WhyKly?

People who don't like doing something often try to "improve" it, that is, make it more into something they think they might like more.

Bicycling is a perpetual target for people like this.  They say that the problems with commuter bicycling are sweat, the clothing, the physical effort, the exclusivist attitude of those who already do it. Usually they come with some way to make bicycling more like a form of transportation they recognize. This usually means adding a motor.

The latest overhyped entry in this field is the FlyKly, a powered bicycle hub you can control with your iPhone. If that last part doesn't seem to make sense, since a handlebar control would be easier, you don't understand how important it is for people to think there's a reason they own those phones. The linked HuffPo article has all sorts of absurd reasons why using a phone to control your bike's speed is "smart", including the fact that it can suggest routes that are "more fun" and help city planners establish bike lanes.

As attempts to make bicycles into something motorized, and thus real transportation, go, the FlyKly is fairly reasonable.  The hub weighs nine pounds, which is not bad.  I don't believe the claim that it can push you at 20 miles an hour for up to 30 miles on a charge, though.

They never show the derailleur side. So unkempt, like bicyclists themselves.

How many people would bike to work with an electric assist who wouldn't without it? I suspect the number is small. The roads are still dangerous, and your bike can still get stolen. But one of the pleasures of bike commuting is the physical part of it. It feels good to get to work under your own power. But then I already do it, and so am not the target of this product.

On another note, there is the flying bike, debuted in Prague:

Yes, that's a dummy. Right now, real people are too heavy, and too sane.

This thing weighs 190 lbs, has six rotors, and requires 47kW from its hefty batteries. Just for comparison, a bike at 9 mph takes around 30W.  Could you get a person on it if there was a pedal assist? This is more something for a movie, to help the main character escape unexpectedly from pursuers, than a really useful thing, but I can see how much fun it must hav been to create it.

Pity the poor bicycle. It's a marvel of subtle technology, though always subject to improvement.  A human on a bicycle is the most efficient vehicle available, and uses our own muscles optimally. And yet, it gets no respect from most people. That's kind of fine with me. Things are getting crowded enough out there without people coasting along on electric bikes.

Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy

That's actually a listing of presidents following Nixon in a history lesson in 1975's post-apocalyptic teen sex comedy, A Boy and His Dog, based on the Harlan Ellison story (and featuring a talking telepathic dog that could be the reincarnation of Ellison himself). Probably not worth seeking out, though I enjoyed it at the time.

But it could be an account of the last couple of weeks of news.  My teenage son asked me if some spectacular new piece of information had surfaced about the assassination, thus justifying the enormous amount of coverage. I had to say that no, there hadn't been. It was a generation mourning itself.

I don't mean to be flip. It was, after all, a tragic and significant event. I just found the focus to be a bit relentless.

Still, a couple of interesting things did appear.

One was this recording of Erich Leinsdorf making the announcement of the assassination to a stunned Boston Symphony audience, and then launching into an impromptu performance of the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.

 This is my music. I still remember my parents buying me an LP of a Bernstein/NY Phil recording, with this cover:

Three heavyweights

I've owned a number of recordings since then, but I still remember the pleasure with which I listened to that one. In context, that funeral march is extremely moving, though that may seem odd for someone who grew up outside the context of European concert music. I wonder how many people still remember that particular performance at Symphony Hall?

The second is an eerie HD version of the Zapruder film, which Kottke says was made by someone named Antony Davison, though I see no other references to him online.

A friend who lived in the Soviet Union as a child in the 1960s once told me that there was a TV show there about the United States that played the Zapruder film repeatedly as its opening credits. This is probably the most intensively analyzed 26 seconds of film ever shot, and it still has the power to shock.

Tom Perrotta's "The Leftovers", and the question of genre

Last night one of the book groups I belong to discussed Tom Perrotta's most recent novel, The Leftovers. One of the things I wanted to talk about how you can tell a science fiction writer did not write this book.

Now, I did stay away from a point like "it's too well written".  But it is really wonderful to read, sharply observed but not show-offy, and focused on really daily events. Which is part of the point, because the book takes place a couple of years after a large number of people disappeared in what the remaining people are reluctant to call The Rapture. The leftovers need to deal with the vast irrational absence, the disappearance of people they loved, or even didn't care for all that much, but who in retrospect mattered a great deal.

There are cults and obsessions, and that is definitely something a science fiction writer would focus on. But one thing that pretty much any science fiction writer would be interested in is whether the people who vanished had anything in common with each other. Was there any feature they had in common? Does anyone run the numbers? Aside for a toss-off comment about the seemingly unusually large number of TV chefs who were taken, no one seems particularly interested in the question. Aliens are never suspected.

And that's a good choice. Perrotta is interested in the Leftovers, not the Absconded. How do you live your life in the new world? That's the important question.

I just know, if I was writing this, I would start to focus too much on those who left, why, what happened, what we can learn about it, what it says about God and physics. And while that would interest the science fictional mind, it would not be the crystalline work that it is.

And I did have a Rapture-related story in mind, and it did focus on those who left, in fact about the very mechanism of their leaving. Seems silly now. But I am, after all, a science fiction writer, so I might end up writing it after all.

Meanwhile, I need to read some of his earlier books, which I know only through movies. Fun stuff. CHeck it out.

City life: what's a "parklet"?

There was a story in the Boston Globe this morning about an experiment with "parkets": parking spots along a street converted into tiny parks.  Surprise news in the story: no one is using this unexpected urban amenity.

Take a look at this picture and see if you might be able to figure out why no one would come and sit down here:

Does my butt look like an arrow to you?Who in the world is supposed to ever sit here? Even assuming the location makes some kind of sense, the space looks completely uninviting, and the seats positively hazardous. Two people can't possibly sit together without rolling off in opposite directions. Designers keep getting too clever with things like this.

Assuming there actually is a demand for a small area along the road to have a sit and meet some neighbors (not necessarily true), I'd say the first change would be to provide comfortable seating that looks inviting. Then make sure a food truck is stationed next to this every day, so it gets a lot of use.

All of us who live in cities want to make them fun and inviting. But cities evolve best by watching what people already do voluntarily, and making it more comfortable to do that. Community meetings aren't as useful as might seem, because people always claim they like to do things they think they would be better people for doing, and then never actually do, no matter what the streetscape. "I want to talk about community affairs with neighbors of ethnic groups different than my own in a convenient location along a major thoroughfare". Well, maybe.

If these areas of town are anything like Cambridge, turning these spots into bike parking lots would have the biggest positive effect. The bike parking situation is murder!

It's good that the Globe covered this not-so-exciting story, though, because it's at this level that life is really lived. The best way to improve is to see what actually works and what doesn't.

Vonnegut's new play: the peril of looting a dead writer's desk drawer

Last night I went with my friend Marilyn to a new play being premiered by the SpeakEasy Theater: Kurt Vonnegut's Make Up Your Mind (for marketing purposes, his name is in the actual title of the play, even though he also listed as author). Vonnegut had certainly shown his ability to write plays in the past, like Happy Birthday, Wanda June, though I have no idea whether it was any good.

According to the Playbill at the performance, Vonnegut's Make Up Your Mind is self-referential, because he left 11 different drafts of the play at his death. Playwright Nicky Silver was asked to assemble them into one play, adding some other pieces from Vonnegut's essays and other writings (Vonnegut appears as a character).

It's terrible. Truly terrible. It's like a set of skits by a overindulged high school student who might show some promise if trained and disciplined. Scenes ramble on, looking for a punchline, characters wander on and off. But it isn't bad in an interesting or appalling way. It's just unsuccessful.

You can read about the plot elsewhere, such as it is. The actors seem skilled, but have so little to work with, they all seem gloomy and indecisive. It's not like the SpeakEasy to disappoint me in this way. This is a cruel thing to do to a dead writer. Vonnegut never finished. He was never satisfied with it. Writers write a lot. Some writers need to a write a lot of dreck to find the stuff that's good. Sometimes they neglect to burn the dreck before they die.

I know theater companies need premieres to show that they are not just museums of a dying art.  The acerbic Thomas Garvey, at Hub Review, has a bit of a rant on the state of new play productions in Boston, which matches my experience. I have not seen the other plays he mentions, but have had the experience in the past of wondering, at a new play, either "wow, what a disaster" (like Noah Haidle's Persephone), or "this play could have been pretty good, if it had been workshopped, edited, and taken on the road and then reworked again" (any number of recent productions). I've bitched about this before. You'd think, given the tiny number of slots for new play productions, the ones we see would be really good, or at least meretricious crowd-pleasers. They are never either.

This play is in the "disaster" category. And it's not even like Vonnegut's name will bring in a younger audience. It will be the usual cottontops who know what a granfalloon is.

12 Years a Slave, and the Capitol building

Last night, my daughter Faith and I went to see the movie 12 Years a Slave. It is a movie specifically about the experience of slavery before the Civil War. Though at least one character makes a remark on how this will all have to change someday, no one mentions the President, any bill in Congress, or any news of any kind. There are no scenes that follow the lives of non-slave characters. The focus is on the day-to-day experience of slavery.

That's what makes the movie powerful and almost intolerable. There is no escape, no opportunity for vengeance, not even any sign the system could ever possibly change. And, in fact, it didn't, until invading armies destroyed it.

It is even realistic in that we see privileged slaves: household slaves, and slave mistresses who have learned to take advantage of their position. And we do see one slave mistress who was finally sold off by her previous master's daughter, and is now a field hand like the rest, because a position that is only granted by someone else can just as easily be taken away.

There is actually one small opening out to imply the larger political situation, in a really brief image. After the freeborn Solomon Northup is kidnapped into slavery and chained in a cell, the camera pans up and reveals that his location is Washington DC. We know this because we see the Capitol Building on its hill.

And even here, the movie shows its quality, and its daring, because it shows the Capitol as it looked in the 1840s, with its low copper dome, not the 1863 building we all know.  I can't find a screenshot from the film, but this shows the dome so you can see how low it was then:

The original Capitol, with a coffle of slaves

This is daring because the image lasts only a second or two, and most people will not instantly recognize that version of the building. Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997), a movie about slaves and slave trading set in 1839 that focused mostly on the white characters,  lacked that courage.  There is a scene with John Quincy Adams where what looks like the post-1863 Capitol looms behind him.

In fact, what it shows is the c1900 Rhode Island State House:

A great building by McKim, Mead and White, but not the U.S. CapitolWhen I saw the movie, though, I did not think we had moved to Providence. I saw it as the Capitol building.

Filmakers and writers setting scenes in the past are always torn between being true to the situation, attitudes, look, language, and relationships as they really were, and making sure that those are comprehensible and sympathetic to a modern audience. I think this movie takes at least one step toward accuracy and away from comfort. I'm sure people will point out inaccuracies, and places it could have gone even farther. That's inevitable. It goes incredibly far.

This makes a great pairing with last year's Lincoln, white people arguing about slavery, because it shows what they were arguing about. And I will say, as I said about Lincoln, that every American should see it.

What I'm working on now

As I mentioned a while ago, I have pulled some old works out of the drawer to work on.  Some are stories my writers workshop gave me useful comments on, some have not been seen by anyone.

I've already sold one, to Asimov's, and another one has been revised and submitted elsewhere, so some progress has been made.

Now I am wrestling with a novella I tried to write a couple of years ago. I wrote a lot of words and never even got close to the crucial parts of the story. It's a story about free will and compulsion, set in a world of intelligent trees and other products of long-ago genetic manipulation. I keep coming up with ideas that distract me from the main point. This is probably my greatest productivity killer.

Can I wrestle the plot into submission by the end of the weekend? I'll let you know.

Why do people believe crime is getting worse?

For the past 20 years, the rate of both violent and nonviolent crime has been declining incredibly. And the decline has not stopped. As I've mentioned before, the cause of this is obscure--broken windows policing, Roe v. Wade, decreases in childhood lead exposure, increases in obesity...who knows? But the facts are incontrovertible.

So why do so many people think crime has not only not dropped, but has actually risen? According the the Gallup poll at the link

Currently, 68% say there is more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago, 17% say less, and 8% volunteer that crime is unchanged.

It's really surprising that democracy works as well as it does. The Gallup poll also says that 38% say there is an area within a mile of their home where they feel unsafe walking at night.  I had no idea there were that many people who walk anywhere, much less at night.

Was no one alive in the 70s and 80s? Don't any of them notice the difference, particularly in property crime, like stolen cars and break-ins? I sure do.

So, what about that belief is comforting to people? Do they use it to explain to themselves why they so seldom leave their house except to go to work or the mall? Or is it just bad sampling from watching local news, which fronts every violent or perverse act that took place on the continent that day and makes it seem like they are happening in your own village?

I don't know. But if they're wrong on something that really does enter into their day-to-day lives, they're probably more wrong about everything else.

Severe editing done!

Last week I whined about having to cut my YA novel down from its obese 110K words down to (actually) 75K.

I flew on business several times last week, and did a lot of marking up of printed manuscript en route. Then, staring early this Saturday, I commenced implementing the edits. It was surprisingly easy to cut maybe 25K words out, making me realize I had been a bit self-indulgent in my text.  The other 10K was a bit harder, but still not the torture I anticipated.

And I did have it wrong.  Martha had asked for 75K, but I remembered wrong and was aiming for 80K.  When I realized my mistake, I had to go through again, making more small cuts earlier in the book, to get it moving faster.

So that was my weekend, from early in the morning until afternoon, though I did go out with a friend early Saturday night.

I'm under a lot of personal stress currently, and a lot of things have been going wrong. It's a comfort that this, at least, got done.  Now we'll have to see what comes of it.

The terror of severe editing

Starting is always the hardest part.

My agent likes my book (title now in flux), but says it is too long for its market.  And I mean far too long. It is about the same length as my previous books, which seems to be my natural length, around 100-110K words.  YA should be more like 80K. 

And she's right, both for this market, and in general. Most books should be way shorter than they are.  I say that myself, frequently. So why have I been so reluctant to savagely cut my own work? Because all of my words are so great? Do I really want to sell this thing?

You can tell I'm psyching myself up.  I have a couple of long car rides this weekend (elder child checking out McGill), and hope to make a dent in it.  This is where someone close to me and familiar with the text would be a big help, but my spouse never reads anything I am working on, and is only reluctantly persuaded to take a look after it is published.  A considerate, literate spouse with a ruthless streak would be a big help.

Killing your darlings is one thing, but contemplating darling genocide is another level of writerly hell. But this is whining. I am alone with this book. I'll let you know if I survive my struggle with it.

Jane Austen and Film Noir

I recently read Jane Austen's Emma for a book group I belong to. A few days later, I watched an interesting minor noir, Too Late for Tears. And I got to thinking about the connections between Jane Austen and film noir.

Short answer for the impatient: film noir is what happens when a Jane Austen heroine discovers that the man she's married has way less money than she thought.

In Too Late for Tears, from 1949, Jane and Alan Palmer are a couple who unexpectedly end up with a bag of obviously illegally obtained cash. Jane sees the windfall as a way of escaping their life of installment payments, Alan isn't so sure. That's not a good stance for Alan. Jane maneuvers around everyone who threatens her hold on the cash, and is eventually brought low only by a narrative contrivance.

Emma is actually not a good example for my thesis, since Emma Woodhouse actually has a fair amount of money of her own. But Jane Austen heroines are compelled to make sure their passions match their interests, and fall in love with men able to support them.

Sometime later, I also watched the biopic Miss Austen Regrets, which deals with a slightly fictionalized version of Austen's later years, when she has to face the consequences of choices she made earlier in her life, and struggle to support her family through her writing. Olivia Williams is great as Jane Austen, BTW.

Immediately postwar America was on the verge of a boom, but it must not have felt that way after a decade of Depression and half a decade of war. Early 19th century Britain's Industrial Revolution had not yet had significant economic effects, and it was still a static economy. In such economies, if one person has more, someone else has to have less. The pie isn't growing. There is only so much productive land. Thus, it's easy to lose out, and live the entire rest of your life in penury. There are few second chances, particularly for women.

The women of noir also feel that the pie isn't getting any bigger. As with Austen women, their physical attractiveness is their only real asset in the search for secure wealth, while their cleverness is the hidden asset that allows them to leverage that attractiveness to get what they need to survive.

Too Late for Tears actually stimulated a lot of interesting thoughts. Lizabeth Scott as Jane is an oddly compelling high-cheekboned ice queen, though handicapped by a stiffly waved do almost as ridiculous as the one imposed on Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity five years earlier. The trusting and slow-witted Alan Palmer is played by Arthur Kennedy, who would have much more fun as the roguish and sly Emerson Cole in the superb Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart Western Bend of the River, a few years later.

And the somewhat pathetic baddy, blackmailer Danny Fuller, is played by Dan Duryea, specialist at the half sniveling/half snarling villain. He is a few notches below his best here, and handicapped by a big suit that can't hide that he's a skinny little weasel. He would do much better as Waco Johnny Dean in the Mann/Stewart Winchester 73, the next year. Some people think of those Mann Westerns as Western Noir, which would explain the commonality of actors, but that's not the genre-slip I'm concerned about here. Worth thinking about, though.

If you add some Emerson Cole to the somewhat dull-witted Alan, more Waco to Danny, and make Jane, well, Jane, I think you'd really have something. The once-flirtatious witty repartee has turned deadly, the home economics are grim, the wife is ready to use her quick wits to figure a way out of this situation. But Darcy...I mean, Allan, has a few more tricks up his sleeve than he was allowed to use in the current version.

A static economy leads to existential despair. A static economy that was once a growing economy leads to rage and murder. We'll see if the current impasse in our political system returns us to noir as a way of life, rather than just a style.

Me and the government shutdown

I am a victim of the government shutdown, in a "First World Problem" kind of way:  if all had gone as planned, I would be hiking down below the North Rim of Grand Canyon today.  Instead, I am in my basement, typing this.

My annual hiking trip with my friends is something I look forward to all year.  And we had tried several times to get space at the limited North Rim campsites in order to do a good loop hike. We did the trial-by-fax application process (OK, my friend Paul did, by going into his office on a Saturday and sitting by the fax machine) three months ago. We finally got our spots.

Paul actually drove up there from Santa Fe to meet us, and found himself virtually alone in Kanab, Utah, as everyone waiting for a rafting trip, a hike, or anything else to do with the federal lands up there pulled out and home.  Now he should be home as well.

I will deal with my political reaction to this shutdown elsewhere. All I can say is that I hope I don't run into Rep. Randy Neugebauer on the trail anytime soon.

Picking up old projects

Now that I have turned my novel in to my agent, I'm turning back to some things I was working on before I really dove into the revision.

There are a lot of unfinished stories and other projects littering my mental universe. I have notes in various formats: an old composition notebook, bundles of notes on yellow 6x9 pads, bundles of note cards, crumpled sheets quickly scribbled on at work or while doing something else, emails to myself, even text generated by Dragon Naturally Speaking when I was unable to see after my eye operation...not each of these is done by a different personality, but it is still disturbing to come across having forgotten the original moment of thought.

I also have unfinished drafts, sometimes multiple ones.  Sometimes I have forgotten why I restarted, or what I was after with the new approach.

The one advantage is that I have completely forgotten how much work is invested in each piece, and so can look at them a bit dispassionately, seeing only how much work remains to get each one to submittable quality--or abandon it as not worth further investment.

But, jeez, there are a lot of them. My life has been in disorder for longer than I consciously realized, and big changes have been going on that I only recently really gotten to grips with. And these changes are far from complete.

I hope I have some time this weekend to bring order to this obsessive mare's nest.  I leave for my annual hike next week, and when I come back from that, don't want to return to something that looks like case files from a competency hearing....

On losing a Kindle

I never thought I would like an e-reader. Actually, I'm still not sure I like it, but I sure need it.

As I mentioned, I lost my Kindle on a business trip to Toronto  Everyone I contacted was very helpful, including the Toronto Police Department, but it has not turned up.  Next week I am flying to Las Vegas and then driving up past Jacob's Lake to do a one-week hike down the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

I like to read in the evening when I hike.  And, at this time of year, there is not only evening but a lot of night that I can't really sleep through.  But books are heavy.  Sometimes I've hauled pretty heavy books, which is great for when I'm not moving, but made moving painful and slow. Pretty dumb, in retrospect.

A Kindle, or similar e-reader, is a great solution. Doesn't weigh much, and carries a lot, including maps and trail information.  I often PDF notes and other information to put on it.

My Kindle stores a lot of classic literature, obtained for free or for really cheap.  And, believe it or not, sometimes I read it.  I've done Barchester Towers, which I keep meaning to blog about. Actually, there's a lot I keep meaning to blog about, but I usually only blog when I'm avoiding writing...like right now.

It also has a distressing amount of self-help literature on it, the main thing I am missing right now. I don't like getting too intimate here, but there have been several big problems in my life recently and among the vast mass of self-help books are some that are...well, extremely helpful. Call them "moral philosophy" if it makes you feel better about them. Most of the great books of philosopy from the Roman period, whether Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic, or Cynic are really self-help books.

A Kindle is also perfect for insomnia. It won't wake anyone else up, and the light level is really low, so I'm convinced it doesn't reset my internal clock. Because of those stresses, I wake up a lot in the middle of the night.

So I need to get a new one, and, as it happens, a new model of Paperwhite is ready just before I go. So I ordered it.  And I thought these things were supposed to save you money.

Forced to proofread

I was on a business trip this week. I was doing something both interesting and stressful:  videoing analysts at the company I provide marketing for.  I had to learn how to set up lighting and sound, select and buy equipment, and then learn to use all of it. I think it all came out well.

But somewhere along the way I lost my Kindle.  I'll try to track it down today.  I don't favor the Kindle for regular reading, but when traveling or camping, it's great, given how much it can carry.  So I had no other reading material with me, and only discovered the loss in the departure lounge.

To entertain myself I was forced to do something I've been putting off: proofreading the scanned files from my backlist, starting with Carve the Sky, preparatory to turning them into ebooks for a new generation of readers.

I got maybe 15% of the way by the end of the flight.  This is going to take awhile.  But it is essential.  I'm resisting the urge to rewrite anything, though I do fix an occasional word choice I no longer agree with.

But, you know what?  The book's not bad.  I try to write things I would like to read, and Carve certainly qualifies.  Maybe it can find a new life as pixels, since ink on paper (its natural medium) just didn't cut it. The question is whether I can give the task the time it really needs, given that I want to keep writing new stuff too.

Book Groups, and the Literary Blind Date

Years ago I belonged to a book group. It was a group of biology researchers of various kinds at Harvard, as well as friends and hangers on, who liked taking a break from lab work to discuss literature. It went on for a few years, and I had a great time, made friends, and read some works I would not have found otherwise.

I haven't done anything like that since. Recently, however, I've started checking out various Meetup groups in my area, including a couple of book groups.  Last night I attended one that discussed Nabokov's fantasia on his early life, Speak, Memory.

A first session with a new book group is very much like a blind date. Will they like me? Will I like them? Will we have anything to talk about?

In the event, I had a great time. Smart people, great discussion, and we got to meet outside at Radcliffe Yard until it got too dark to see each other, and it got cold, and a guard showed up to tell us we weren't supposed to be where we were.

I'm also trying out another book group, one that meets in bars associated with the topic of the book being read. I liked the first meeting of that one too.

Reading books for book groups risks being yet another assignment in a life overfull of them, and another way of getting behind on other reading, but meeting interesting new people makes it worth it. It got done writing my book at the same time as a number of other things are changing in my life. It's time for a change of mental scenery.

Gestation speed

The germ of the idea for Timeslip (or whatever--as I've mentioned, I'm trying to come up with a better title) came to me while I was a participant at the Rio Hondo workshop in the hills above Taos, NM in May of 2010.  Several other people had submitted sections of YA novels, and I thought "hey, maybe I can do that!"

I got up early one morning and drove off to take a hike by myself.  As I walked, the character and basic structure of the book came to me.  By the time I ran into too much snow to keep going, I had enough to get me started: my main character Doug, his father, and the device his father has invented to get into other worlds with other histories, the device that brings someone from one of those other worlds into ours, and gets Dad kidnapped.

Later that year, my family and I spent a week in the Adirondacks. Every morning I got up early and did experiments with the book. That's the way I get through the initial planning of a novel.  I pick some possibility and examine its implications, and its downstream consequences. I wouldn't say that's an efficient way to do it, but I don't have the gift of distinguishing fruitful possibilities from sterile ones. I have to take each one out for a fairly extensive test drive. I sat out on the porch, feeling the light grow over Long Lake while the family slept, and scribbled in what is now the first of a thick series of notebooks lined up near the desk where I write this.

The first draft went fairly quickly, by my standards, and I had it done by September of 2011.  Why, then, did I only manage to turn the thing in in September 2013?

Partly, it's because I'm an idiot. Or, to put in a way that is both nicer and more accurate, I have an "uneven cognitive profile" -- #6 in this quick essay on procrastination, by an online advice-giver, Dr. Alice Boyes, whom I've really gotten useful advice from. In many situations, my cognitive strengths allow me to skip over the things I don't do well.  But a novel, or a really busy job (as I have right now), sometimes exposes very real blindspots that I need deal with. Let's call that my UCP problem. Finding a way to detect the blindspots before they cause real problems is the main task of my self-analysis.

And partly it is that fact that I do work full time, at a job that requires a lot from me, and am my family's main financial support.  But that might account for one year of the delay, not two.

Despite my best "fruitful alternative" planning, I often end up in a narrative dead end.  I'm not particularly adept at working out complex plots with lots of competing parties, and yet, those are the plots I tend to favor.  Why not an entertaining picaresque, where one thing happens after another, and aside from a few coincidental meetings with characters from earlier in the narrative, there is no plot to speak of? I dunno.  The inspirations for those just don't seem to come to me.

So I ended up stuck several times, and had to work my way back out. I rewrote it, gave it to the Cambridge SF Workshop a year ago, and they gave me some useful advice.  Then, as often happens, I had too much to think about and fumbled and procrastinated. Was that wasted time, or useful gestation? Some of both. I did get a much stronger last third as a result.  Still shouldn't have taken so long.

On the topic of novel revision, the best advice I've found anywhere comes from writer Holly Lisle: her blog post How to Revise a Novel. Her ruthless scene-by-scene analysis really brings every problem out into the open. Now that I have incorporated her advice into my practice, I'm hoping it will percolate back into the actual scene construction, making the book "revision ready" in the first draft.

As I said, I'm hoping.

But, you know what?  I like this book a lot. I read every word while proofreading and line-editing this last time, and actually felt good about it. That's rare. Writing a younger protagonist, and striving for simpler language, forced me away from my love of imagery, background information, and complex language and into a sparer, more dramatic style.  I'm not giving any of those up, by the way. But I hope that when I revisit them in another book, I can use them because I want to, not because I need to in order to make up for other deficiencies.

It's Sunday morning.  I want to write a few stories before I start my next book. So, I will press "publish", get another cup of coffee, and get to it.

Done. Now what's the title?

Last night I wrote that I was almost done with editing my latest novel.  Now I actually am done.

I've been talking about this one for a while.  It's a YA novel about a teenager whose father invents a way to cut through to alternate histories--and then someone comes in through from one of these alternate worlds, kidnaps Dad, and disappears. I just reread every word of the thing without cringing.  I hope that's a good sign.

The problem now is the title.  It's working title all the way along has been Timeslip. But, as my writing workshop pointed out, it's misleading. It's not about time, its about worlds.  My friend Steve Popkes has pushed strongly for Crossworld. There are merits to the suggestion, but there's an evangelical tinge to the term, as you can see from this organization.

I like getting "World" in there. But putting that word first, as in Worldslip, crams too many consonants together. The same problem dogs my actual favorite alternative Worldswap. That's probably why this simple combo has never been used as a book title, as far as I can tell.  Crossing Worlds has been used once, but for a historical novel, not an alternate world adventure, so that's a possibility.

I often get stuck at this point. I want a title that lets the reader know at least a bit about the book.  IF anyone has any votes or suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.

Teetering on the brink

For the past few months, I have been revising my next novel, a YA alternate history adventure.  At least the character is adolescent, and the language is simple, but I'm not sure it fits the current model of bonding-against-dystopia YA fiction.

And for the past couple of weeks, I've been doing a detailed proof and clean, and resisting the urge to do any deeper editing. As they say, no book is ever finished, just abandoned, and sweet noises this one makes, I'm leaving it on someone's doorstep soon.

And I'm a day or two from submittable version. It's been a long haul, my job has been stressful, and I'm in a frazzle.  What will I do when it's done? I'm not really sure.