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8/1/08: Launch Pad, day 2

Launch Pad is Astronomy 101 in a week. Some of us are already getting a little crispy around the edges.

Steve Gould has a cute tiny Asus “eee” laptop. I have discovered that you can get Mac OS X to run on it. ::wants::

Mike Brotherton started off the day with some introductory remarks. Observational astronomers, he says, are night owls; theorists are the ones who schedule 8am classes. He revealed that in academia it’s standard to pay for publication of your accepted papers ($150 a page or so); this helps keep the academic journals afloat. He also shared some useful URLs, then gave us a lecture on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Almost everything we know about the universe outside of the Earth (except for some moon rocks and space dust) comes to us in the form of light and other electromagnetic radiation. He explained the relationship between frequency, wavelength, and the speed of light, and how light refracts and is broken into the spectrum by a prism because the speed of light in glass is lower than it is in air and varies according to the wavelength (the frequency stays the same, but the wavelength changes as the velocity of the wave goes down). Light is also a particle, of course, and the energy of each photon is determined by its frequency. This isn’t the same as the intensity of the light, which explains why you get sunburn from high-energy UV photons but no harmful effect from even a very intense green light.

“Black bodies” are objects that absorb light equally at all frequencies. These objects also emit light at all frequencies when they are hot. The term “black body radiation” refers to the characteristic spectrum of such a body, which peaks at different frequencies depending on its temperature. The total amount of energy emitted also depends on the temperature — if you double the temperature (measured in degrees Kelvin, i.e. degrees above absolute zero) you increase the energy by a factor of 16!

Telescopes come in two basic flavors: refracting (lens) and reflecting (mirror). Reflecting telescopes are lighter and don’t have chromatic aberration (the red and blue fringes you can see on bright objects when you look through the edges of thick glasses like mine), but the focal plane where the image appears is on the same side of the mirror as the object being observed — this is not much of a problem in real life, you can put the sensor there, or a mirror to redirect the image somewhere else, without interfering with the telescope too badly. Reflecting telescopes are also much easier to make big, and the bigger (in diameter) the better.

Modern professional telescopes use adaptive optics (tiny rapid changes in the mirror to compensate for atmospheric disturbances) and long-baseline interferometry (using several small telescopes to simulate a much larger single telescope) to achieve results nearly equivalent to space-based telescopes. However, space-based telescopes can see frequencies no ground-based telescope can see through the atmosphere, including infrared and X-rays.

Danny Dale then gave us a lecture on dust in space (say it with me: “Duust… iiiinnn… SPAAAAAACE!”) which was reasonably interesting, but as much of the presentation was seemingly meant for other astrophysicists (lots of charts) I didn’t get as much out of it as I would have liked.

Jim Verley led us through a hands-on exercise in which we got to look at glowing tubes of several different gases through diffraction gratings, trying to identify the gas by comparing the spectral lines we saw with charts of several common elements. The exercise was very cool and a lot of fun (I have never seen a band of pure teal light before), and clearly showed us that the difference between theory and practice is always smaller in theory than it is in practice. I was reminded of the classic Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass.

Next up was Jerry Oltion with a couple of exercises in back-of-the-envelope calculation. He started off with an easy one: how much does a cow weigh? The answer, no shit, started off with “posit a spherical cow of uniform density…”. The next question was “if we want to build an accurate scale model of the solar system, including Pluto, inside this 30′ long classroom, how big is the sun, how large are the planets, and how far are the planets from each other?” Jerry brought an assortment of spherical objects to help visualize this (“I have the minor planets here in a bag…”).

We started off with a beachball-sized sun, which makes the Earth a 1/10″ diameter BB 100 feet away; Pluto would be an insignificant speck 4000 feet away (nearly a mile!). From there we made the sun smaller and smaller (softball, tennis ball, ping-pong ball, marble…) until we finally got down to a 0.9″ mustard seed. At this scale the solar system (well, not the diameter of the solar system, but all the planets strung out in a line to scale) just fits in the classroom. Earth is a tiny speck 9″ away, Jupiter is smaller than a grain of salt at 45″ away, and Pluto is an even tinier speck 30′ away. There’s a whole lot of empty space in the solar system. Furthermore, at this scale Alpha Centauri A and B would be a pair of mustard seeds 20-30′ from each other… 31 miles away!

The width of your finger held at arms’ length is about 1 degree of arc, by the way.

The final exercise was to view the space station docking scene in 2001 and determine its gravity, using the equation v2r = g. The station rotates once per minute and, based on the heights of the people visible in some windows, is about 150 meters in radius. This means the circumference is about 1000 meters, so v is 1000 meters per minute, which yields a simulated gravity about 1/6 of Earth’s — the same as the moon (though the people inside move as though the gravity is Earth-normal). The very tidy numbers suggest that Arthur C. Clarke told the special effects guys exactly what to do.

I had a lot of fun with the back-of-the-envelope calculations. My father did this sort of thing with me all the time when I was a kid. Some other members of the workshop were left behind, though. I imagine they must feel the way I feel when I see tanned and fit people on sailboats who just hop into the water and swim to shore for lunch.

The day ended with a party at Mike Brotherton’s house, where we chatted with members of the UWyo astronomy faculty and saw the Milky Way (faintly) and a couple of meteors. Tomorrow night we go to the big WIRO telescope up on the mountain.

7/31/08: Launch Pad, day 1

Jay Lake coming back from the shower, singing “Cinnamon Girl” while holding his glasses in his mouth, sounds very very odd. Kind of like Czech.

Breakfasted on a real New York bagel hand-carried by Mary Robinette Kowal, then walked to a nearby grocery store in search of kleenex and other necessities. However, the store seemed to consist of nothing but a meat counter (and why, pray tell, did the sign say “Groceries” and not “Meats”?) and the nearest full-service grocery was too far to walk.

All the Launch Pad people gathered in the lounge (they have all the men on one end of the 5th floor, the women all the way on the other end, and married couple Steven Gould and Laura Mixon sharing a room near the middle) then walked in a group to the classroom, which is about 15 minutes’ walk away. Very much like Clarion, back in the day, except that breakfast, lunch, and snacks are provided.

First day of classes was very full, beginning with introductions all around, filling out forms about our math expertise and what we want out of the workshop, and an initial test of our astronomy knowledge. I’m fairly confident I knew almost everything on the test. (One exception: “which color of star is hottest, red, yellow, blue, or white?” I knew it was either white or blue.)

Mike Brotherton led off with a lecture on the scale of the cosmos, including a viewing of Charles and Ray Eames’s short film Powers of Ten. Apparently, astronomers prefer to use numbers between 1 and 10 (sometimes up to 100) and use different units (kilometers, astronomical units, light-years, parsecs, redshift units) to keep the numbers in that range. I was surprised to learn that, using satellite-based telescopes, we can now use parallax to measure the distances to stars up to 1000 parsecs away.

Discussion of the size of the universe got a little weird and metaphysical. The observable universe is 28 billion light-years across, because the big bang was 14 billion years ago and we can’t see anything farther back than that. However, the universe as a whole is much larger and definitely doesn’t have an edge, but may or may not be infinite. Questions like “how can the universe be bigger than all the way back to the big bang?” proved to be difficult to answer for this audience at this time. Maybe more later, when we discuss cosmology.

Jim Verley then gave a lecture on public misperceptions of astronomy, starting with the film A Private Universe which reveals that even Harvard graduates can’t explain why we have seasons (one popular false explanation is that “the Earth is closer to the sun in summer”) or why the moon has phases (“it’s the shadow of the Earth falling on the moon”).

The basic problem is that students don’t come to school as blank slates. Many people have incorrect private models in their heads, which must be identified and confronted on an individual basis before the student can really internalize the standard model. Even if they learn the standard model well enough to pass the test, if the private model isn’t explicitly displaced it may return years later after the standard model has been forgotten. We then looked at a bunch of different pictures purporting to explain the phases of the moon and identified how they could mislead the student if the student doesn’t already understand the standard model. For example, the illustration in the Wikipedia article on the phases of the moon could easily be misinterpreted as saying that the moon goes through all of its phases every 24 hours.

It turns out that understanding moon phases, which involves simultaneously considering the Earth-Moon system as seen from above and the moon as seen from the Earth while keeping in mind the separate 28-day lunar orbital period and 24-hour Earth day, is remarkably hard. One solution proposed for elementary students is Kinesthetic Astronomy in which the students move their own bodies to help understand astronomical phenomena. As ad-hoc science educators, we SF writers have only words at our disposal, but we can still “show, not tell” to help get the concepts across and be damn sure we’re getting it right.

Jerry Oltion then gave us a whirlwind tour of the solar system, including information about what you can see through various types of telescope (illustrated with photographs he took through his own scopes) and some of the latest data from Titan. I took copious notes.

We went from there straight to dinner at the vegetarian Sweet Melissa, which responded to an unexpected influx of almost 20 people with rapid service and exceptional food. Highly recommended.

After dinner we decided that, rather than poking fun at the bad science in Armageddon (“nearly one mistake per minute”), we would watch the Twilight Zone adaptations of “The Star” and “The Cold Equations”. Both adaptations were flawed, but prompted some interesting discussion.

I really should be asleep now…

7/30/08: Launch Pad, day 0

Travel day today. Awoke 5am for a 6am cab that actually arrived at 5:50. I don’t think anything was left behind in the resulting mad scramble, though I did forget to empty my water bottle, which was duly confiscated by the TSA. Grr.

Uneventful flight to Denver, where I said goodbye to Kate, who is going to spend the next week relaxing and enjoying nature in the vicinity of Pikes Peak. Jay Lake and I had lunch, then wandered about the airport for some time looking for an unobstructed, working electrical outlet with something resembling seating nearby. We settled for sitting on the hard marble floor behind some garbage cans. What is it with airports and electrical outlets, anyway?

All the Launch Pad folks arrived by 4pm except for Nancy Kress, whose flight was delayed. We piled into a van and were driven to Laramie, where we were treated to dinner at the dome-topped Library restaurant (though we had to pay for our own drinks — no alcohol on the taxpayer’s nickel!). After dinner we had a whirlwind tour of the campus, then checked into our rooms.

The dorm is a lot like Clarion West (as it was when I attended, not the sorority house with personal chef those soft kids today have). Hard little beds, hard little chairs, bathroom down the hall. But it’s only for a week, and there’s Ethernet.

And the stars are gorgeous, even when seen from town. Which is, after all, why we are here.

7/27/08: Why can’t I be more like me?

Finished revising the global-warming/honor-killing story and sent it off. I fixed some of the worst probems, but I’m still not completely happy with it. The characters are deliberately unsympathetic, which will probably kill the story for many readers, and I still don’t think I’ve succeeded in establishing their motivations for a couple of key reversals. But the world of the story is so grim that I don’t want to spend any more time there, so off it goes. It may not sell, but at least I took a risk and tried something different.

Next up is revision of the magic-lesbian-plumber story, which should be much more fun.

I picked up a copy of Dozois’s latest Year’s Best and discovered that “Babel Probe” (Darker Matter), “Moonlight on the Carpet” (Aeon) and “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” (F&SF) all snagged Honorable Mentions. Go me.

One more thing before I go and take a nap: I found the following in a two-year-old email and decided that it’s worth sharing.

I saw a stupid TV show on MTV the other day, called something like “Why Can’t I Be You?” In this show, a person who isn’t happy with their life contacts the producers and says “I wish I were more like X,” where X is some former classmate or co-worker or random person on the street. In this particular instance it was some uptight barista who wanted to be more spontaneous, like this guy he knew in high school. The producers found the guy, put the two of them together, and told the guy “we want you to take this barista along with you everywhere for 48 hours and show him how to be like you, while we film everything. We’ll give you a thousand bucks.”

The result was only mildly entertaining and somewhat appalling, but it got me to thinking: what would I do in this situation? Which led me to ask myself which of the two roles I envisioned myself in. After a while I realized I could see myself in both roles. Which made me think of the show in this way: if the me who is depressed, angry, and antisocial came to the me who is happy, flexible, and outgoing (for I contain both people, as I’m sure most people do) and said “I want to be more like you,” what would I tell me to do?

It’s an interesting way to approach the question of how to make my life more like what I want it to be. No answers yet, but taking risks and reaching out to friends are part of it.

7/25/08: Where I’ve been, where I’m going

Wow, it’s been almost a month since my last post. Apologies.

The first week of that time was spent in Cleveland, at the annual gay square dance convention. Convention was fun as always, though as I commented on Sunday night “the more friends you have, the shorter Convention gets.” We had a great time at the Cedar Point amusement park, riding roller coasters. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an excellent museum, with clear informational signage and videos answering not only the question “what is this?” but “why is it important?” As for Cleveland itself… this city makes me realize just how good we have it in Portland. It’s a rust-belt city with crumbling infrastructure, the restaurant situation is dire, and the downtown area seemed almost completely unpopulated even in the middle of a weekday. They’re trying, Lord knows, with much new construction and investments in mass transit, but it feels desperate. I wish them luck.

The following week we put together a new issue of Bento. As usual, we went from “omigod we have nothing, what we do have sucks, this is never going to come together in time” to “hey look, it’s a zine!” with head-spinning rapidity. It’s back from the printer already, even. We’ll be handing out copies at the Worldcon and mailed copies will be sent shortly thereafter.

Planning on the bathroom remodel continues apace. We just signed the contract and will have the final walkthrough meeting (with the ceremonial handing-over of the first ginormous check) next Tuesday. Teardown starts shortly after we return from the Worldcon. We have only the one bathroom. We’ll manage somehow.

At the moment Kate is in Kennewick, helping our niece with Project Destroy Grandparents while Kate’s sister is in Sweden for some kind of martial arts thing. Yes, Sweden. Who knew it was a hotbed of kendo?

I’m batching it (should really be “baching it,” I suppose, but that doesn’t suggest its pronunciation) here in Portland for the nonce. I’ve been working on revising a short story but it’s going really slowly. I hate revisions. Too bad I have a lot of them to do right now.

Kate returns Sunday. On Wednesday we both leave for Denver, where we will disperse: me to Laramie for the Launch Pad astronomy workshop, Kate to a rustic lodge near Pikes Peak. We’ll rendezvous back in Denver the following Wednesday for the Worldcon, where my schedule is as follows:

  • Wed 11:30: Launch Pad: Astronomy for Writers
  • Wed 16:00: Reading: David Levine
  • Thur 10:00: Short Fiction: On its way out or a way to break into the market?
  • Thur 14:30: Have blogs and listservs replaced fanzines?
  • Fri 10:00: Clarion West Writers Workshop: How it Helped My Career
  • Fri 13:00: Signing (45 minutes)
  • Fri 14:30: Kaffeeklatch
  • Sat 11:30: Clarion West Student Readings, the 21st Century

And, looking a little further into the future, I’ll be giving a reading in San Francisco on September 20, part of the SF in SF reading series. This does mean skipping out on Saturday evening of the West Coast Gay Advanced and Challenge Square Dance Weekend. The perils of living in multiple fandoms.

Oh, one more thing: The signed and numbered hardcover of my collection Space Magic is now available from Wrigley-Cross Books.

7/1/08: Off to Cleveland

Sitting at the airport waiting for our flight to Cleveland for the annual gay square dance convention. Internet connectivity may be spotty for the next week.

I haven’t done any writing in the past week and I’m probably not going to do much during the convention. I think I am blocked by the story I need to revise. It’s the bleak nasty one that was (deservedly) given a fairly tough critique at Taos. I dislike revision at the best of times, and this story needs a lot of it. Also, to revise this story I’ll have to force my head back into a very uncomfortable place.

I could revise the other Taos story instead, the one that’s fun and light and I think people will really enjoy, but I think if I do that one now I may never get to the other one. And I think the other one is worth revising. It may never be published, but if it is I think it may piss people off in an interesting way.

Everyone have a great Fourth of July!

6/27/08: Taos aftershocks

I had a big list of things to do on Monday after getting back from Taos. It’s now Friday. How’d that happen?

We did attend a delightful lecture by Peter Schickele (of P.D.Q. Bach fame) on humor in music, and a performance of Avenue Q. I greatly enjoyed the latter, and I was particularly impressed with the performer for the puppets Kate Monster and Lucy The Slut. Not only did she play two vertices of a romantic triangle, sometimes both on stage at the same time, but she was visibly pregnant — not something the romantic lead could get away with in most shows.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I learned at Taos Toolbox. Although it wasn’t the life-changing experience that Clarion was, I did learn a few things…

The (unplanned) theme of the workshop seems to have been that one’s greatest strength often turns out to be one’s greatest weakness. This is true of characters (for example, the character who is most kind and trusting is taken advantage of by the bad guy) and of writers (for example, the writer whose dialog is the most natural and powerful is tempted to use it to paper over plot holes). For me, this strength and weakness is plotting — I am constantly amazed how much difficulty some writers have in figuring out what happens next (for me, it’s always inescapably obvious) but the downside is that my plots tend to push the characters around.

Beginnings are really, really important, because they set the reader’s expectations. For example, we read a YA novel excerpt which opened with the main character diligently sorting jelly beans by color. Many of us figured she was autistic, obsessive, or just preternaturally tidy, and assumed that this would be significant later on. But no — according to the author, it’s just what the character happened to be doing when the story started. The thing is, at the very beginning, a story has no forward momentum. It’s standing still, and from that point it could go in any direction with equal ease. The opening tells the reader which direction the story will be going, whether deliberately or not, and once the reader understands that direction it takes a substantial effort to redirect that momentum. A beginning that points the reader in the wrong direction can cause them to make incorrect assumptions that will make them throw the book at the wall later when the book doesn’t line up with their expectations.

Symbolism and foreshadowing are powerful tools, which I do not yet know how to use consciously. The opening of Casablanca, in which the viewer is prepared by the cinematography and the other characters’ reactions to understand how significant Rick is before Bogart even appears on screen, is one example of foreshadowing, but Nova uses it over much longer stretches of the book. Symbolism… it’s like radioactivity to me. It’s always present in the environment, I know that it is powerful and can be used safely if appropriate care is taken, but I’m afraid of it.

Too much dialog in works by beginning writers is “on the nose” — characters saying exactly what they mean. Dialog that is “indirect,” that is, in which the character doesn’t say what they mean or says something that could be interpreted in multiple ways, is more realistic and also increases the density of the prose (by, for example, imparting information and revealing the character’s emotional state at the same time). I use indirect dialog some of the time but I want to use this tool more effectively.

I am very fortunate to have a community of genre writers here in Portland. Most of the other people at Taos Toolbox lacked an in-person critique group back home, even the one from Los Angeles. I have an in-person critique group, a bunch of writers to hang out and write with at the coffee shop once a week, a semi-monthly authors’ lunch, and two local writers’ organizations, not to mention OryCon, Wordstock, and the Writers’ Dojo. I’m aware of two or three other in-person critique groups in Portland just for SF/Fantasy writers, not to mention the Wordos in Eugene.

Now I have two stories and a novel to revise. I hope to have both stories in the mail in the next couple of weeks, and the novel done and out the door by the end of August. This plan is complicated by the upcoming square dance convention (July 1-8), trip to Seattle for a Clarion West party (July 18), Launch Pad workshop (July 30 – August 5), Worldcon (August 6-11), and Farthing Party (August 28 – September 1).

Oh, and we will also be putting out an issue of Bento and continuing to plan a bathroom remodel during that time.

This is fun. Really it is. But next year we will not be traveling quite so much.

6/22/08: Taos Toolbox, days 12-14 and wrap-up

On Thursday we had three critiques and Walter talked about magic (magic is the violation of natural law by human will; it can only be used by certain people or in a certain spiritual state; if anyone can do it by following a formula it’s really a technology) and aliens (Hegel said that you define yourself in regard to other people, e.g. the definition of Me is that I am not The Other; Sartre said that if another person views the same landscape as me, in some ways every object in the landscape is shared between me and The Other).

Thursday afternoon we found that nobody could get online. The hotel’s wireless servers were providing a signal but not an IP address. A few of us, depending on location, were able to get an intermittent and weak connection from an open network nearby, but it was rarely enough to download an entire web page. I finally gave up and used my phone to check my email. That worked okay, but when I sent a reply and Cc’d myself, I got a bounce: my mail to myself had failed because my mailbox was full. Argh!

It was time for dinner. I couldn’t get online. I knew that anyone trying to send me mail was failing. And I had no way to correct the situation.

I went down to dinner (steak night!), where someone told me that the convenience store had a pay Internet terminal. It was working, though it was a terribly slow Windows 95 machine, and I was able to get on and delete a few very large and replaceable emails from my inbox. That fixed the mail bouncing problems, for a few days at least, and because it took me less than two minutes I wasn’t even charged. I felt much better and enjoyed my dinner.

After dinner we got together and watched Cloverfield. I was leery of it, because I’d had some motion sickness problems when I saw it in the theatre, but someone said he hadn’t had any problems watching it on video, and indeed it was no problem at all. Though the characters were equally stupid on the small screen. Also, though I looked as carefully as I could in the very last shot (and we watched it a couple of times), I was never able to spot the meteor which you can supposedly see descending.

Friday was the last day of classes. We had two critiques and Kelly talked about the Young Adult market (including picture books, easy readers, and middle grades). As near as I can tell, the only significant difference these days between a YA novel and an adult novel is that a YA novel is shorter (50-60,000 words) and has a young protagonist (typically 15+ years old). The only firm rules in YA seem to be: don’t be boring, and no bestiality (but there are a few exceptions to the latter rule). After that we had a general Q and A, where Walter and Kelly answered questions about pacing, person and tense, and challenges. Mostly, though, we sat like a bunch of clubbed seals.

We had a couple of options in the afternoon: a trip to town and a mountain hike. I chose to stay home, pack, and write up my requested evaluation. These didn’t take nearly as long as I’d expected, and the Internet was still down, so I found myself reading email on my phone and wishing I’d gone out. That’s when the thunder crashed and hail started rattling the windows. The hikers came back a while later, shivering, and immediately hit the hot tub.

Friday night we all went out to dinner at a fancy Bavarian restaurant, located a mile and a half further up the mountain on a scary dirt road (posted “four-wheel drive only”). I really have to wonder who their customers are, especially during the summer, but the food was good; I had sauerbraten with spaetzele and rotkohl. We presented Walter and Kelly with gifts and certificates of appreciation. Then we all came home and gathered in one of the condos to finish off the wine, beer, pie, and ice cream. Eventually the group dwindled down to just a few, dishing industry gossip, which was great fun but I fell over around midnight.

Woke up too early this morning. Nobody was around: they had all either left already or weren’t up yet. I ate breakfast alone, took my bag to the car, sat around for a while looking at the place the workshop used to be. Very sad. Still no Internet. Eventually Walter came by and I helped him pack his stuff out to the car. A few other people did come by for goodbyes, then we (meaning me and two other people whose flights were at about the same time) hit the road. It was a little earlier than planned but there was nothing to do here and we figured we’d make use of the free wireless at the airport.

Three hours’ drive and a nice lunch later, we arrived at the airport. Our flight was delayed, and delayed again… my traveling companion will almost certainly miss his connection, but I have a three-hour layover in Denver so it’s no crisis for me. But there was no Internet! Argh! I had a good strong signal and was able to get a connection and an IP address, but no web pages. Pinging the router whose address was provided by DHCP gave the error “Host is down” or nothing at all. I tried manually configuring a few other likely addresses, but that didn’t help. Weirdly, a few other people were online. My guess is that they got on before the router went down, and are working with cached DNS data.

So I sat in the gate and wrote this, to be posted later…

…and, it’s later. I’m in Denver. I found a cheap, quick, fairly healthy dinner at Itza Wrap, and DIA now has free (ad-supported) wifi. But the ads on the free wifi prevented me from using FTP, so I could check my email and such but couldn’t update this blog.

…and, it’s later still. The plane from Denver to PDX pulled out of the gate right on time… and then someone a few rows behind me was violently ill. The plane returned to the gate, paramedics took her off, and then a clean-up crew had to be called. We finally left DIA an hour late and I got home about 1am Sunday.

Whatever.

Anyway… that was Taos Toolbox. In some ways it was like another two weeks of Clarion, but with better accomodations and less oxygen. I didn’t learn as much as I did at Clarion (not too surprising, as I’m starting from a much more experienced place), but I did learn some new things, especially about novel-writing, and I think I had more fun. I made some keen new friends, some of whom I would label as Writers To Watch (at the risk of alienating those not mentioned, I’ll say that the two whose writing impressed me the most were Will McIntosh and Deborah Roggie). I wrote two new stories, one of which was risky and experimental and may not be publishable, the other of which was much more like my usual and came out really well. I probably gained a lot of weight.

It’s been a workshop. Now it’s good to be home.

6/18/08: Taos Toolbox, days 10-11: Some have broken under the strain of it

Two critiques Monday, a talk by Walter on characterization, and a talk on Kelly about some reasons that submissions get rejected, leading into a discussion of reversals, the proper use of cliches and stereotypes, and the use of accents and diction to indicate characters’ class. I did a couple of critiques in the afternoon… not quite sure where the time went. There was an exercise I was supposed to do, taking a personal anecdote and expanding it into a story, which I could not do because I couldn’t think of a single anecdote. I’m usually slopping over with anecdotes, but they are invariably triggered by something in the conversation… “hey, think of an anecdote” gets me nothing.

In the evening some of us watched Father Goose (1964, with Cary Grant). Movie night was a little underpopulated because lots of people were trying to complete stories or critiques.

Today we had three critiques, including my lesbian magic plumber story. It was very, very well received. There were some suggested improvements, including building up the growing love between the plumber and the undine, mentioning earlier that undines are incurable romantics, and changing the plumber’s ex (who shows up several times) into several separate exes to demonstrate the plumber’s previous personal history. A few people didn’t understand the references to Hawthorne and U-Hauls.

After that, Walter talked about worldbuilding. Walter’s special tip for creating a world: follow the money! If you understand who raises the food, how it is transported, where it changes hands, and how much it costs, you will have a much better sense of how your invented world works. Also: “Things are the way they are because they got that way.” What is the history of your world? Kelly then talked for a bit about the mainstream story “A Conversation with My Father” by Grace Paley, which I personally didn’t care for. In the afternoon some of us drove to Arroyo Seco, the nearest town, for coffee, gelato, french fries, and a little souvenir hunting (I didn’t find anything).

In the evening, most of us attended a round-robin traumatic reading of Micah (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Book 13) by Laurell K. Hamilton. We were able to read half the book (in which the main character takes a phone call, drives to the airport, talks with the FBI guys, checks into her hotel, and has sex — yes, that’s all she does in 140 pages), aloud, in only two hours. By explicit request, I read the infamous Chapter 6 using Charlie the Purple Giraffe’s voice for the character of Micah.

If we are lucky we will not be thrown out of the hotel in the morning.

6/16/08: Taos Toolbox, days 8-9: Magic, wizardry, and big dinners

Word count: 5830 | Since last entry: 2026

I should really be asleep right now, but I don’t want to get too far behind on the blogging.

Sunday was largely devoted to writing. I wrote 2000 words and did a couple of editing passes to complete what I am now prepared to call “the magical lesbian plumber story.” I like it. We’ll see what the rest of the gang thinks in a couple of days.

Sunday night Stephen R. Donaldson came to give a guest lecture. I thought we were only going to dinner, so I didn’t bring a computer or notebook. Fortunately, one of the other students agreed to share her notes with me. He talked about various forms of writer’s block and a variety of literary techniques. Interesting tidbit: he only works on one thing at a time, ever since he took a little time off to write a fantasy novella between books 3 and 4 of the Gap series. That effort drove so much of the Gap universe out of his head that, when he was halfway done with book 4 and proofread a copy of book 3, he discovered he’d completely forgotten half the plot threads from the earlier books. Never again, he swore.

We all went with Donaldson for a very nice dinner at the Apple Tree restaurant in Taos. He didn’t talk much at dinner, but just as we were getting up to go I asked him if he was familiar with Northrop Frye’s theory of modes. He was (he was working on a doctorate in English Lit when he stopped to write full-time), so I asked him to comment on my idea, which I had way back in high school, that Thomas Covenant is an Ironic character in a Romantic world. He replied that that’s a valid way of looking at it, but his original concept of Thomas Covenant was as the inverse of King Arthur: where Arthur was a perfect man brought down by imperfect people around him, he wanted Covenant to be an imperfect man raised up by perfect people around him. Glad I asked!

A full day of classes today: three manuscripts critiqued, a lecture on synopses, and another lecture on contracts. Right after class I had my one-on-one with Walter. I didn’t really have a lot of questions, but he did say that I am a “very talented writer” (gawrsh). I wish I had had a novel ready for this workshop, because we’re mostly focusing on novels, but novel #2 has already gotten plenty of feedback and novel #3… well, I don’t even know what novel #3 is going to be yet. But based on my conversation with Walter about how careers work, it should probably be SF rather than fantasy. Although I have a more fantasy ideas, it seems to be my SF stories that sell more consistently and attracts more critical attention.

We had only a couple of hours free in the afternoon, with two manuscripts to critique for tomorrow and a brief exercise to write (describe an office three times: from the perspective of a character whose mother has just died, a character who has just had a proposal of marriage accepted, and a character whose rival has just been promoted over his/her head).

After dinner (spare ribs and corn on the cob) we got together for readings and movie night. Everyone was asked to prepare a three-minute reading of their own work. They were all astonishingly good! Then the movie, which was Trouble in Paradise (1932). I had never even heard of this movie before, and the only actor I recognized was Edward Everett Horton (the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales), but it was delightful.

After the movie, hot tub. We talked about agents and conventions and solved the problems of the world. And so to bed.