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By Lynn, on January 26th, 2010%
I made several and made good (finally) on one of them today.
I have a gym membership, but it’s been a while…a couple whiles, at least…since I’ve paid a visit.
But things have been going better. I’ve written new prose (a little) every day for over a week and the Daughter of the Bright Moon proofread/prep for Closed Circle is coming along. I paid my January bills, even did the filing (much easier now that I’m scanning everything into searchable PDF files).
So, today I hit the gym. Well, not quite the gym, the aerobics room in the building behind the gym (actually a Wellness Center associated with the local hospital) for my very first Zumba class.
Oh my.
It was fun and a very good aerobic workout, which is what I was aiming for, I think I may have tried something that no one born before 1960 should try. We’ll know better tomorrow when (if) I successfully haul myself out of bed.
In the meantime…
How to use semi-colons – The Comic
By Lynn, on January 23rd, 2010%
Today I joined goodreads.
You can find me (I think….hope) here.
I’ve added a mess of books, sorted them into “bookshelves” that appear to bear little resemblance to anyone else’s shelves (hope that’s not going to be a problem) and (much to my surprise) managed to put a bit of cover-age in the sidebar.
That’s enough excitement….although the simple proofread prep for Daughter of the Bright Moon is progressing nicely, as is my original short story for Closed Circle, which has the working title of Exiled on Main St (and, since I’m not going to be peddling it to an intermediate editor, it’s likely to stayed Exiled.)
By Lynn, on January 22nd, 2010%
My daily drift net caught this video for the second time and I watched for the second time (I recommend muting the sound track. I don’t have anything against women singing Ave Maria, but, IMHO, the hymn adds nothing to this video).
Together, SF and Fantasy are the genre of exponential What Ifs, but my mind rarely manages the leap from a neat bit of speculation to anything that resembles a STORY.
But this video is different. Not because the notion of a ringed earth is earth-shatteringly new; I’m sure I’ve encountered it before. No, it’s the fairly skillful juxtaposition of the CGI rings behind familiar cityscapes and the throwaway line about how the hypothetical rings would light up the night sky.
What if “night” wasn’t particularly dark? It’s rare now, but if you ever do happen to be in the middle of nowhere on a moonless night without any of the light sources we take for granted, it’s DARK….pitch dark….cave dark. Scary dark, ‘cause things can sneak up on you—which figured into every war strategy, including the ones we’re fighting right now.
Early on in Iraq I recall a TV interview about how American military strategy had evolved to favor nighttime operations, thanks to our nightscope technologyies. “We own the night,” the officer stated, flatly and accurately.
But who would own the night if the earth had rings? How would military strategy—which is to say a whole lot of history—turned out if night’s darkness wasn’t measured by the moon orbiting us but by us orbiting the sun?
For that matter, how might our myths and religions developed when the most noticeable thing in the sky was pretty much constant: no risings and settings, just look up and there they are. Sun gods and lunar goddess….and what might rings have been? Would we have figured out that we’re living on a ball, not a board? Would we have been as fascinated by the stars and the planets?
I could almost make a story out of that.
By Lynn, on January 21st, 2010%
If it’s 11PM on Wednesday, in the eastern US time zone, then the odds are that I’m on the phone, talking to Elaine. We set our conversational dates (Wednesday and Saturday) and time back when I’d first moved to Florida and “unlimited long distance” was only a dream.
We have wide ranging conversations, but there are some subjects we return to time and time again. Lately, we’ve been putting a lot of time into electronic publishing. Sometimes the conversation is general, but tonight it got quite specific because I’m trying to get Daughter of the Bright Moon prepped for release on Closed Circle.
Daughter wasn’t merely my first published novel….it was my first attempt at writing publishable fiction. (The story of how I came to write Daughter is here.) I don’t make a habit out of reading my own books after they’ve been published. I skimmed through it before I wrote Rifkind’s Challenge (Recognize my avatar?) but I don’t think I’ve actually read it since it was published.
Oh dear.
Story-wise, I still think it’s pretty good. Rifkind will always be one of my favorite characters – the only one I ever actually dream about—and not because she was the first one I conjured. But regarding my writerly skills…. Daughter’s so raw a good vet could save it!
(When it came out, Library Journal ran a review that included a phrase that I’ll never forget “….the author’s style, which can charitably be called turgid.” Ouch.)
I probably could live with a raw style….even a turgid one. Daughter is what it is: the place where I began as a writer. If I hadn’t changed a bit in the last, oh, thirty-odd years, I wouldn’t be prepping it for anything.
It’s worse than that though.
Reading along, it’s usually petty clear what I meant to say, unfortunately, that’s not necessarily what I wrote. There are inconsistencies—not the foolish inconsistencies of small minds, but the ones where it’s raining at the start of the paragraph and the sun’s shining at the end of it. (Granted, the weather can change that fast here in Florida, but Daughter’s not set in Florida.) And I really hadn’t mastered the art of creating a coherent point-of-view.
All of which is to say that prepping the prose is turning into something that’s feeling a lot like re-editing the prose
Elaine says, If it’s not an outright typo, leave it be. And she’s got a point, at least two points: A good many readers liked Daughter just the way it is; they won’t appreciate anyone messing with it, including me. And it’s not just that I’ve changed as a writer, I’ve changed as a person and I can’t re-edit the prose without rewriting the story.
There’s a lot to be said for listening to Elaine…if only because it will take a lot less time to get Daughter ready if I’m only looking for typos and scanning artifacts. But some of those sentences!
I don’t know….
By Lynn, on January 19th, 2010%
Apparently I was successful in my quest to restore CJ’s lost blog pages. I had help. Steve and others answered the bleg and gave me some quick lessons in mySQL and PHP. I needed a few days to make use of what I’d been told but now the black box that was WordPress has positively lightened to charcoal gray.
I don’t know why I’m so surprised…why I’m always surprised.
Probably because I started messing with computers before things got formalized. I learned COBOL and Fortran from books I read on the subway, commuting between the Bronx where I lived and Manhattan where I worked, which was in Group Pensions at Metropolitan Life Insurance, where IBM was one of the clients.
One day–after some sort of high-level barter deal, I suspected—stuff appeared in our corner of the 26th floor: a pair of Selectric typewriters mounted like teletype machines over boxes of accordion-fold paper. Rumor had it that they connected to a new computer….a computer that wasn’t connected to Data Processing….a computer of our very own….if we could figure out how to use it.
It was a little like running rats in a psych lab: put the Selectrics on the floor, start the rumors, then see what the rats did next. If there were manuals, I swear I never saw them.
Actually, I wasn’t one of the privileged few who got to play with the Selectrics….not at first. I’d drifted into a sort of limbo there on the 26th floor—overqualified for the part-time clerical work I was doing while pursuing my then-dream of a European history PhD, but not one of the math and/or engineering grads in the actuarial trainee program. I hung with the trainees, though, not the clerks (if you’ve seen Mad Men you’ve got a idea of how our work-space worked) or my fellow PhD candidates at NYU, for that matter; and almost from the start, those Selectrics had me mesmerized. On nights when I didn’t have classes, I’d stay late—‘cause the computer behind the Selectrics ran 24 hours a day—and practice my COBOL.
Actuaries are the brains—and very often the power—of insurance companies. They’re accredited and to earn that accreditation they have to pass a series of exams, which were given twice a year. The trainees got comp time to prepare for their exams. A week before exams started, the place would be half-empty and the Selectrics would be still and silent.
One of those corner-turning moments in my life came one of those quiet, pre-exam afternoons when my boss—who didn’t like me—as far as he was concerned actuaries were like the Marines: the few, the proud, the brave and I was infantry (on a good day)—appeared in front. You’ve got your chance, he said (because he knew what I’d been doing on my own time). One of our big clients wanted to know how much money a change to their pension plan was going to cost, and they wanted to know by the end of the day. Get me the numbers, he said, then shrugged, because we both knew I would and we both knew I’d escape from limbo after that.
Ultimately, I took (and passed) a couple of the actuarial exams, but they weren’t really my cuppa. Computers, on the other hand…. They’re as mesmerizing now as they were the first time I typed “IPL CMS.” Before I started writing fiction, I peddled my programming skills to three different insurance companies, but I never got any sort of formal accreditation, never sat in a classroom, never had a teacher….and never stopped being surprised when I make the dratted thing behave.
By Lynn, on January 13th, 2010%
There are over 1500 lakes here in Lake County, FL. A lot of them are plugged up sinkholes (which sometimes come unplugged, transforming lakefront property into a meadow fit only for goats). Some of them are little more than seasonal retention ponds. No matter what kind of lake, though, they have at least on thing in common: no roads cross them.
Net result: if you want to get from here to there, you don’t have a lot of choices. If you think that little road is going to be short cut, think again, ‘cause most likely it’s going to wind up on a lake shore.
So, there are relatively few main roads in our 950 sq. mile county and if you’re going to start a business, you’re probably going to start it within a couple hundred feet of one of them.
Since I got here in 1997, I’ve seen a lot of ground broken for new stuff; more, honestly, than I would have liked. But since 2006, mostly what I’ve seen is buildings left half-finished and businesses disappearing pretty much overnight. And since last year, the view from US 441 or US 27 has gotten downright frightening.
Seems like every time I go somewhere, something else has shut down and nothing is coming in to take its place. True, a lot of this is our own fault—Florida has never been known to have 20/20 foresight—but that doesn’t make the pain any less real.
There’s not a lot that one person can do. I did change banks, from a major regional bank that wasn’t doing too well on its “stress tests” to a two-branch outfit that promises to keep its assets invested locally (putting my money where my mouth is, in a fairly literal way) but that was about it until friends who own a yarn store up in Gainesville (Hanks Yarn and Fiber – the only place to find Haldesoap and Haldespun yarn – that’s “Halde” as in Haldeman, those Haldemans) clued me into the 3/50 Project.
The 3/50 Project has its own website where they describe their philosophy and goals better than I can. Suffice to say, the main idea is: Each month, every month, take fifty dollars and spread it around to three local, independent businesses. I’ll have lunch with friends at Ramshackles rather than Burger King or the Olive Garden, pick up my leafy greens at Dr. Johns Produce, buy my embroidery threads at the local store even though it’s cheaper to buy them from an online distributor.
It doesn’t take long to rack up $50 and it can be a bit depressing to realize that there are a lot of things I can’t buy from a local independent, starting with new (as opposed to used) books. I still believe that Lake County is one of those places that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, but it’s home and I’d spend that fifty dollars anyway
And, who knows, maybe it makes a difference
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What I'm working on these days
Exiled on Main St.
Short Story
Status: Active
Word count: 5500
as of: 7-12-2010
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Look Who’s Talking…