The indignities of the day job

OK, so it's pretty much my fault. I had a number of time-sensitive tasks with my client, and I put one of off that seemed less time sensitive...one that suddenly had to be designed and delivered. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (the client is not in the US). For a conference.

I did it, with the help of an incredible designer (thanks, Ruth!)  Unfortunately, after she left, I found something that needed to be changed, so I had to download a trial version of Adobe Acrobat and cut and paste logos from one PDF to another.  I lack the visual skill to be a designer. I barely recognize myself in the mirror.

Dumb. It was dumb. Every time I looked at that particular project there was something more pressing to do. But, of course, eventually sunken bodies bloat and float to the surface. Fortunately, I work fast. And, fortunately, I partnered with someone else who does too. The client was grouchy, needless to say, but at least has what she needs.

Will I never ever do this again? I sure would like to think so!  I can take comfort in the fact that it happens a lot less than it used to--and I have been incredibly busy with deliverables.  But no excuses. Gratitude. Gratitude for the help I got, for the fact that the client reviewed and commented quickly, and for the fact that I am still (somewhat) alive.  Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone.

Do you really want a bike that reads your mind?

OK, this is a little too much intrusion of science fiction into daily life:  a bike that allegedly shifts in response to your brainwaves (HT: The Infrastructurist).

Now I know why so few people bike: it's just too hard to decide when to jump up or down a cog. Although I'm not sure a mind-reading bike really solves that particular problem, since you still have to decide to shift, though it says it can also remember previous shifts by location, and then shift again at the same place, say downshifting before you hit a hill. No indication if it takes a wind reading before doing so.

This is kind of fun, if creepy, but it's really a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is the intellectual demands of shifting, it should measure muscular effort and cadence, and shift to maintain constant pace and effort. Your mind shouldn't really have much to do with it.

Or it could measure sweat (maintaining an effort that keeps you from getting to the office soaked in sweat) or passerby perception (if someone attractive is watching you, you'd like to be showing some real speed and form). There are lots of possibilities.

Or you can get a fixie, like I have, and just follow its cruel dictates.

Do you really want to know how much time you waste?

We don't know how many calories we eat, we don't know how many times we lie or delude ourselves during the day, and we certainly don't know how much time we waste.

I work on the screen all day. Early in the mornings, before paying client work, I use the Writer user on my Windows computer to do my fiction writing. It has no internet access. It is also oriented vertically, and my documents are green Lucida Console on black. This, incidentally, terrifies my offspring when they see it.

Not that I don't wander off and get distracted, but it's good old-fashioned distraction, requiring a magazine or seeing if the newspaper has been delivered yet. Character-building distraction.

The rest of the day, I am connected up to everything in the world, just like the rest of you. I started to wonder how much time I spent "recharging my batteries". I knew it was too much, but how much?

I put on RescueTime, which lets you track exactly that.  Some days weren't too bad.  Others, when I was stressed, were terrible. So, just like when the scale starts to go up and tracking is particularly imjportant, I stopped looking as much. I'm not a confessional blogger, so it will take me some time to decide to share any real numbers with you (and thus with my clients).

Now I put on Leechblock, a Firefox add-on.  This is more punitive (though RescueTime has nanny functions too--they just aren't free along with the basic time tracker).  You tell it what sites you waste time on (for me, Google Reader, Slate, Andrew Sullivan, and other commentators on events of the day), tell it how much time you want to limit yourself to, and it turns the spigot off when you reach the limit.

I don't generally hit my hourly limit.  But I do hit the daily limit. Do I really need to read that much well-informed commentary on the Euro crisis, the Republican debates, and human population genetics? Obviously, no.

The question is, will putting these limits on make me more productive on the things I want to produce? I'll follow up in a couple of weeks and let you know.

The menace of "red drift"

"Red drift" might have had a political connotation some decades ago, but now it refers to a problem with apple varieties.

This week's New Yorker has an article on apple breeding called "Crunch" (not free online, but I still read paper magazines), centered around the breeding of a new apple variety with the unfortunately overengineered name SweeTango.

I like articles about the day-by-day labors and decisions that go to create and then change everyday objects we take for granted, so I liked this one.

The most revealing, and disturbing, thing was the market-force-created ailment suffered by popular apple varieties, called "red drift" by the apple grower Dennis Courtier.  Natural variations in an apple variety will create some that are redder.  Retailers prefer them because they think customers like red apples better, and they hide bruises.  Breeders go for more of the red ones. So flavor goes down as red goes up, sapping flavor from Gala as it did from Red Delicious, and now, apparently, going after Honeycrisp.

The article is about trying to come with a kind of appellation contrôlée for apples (the author, John Seabrook, does not use this term, by the way), so that buyers can rely on a common flavor profile--a clear identity for the apple.  More and more, there will be such defined entities in mindspace, occupying defined parameters of crispness, sweetness, redness, shape, smell, place of origin, name of grower, connection to sense of simplicity or grace. "This red and no redder" will be the battle cry.

In the modern world, if you think something is simple, you must be missing something.

The pain of revision

My evenings are currently dedicated to rereading the draft of my novel, Timeslip, and thinking about what changes to make.  I sit in my armchair with a stack of lined Post-Its and a pen and go through chapter by chapter.

The text is already full of notes from when I was writing it the first time.  I have a keyboard macro that adds a dated note (italics, with three asterisks in front so I can search them out), whenever I need a fact, or am worried about something, or remember that this affects something earlier in the narrative, but don't want to stop to find or fix. I now use those notes to figure out what I should do now. Often the note really says something like "oh, you can figure this out later". Well, "later" turns out to be...now.

The hardest thing is pushing the conflict. The book is a piece of commercial YA fiction (ostensibly), which is useful discipline for me. Clever notions, character development, odd facts--can't hide behind those. It's always painful to see how evasive I was when writing the first draft, how I stepped away from one character's need pushing against another's, how I let Doug, the main character, coast along, or evade confrontation, or get a break because the opponent is taking a break too. Well, Doug is going to pay now. Revision is the job of going out in a van and hunting down the escaped prisoners (aka "the characters") and putting them back to work on the narrative chain gang.

Otherwise, we have a failure to.... Well you know the drill.

Finding your own limiting factor

FuturePundit has an interesting entry on working memory.  It seems possible that, in addition to raw intelligence, or processing power, various other factors go into your mental performance, including working memory and long-term memory. To have complex thoughts you need to hold the various parts of the thought in your memory while having it. And to develop sophisticated skills you need to remember them for an extended period of time.

For anyone, no matter how smart or successful, one or another of these is probably the limiting factor in mental performance. If you knew what your own limiting factor was, you could focus your attention on it. This would be the most effective way to get better performance out of your brain. And, even if there are hard limits to improvement, you could make decisions about the types of tasks you would be best at and try to get work that lets you do those tasks most.

And, as time goes by and you get older, it would be useful to know where you are declining most. You probably worked out ways of doing things when you were younger that suited the mental skills you had then. You are not likely to let these habits go, even though now, with a different set of inherent abilities, they are suboptimal.

Note, I say "useful" to know. Not cheering or delightful. Cognitive decline seems inevitable. But you can probably work out ways that that decline hits actual performance as little as possible. As in war, victories are nice, but successful fighting retreats are what take the real skill. As much as possible, our goal is to live to fight another day.

A novel draft finished

This weekend I wrote "The End" on a draft of my YA novel, Timeslip.  At four months start to finish, it went much faster than these things usually do for me.  The book is more action/adventure, with an actual opponent, and some pretty clear things to achieve.

Now, it's not done, by any means. It has to sit in a (virtual) drawer for a four to six weeks in order for me to forget a bit about how much work it was to write, so that I can tear it apart, raising the stakes in each scene, etc.

I'm thinking about printing it out and working entirely from the printed version, typing it all back in. This seems like a perverse waste of time, but experience tells me that running the narrative through my brain and out through my fingers again actually helps. Keeping stuff that seems perfect as it is usually results in trouble down the line anyway, and things do not go faster in the end.

I won't even try to guess when a workshop-ready version would be ready, but I'm glad to have gotten through this draft.

In Our Time opens its archives

One of my favorite podcasts is In Our Time, a BBC radio show hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Every week he gets some Brit academics into the studio to talk about something like Boethius or the Sturm and Drang movement. Bragg is good at asking productive questions and keeping his guests from getting stuck on some obsessive academic point. I listen to it almost every week.

For quite some time, BBC Radio 4 has posted the most recent radio programme. They got busy over the summer, and have now posted all of their old shows for download, dating back to 1999. They classify their shows by history, philosophy, culture, religion, and science.

If you're a civ nerd, it's great fun. Check it out.

Studying geology

One science I've never really studied is geology. I developed an interest in it when I started hiking the Colorado Plateau area a couple of decades ago. So I can kind of pretend to knowledge about things like Navajo sandstone (a dramatic cliff-forming layer you see in the Escalante region and in Zion), while not actually understanding too much.

This last trip, we hiked Yellowstone and the Tetons, and one of my friends asked me a question about the geology that I could not answer. I did then get a book on the geology of the region, but also resolved to learn more about it in general.

So I turned to my old source, The Teaching Company, which is clearly trying to rebrand itself as The Great Courses.  I'm currently watching and enjoying an introductory geology class, Nature of Earth. I now know something about the nine kinds of silicates that make up igneous rock, about oceanic basalt and continental granite, and the chemical reactions that lead to clays.  The professor, John J. Renton, has the glasses, moustache, and plain demeanor you would want from a geologist, though he actually started as a chemist.

All my the last part of my life is going to be devoted to is filling the gaps left by the first part.

Waterfalls, geysers, and bears, oh my!

For the next week, I will be hiking the backcountry of Yellowstone, looking at geysers and waterfalls and evading grizzly bears.  The mosquitoes are supposed to be horrendous this year, because of the high snowpack and resulting wetness.  That's probably my least favorite camping experience.  I tend to try to hike later in the year, trading cold and long nights for days with no bugs.  Didn't fit in with my hiking partners' schedules this time.

Be back next week.

The "committed" auteur: Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor

I'm toying with a horror novel set in an abandoned insane asylum. Nothing unusual here, certainly, but I think it might be fun.

Part of the backstory is someone who had himself voluntarily committed to investigate something of what was going on at the asylum while it was functioning, events that play a role in the present.

In the spirit of research, I rented Samuel Fuller's movie Shock Corridor (1963), about a reporter who commits himself to a mental hospital to find out who committed a murder there.

What a terrible movie! Fuller wrote, produced, and directed. Whatever the merits of his direction (hint: minimal), the writing, at least, is wretched: overblown, repetitive, and rambling. It really plays as if he just wrote it once, a few days before filming, and then never read it again, and just handed out the shooting scripts to the bemused and long-suffering actors.

The story is about a man, Johnny Barrett, who goes into an asylum and there becomes mad. Fine. But the first ten minutes or so involve his girlfriend, stripper named Cathy, with the austere face and demeanor of a nun in a particularly restrictive order, who tells him that this is dangerous, and that if he goes in there, he will lose his mind. Then we see her sing and do a woodenly choreographed striptease. The rest of her scenes involve her telling Johnny's editor that Johnny will lose his mind, or telling Johnny on visiting day that he will lose his mind...her scenes take up about a third of the movie, have no connection to anything, and never pay off in any way. Except that he actually does lose his mind. She was right!

About a third of the way into the movie, we finally figure out that Johnny is there to investigate the stabbing of a man named Sloane. Who Sloane was, why he was killed, what the consequences were, who might have wanted to kill him...to Fuller these are tedious irrelevancies.  What he really wants to do is let a few actors rant about modern societal issues, have a moment of clarity where they remember something about the stabbing of Sloane, and then have big breakdown.  This is definitely one of the times where the term "cult" actually means "lame".

In addition to wasting time with Cathy, Fuller sticks in some color sections from failed movie projects, trying to amortize their cost by labeling them as memories or dream sequences. At one point, a character actually remarks how odd it is that his memories are in color, presumably because he knows he's actually B&W. The silliest of these is where a black character remembers being a Brazilian Indian, presumably because those were the darkest-skinned people Fuller had footage of.

As usual, I thought about many different ways this story could go. Obviously figuring out the stabbing would be just the start--why the stabbing happened is the interesting thing. Cathy only makes sense if she has her own game to play, either encouraging madness on the part of her fiance, or facing a threat while Johnny is incarcerated, or finding clues at the strip joint that connect up with Johnny's investigation--clues Johnny rejects. What seems to be irrelevant "thematic" rambling by the various madmen would actually conceal useful information, information Johnny doesn't see because he is obsessed with only one question, that about the stabbing.

So it was useful for me to see, because it gave me a lot of ideas, as failed movies often do. You might want to see it as a sociological document, or as a desperately ridiculous failure, or as an example of what a total farce auteur theory turned out to be. Just don't see it because you think it will be fun to watch.

Effective reading level = native reading level/attention

That's the equation I use to guide my thinking, and that of clients, when deciding on how simple and short a piece of marketing text should be. The "equation" part is actually a bit of an overclaim, because I don't have any real numbers with which to calculate. And I suppose it should really be divided by "inattention".

But what I mean is, people aren't paying attention, particularly not to your extremely urgent marketing message. So even if they read at a post-graduate level when they are paying full attention, they read like a fifth grader when it comes to figuring out what you are saying. So you need to use the attention they have most effectively.

I love a long sentence with multiple clauses. But not when I'm trying to decide between two cell phone plans, or looking at a brochure for a product I'm not sure I'm interested in.

So, when writing a marketing piece, keep in mind the effective reading level of your audience.  If they're primed and attentive, say because they are at the point when they are comparing specs and performance for a purchase decision, you can get complicated. If you're trying to best use a tiny bit of available attention, go simple.

You can't know what to do if you don't know what you're doing

Sometimes I listen to fellow writers and other artists talk about what they want to do with a certain project. They want to finish a book, or write a magazine article, or figure out a way to do their art more.

Often I find out that they have been worrying this particular bone for years. They've started and stopped. Everyone loved the pieces they have managed to get done, and so now they want to talk about whether they should do more, and if so, what the best next step would be....

I suppose I have been this way myself. Doing something time-consuming and demanding that no one else cares a bit about is difficult. So the urge is to spend even more time and effort avoiding doing it.

The solution is obvious, and sometimes often impossible: just do it. Pick a target, a goal, a task, and start doing it. Even if you throw away most of what you do, you have more than you would have if you didn't do it. And given how much of any given day most of us waste by checking our email, watching TV, trying to choose between two brands of canned artichoke hearts, or looking an Amazon for books we might like to read on a certain topic, it's not like you'll be crowding out anything important.

Your actions must be concrete, at least in the sense that you can picture yourself doing them.  And you know your weaknesses.  No, really, you do. You know if you spend time collating research to avoid doing work. You know if you obsessively rewrite the first three chapters instead of moving forward. You know if you come up with much-more-interesting potential opportunities every time the work gets hard. You know what keeps you from moving forward.

So you know what to avoid if you want to get to something.

Pick a spot on the endless blank wall of uncreated art and hit your forehead against it. Do it again. Stay on the spot, pounding your head against it. Eventually the wall will crack.

I can't actually promise much more than that, but once that crack is there, you have something to work with. The people I listen to spend their time worrying about finding the right spot on the wall. There is no right spot on the wall. You create that spot...with your forehead.

Don't come back to me until you have a headache.

Why there's no such thing as marketer's block

I write for a living. Mornings, I work on my fiction--right now, a YA novel about teens discovering the existence of alternate realities.  The rest of the day, I write marketing pieces. For now, I have a steady contract with a place that provides information on the medical device market.

A writer can get writer's block. A marketing writer cannot get marketer's block. Sure, a day or so might go by when you have trouble organizing your thoughts and tasks, but it better not go on much longer than that. Because your clients kinda notice that.  You have press releases every week, pieces to go out, edits to respond to....

It's useful to take the mindset and move it to the fiction. It's a job, after all. A job I chose, a job no one needs for me to do. But a job.

So, if you're a writer and wondering whether a day job writing would use up fiction resources, don't worry. It may take some energy, but the skills you learn can be immensely useful.

My Readercon schedule

As usual, I was insufficiently enthusiastic in my responses to Readercon's complex panel signup process, and only got one panel--on Thursday, tonight, before the convention even starts. The signup has you rate panels by A+, A, B, and I get the impression that a lot of writers who are savvier than me say A+ to everything they have even the slightest interest in. In my initial run through, I was honest...and then forgot to go back and inflate my scores.

And I knew I had to do that. This happened last year too.

Of course, unlike most conventions, where anyone can gas on about almost anything, Readercon panels tend to require actual knowledge if you are not to make a fool of yourself, and waste the audience's time.

My obvious ignorance is not the reason I did not get on any panels!  That is not the explanation! So don't write and tell me so.

Please.

I do have a couple of other events that don't rely on my knowing anything except my name, and what I have written.

If you want to catch me, here is my schedule:

Thursday July 14

8:00 PM    ME    How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction. Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Barbara Krasnoff (leader), John Edward Lawson, Terry McGarry. You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.

Friday July 15

1:30 PM    VT    Reading. Alexander Jablokov. Jablokov reads from The Comfort of Strangers.

This is an alien sex story. Nothing too graphic, but consider your sensibilities before attending.

Saturday July 16

10:00 AM    Vin.    Kaffeeklatsch. David G. Hartwell, Alexander Jablokov.

David has been editor for most of my books. And, surprisingly, after the miserable sales figures for Brain Thief, he still talks to me!  We're actually just at the same time, not together, but there may be some overlap as a result.

Sunday July 17

11:00 AM    E    Autographs. Walter H. Hunt, Alexander Jablokov, Rosemary Kirstein.

I got lucky, and am autographing with two people I know and like.  Because we'll have plenty of time to talk!

12:00 PM    NH    Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop group reading. F. Brett Cox, Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer. Members of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop read selections from their work.

This is the spot for short-shorts, which I seldom write.  But I do have one I wrot a long time ago, which I wil have to remember to pull out.

Plotting and planning

I am in the middle of the book. Ah, the dreaded middle, when all those brilliant ideas in the outline suddenly look like infomercials for grout cleaner; when your main character sits down on the floor, says he's tired, and refuses to move; when that clever plot twist sounds like a third-grader's knock knock joke.

Good times, good times.  You know what they say:  when you hit rock bottom, start digging.

Maybe they don't say that.

The book has been going quickly, but is still somewhere between half and two thirds done.  So I'm in the midst of a quick reevalution, trying to forget how far I am in the book.  It should be just as interesting here as when it started, if not more so. If the main character has satisfied some initial goals, he has certainly learned enough to establish new, more realistic goals. How about instead of getting that important question answered, he is met with resistance? If the the author didn't think of something initially that now shows up, isn't that more unexpected than if you'd known in the first place?

Through experience, I know that if these problems aren't solved quickly, momentum will be lost.  More news as it happens.

Confessions of a lazy workaholic

Lately I've been working really hard. I work on a novel from 5:30 in the morning or so until about 8 or 8:30.  Then I work for a client who has a lot going on, doing everything from writing marketing pieces and press releases to running webinars. The rest of the time on their clock I try to get work out of people I don't manage and who don't need to do what I say. Fortunately, I have a teenager, so have learned authoritative persuasion without real enforcement capability.

Then I have to do things like exercise or cook dinner for the kids or manage my finances or keep the garden from drying out or being overrun with weeds. Not to mention doing the reading that will be the foundation of the book after this one.

None of this is natural to me. I have a great talent for leisure. Sitting in the garden reading a book, drinks with a friend, a bike ride--it doesn't take much to make me happy. So work has a high opportunity cost--I've always half thought that extremely hard-working people fear the challenge of unstructured pleasure, and so stick with that which can be clearly defined.

But instead of goofing off and doing those things, I'm working. So I figured out how to manage that, finally, at this advanced age. We'll see how it works out.

Self-improvement and self-help

I have long thought that the only personal program worth pursuing is figuring out who you are, and being the best version of that that you possibly can.  Figuring out who you are takes up the first part of your life, turning yourself into the best possible you takes up the rest, sometimes only after some bits and pieces of you have already started to come off.

That's self-improvement.

But you're not alone in this world, and you don't make sense without taking everyone else into account.  I, for example, have a wife and children. And our oldest is having serious problems in school, all self-inflicted. He doesn't have the slightest idea who he is yet, and desperately enraged at the necessity of finding out. So I spend a lot of time trying to understand, coach, and encourage, while not giving up on mutual understanding of my authority.

I sometimes feel like I have to defuse an unexploded munition daily. Every day the little numbers stop before they hit zero is a good day. Some weeks don't have that many good days.

Being who I am, I'm reading a lot of books. Some are good, many are indifferent or useless.  But the good ones speak with a real clarity. After all, we do have a lot of experience in dealing with adolescents. It would seem that there would be a lot of useful rules of thumb, and kind of flowchart reasoning: "when you do this, does A happen? Does B happen? The most effective approach differs between these two."

Many books are inspirational, intended to let you know you are not alone, that you are still a worthy human being, etc. Those don't do anything for me. I am looking for that distilled information on how to keep your child from failing Algebra, off drugs, and not screaming at his mother. And I'm finding it. That's self-help, and, at its best, it is an astonishingly useful genre. People know this stuff.

Most people who mock self-help books (myself among them) are smug in our assumption that we undertand ourselves and can figure out what to do if the situation is difficult. I can tell you here that I don't have the slightest idea of what to do, except continue to love, and am incredibly grateful that intelligent and dedicated people have chosen to pour their wisdom into text for me to benefit from.

A continual project of self-improvement

When I think about all the efforts I make at making my mind a little better equipped, a bit more efficient, perhaps even a trifle more pleased about the world it finds itself in, I think of a tiny essay by Logan Pearsall Smith, called "Edification" (this is it in full):

'I really must improve my mind," I tell myself, and once more begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys.