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.
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.
Dropping the name “the Honourable Mr. Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes” into the book.
What? I needed a baron’s son of the appropriate age, and he was the first one I found.
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.
(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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Come on, brain. We only need 150 more words, and then we can stop for tonight. And yes, that does mean you’ll have to figure out just what Dead Rick thinks he’s accomplishing by going to La Madura, but we’ve got to make a decision on that sooner or later. If it’s sooner, that means we can spend tomorrow thinking about its ramifications, and that will make tomorrow’s writing easier.
Of course, it would help if we knew what Dead Rick is supposed to be finding. And we already skipped over that one to start tonight’s work. This skipping-details thing, it is not working out so well for us.
I had it firmly fixed in my head that Running With the Pack was coming out in May. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered it’s been on sale since some time in April.
So if you were interested in reading “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” (the Fake Werewolf Paper), or generally like stories about werewolves, you’re in luck! The anthology is out. I’ve linked to Powell’s, but it’s available from other fine bookselling establishments, at least of the online sort; I don’t know for sure about physical bookstores. Anyway, enjoy!
Apparently I am the sort of person who thinks, “hmmm, I need to eat lunch,” and also “hmmmm, there’s that thing I’ve been meaning to watch for research,” and therefore sits down to enjoy some teriyaki salmon while watching a documentary on London’s sewers.
Complete with re-enactment video of what things looked like before the new system.
What can I say? I have a strong stomach.
If you were to talk about where Pelham Crescent is in London, what district name would you use? Kensington? South Kensington? Is it close enough to count as part of Knightsbridge? (Not according to Wikipedia, but.) Or something else entirely?
It’s a beast, trying to sort out the boundaries of intra-urban place-names for a city you don’t live in. And for all I know the areas were defined a little differently in 1884, but that officially falls into category of “if you can prove me wrong, Dear Reader, then you bloody well deserve your victory.”
Fans of Driftwood, rejoice: I finally got around to writing and revising and submitting a third story, which are usually the prerequisite steps to selling anything. Which is to say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought “Remembering Light.”
That’s three, which means Driftwood officially gets its own category in my site organization. I hope to have quite a few more than that in the long run, though.
In my anecdotal experience, there’s a distinct cadre of people who stopped reading this series at The Dragon Reborn, on the grounds that “I could tell it was never going to end.” While that turned out to be rather prophetic, I don’t think it had to be; as of TDR, there was no obvious reason to believe the series wouldn’t be, say, five or six books total, instead of the fourteen-and-a-prequel we’re getting in the end. While long, that isn’t endless.
But I think the people who made comments to that effect were onto something, even if it wasn’t quite the something they articulated. Namely, not only did this book establish that clearly this wasn’t a trilogy (which was what most people probably expected), it transformed the work as a whole into a very odd beast: an open-ended arc plot series.
Most open-ended series are done on an episodic model: the characters may grow and change over time, but there isn’t a metaplot trending toward a definite endpoint. (Mystery series exemplify this type.) Conversely, series with metaplots and defined endpoints usually have a planned length — think Harry Potter — even if that planned length changes in the execution — think Martin. But TDR sends the clear message that, while we’re still heading for Tarmon Gai’don, the length of the journey is now anybody’s guess, Jordan’s included. It won’t be four books; will it be five? Six? Nine? Who knows.
The problem with this is that it pretty much sacrifices structure on the spot. A trilogy is a well-recognized structure in fantasy; experienced readers will have a sense of when the action is going to rise and fall, and take delight in (successful) variations from that pattern. Quartets and quintets and so on are less familiar, so reader expectation plays less of a role, but there’s still something guiding the author. The number, whatever it is, provides a standard by which to judge when the plot should be allowed to branch, and when it should be drawn back inward again. Abandon that metric, and you make it much harder to balance your story. Inasmuch as you succeed, it will be by instinct and good fortune, neither of which can sustain you forever.
TDR does not, in and of itself, set up an endless series. But it removes the plot brake, which leaves the author in less control of the vehicle than he was before.
And as a corollary, the writing relaxes into a degree of inefficiency. It’s not the degree seen later in the series, where hardly anything seems to happen, but you can see one major pattern emerge here: the establishing info. Some of which is very repetitious — like Min and her visions, which get explained for the third time in the opening scenes of TDR. While that might be useful for people reading these books a year or more apart, at any faster pace — or on a re-read, when these things are abundantly familiar — it gets old. And that’s paired with a prose-level inefficiency that requires me to read these books at speed, because if I slow down I’ll start mentally rewriting every other sentence . . . but hey, you know, these books sell like hotcakes despite flabby prose. From a cost-benefit perspective, I’m not sure it would have even been worth Jordan’s time to copy-edit his words down to something tighter. Whatever the reason, it’s undeniable that this is not a tight book, and neither is anything that comes after.
But that’s enough macro critique; on to the specifics of TDR.
So I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be one of the GoHs at Sirens. But I’m allowed to submit my own programming proposal, apart from the stuff I’m already slated for, and I kind of think I would like to do something.
The question is, what?
I have a few ideas floating around my head, but none of them have really leapt up and convinced me that’s what I should go with. I therefore turn to you, The Internets, and ask: if you were coming to hear me do something at a con other than give a keynote address and present on my own writing (which are part of my GoH duties), what would you want it to be?
They have a good outline of different programming models here. The first two are out (paper and pre-empaneled paper set; I’ve had enough of those for now), and I’m unlikely to assemble a panel discussion in the remaining time. But that leaves everything from workshops on down as a possibility. And while this year’s theme is faeries and the conference is generally focused on women in fantasy, neither of those is a straitjacket. Practically any interest of mine could fit into this — though I don’t think I inkle-weave well enough to teach anybody else, and I suspect there would be liability issues with a “Stage Combat 101” class.
So help me brainstorm. If you could have me host a discussion on any topic, or teach a workshop on some skill (writing-related or otherwise), or anything else random, what would it be? I’m not sure if I want to riff off some of my website essays, or talk about the role of violence in fiction, or how to write politics, or fight scenes, or whatever. Too many ideas, not enough decision. Halp?
First, I tried this for the help_haiti auction and it was a lot of fun, so I’m doing it again: Onyx Court historical fiction, up for auction. Pick your person or event from English history, and I’ll tell you what the fae had to do with it. The cause this time around is ; full details here, but the short form is that Deb Mensinger is lined up for a liver transplant that will cure her of porphyria, but her donor (her brother) has no insurance and lives on the other side of the country. So the auction is to help defray costs.
Minimum bid on my offer is $5, “buy it now” is $50, and bidding ends Sunday, May 23rd.
Second, I’m once again participating in the Brenda Novak auction to benefit diabetes research. My contribution is a signed pair of the first two Onyx Court novels. Bidding currently stands at $7, with the increment set at $5.
Both auctions have a LOT of other material on offer, so browse through and see if there’s anything that catches your eye!
UPDATE: Er, so the first auction is already gone, via “buy it now.” I will contemplate possibilities for other offers.
Yesterday, when I sat down to write, my total wordcount was 15,085. When I stood up again, having written 1,092 words in the interim, my total wordcount was 15,085.
This has, with minor fluctuations in those last two digits, been my wordcount for the last five days. You see, the plan was this: I would write roughly 500 words a day throughout April, for an ending count of 15K, and then when May began I would kick it up to my regular pace of 1K.
But on May 1st, heading off to a friend’s concert, I finally had to face facts: I’d written the wrong beginning for Eliza. I was sitting there wondering what kind of plot complications I could think up to delay the event I wanted to end Part One with until the end of Part One, given that at present there was nothing stopping it from happening two scenes later, and nothing interesting to fill the intervening time with . . . and then it occurred to me that her immediate backstory had a number of complications that I’d just sort of skated over as a fait accompli. In part because one of those complications was something I didn’t have a detailed solution to, and it’s easier to get away with a non-detailed solution if you don’t show it onstage — but that was a pretty weak justification.
I had plot for Eliza. I’d just started her portion of the narrative after half of it was already done.
Now, the good news is that at least some of what I’ve already written for her might be salvageable. (I’ve already re-used one scene.) The rest will need heavy revision, since those scenes are full of the kind of establishing work that one puts into opening scenes, and that’s no longer needed; what’s left will probably be shorter, so I’ve still lost wordcount. And god knows it’s been frustrating to write a thousand words every day, then delete the obsolete scene and find I’m still at 15K.
But not nearly as frustrating as having to invent plot for Eliza because I skipped over the stuff I already had. So I cut the old scenes, and I write new ones, and the numbers look like I’m treading water — but they’ll start moving forward soon enough.
