A new lit crit term no one really needs: Bombastoroman

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For years, my writing workshop, the Cambridge Science Fiction Writers Workshop (usually abbreviated CSFW) has tolerated my somewhat overexcited manner of critique. This style wouldn’t fly everywhere. Sometimes I get a little too excited. Still, the workshop has functioned for decades. I like to think my injection of energy has something to do with that.

James Cambias submitted a story to the last workshop that was a kind of bonsai or haiku version of one of those gigantic multidecker hard SF novels, full of adventure, weird species, gigantic artifacts, and deranged speculation.  Only his was a few thousand words long, fun and tight.

A Bildungsroman, staple of college lit courses, is a novel of education, of growing up, of learning who you are.  What is the hard SF novel series about uncovering the truth about the universe, and understanding what we are as a species?  The Bombastoroman!

OK, so maybe I'm revealing my true literary colors here. I feel that, increasingly, SF is too long. And this is true no matter what length we're discussing.  The stories are too long, the novellas are too long, and the novels are too long.  The Bombastoroman rules all.

You heard it here first.

A new story: The Boarder

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I've posted a new story, The Boarder, which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

It is neither. This is, in fact, a straight piece of conventional fiction, in the form of a memoir. But it is about science fiction, the experience of reading it, and the relation between it and the history of the actual space program, told through the manifestation of a Russian metallurgist as a boarder in a boy's house.

I suppose the story should have had a more interesting title. Vassily is one of my favorite characters. He is not a real person, but is based on my understanding of what such men were like.

In fact, I always wanted to be such a man, an eccentric and brilliant engineer with a sense of the way the world works. I may be eccentric, but the engineer part never worked out for me. Vassily is, in part, my attempt to regain some of the feeling of physical certainty that such people have.

It's actually a story quite close to my heart. Even if none of it ever happened.

"The Day the Wires Came Down"

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My story "The Day the Wires Came Down" is the cover story of the April/May Asimov's.

It is about a brother and sister who learn a few things while on a normal-seeming errand on a kind of aerial gondola system that runs above the rooftops of the city in which they live. 

If possible, I ask my readers to refrain from seeing "The Day the Wires Came Down" as a steampunk piece, despite the presence of a technological level that is clearly late 19th century. There is steam, there is coal. There are even balloons. But the entire approach is resolutely non-punk. The story has none of the silicone-enhanced Victorianism that, to mind, characterizes that lately popular subgenre.

Here is the complete painting of which the magazine cover is a piece.

It's a beautiful illustration, and I hope leads people to the magazine, and the story. The artist is not American, and is identified as Ornicar (you can see the artist's name as the destination of the telpher car in the illustration).  When I learn more about the artist, I will let you know.

But don't be seduced by Ornicar's svelte steampunkness.  Arabella is not a Victorian lady--she is much more reluctant in her role, and more resistant to characterization, than this easily besooted parasol-carrying lady is.  Her brother Andrew has vanished. And my airy Jablokovian city has gotten a bit subterranean. All in pursuit of magazine-cover signifiers, I presume.

The story is a bit of a mystery, an elegy for a vanishing form of transportation, and a first exploration of my city.  I plan to write other such pieces. Give it a read, and let me know what you think.

How to be less mediocre

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One of my favorite blog names is Less Wrong, because of its clear sense of the achievable.  It is also something I read regularly. It descends (as I remember) from another favorite blog with similar ambitions, Overcoming Bias.

We are wrong, and we are biased. Our mental tools are feeble and designed for different purposes than we are trying to use them for. Trying to think is like one of those puzzles where you have a burnt candlestick, a box of spaghetti, and a gossip magazine from 1953, and need to do something like resect a bowel or cool down a nuclear reactor.

My whole life is attempting to achieve things with inadequate tools. I'm not mentally organized, I'm easily distracted, I dislike sustained boring effort, and I often get discouraged. I have no particular talents, though I once thought I did, or hoped they would emerge as I matured.

That I get through even a day, ever cash a paycheck, and ever finish a book, or even a blog post, that I stay married and keep my children alive, is the result of deliberate conscious technique. Of ways of wrapping that magazine around that spaghetti to make a lever and then using the wax to absorb alpha particles...hey, look what that Dorothy Kilgallen has got up to.... 

Books and web sites are full of people who tell you that they were alcoholics, or sex addicts, or had a psychotic breakdown, and now have Pulitzer Prizes and run their own multimillion dollar motivational businesses.

I love some of those people.  For example, I love "Penelope Trunk". She has great workplace advice. But a hot Aspergerish serial entrepreneur who is a former professional volleyball player already has a charisma/status advantage most of us don't.  What about us regular shlubs?

All I can offer is information on my experiences in trying to be...less mediocre. About trying to feel less ashamed of myself when I look back over my day, my week, my life. About what has worked for me...until it stopped working for me.

Every day can't be a clean reboot, because then you have to look at that stupid hourglass for far too long.  But, everyone once in a while, you can do it.

The bikepocalypse continues

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Boston drivers suck.  Boston pedestrians suck. And, yes, Boston bicyclists suck. Can't we all just admit we suck, and get on with it?

No, of course not.

But we're nothing compared to NYC, as this, yet another story about NY bike lane conflicts, shows. Nothing gets people angrier than bicycles. This, by the way, includes my wife, who had a run in with a bicyclist a few months ago, and came home denouncing us all.

And bike lanes just make people go berserk. Bicycling advocates (as distinct from people who just ride their bikes to get from one place to another) try to find ways to demonstrate that bike lanes are inadequate, unsafe, cluelessly designed. And bike haters try to demonstrate that...well, that they hate people who ride bikes.

I'm not going to read the New York Magazine article Infrastructurist links to--it starts with an obsessed psychology professor who videotapes a new bike lane to demonstrate it is underused. Why do I suspect she lives in a rent-controlled apartment?  One reason for New York's obsessiveness is that its bizarre rent regulations not only encourage obsessive behavior, but make it mandatory for survival.

Cambridge was forced to eliminate its belovedly insane rent control regulations quite some time ago, and is a much saner place because of it. We even have a bike lane here and there, nothing too crazy.

Of course, we all still suck. On that, I think everyone can agree.

SF's DFW problem

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I'm a fan of the work of David Foster Wallace. Not a big fan, mind you. Like any mild DFW fan, I prefer the journalism to the fiction, and the short fiction to the long. True DFW aficionados love Infinite Jest, which has so far defeated me--if you want the truth, I don't find the wheelchair-bound French Canadian terrorists funny, and if they aren't funny, they aren't anything. Broom of the System, on the other hand, I found delightful, but I think true fans find it a lesser work.

I occasionally bring up DFW in discussions with fellow science fiction writers. The usual response is disdain and contempt. Sometimes it is bewildered ignorance: "who?" Occasionally, the situation gets belligerent.

Our field is somewhat parochial, but I have to admit, this startles me.

First of all, to progress, you have to steal from other genres and writing styles. DFW is almost impossible to steal from, but something of that paranoiac self-awareness, where you are fully conscious of your own intestinal peristalsis, would be useful in our field. Infinite self-awareness leads to total inaction, a defining state of post-modernity.

I was with two science fiction writer friends recently, and I talked about DIY sous vide cooking--sealing food in vacuum bags and cooking it in a hot water bath to a precise internal temperature, which gives you perfect medium-rare steak every time (130 degrees F), and then searing it to get a nice brown surface. Their reaction?

As it turns out, they both eat their beef well done, and found the idea terrifying and gross.

Not all SF writers are afraid of literary experimentation, and not all eat their meat cooked to shoe-leather consistency because they fear microbes and other gross living things. But: DFW and medium rare steak. There is some kind of deep connection there.

Is science fiction the well-done steak of literature? No wonder some readers find my productions too...bloody.

Actually, this explains a lot.

Cycling sucks

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Here, a cool video from the blog Copenhagenize (via Urbanophile):

also here.

There is one scene where people are fighting over parking spaces. Maybe that's not an issue in Copenhagen (hence funny) but often in Cambridge there is a shortage of places to park your bike.

Now, of course, the problem is climbing to the top of a huge snow mound to find a place to lock your bike.

But the point of the student film matches my experience: when people wonder how I can bike everywhere, I wonder how they can put up with all the various indignities inherent to city driving (and parking).

Vaccines, fiction, and the story of being a parent

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I live in an urban area, around many educated parents. When my children were young, I was a bit appalled to find that some of them didn't vaccinate their children. The reasons were, to my rationalist mind, odd, even weird, based on a sense of purity, and relying on free riding on others who did vaccinate, not some kind of informed risk/gain calculation.

Parents of young children often desperately want some kind of objective metric of how well they are doing.  That's why they get obsessed with things like 100% fruit juice drinks (flavored sugar water, much like any other kind of sugar water), organic food (indistinguishable from conventionally raised equivalents), bike helmets (if you're not riding in traffic, I'm not sure it matters)...and whether you let your children get a vaccine shot. They used to swaddle them, or refuse to hug them, or put mustard plasters on their chest.

Because, really, you have no way of telling how well you're doing.

Not vaccinating (or feeling guilty because you did) is a way of regaining some control over the narrative of your child's life.  But you really have almost no control over it. The results are pretty much random. The steering wheel isn't connected to anything.

Now, make no mistake. Opposition to vaccination is a dysfunctional narrative, one that leads to a vaguely creepy glaze-eyed stance. If you talk to those folks on that topic for too long you begin to wonder how many people who go on a killing spree with an automatic weapon oppose vaccination...or were not vaccinated because their parents opposed it.  Why aren't sociologists paying attention to the things that are really worth studying?

Marketing blood donations

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I give blood when I can. Not at the absolute two-month interval, but maybe two or three times a year.  I hate it, but I do it.

From my research (i.e., a quick Google search):

According to this CBS News story:

  • There are 111 million eligible blood donors in the United States, around 38% of the population.
  • Blood collection centers get 129 units of blood per 1000 eligible donors (presumably annually--article not specific)
  • The average donor gives 1.7 times a year

The article does not specify how many people donate in a given year. Dividing 129 units by 1.7 units per donor gives an average of 76 donors per 1000, or 7.6% of eligibles donating (feel free to check my math).

This Red Cross quick facts sheet says that "more than 38,000 blood donations are needed each day".  Right now, with 129 units per 1000 annually out of 111 million, it looks like we get a bit more than 39,000 daily donations.  So things are pretty tight, and blood doesn't keep. Incidentally, I could have used having these numbers more clearly stated.  How many people do donate in a year? Who are they?

So how do we increase the numbers?

Some people would never be willing to donate. Perhaps many people.  But there's a lot of space between my estimate of 7.6% of eligible donors actually donating and the theoretical maximum, even if that's only 15% of eligibles.  More per donor is one way to go, following the same principle that leads charities to call you if you gave in the past--you really are more likely to in the future than someone else.

And it has gotten easier to find out about drives in your area, though the Red Cross has a long way to go in making that system user friendly.

But giving blood is not a cultural imperative, like minimizing your carbon footprint or recycling or other barely useful or entirely useless things like that. That doesn't make sense. Blood has a real immediate benefit, unlike reusing milk jugs. It would seem a natural for a cultural revival.

Giving blood has to become cool. And it has to be visible. Some celebrities need to visibly donate. It needs to play a role in some popular TV shows. It probably needs some celebrity spokesperson.

I know this all sounds really cheesy.  But young people, particularly, need to get into the donation habit. It should be something college kids get together to do, two or three times a year. The Red Cross (or whoever is running the drive) should encourage group donations, with plans for what to do when one or more of the group is ineligible (and you can be ineligible for having had sex with someone in Africa a couple of decades ago, as one friend of mine discovered to his dismay). People who donate need to feel that same smug sense of superiority they get when they buy Fair Trade coffee.

What characterizes a blood donor? I answer a lot of questions about drug use, etc., when I donate, but no one collects any demographic information from me to establish a target market for increasing the donor pool (potential customers probably have a lot in common with current customers, "customers" in this case being donors). I presume there are skews in income, race, etc.  I presume the number per thousand is different in different areas. Does anyone collect that information?

So the Red Cross needs some innovative marketing. No escaping it.  Who is going to provide it?

 

Where I am now--middle aged and laid off

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One of my points of (minor) pride has been that I have a regular job, not one of these squishy vague freelancer things that all the other writers have.

Well, I have to give thatparticular pride up. I am now a freelancer myself, with a technical marketing communications business and, so far, a couple of clients.

How did this happen?

Well, like many people, I did not like my job. And...I really didn't like my job. But no other job I could find to look at looked a lot better. My company had some serious issues, like the absence of any real business plan, but nothing psychotic or deranged. Just bad behavior. Nothing unusual. Over years in the workplace, you're going to run into a lot of bad behavior. If that makes you insane...you'll be insane.

I'm temperamentally unsuited for fulltime employment. I can't sit still and do the same thing for that long. But I've done it, and done it successfully, for more than a decade. When it comes to that, I'm temperamentally unsuited to marriage and parenthood as well. Mary, good wife that she is, occasionally thanks me for doing a such a good job despite my natural inclinations. Almost everythin I accomplish is in some sense contrary to my nature.

So, not liking my job, and not seeing another that appealed, I did start to think about doing what I do, marketing communications, as my main source of income. I have an engineering degree, I worked as an engineer for years. Surely someone must need a good writer with a technical background?  Add in my healthcare marketing experience, and it seemed like a reasonable bet, particularly in Boston's market.

So, evenings and weekends, I thought and schemed and planned. I wrote a new web site, I put my portfolio together, I even got a client by jumping on a chance conversation and turning it into an opportunity, though I didn't have much time to do the client's work.

But I lacked the nerve. I couldn't just leave. The outrageous (and non-tax-deductible) health care premiums alone were enough to deter me. Then there's that pesky mortgage and those hungry children....

My job finally saved me the trouble of making a decision. Having their own problems (that unfortunate lack of a business plan), they eliminated my position and laid me off. So now I am thrown into it willy nilly. If I find a suitable fulltime position I'll take it, but meanwhile I'm trying to add clients while continuing to work on my fiction.

So I've lost the pride that comes with being able to torment yourself 9-5 five days a week in exchange for a salary, health insurance, and a 401(k). I'll have to replace it with an amorphous spread of tasks and client prospecting, and the pride of eating what you kill. I'll keep you posted on how I do.

 

Biking by Google

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A few months ago Google Maps added bicycling to its methods of conveyance.  When it first started, its recommendations seemed a bit old-ladyish to an experienced urban bicyclist.  It would take you to a bike path in preference to any other way.

Bike paths are seldom the way to get anywhere in a hurry. If they are smooth and well-laid-out, they are crowded with pedestrians, dog walkers, and wildly weaving bicycling children as padded up as NFL linebackers. Otherwise, they are creased with roots and frost heaves, with gravel patches and potholes concealed by slick fallen leaves, and make sudden right angle turns before mysteriously vanishing in the middle of nowhere.

But the essence of Google is consistently getting better, and so it has. Today I went to have lunch with my old boss, Liz (catching up + looking for work) out in Burlington, a Boston suburb known almost entirely for its vast mall.  Google maps found me a route that did, in fact, take in some bike paths.  I almost rejected it, but than decided to try it. The other routes into Burlington are gigantic multilane monstrosities, way worse than any urban street.

The Minuteman Path, allegedly one of the most traveled rail trails in the entire country, was pretty well empty in the middle of a cold November day.  And the previously unknown-to-me bike path from Lexington to Burlington was, in fact, fairly creased, but snaked along in quite an engaging secret way, behind houses and along a stream, spitting me out just a couple of blocks of traffic horror on the Middlesex Turnpike away from my destination.

I may not accept the advice, but it's nice to have a resource for finding secret ways to survive the suburbs.

"It was a dark and stormy night"

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I'm a big fan of the short story writer Ron Carlson.

Yes, I know he writes novels too. I've been hesitant to read them. While some writers do both forms well, it's not as common as you might think. Sprinters don't win marathons. I'll give in eventually and give it a try.

Meanwhile, I just read his Ron Carlson Writes a Story, a short book on writing that does exactly what the title says: it lets you sit next to him at his desk as he writes a story, "The Governor's Ball". That story is clearly a pivotal one for Carlson. His introduction to his combined story collection A Kind of Flying goes through the writing of that story as well, and says it was a start of a new period of productivity for him, writing a new way.

Ron Carlson Writes a Story is charming and quick. What's interesting is that he focuses, not on what makes narrative choices good for a reader, but what makes them good for a writer. He guides the writer in how to set up narrative options, ways of making the story open out rather than close down as you struggle for the next paragraph.

Sometimes when you look at the casing of an electronic device, you think something like "why is that notch there?" The answer is, it is there, not because of some current function, but because the machine stamping it out needed a place to hold it. Same reason your navel has no function. It's an artifact of the manufacturing process (placenta and umbilical).

Carlson doesn't use this metaphor, by the way, so don't blame him for it.

He shows the writer how to make sure narrative choices give you what he calls "inventory": stuff to work with.

Then he quotes another writer, David Boswell.  If I could find the original source, I would go directly to it, but I have been unable to. Perhaps this was what citations call a "personal communication":

The writer David Boswell says it perfectly: "'It was a dark and stormy night,' is not a terrible sentence from a reader's point of view, but it is a terrible sentence for the writer because there's no help in it. 'Lightning struck the fence post' is much better because there's that charred and smoking fence post which I might have to use later." I'm constantly looking for things that are going to help me find the next sentence, survive the story.

In case you got lost in the LISP-like stack of levels that was me quoting Carlson quoting Boswell quoting Bulwer-Lytton's infamous first line of Paul Clifford, so often mocked by the aspiring novelist Snoopy in Peanuts.

It think that is a brilliant bit of advice from Carlson. A writer's goal is to survive the story. Grab whatever will help you do that. You can come back later and edit, but meanwhile, survive is all you can reasonably do.

Close to the end of reading in the garden

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One great use of a garden is for reading, particularly in the afternoon, when the day's work is done (or has been put off).

This year I put a bench in a spot that gets the last afternoon sunlight.

Today I cut it pretty close, but it was warm enough to sit out there even without direct sunlight. Not much of that in the future, though.  Fall is well on its way in New England. Yes, that is a bathtub Mary peeking out from behind the bench. She came with the house, and for quite a while has been in the front yard. I'm redoing that (slowly), but we don't have the heart to completely banish her, so for now, she blesses us from the back corner of the garden.

The book is Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, perhaps the first great global bestseller, and a template for the portrayal of ancient Rome and early Christians on film. I'll write more on it in the future.

When sitting on my bench Monday afternoon (I had Columbus Day off, a rare treat), this was the view to my right:

And this to my left:

These shots are concealing how small my yard really is.  But you can see how autumnal it's becoming.

Failures of mental organization

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When I was younger, weekends were a time for entertainment. I'd hang with friends, go on long bike rides, go to movies (nothing better than a movie in the middle of the day).

Now weekends are when I organize my mind. I write, I consider a prospective novel, I plan career improvements. This, for some reason, takes hours. Slow, methodical hours.

If I miss having that time, as I did while hiking a few weeks ago, my life falls apart. Oh, I get my work done at work, and I fulfill my responsibilities around the house, but my writing career careens off the road and lies upside down in a ditch, wheels slowly spinning.

I don't know why this is.  Sure, work and family take a lot of time and energy, but it doesn't seem that it should require so much direction to keep everything else moving.

But it does. And I know it. Two weekends since I got back from the Wind River Range, and I am only now getting things in order--a book proposal for my agent, a new short story, and some freelance marketing work.

If I work it right, I can keep things going until family holidays disrupt it again. Wish me luck!

And silent it was

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I'm...well, I'm an older person.  My brain formed before any personal form of communication other than a rotary dial wall phone was available, and personal musical entertainment was a portable record player or a transistor radio.  Many people of my vintage are now dependent on a constant drip feed of information, contact, and entertainment, but, somehow, I am not.

So, when I go away on vacation, I go away.  And my children are forced to accompany me, while leaving all their electronics behind as well.  And in the Adirondacks, where we were, you can't even get a cell phone signal, and there are actual telephone booths with pay phones in them.  Amazing!

And I don't miss any of it.  That, of course, puts me out of step with pretty much everyone else.  I like quiet and stillness.  I like to sit and read.  In the early morning I write novel notes in a spiral notebook.  I do jigsaw puzzles with my children. Since our usual family media diet is fairly sparse to begin with, they deal with it.  We do have electricity.  And hot water.  I also make them climb mountains and paddle canoes across lakes.  Classic dad, I am.  I can just hear the eulogies.  They'll be sorry then....

The fundamental problem is that my brain is really really slow.  Despite my lack of distractions, I get little done on any given day.  So don't think I'm virtuous, and have one up on you.  You can probably write your tweets, watch videos, track your stocks, update your Facebook status, and still get more of your novel done than me.  And good for you.

Now, if you'l excuse me, I really should get something done....

 

Doored!

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Urban bicyclists don't fear moving cars that much. There might be the occasional lunatic tearing unexpectedly across an intersection, but mostly they are pretty predictable. Despite their poor reputation, I've found Boston-area drivers to be fairly courteous and flexible (except for the occasional pickup truck, for reasons that still mystify me).

No, what we fear is what I encountered today: the swinging open car door. That can take you out instantly, and if it pushes you out into traffic, can kill you. It's hard to predict, and maneuvering around it can be almost as dangerous as hitting it.

I was on my way to work. I know the pattern of lights on the hill down toward the Charles and the Science Museum on Cambridge Street in Cambridge, so I had timed my approach down the hill for the extremely short green at First Avenue.  I saw the seconds counting down on the pedestrian signal. As it hit zero, I pushed forward along the line of cars that was about to start, keeping half an eye out for anyone who might go suddenly right, across my path. But I was going pretty fast, about the fastest of the entire ride.

A passenger, opening her door and jumping out just as the cars started, hit me like a baseball bat across the forehead.  I smashed into the end of the door and went down instantly, face planting on the pavement. Once I realized I could move, and wasn't lying in a pool of my own blood, I jumped up, and may have uttered a few oaths.

The woman who had taken me out was apologetic. What could I do? My cheek was cut, my prescription sunglasses scraped up and pushed into my face. I got her contact information, but was not sympathetic to her apologies. We've all opened our door without looking, but...Jesus, she could have killed me. I was in a bike lane, I had the green light: rarely am I so virtuously in the right.

Seven stitches and a tetanus shot later, I was in my office.  I should have been home in bed, because the shock had me quite shaky. But I have a week's vacation coming up, and a lot to make sure gets done before I go.

It certainly could have been worse. I'm an aging bag of bones, and don't bounce like I used to.  I'll see how black and blue I am tomorrow, but I think I escaped more serious consequences than a potential GI Joe scar on my right cheek.

It's those passenger doors that are the most dangerous. I regularly scan parked cars for heads.  But I just don't have the bandwidth to keep my eye on passenger-side doors too. Cars in the street naturally have heads in them, so it's impossible to filter. So, please, car passengers who get out in the middle of the freaking street. Give a mind to who you can kill, particularly in a busy biking city like Cambrige, and give a quick look before you swing.

Another step toward the bikepocalypse

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Here's an odd local story (the man is pictured standing just a couple of blocks from my house).  Our neighboring town of Arlington has decided to redesign the main street through town (Massachusetts Avenue), to allow for easier and safer bicycling.

The gentleman pictured, Mr. Berger, objects.  He is motivated by "a deep distrust of government". And he fears "that the redesign would make it difficult for emergency crews to pass through snarled traffic, endangering lives."

I haven't seen the plan, and can't judge how well it would actually work. But, as I have wondered before, why does opposition to bicycles always take on such a melodramatic tone? Mr. Berger seems to feel that the Mass Ave. exists in a state of nature, untouched by the hand of man, or oppressive government. Clearly any road redesign will involve government action.  Just, in this case, government action of which he does not approve.  Car-oriented design is just natural, dammit. Why mess with it?

And this "emergency vehicle" thing gets trotted out in all sorts of urban design issues, from raised pedestrian crossings to alleys. It's childish. Yes, I picture a flood of bikes, like Peking before capitalism, so dense that fire trucks are stranded, wailing their sirens desperately as small children are burned alive in their ramshackle Arlington slums.

Now, maybe he can't actually say, "I think bicyclists are a bunch of smug jerks, and don't want them in my town. Every time I see one I want to run over him." But that is, I think, what underlies a lot of opposition.