iconage

I keep not getting around to the substantive posts I mean to make, so this will have to stand in lieu of them.

Some of you may have noticed my abundance of new icons. It’s because I’ve upgraded to a paid account, and can now have 35 instead of 6. I’m slowly filling up the slots; you can see my latest (and cutest) addition on this post, and the rest of them here. (Yes, folks, I finally have a Memento icon, well after I’m done running the game. I put it in there anyway, ’cause I have the space.)

I turn to you, my readers, for assistance in finding/making two new icons. The Long Room pic is my academic icon, but I’d like one for teaching specifically; I’m not sure what I want out of it, but not a generic apple-chalkboard-etc. kind of thing. Maybe something fairy-tale related, since I’ll mostly be using it next fall, when I teach my own course for the first time. Also, I would like an icon for my costuming endeavours, and again, I have no idea what it should look like — a sewing machine just doesn’t seem exciting. Something that reflects my tendency to end up in homicidal rages when I sew? (If you have the capacity to make animated gifs, let me know; I usually don’t favor those, but a montage of me-in-costume pics might be appropriate.)

Maybe a LARPing icon, too, so I can save the Roman d20 for tabletop gaming.

I mean, I have all these slots; I might as well use them. ^_^

goal anxiety

I’ve come to realize I have a moderately dysfunctional relationship with goals.

(This applies to more than just writing, but writing offers a good, clear-cut illustration of what I mean.)

Let’s say I’m working on a novel and my goal is 1000 words a day. One evening, out of laziness, I write only 800. Or — more likely — I just don’t write at all. (If I put my butt in the chair, I tend not to leave until I have quota.) I treat that as a deficit I need to make up; I write 1200 words or 1500 words until I’m back where I would have been had I not been short one day.

This is moderately okay. Especially since I usually manage to cut myself some slack for occasions when something (like travel) takes me out of commission for several days at a stretch.

The dysfunctionality comes in when I write above quota. Take a recent example: I’m working on something where my weekly goal is 10K. Which means, in general, 1500 a day, with one day where I can cut back a bit and just do 1000. This past week, I wrote 1500 (and change) for a couple of days, and then 2K one day. I built up a surplus.

This does not get treated the way a deficit does — as slippage that should get averaged out.

No, instead my obsessive, goal-driven self tends to ignore all surpluses. Who cares that I’m more than 500 ahead; I should still write 1500 every day. Including that day that was supposed to be an easy 1000. Then I’d be a thousand ahead of where I meant to be! But don’t let that fool you into thinking I could do just 9K the next week. No, it’ll be 10K or bust, and if I can squeeze out more, than full steam ahead!

From the perspective of finishing books (or whatever else I might be working on), this seems pretty good. I’m beginning to notice, though, that it might be a little hard on me — it means I never earn a break. Any such break would have to be earned in advance, and once I’ve done that, I just keep pushing. More words written, more pages read, more cleaning done, whatever the task at hand is, I keep going. Until it’s done.

And then I look for something else to do.

My fiance is probably beating his head into a wall, having read this far; he’s a big advocate of me relaxing and not being so hard on myself. But he (and the rest of you) can take heart: I’ve made a baby step in mending my ways. Having built up a surplus earlier this writing week (which is, for uninteresting reasons having to do with this project, Thursday through Wednesday), I let myself cut back a bit for the last three days. I wrote over 1K each time, to hit my weekly goal, but didn’t make myself do 1500. Right now I’m sitting pretty at 53 words over target — in the middle of a scene, no less, which I decided to leave as a carrot for tomorrow, rather than finishing it tonight.

Mind you, I’ve got other things I need to get done, which is another argument for not driving myself to oblivion on one project only. But nevermind that.

Goals: they’re to be met, but not always exceeded.

“And died stinkingly martyred.”

Don’t ask me why, but the squirrelly part of my writer-brain, the part that finds odd things to ponder (and then usually buries them somewhere and forgets about them thereafter) started thinking about death lines this evening. That is, the things people in books/movies/plays/etc. say when they’re about to die or in the process of dying. Shakespeare, for all I love him, was a melodramatic little wretch where those are concerned. I think one of my favorites comes from Dorothy Dunnett — it’s a bit of a cheat, since the hit doesn’t actually kill Lymond, but he believes it’s going to (and it really would, were it not for some bloody-minded medical intervention) — anyway, having done something good at what amounts to the sacrifice of his life, this is how he exits:

“And died stinkingly martyred,” said Lymond, with painful derision; and losing hold bit by bit, slipped into Erskine’s gentle grasp.

Which is why I love Lymond: he mocks himself even as he’s bleeding out of rather too many holes for anyone’s peace of mind.

What’s your favorite death line?

Order now!

Want to get on an FBI watchlist?

(Those of you who aren’t already, that is. Which might be several of you, for a variety of
reasons.)

There is now a website
for Glorifying Terrorism, Farah Mendlesohn’s anthology of politically provocative
fiction. It’s a British publication, so my USAian friends will have to get it shipped, but
there’s a PayPal button up now, and Farah tells us it’s going to press in the next two
weeks.

And really, it only breaks a British law, not an American one (yet). So you have no reason
not to buy it and support the cause of free speech.

A sort of anti-NaNoWriMo

Many of you know that my reservations about NaNoWriMo include the pace (1500+ wpd is a
pretty brutal rate for people not used to it) and the goal (a 50K novel isn’t saleable, at
least in my genre).

If you’re interested in having a public boot applied to your ass, but you share my
reservations, try this on for size: Novel in 90. Short form is
750 words a day for 90 days, for a goal of 67,500 words (which need not be the end point of
the novel). It’s the brainchild of Elizabeth
Bear, and it’s growing like rather scary kudzu, but over there you’ll find everything from
professionals (including her and me) to people who have never written a novel in their lives.
She’s taken down the bit in the profile that said in large letters “WE WILL MOCK YOU IF YOU
FAIL,” but the idea is to prod yourself into productivity through public accountability.

I know some of my friends are looking for help in motivating themselves, so if you count
yourself among that number, go over there and sign up.

I will mock you if you don’t. ^_^

Even the weird ones can find a home

A while back, I wrote a 2000-word second-person present-tense story about filling out an
application form. Having done so, I stared at it and wondered where the hell I would ever
sell it.

The answer, it turns out, is Electric
Velocipede, a quirky and well-respected magazine edited by John Klima. Glancing at
their fiction, I can see a story by Scott William Carter that’s in the second person and
present tense, so maybe it’s not much of a surprise, eh? I’m very happy to see it placed so
well — oh, let’s admit it; I’m happy to see it placed at all. It’s a weird enough story that
I had very few ideas about where to send it that wouldn’t just be a random shot in the
dark.

I will, as always, give people a heads-up when it actually goes into print.

Inaugural random thought for the new year

The playing of a Bjork song (“Human Behaviour”) at the dance party tonight inspired me to
come up with a genre system for music based on parts of the body. That’s a thigh song, you
see, where “thigh song” is defined as “a song where you plant your feet wide apart and sink
down, knees bent, so your thighs will be very unhappy at you later if you don’t normally do
things like that or have fallen out of the habit.”

Thigh songs may perhaps be subdivided into stompy songs (self-explanatory) and thigh-hip
songs, which blur over into those hip songs where you’re not sunk down while swinging your
butt around. There are also toe songs (bouncing a lot on the tips of your toes) and feet
songs, not to be confused with the former category — feet songs involve both heel and toe,
doing fun footworky things. Also arm songs, though you don’t find a lot of those in what
people normally think of as “dance music.” (My definition of music worth dancing to is . . .
idiosyncratic.)

And wow, spelling that word took way too many tries, so I’m going to bed.

Happy New Year, all.

Another year of recs

With a day to spare (why do I always leave these so late, even when I know what I’m going to be writing about?), I’ve finished and posted the last of my recommendations for this year. As advertised, it’s the last of the classical “primary sources” recommendations: Virgil’s Aeneid, rounding out the set begun with the Iliad and the Oydssey.

*click*

When you have a worldbuilding problem for a story you’re not really
working on at present, to which your mind returns periodically to niggle
at it in search of an answer, it is very satisfying to find oneself
niggling at it once again and this time having the answer fall into one’s
lap. And while it may not be satisfying to realize your failure to see
said answer before came about because you let yourself fall into a rather
stereotypical trap of perception, it’s somewhat nice to also realize that
means you’ll have an opportunity to make a quiet demonstration of a point
to which you have always spoken in support.

In other words, most hunter-gatherer caloric intake comes from the
gathering, not the hunting. And I’d forgotten that.

Go about your business. All is well with the world now — or at least
with that world.

Apocalypto

Grar.

So very nearly good. I can forgive it things like architectural features apparently drawn
from about 1500 years of Mayan history. I can, if I try very hard, dig up a Mayan city still
occupied around, y’know, that time. (Though they could have made my life far simpler
in that respect by filming in Nahuatl instead of Yucatec. Then I wouldn’t have spent five
minutes after the credits snarling and flailing about Aztecs.) I could maybe even let go of
the weirdness of a large Mayan city apparently being surrounded by hunter-gatherers at no more
than two days’ distance. (What, did they all survive off that one cornfield?) And hey, some
of the things I thought were inaccuracies turned out not to be!

But grar.

I debated long and hard whether or not I wanted to see this movie, given Mel Gibson’s
personal disagreeability to me, given the potential (and, I’m afraid, actual) colonialist
overtones of the story. In the end I went because I’m a Mesoamerican geek, and because I
wanted to tell Hollywood there’s at least one more person in the world who will happily watch
movies in obscure Central American languages with actors nobody’s ever heard of. And I don’t
regret going, and I really almost like the movie. But it isn’t what you’d call the best
representation of Mayan culture; the aforementioned hunter-gatherers make it look more
primitive than it needed to, and it doesn’t give the context that human sacrifice
needs. (Okay, so my article is Nonfiction Lite, but it sums up much of what I would
otherwise have to repeat here.) Few people watching that movie will know or care about the
cosmological framework in which sacrifice generally fit, nor the ways in which the epidemics
that appear to have preceded the physical arrival of Europeans on the mainland sent
people into a frenzy that was to normal behavior as the apocalyptic cults and flagellant
societies of plague-era Europe were to normal Christianity before everybody started dying.
Few people will think to make that comparison to our own history, and therefore to understand
how Europeans wouldn’t come off so well were we to make this kind of movie about them during
the Black Death. Instead, we get Noble Savages (the hunter-gatherers, whom I actually quite
liked aside from their anachronistic subsistence strategy) fleeing the pointless sadism of the
Evil City Folk. Things lack context, and sometimes sport inaccuracies while doing so. It isn’t a great combination.

And yet. And yet. The cenote outside the village, the jade in the nobles’ teeth, the
atlatl. The murals with elements taken from a site my sophomore
tutorial leader excavated. The actor whose profile is about the closest you can get to
Mayan without practicing cranial modification on an infant and then waiting twenty years for
him to grow up. There were so many details that were good, and Gibson filmed the movie in
freakin’ Yucatec. It came so close to being a film that would make me melt in geeky glee.
I just wish I didn’t have to feel so ambivalent about it.

A Life in Music

December is my month for nostalgia, for making at least one retrospective post about
something. I keep feeling like it should be about writing, since my first novels came out
this year, but my heart isn’t really in it; I’ve been talking about writing a fair bit all
year, so I don’t feel like I’ve got something I really need to say and haven’t.

So instead, this post is about gaming, and specifically about two interrelated bits of
nostalgia. Last night I finished making the last soundtrack for Ree, and wanted to post the
full track listing for anybody who’s interested — mostly for those who have copies and might
want to know what the songs are; if you don’t know the character or the game, a random list of
songs probably won’t mean much. Page down for the actual nostalgia, and an explanation of why
it ran to five CDs in the end.

Track listing . . . .

I’ll be a real teacher!

Just got official notice that my course proposal for Collins, the honors dorm here on
campus, has been accepted. Next fall I’ll be teaching “Fairy Tales in the Modern World,” a
class on contemporary retellings of folktales. It’s mostly literature-based, but I’m slipping
in what I can about movies, role-playing games, and the like.

I’m both very excited and a little nervous. I’ve got four years of teaching experience
under my belt, but it’s all as an assistant to a professor, so this will be my first time
running my own course. The cool thing is, enrollment is limited to 20, so it will also be my
first chance to really get to know my students personally, give detailed feedback on papers,
etc, rather than plowing through sixty student assignments and teaching three sections. Since
a lot of the students are going to be freshman and sophomores, this means I have a shot at
actually influencing how they approach their college education. (Yeah, yeah, delusions of
grandeur, I know. But I have hopes.)

old ghosts

There’s something deeply odd about revisiting a text you wrote when you were fifteen, with
an eye toward revising it into something worthy to see the light of day now. (I might have
been sixteen, but I don’t think so. Certainly I was in high school.) It’s not purely
craptastic, though it comes close; large chunks of it are getting deleted without a second
thought. But I had a few worthwhile turns of phrase, buried in amongst the chaff. And the
idea still has some compelling force, which is why I’m revisiting it in the first place.

Should this end up seeing the light of day, it will displace Doppelganger as my
earliest idea to successfully reach print. I can only think of one other thing that stands
even a faint chance of defeating this for that title, and that one thing will be so heavily
modified by the time it does so that it would only barely qualify as the same idea I had when
I was fourteen.

Still. Kee-rist. I was fifteen when I thought this up. If I thought it was weird
admitting I wrote Doppelganger when I was nineteen, this would be substantially
worse.