Professor of Indefinite Studies
Need something to read this weekend? SFSignal has a wonderful guide to the recent NPR Top 100 SFF books.
Me? I’ll be reading this.
Or maybe I’ll be reading the books I just got from Elizabeth Bear’s book sale.
Or going to SCA events in the rain.
Or, just maybe, all three.
I have a DRAFT of the cursed project, only years late, and with much more agony than expected. I’m off to drink beer.
But first, so you don’t feel abandoned, some SCIENCE, science that has nothing whatsoever to do with the cursed project.
This makes me happy, and even makes me feel better about satellites (a major component of the cursed project).
(via Bad Astronomy)
More spectacular astronomical photos.
And finally, this is weird: what you eat can affect your gene expression. It turns out that microRNAs from plants can be found in animals that eat them, and those microRNAs could be affecting which proteins your body produces. Wow.
Okay, enough science. Beer and pizza!
Have an excellent weekend, and don’t work too hard.
Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. This isn’t a holiday I normally celebrate, except to acknowledge the silliness that is the Internet, but this morning’s nag email from Google Calendar said, “You have no events scheduled today” so why not? (I love that email subject line: it makes my day to see it in my inbox first thing in the morning.)
So, in honor of TLAPD:
I tried (semi-successfully) to show both my pirate shirt and the skull earbuds. The eyes on the latter are supposed to light up, but aren’t so reliable. There’s a reason they were on the clearance rack, I think.
And, of course:
Not horsefeathers, but dinosaur feathers preserved in amber.
That’s so cool.
And a few other things to keep this from being a ridiculously short post…
Ada Lovelace Day is October 7 this year. I need to come up with a good topic, to follow my essays on Beatrix Potter and Elizabeth Blackwell.
Elizabeth Bear is interviewed at Terribleminds.
And let me share with you my earworm, entirely unrelated to anything else in this post.
I finished revisions on the newest short story this weekend, and the first crits I’ve seen were very favorable. Yay! I pushed myself pretty hard with this one, and couldn’t tell whether the things I struggled to include were too much. Theme, dialog, unreliable narrator. Very exciting! It will be going out into the world shortly, there to be joined by its previously-rejected companions.
I tried a new approach to revisions. Rather than rereading and poking at it, retyped the whole thing, keeping theme and voice in mind the whole thing. I think it worked, by which I mean that it smoothed the whole thing out both stylistically and thematically. It took forever, though: I spent most of the day Saturday revising this 4000-word story. I’m thinking about subjecting the other stories waiting to be resubmitted to the same treatment before I send them back out.
I’m also starting to get itchy to work on long-form fiction. I have novel revisions to do, and I do really want to get Paper Magic finished (complete first draft, started revisions), followed by After the Dawn (about 80k words, perhaps half of which are salvageable, but I have a complete outline/synopsis). Both are YA fantasy, though unrelated.
Next in the queue after that are two adult fantasy novels: Underground (working title only), an urban fantasy/cozy that amuses me to no end (tropes! I can mess with them!), and a science fantasy novel that’s starting to gel. I figured out the major planning thingie that’s been bothering me last night, which makes me interested in it despite its lowly place in the queue. It has a working title, but I can’t tell you what it is.
Once I finish the next phase of the cursed work project I’ll have more brainspace for fiction, at least until the next thing comes along. My current difficulty isn’t juggling time so much as concentration: if I’ve spent 10-12 hours thinking hard about work, there’s time left but not brain.
I’m never going to be able to write every day, unless I do it just to create a habit while knowing that I’ll just be throwing those words away again. Which doesn’t seem all that helpful, really. I’m past the stage of writing for word’s sake; words now take thought and attention. That works fine for short fiction, but putting down a novel while my brain is employed elsewhere makes for a slow reentry period when I get to pick it back up again. I’m a master of leaving myself notes (novels aren’t the only large projects I have to do this to), but it’s still not ideal.
I’ve talked here before about writing every day, or not, and I’m sure I will again. It’s such a pervasive dictum in the writing community, one of the strongest “Thou musts.” Like any other always-true rule, it isn’t, but it still has the power to make me feel guilty when I run across it.
I completely agree that to be a writer you have to write, and to be a professional you have to submit, but there is not and never will be One True Way. If you want to write, figure out how that fits into your life. If it’s every day, that’s great, and you’ll be more productive. But if it’s only on weekends, that’s fine too, or if what you can manage given your time and brain allocation is binge writing between other projects, that’s fine too.
The only thing that’s bad is if you quit writing because you can’t do it the way Famous Writer X says you must.
A while ago now NPR polled its readers online for what they thought the best 100 SFF books were. The list is a bit odd, with some series combined and other represented by one or two individual entries, but it was interesting nonetheless.
My friends promptly turned it into a meme, and I eventually got around to following suit. I’m writing this in a plain-text editor, so rather than bolding and italicizing I’ll just reorder the lists.
Of the 100 entries, I’ve read 77, left 3 unfinished, and haven’t read 20 (but most of those are on my to-read pile). I’m baffled by a few, and appalled by one. No, I won’t name it. There were also a couple that I think I’ve read, but wasn’t positive on, so left in the unread category.
Have read (or in the case of series, have read a substantial number of the books; 77)
1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
22. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
23. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
24. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
25. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
26. The Stand, by Stephen King
27. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
28. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
30. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
32. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis
Have not read (20)
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
29. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldon
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
Started but didn’t finish (3)
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
Most of the older ones I read because my father had copies, and I read voraciously as a child. Asimov, Bradbury, and so forth, while I was too young to have any concept of “popular” as applied to books, really. After that I moved on to public libraries, which were also likely to have the most popular works of SFF. Now I still read popular works, but the arbiters of popular for me have changed dramatically.
It’s the end of the year at work, and that has prompted me to make a list of publications to date. So far in 2011, I’ve had published:
There’s no new fiction on that list. I think I’ve only finished one short story in 2011, though I’ve started several. I did finish a novel draft, though the revisions are going very slowly. The rest of the list goes a long way toward explaining the lack of new fiction, though it doesn’t satisfy me. Objective for the rest of 2011: send some short stories out, and see if I can change the last item.
Isn’t that all we ever talk about around here? Apparently.
Remember that zombie book that I had a story in (Rigor Amortis, Absolute XPress, 2010)? The one that sold a gajillion copies and is being reprinted?
The publish date isn’t until mid-October, but there are copies in the dealer room at WorldCon in Reno. (Where I’m not, but I plan to be in Chicago next year!) So exciting!
And some links, both writing and science:
PublishAmerica does it again. Simply amazing.
Free will? Nope, just parasites.
New way to develop models for 3D printing, one of my pet tech interests: evolve them. (Anyone else remember Richard Dawkins’ software for The Blind Watchmaker?)
Augmented reality is another pet interest, and this company’s prototype is amazing: 3D real-time optical tracking? Wow.
I know, two topics you’ve totally never seen here before!
First the writing.
How to write a book in three days. Michael Moorcock did it, and explained how.
If that wasn’t enough to think about, here’s Lester Dent’s Master Plot Formula for pulps.
And then the science.
Those word count progress bars? Just might help you succeed!
But whatever you do, watching TV should be avoided. There are so many reasons, but a really big one is that it has a serious impact on life expectancy, possibly even worse than smoking.
More reasons that drinking coffee is good for you: skin cancer prevention.
And if, like me, you combine the two, the deadline for the Science in My Fiction anthology is fast approaching. Got your story done?
