Breaking for lunch. Revisions a little going a little slower than I thought. Confused protagonist still wary of federal agent., strange woman and soldier trying to convince him to leave a strange apartment.
Saturday, April 7, 9:18 a.m: Beginning my writing day today. Thought I would experiment with a live blog, because I know you want to know my every thought and idea.
I will attempt to update you periodically as I write. I should probably just do this on Facebook or Twitter, but neither posts directly to WordPress. Anyhow, my first task is to edit last weekend’s revision of my WIP, revising the first draft of my science fiction novel, which I don’t yet have a title for.
This post will be much more like a tweet. It’s short and points you to a link of a new favorite writer, Melinda Snodgrass, a blog post at her website about her plotting, and she’s an excellent plotter. Anyhow, here you go: How I Write.
New Year’ Eve 2011 update of Books Bought, Books Read (with commentary as warranted):
Books bought since Oct. 1, 2011:
In the SF Masterworks series:
Books Read:
Steering away from SF and random posts on writing, I’m going to give you a link to a friend’s blog. If you are a bit whacky you might get help from her. (Hope she takes no offense to my attempts at humor.)
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A good novel. Better on the second read. Obviously influential to the genre–cyberpunk in particular. But I seem to be missing why it’s such a seminal SF work. Still, Gully Foyle maybe most memorable character in SF.
Comments?
In the early part of the twenty-first century there were people who believed we were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s; those people were dismissed as loons, quacks who went out to New Mexico and watched for the Grays to emerge from Area 51.
At the time, I thought such people were at the very least misinformed, pretty damn weird, and probably sold jars of lime Gatorade to tourists believing they were buying alien urine. So it goes.
***
In my late forties I decided to begin taking a morning constitutional on the advice from the books of health gurus—to some these gurus are quacks as well—and on one of these walks, on a crisp cloudless October morning, in a quaint middle-class neighborhood west of my flat, I passed by a nice red-brick house of a family I knew only slightly, when I heard a slight rustling from their hedges.
I stopped and listened, thinking it was only a squirrel or a bird, or perhaps a lizard. But the sunlight dappling through the shade tree in the front yard revealed something else—an azure sparkle through the leaves. At first I dismissed it as perhaps some piece of trash, a beer can perhaps, caught in the leaves.
Later, after we knew the truth of the mattter, some who saw the pictures I took with my camera phone said they heard hissing in the night sky. Others heard nothing, but reported a mass of comets sho0ting through the sky, an unusual enough phenomenon little reported by the media, which was too busy analyzing Kanye West’s decision to go into fashion design.
Anyhow, I started on my way once more, but then the rustling in the hedges erupted again. I stopped and turned and watched. Something was rising steadily above the leaves and limbs. I brought my camera into focus.
A glowing blue globe peeked from over the edge of the hedge. I trembled but felt compelled to approached, almost as if the Thing were laying some kind of Jedi-mindtrick on me.
The Thing rose silently. There were no visible means of propulsion. Clearly, a technology superior to any on Earth—as far a we know (who, after all, really knows just what the frak is going on at Area 51).
I moved closer. It hovered in place over the hedge. I saw no massive hole, no sign of impact whatsoever. It made no threatening moves, no sound, but I knew better. I knew from sci-fi flicks that nothing good could come of this.
I knew the invasion was on, and at the moment, was its only witness on this too quiet street . . .
An update to my pollysyllabic spree:
Books bought
Books checked out
Books read
I decided to shift genres and read some nonfiction after checking out Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food at my neighorhood library. I’m slowly
jumping on the food/nutrition/health bandwagon, as I’ve hit my forties and have been trying to eat more vegetables, and be a little bit healthier in my habits, both physical and mental.
When I started reading the book yesterday, I had only read a few pages of the book and found a curious editing choice in the copy I checked out. Library books, of course, are often abused: they’ve been marked in, had coffee spilled on them (I’m guilty of this abuse), have torn or even sometimes missing pages. I once even found a leaf in a copy Arthur Plotnik’s The Urban Tree Book .
On page 6 of the library copy of the book, the previous borrower decided to take action (see PDF) and quibble with the author over word choice, scratching through the line “coming down from the trees,” not because the line is cliche, but because Pollan has chosen to refer to humans as an evolved species and not a divine creation. The “editor” in pen has inserted in the margin “being created by the All mighty God.”
I alternate between finding this funny in a Ned-Flanders sort of way (recalling Flanders marking out “darns” and “hecks” from either Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew) and finding it annoying. I can imagine this reader with pencil in hand, grumbling to himself and thinking, Gosh darnit I’m so sick-and-tired of these liberals and their making monkeys of us, I’ma gonna make the next person reads this here book think about the Truth and facts. Yep, they gonna know the Lord created the universe in six days and our world is six-thousand years old.
The comment is not relevant to Pollan’s argument. The previous reader has co-opted the book as his own, as if it were his desire to have written a book about food and nutrition, but from the perspective of creationism.
After I posted this entry yesterday, I flipped through the book and discovered the previous reader had kept editing as he read when Pollan made reference to humans being an evolved species, an animal, a mammal, a primate.
The first thing these edits caused me to think of is my own obsession with debates over evolutionary theory (a theory based on hard science; of course, the scientific method could arguably be an ideology; certainly evolutionary theory, or rather correctly, the theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin, et al, was much abused in Darwin’s own time through Social Darwinian theories) and creationism (an ideology that is a subset of the ideology of religious fundamentalism that makes serious leaps of logic, faith and misreading). Pollan, interestingly enough, talks about currents in food science as nutrionism, “an ideology . . .[a way] of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.”
Anyhow, I believe in evolution, in natural selection; I believe we are animals, mammals, and primates and there is good, solid, examined evidence to demonstrate that life primeval wasn’t Flinstonian in nature, as some creationists try to demonstrate.
That said, the next thing the creationist editor caused me to think about was a recent Facebook discussion about artistic intention and the intentional fallacy. Clearly, the creationist editor misread Pollan’s book, and read into it an argument against creation, and seems to ignore Pollan’s—from what we can gather through textual evidence only—intention: “My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.”
Or is this Pollan’s intention? Perhaps he really is trying by writing about an interesting topic such as food and health to sideswipe us into believing we evolved tens of thousands of years ago and monkeys are our uncles ?
I tend to think opening the evolution-creation debate wasn’t Pollan’s intention, but I’m just another reader of a so far well-written book-length argumentative essay that tries its best to examine unexamined assumptions about food.
Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:
Do you carry books with you when you’re out and about in the world?
And, do you ever try to hide the covers?
Yes, I carry books when I’m out and about. Of late, when I go to substitute teach, along with my lunch in my backpack, I carry Year’s Best SF 12 to read on my breaks.
It’s a short story anthology from 2006 and includes Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, and Ian MacLeod.
Short stories are really good for the hour or so of planning period time I usually have available for myself. Much better than reading the same copy of Wired or Time or Newsweek found in the teacher’s lounge.
No, I don’t hide the covers of books I carry around, unless it’s a big stack in the shopping bag from the bookstore I’ve bought them from.
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