Okay, new question

My brain is blurring out from staring at lists of Latin nouns, so I’m going to throw this a bit wider open and see what the commentariat can suggest.

In this totally hypothetical story that I’m totally not working on, there is a group of female knights under holy orders, in a secondary-world setting modeled on medieval Europe, serving the Queen of a place that will probably look like France. I want their names to form a list of the virtues they are supposed to uphold. (There is room for irony here, as they will not always live up to those names.)

What virtues would you expect to see on that list?

I need a total of twelve; suggest as many as you like. Bonus points if you can provide me with Latin nouns matching your suggestions, ending in either -tas or -ia — I’m trying to see if I can get a satisfactory set without having to rejigger any of the Latin. (I can put together twelve on either pattern, but not without leaving out some concepts I think I’d like to include.)

a question for the Latin geeks in my readership

Imagine you are reading a story wherein members of a particular group are all named with Latin nouns for virtues or good qualities. (This is not simply a meta trick on the author’s part; the meaning of those names is acknowledged in-story. The setting is, however, a secondary world, wherein Latin is being used to fulfill a role more or less like it does in reality.) Most of the names are genuine third-declension nouns following the -tas, -tatis model — e.g. Pietas, Honestas — but a few are clearly adapted from first declension nouns so as to make for a consistent pattern — e.g. Justitas from justitia. The rest of the Latin in the story is grammatically correct.

Feel free to elaborate on your perspective in comments.

belated link

This is two days late — I was out of the house more or less all of Sunday, and busy yesterday — but I wanted to link to this month’s SF Novelists post, “Who Mary Sue Isn’t.” (Shorter version: I’m really tired of hearing the term, because I think it’s gotten so vague as to be near-useless, and its implications frequently bother me.)

Comment over there; no login needed.

two charitable causes, again

Because my first Onyx Court history offer went in less than two hours, I’m doing a second one, this time without the “Buy It Now” price: go here to bid on your own piece of historical faerie fiction. (Now with bonus “Special Richard III Disclaimer.”) The auction ends on May 23rd, so get your bids in soon!

Also, the Brenda Novak auction for diabetes research is still ongoing, and there are still a pair of signed Onyx Court novels up for sale.

NO.

Dear Brain,

No. No, no, no, no, NO.

There are many things we need right now — an answer to the question the stranger just asked Dead Rick, a precise outline for how Eliza and Miss Kittering are going to achieve a state of conflict-balance, some sense of what’s going on with the Society — but NONE of them are the premise for a random secondary-world YA fantasy series.

Even if it involves an order of holy lady knights who run around spying for the Queen they’re sworn to protect.

You know perfectly well what this is. We’ve entered into the Stage of Oooh Shiny, where everything looks enticing except the book we’re supposed to be writing. Put the shiny down, and get back to Victorian England.

(After all, I’ve already written half a page of notes for the YA-knights idea. Maybe we can do more later tonight.)

Er, I mean, NO! No new shiny. Work on old shiny instead. I promise, there’s plenty of fun to be had there.

Not nearly as cross as she should be,
Your Writer

slogging through tonight’s words

On the bright side? I’m saving my editor a lot of work. Because I’m pointing out to myself things like “it would be better to actually show Miss Kittering sooner than the 25K mark” and “if you don’t get Ailis in here somehow, she’ll come out of nowhere in Part Two” long before this manuscript comes anywhere near him.

Mind you, it leaves me in fear that this is going to be the most recursively-written novel I’ve ever produced — but since the recursion is at present adding to my wordcount rather than subtracting or replacing, I’m okay with that.

Back to the last hundred words. Then I get to sack out and watch TV.

Best of Talebones

For those who enjoyed my story “The Twa Corbies” (audio here), you’ll be pleased to know it’s going to be included in Patrick Swenson’s upcoming Best of Talebones anthology. I’ll announce the full ToC when he sends it out; given the great fiction the magazine published in its fourteen-year run, I expect there will be a lot of awesome names included.

Admittedly, there *is* a downside.

Not counting a one-shot LARP, I’ve run two games in my life: Memento and the Scion game currently in progress.

The year I ran Memento was the year I did not write a novel.

If there’s a causal relation there, it goes in the direction of “no novel, ergo free time for a game.” I was in negotiations with my editor for what I would write next, and reluctant to commit to a spec project just to fill time, when odds were good that I’d have to drop it halfway through in order to do something contracted instead. The causality was not that running a game ate the energy which would have otherwise gone into a novel.

(And the negotiations ended up settling on Midnight Never Come anyway, which grew directly out of Memento. So.)

But it is true that I did not write a novel while running that game. This year is the first time I’ve tried to do both at once, and the result is . . . interesting.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to find a way to build some downtime into my noveling process. The usual way of things is that I work virtually every day for three or four months straight, and at the end of it I have a book. But that’s exhausting, and after two months or so I start getting really bitter about not having weekends or days off.

One idea I’ve toyed with is giving myself a break on Thursdays. That’s the day I run the game, and it turns out to be singularly difficult to get anything done then — especially since I have physical therapy appointments Thursday afternoons, too. So I spend part of my afternoon at PT, and the rest of it prepping for game; since I am not a morning writer, that leaves me with only the time after the session ends to do any work. Which requires a rather massive change of gears in my head: game and book may be only about nine years apart temporally speaking — 1875 and 1884, respectively — but one’s in the Western frontier and the other’s in London, and their vibes are VERY different. Last week I managed 733 words after game because I knew where the scene was going, but last night I did jack, because the scene needed chewing and my brain already had its mouth full.

I’ve built in enough margin of safety that I could afford to take Thursdays off and still finish the book on time. But it does eat a large portion of that margin of safety: if the book runs long, or I miss days for reasons of backtracking or being sick or whatever, I’ll still end up with some crunch time — though hopefully not as bad as it was for Ashes and Star. On the other hand, once PT is done, odds go up substantially that I’ll be able to do at least some writing during the day, so I can then give my brain over to Scion with a clear conscience. So I think what I’ll do is this.

Until PT is done, I have permission not to write on Thursdays. I should, however, try to make up that lost ground in subsequent days, if I can do so without too much trouble. After PT is done, I’ll try to write something every Thursday before game, even if it’s not the full quota; if I manage that, I’m not required to play catch-up afterward. Put that together with the more complicated background math (involving certain things that add to the word total of the book, but don’t get counted toward quota, etc), and this should work out.

But yeah. Unsurprisingly, running a game eats many of the same processing cycles in my brain that book-writing does. (Moreso than if I’m just playing in a game, by quite a bit.) I do believe I can do both — I will certainly try — but this is going to require some awareness and planning on my part.

London Trip IV: Return of the Revenge of the Bride of the Trip

la_marquise_de made me realize I hadn’t actually said anything about this publicly.

I’ll be making my fourth research trip to London at the beginning of June, arriving late on the first and leaving on the tenth. I don’t have my schedule for that planned out yet, but if you are London-local, drop me a line (either here or by e-mail), and I may try to arrange some kind of dinner one night. No promises — it depends on what the schedule ends up looking like — but I think it would be fun.

research thought

Forget Google Street View; what I need is Google Back Garden View.

I wonder if, when I come to London, I could persuade anyone along Queen’s Gate Terrace in South Ken to let me into their back gardens for a look at the space? Satellite resolution just ain’t cutting it.

Eeeeeee!

I have no idea how I would use this, but apparently the OED started being published in 1884.

If I can find a way to work that into the novel, I totally will.

more web-fu needed

The book I’m reading tells me there was a Catholic church opened, I think in Whitechapel, on 22 June 1876. (Following the decision of a priest belonging to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate to start preaching to Whitechapel laborers.) Can anybody help me figure out which church this is? St. Anne’s? Their website gives no history.

Or, y’know, find me a list of Catholic churches in Whitechapel as of 1884 or thereabouts. It’s a measure of our modern age that I was terribly disappointed to discover Wikipedia did not already have a page for “Catholic churches in Whitechapel” that I could check for founding dates.

EDIT: Nevermind. Found my web-fu, then found this.

The Gimpy Feet Guide to Ungimping

(Yeah, I know, I’m posty today. Trying to clear out some links that have been sitting around for a while, that require more discussion than can profitably be done in a linkdump post.)

Someone a while back asked what I was doing about the problem of collapsing arches in my feet. Since most of my foot/ankle problems are interrelated (surprise!), I figured it was worth doing one collated post on all my physical therapy — with bonus link about barefoot running.

This site shows pictures of most of the PT. I’m doing all four exercises in the “resistance band” group on that page, plus two others: with cotton balls between my toes, I’m squeezing the toes together, and I’m also doing the one where you put your foot on a towel and gradually scrunch the fabric up with your toes. Three sets of 15, each day. So far I’ve graduated up two resistance bands; when I can do four sets of 15 with the next (and strongest) band, I’ll probably call it quits with that stuff.

I’m also doing three other exercises, more newly-added to my repertoire. First, I’m standing on one foot. No, really. Aside from the atrophy caused by the surgical recovery, I also had a pre-existing weakness in my tibialis posterior, which is a muscle that runs down the inside of your ankle and splays across the sole of your foot. It’s one of the muscles closely involved in arch support (another being the tibialis anterior, on the outside of the joint), and it plays a big role in balancing. When I try to stand on one foot for any real length of time, I can feel it crapping out on me, causing my ankle to roll inward, with predictable consequences for my balance. So this exercise is remarkably tiring, at least for one tiny part of my leg. The other two are lunges (of the athletic, not the fencing, sort) and one-foot squats, which I can’t really do worth a damn. I’m supposed to stand on one foot and squat down as low as I can (including lowering my back and sticking my butt out; this isn’t a plié), while keeping my heel on the ground. Between the weakness of that one muscle and my possibly structural inability to dorsiflex very far, this turns out to be a carnival of wobbling on my part.

So if you have arch problems, you want to do the inversion and eversion exercises, the ones where you’re moving your foot from side to side against resistance. And it turns out that helps a lot for balance, too: in karate last night, I discovered that when I do one of the rapid 180-degree turns many of the kata include, I’m now landing in zenkutsu-dachi on the far side with MUCH less instability than I used to. I never thought to connect that with the arch issues, but it seems to be related.

Also — on the topic of arch problems — you might want to read up on barefoot running. This is something I only recently encountered, and I’m not a runner myself, so I don’t have much first-hand knowledge on the subject. But there’s a chapter in the book Born to Run that makes a convincing argument for how our highly-engineered running shoes have actually contributed to foot problems, rather than reducing them. And the reasons seem like common sense: the shoe, by stiffening and cushioning the foot, radically changes the mechanics of how we run. I had a deeply suspicious reaction when my primary care doctor told me the solution to my arch problems was putting more support in my shoes; wouldn’t that just further weaken my feet? (You can imagine what my PT said when I asked her.) There’s at least some evidence that running barefoot, or in minimal shoes, with a forefoot or midfoot strike, will actually strengthen your arches by — here’s a wacky idea — using them as evolution intended.

I’m not likely to take up running any time soon, but for those of you who do it, you might want to investigate some of the minimal-shoe options out there.

And now, having dealt with some of the crap cluttering up my browser, I’m off to be productive on a different front. Namely, folding laundry.

a pair of links to ponder

This post is a summary of a lecture given by Dr. Robert Lustig, talking about fructose and the role it may be playing in the general weight gain the U.S. has seen over the last thirty years.

This post is a counter-argument to Lustig.

I don’t know for sure what to make of any of it, except that I do feel Lustig’s being a bit alarmist by calling fructose a “poison” and agitating for its regulation. I’m not a biochemist, so round about the part where tongodeon‘s post turns into wodges of acronyms and other specialized terms (i.e. the metabolisys grafs), I lose track of the argument. But I can comprehend the beginning and the end, and they told me two useful things.

First, I thought I was all virtuous because I’d almost completely eliminated soda from my diet, replacing it with fruit juice. Why? Well, I’d heard that high fructose corn syrup was bad. Whether Lustig is right or not about the problems of fructose (not just HFCS), it does seem to be true that getting my fructose from juice doesn’t really make as a big of a difference as I’d assumed. I’m still chugging the stuff in large quantities, and I trust Lustig is at least right about how my body metabolizes it. What the effect of that might be, seems to be the point under debate. Anyway, I’m going to experiment for a while with cutting back on fruit juice, too, and see what that does.

Second, the “exercise does not work by burning calories” paragraph was exactly what I needed to read, because it clarifies for me some things I’ve never understood. The math of burning calories never worked out in my head (because it doesn’t, really), so I appreciated seeing a brief catalogue of the other things exercise does, that can have an effect on weight. (Aside from all the non-weight-related benefits, of course, like strength and endurance and agility and so on.) In other words, now I know what “it raises your metabolism” actually means.

Anyway, if you happen to be a biochemist on the side, I’d be interested to hear what you think of Lustig’s arguments. Is fructose (whether consumed as HFCS or sucrose) that important? How about the connection with fiber? Or is this, as the second post argues, just the new “low fat” argument, another attempt to demonize one specific part of our diet while losing sight of the big picture?

I’ll believe it when I see it, but . . . .

Courtesy of moonandserpent: Elfquest movie inches closer to actual existence.

I’ve always assumed the thing would never happen, but if it did . . . folks, this is one of the deep foundational stories in my head, one of the things that’s been with me for years and years and years. A movie would either be awesome or a travesty. I’m willing to risk the latter for the chance of the former.

And now I need to persuade myself that the things I have to get done today take priority over curling up with Elfquest.

20K! Finally!

It took me ten days to get here instead of five (thanks to five days spent backtracking on Eliza’s scenes), but I’m at twenty thousand words. Dead Rick is learning things about his own past — nice things, which are actually more painful in their way than the bad things would be. (Don’t worry; we’ll get to those, too.)

I’m approaching the midpoint of Part One, aiming for three parts in total. I may spend part of tomorrow working backward for where I want Eliza at the end of this section, to figure out what should happen between now and then; I should definitely spend part of tomorrow trying to figure out where I want Dead Rick to be headed. I know you can get to your destination by the headlights, but it would be great if I knew a few of the landmarks that lie beyond their beams.

Word count: 20,375
LBR quota: A brief hint of love. Even if Dead Rick can’t actually remember it.
Authorial sadism: Writing a whole scene of Dead Rick doing what he’s supposed to, then deciding to arrange things so that he actually wasn’t supposed to do it.

reasons for leaving Facebook, longer version

Here’s the visual version, showing the recent expansion of information not only to your friends, but to your networks, to all of Facebook, and to the entire Internet.

The good news is, Facebook won’t be doing much more to undermine your privacy — because they’ve already decided to show just about everything to just about everybody.

The graphic is a representation of the information from this EFF article. Wired has more generalized discussion of the issues with Facebook, and Business Insider gives 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. If you decide to do that, though, read this, because Facebook uses just about every trick short of outright lying to prevent you from actually deleting your account.

I’ve never given Facebook much private information; the furthest I went was to list my schools and graduation years, my marital status, and a few interests, none of which are particular secrets. But Facebook, unlike (say) LJ, allows for — sorry, let’s update our terms, is actively taking steps to facilitate — organized mining of that data. This bothers me on three fronts.

First, I can control what data I post about myself, but I can’t control what data my friends post about me. And while this is true of the Internet in general, on Facebook, any photo tagged with my name is automatically and unambiguously connected to me, in a way that I cannot avoid. Also, changes have made it such that I’m not just sharing that info with friends, and with Facebook-the-company, but with everybody who develops an application for them. Do I trust all of those people?

Second, this is a cynical violation of the principles on which Facebook was founded. After years of saying your information would be private, visible only to friends (thus encouraging you to submit a lot of it — after all, isn’t the point of the service to share news with your friends?), now the founder is claiming that our society’s privacy standards have changed and he’s just keeping up with the times. We all totally want to live our lives in public on the Internet, right?

Third — most offensively — this is opt-out, not opt-in. Facebook did not ask me, “would you like to share these pieces of information by connecting them to these public pages?” It said, “You’re now going to share all of this! Or you can pick individually.” And then I had to manually deselect every single item, because I didn’t get a “no, thanks” option. Given the way Facebook has implemented changes, I have no certainty at all that I’ve successfully kept myself out of that loop, because they bury the “stay private” options as deeply as they can — when they even provide them. Sometimes the only way to stay clear is to completely delete information about yourself: you can no longer have private “likes.” You either have them, and they’re auto-linked to public pages, or you leave them blank. So much for sharing private info with friends. To use the service now is to use it for all the Internet to see.

Which is faintly annoying when it’s just a matter of me listing, oh, music as a hobby. But what if you’ve listed “gay marriage rights”? Or “abortion rights”? Or something else politically sensitive? Now your activism is visible to your boss (who maybe voted Yes on 8), and to people who maybe like harassing activists like you.

There are more details in the articles I’ve linked, but those are enough for me. The value I get from Facebook is marginal: yeah, I’ve connected to old friends from high school, etc, but we’ve done nothing more than connect; I haven’t struck up conversations with them. The signal-to-noise ratio of my news feed is so abysmal I don’t even bother reading it most of the time. I hate the layout of the service, and as for the applications, they’re time-wasters I really, really don’t need.

And I don’t feel like continuing to patronize a service that behaves this badly, even if the actual damage to me is likewise marginal.

Facebook FYI

I’ll post a more detailed explanation later, but if you happen to be someone who follows me on Facebook, be aware that I’ll be deleting my account in a few days. (The lag is to give time for people to save any contact info they might need.) They keep doing this round of privacy violations both deliberate and accidental, and I’m done with it. The marginal value I get from the service is not worth putting up with their crap.

all hail the unsung laborers

What a mother’s work is worth.

I’m sure there are a hundred points on which to quibble with the methodology here, but I want to applaud the core idea, which is to look at how much the labor of a mother (stay-at-home or working mom) is worth. The notion that laundry, house-cleaning, cooking, chauffeuring, psychological counseling, and all the rest of it somehow only count as work when you’re not doing them for your own family is nonsense. So all hail the mothers (and the fathers, too, but today is not their day) who keep the domestic economy functioning.