Lane, Elizabeth Longstreth, and Victoria Nixon.  I certainly could have used this in my days at the Medicaid health plan, where various abstruse issues like Disproportionate Share Hospital or “DSH” payments were a constant conundrum.  Thank you, Lane, Longstreth, and Nixon.

Now, as it happens, this piece did not answer a single one of my questions about how healthcare facilities spend, plan, and budget for fixed equipment and building costs.  Not their fault, that's not what they were after.

So I'm still looking for a similar document about that unsexy and essential feature of hospital facilities:  the actual real estate.  Side point: you can't understand health care finance by looking only at the provision of actual care and reimbursement for it.  That's most important, certainly.  But look at jobs, and look at the value of the real estate, and some seemingly perverse decisions and practices will become, if not clear, at least somewhat less contradictory seeming.

But that's for another time.