Consent is a science fiction short about, frankly, revenge as a PTSD cure. I don’t encourage it and, having had PTSD for decades, there’s a reason this story is in the fiction instead of self-help genre.
Maggie Weber was the producer (voice and sonic layout) of the book, and she’s working on a few more short stories from my collection. (She’s also a human and dog mom, clothing upseller (check out her book), prolific youtube…and apparently someone who doesn’t need to sleep).
From my BlueSky account: Lickspittling is a good look for G.Santos and the Jan 6 traitors. But for Google and Apple to bribe Il Duce with funds for his Royal Ballroom is a disservice not only to shareholders, but to the American people. Ah, fascism, the grift that keeps on grifting.
Writing a post from 36,000 feet on a mobile phone with broadband. Life in 2025, for better or worse. It’s WorldCon week. I’m looking forward to meeting with a few authors and agents. I’ve got an audiobook producer working on one of my short stories. More on that anon.
This is shaping up to be a busy year. The fourth novel in the Shmuley Myers mystery series, tentatively titled “A Measure of Mercy,” will be out in the fall. Two other under-wraps projects are underway as well. Or is it three?
I’ll be attending and co-running this year’s Writers Workshop. It’s an excellent opportunity to get peer and professional critiques of your work. The ‘con is low-key, welcoming authors and readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Meet your authors, learn about the business, and attend fun panels (I hear there’s filking).
I’ll be attending WorldCon in Seattle (August 13-17). Glasgow was a trip too far for me last year, but I’m jazzed to go. ArmadilloCon faves Nisi Shawl (whose talks on “Writing the Other” are an ArmadilloCon must-see) and Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries) will be there.
Social Media
While I have accounts on Meta and the site formerly known as Twitter venues, I do not use them. Find me at BlueSky (or, obviously, here).
The prompt for the image above was “a jewish israeli and palestinian arab stab each other each holding a bloody knife.” It was a test, not a wish or political statement. I wanted to see what the AI would “imagine.” I can’t tell which is who. Forgetting the knives, they’re both wearing combat webbing (the one on the left has what looks to be a belt). How could it dream this when I specified knife? Is this what it creates when prompted for either?
Unfortunately, it’s going to get better. And while this might clear the cruft of Photoshop manipulators from the creative industry, it makes me worry about what dark “hallucinations” AIs might be having.
I like my science fiction accurate. I mean, Star Trek is fantasy, Star Wars is a space opera, and Firefly is a space western. The Expanse, with a couple of exceptions (and excepting the protomolecule and all that jazz), is pretty accurate. That’s what I look for.
So…last week, my critique group was working on two characters in a lunar lava tube with limited suit oxygen. “But there are oxygen candles,” geeknerd me said. But chemistry, but physics, But real rocket engineers in the critique group.
To the internet I go, trying to figure out how heavy a candle needed to be to provide oxygen for one person for eight hours. and what would be the gas volume for oxygen and how would a space suit accommodate the extra pressure. To say nothing of heat production… Sometimes there are bunny trails, sometimes there are rabbit holes, and sometimes…dragon lairs. Oh, and don’t bother Chat-GPT: to the same prompt, I got two different answers: 1. Asked the same prompt and got two answers. “…The amount of oxygen…[is] around 1 to 2 pounds of oxygen per hour…,” and 2. “The total amount [is]…in the range of tens to hundreds of liters per hour…”
In other words, GIGO, one the first computer acronyms that I learned many years ago.
Watching a Randal Munroe interview was cathartic. Fractal science questioning and answering are what he lives for. (And, also, harassing Commander Hadfield about how a T-Rex would fly on top of an apparent 737s.) Buy his books; What If 2 is brilliant!
Randall’s got more time than I to turn BTUs into thermal conductivity for surface regolith on the Lunar South Pole and how long the tether from the candle to the spike on the surface could be before the cable melted. The solution to all the above? Write out the oxygen candles and have the characters’ situations be more dire. It’s good to be a god. The surviving characters will thank me.
Cartoon Copyright (C) Randall Munroe, https://xkcd.com/1047, used according to site guidelines.
This is a more poignant Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Memorial Day — than usual for me. It’s been a couple of years since my mother, an Auschwitz and death march survivor, passed away. Life for many years before her death lost relevance, obliterated by Alzheimer’s Disease.
She survived. She returned to her hometown of Sosnociec, married, moved to Sweden and then the United States, and had two of children. She raised them and, when my father was struck by a series of brain aneurysms, was his caretaker for the last ten years of his life.
She survived but was never truly free. She left chunks of herself behind in her home town and in the death camps. For all the freedom she enjoyed, it was a brittle construct, always with a tinge of fear, of anger, of worry that it might all slip away. My sister and I experienced very different childhoods in the same house. My takeaway was that those feelings drove her vituperation, her xenophobia, her need to manipulate and control.
Not all who lived survived to be free again. For some, only death frees from struggle, the rest of oblivion.
Now, as we grow the next generations of traumatized children and young adults, let’s consider how their lives will color whole generations in places like Syria, Myanmar, and, yes, in America. How their pain will inform their lives, their hates, and their legacy, in turn, to their children.
We have to stop the cycle. As best we can, with the tools we have.
Back from hiatus, and starting, edits on my second Shmuley Myers book. It builds on an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Austin police homicide detective in a world (soon to be real, apparently) where every non-birth pregnancy becomes a murder investigation, contraception is illegal, church and state prance together in an evil waltz.
Shmuley needs to balance his roles as a pious Jew, a loving husband, his job as a civil servant, and…
While I’m sure that WordPress’ new post editing mechanism is a cool, slick, thing, it’s enough of a jump from the old way that I’ve heard several authors complain. Which is stupid. And that one needs to download (yet another) plugin to disable it is even sillier.
I should NOT have to wrestle with my blog editor to put pictures in-line with a list. Or have to manually decide to place a list when I’ve started a paragraph. It interrupts the flow of the writing and it makes for a rockier experience. Matt Mullenweg, I’m looking at you. Microsoft used to do these self-goal moves, and this is a big one.
I can’t speak for others, but as a tech professional I know that releases need to set expectations and listen to users. And if the user population isn’t asked, then expectations can’t be set. I’m not talking about avid beta testers and early adopters. I’m talking about folks that use the WordPress platform to facilitate their work, not be their work.
End result is that I’ve put off a number of posts simply because I got bogged down in the formatting and didn’t want to put out something that wasn’t to my liking. (Yeah, I know, the theme itself needs a wrecking ball, but that’s something else…)
Goals people make are frequently not SMART. And that makes them all fuzzy, and frustrating, frankly, when trying to assess progress. 2018 has been, for me, surprisingly good, exciting, and charges me with hope and excitement for 2019.
Creativity
It’s been a year. I worked as a contractor for two months, and had the amazing, humbling, and powerful experience of writing full-time. It’s thrilling. I’ve got a spreadsheet of data (see below), but I wrote approximately three in four days this year, with an average daily word count a bit over 1,600. I developed three separate “universes” and three of the six manuscripts draw from them. The last, for a project named “Qoch,” is my first true fantasy foray. Worldbuilding is a whole different matter than alternate history timelines. Wow.
I now have a literary agent: Martha Hopkins, of Terrace Partners. For traditional publishing, agents are a critical success factor, and Martha’s got the power and panache to find the right deal for my work product.
Novels were definitely my focus. That I have four novels in progress isn’t a good thing. There are logical reasons for why they’re that way, however.
Ken Yirbu is on hold pending my agent getting the first novel in the series, A Day at the Zoo, sold.
I had an editor do a developmental edit on Last Run, so the start of next year will be consumed with getting that out to my agent. It’s done, but not ready for publishing.
Brightly Needing I’ve rewritten from scratch five times, but I’m only counting the last. This might be a trunk novel, but the universe and some of its characters have promise. Call it on hold for now.
Qoch has three novellas/novels outlined, and I’m well into the first of them. It’s always a good sign when my characters wake me up to tell me what they want to do.
On the short story side while I’ve done some writing, it’s not been at the forefront of my writing. And zero acceptances for twenty submissions isn’t indicative of anything–too few to be statistically important. On one hand I’m bummed, but the time cost in shifting from one project to another, be it small or large, is expensive. Better to focus on a single novel plus edits than get creative in a few ways all at once. The one short I started and completed in 2018, Selection Bias, I’ll shop after getting it through the Slugtribe group’s review.
Certified Scrum Master
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Work
I dragged my heels for years before getting a degree, and worked at Charles Schwab for a year as a product owner without any formal training. While I’m not a fan of official stamps of approval that I know something, employment site AIs and corporate recruiterfolk are increasingly buzzword scanners rather than resume readers. So my investment in Agile-related certifications will, I hope, pay off in the new year. I’ve enjoyed doing development, but I’m more attracted to working with humans than screens. (Said the man who types in front of screens for hours on end…)
2019 Goals
I like my goals to be SMART. So here they are:
Creative
Write two novels in the Qoch universe (~70k words each). One in 1H, one in 2H. If the Shmuley Myers mystery/thriller series sells, possibly finish Ken Yirbu.
Write two novellas/short stories in the Brightly Needing universe. A minimum of 100k words between the two. I still think there’s at least one full novel in it, but the shorter works might (finally) kick that off. Timing: one in each half of 2019.
Have Last Run off to my agent at Terrace Partners by the end of 1Q.
Redo this web site so it’s mobile-friendly.
Write a minimum of one web post per week.
Restart my ceramic painting creativity such that I’m putting ten hours/week into it by the end of 2Q.
Work/Life
Get a position in a company with a great culture and good folks by the end of 1Q. Work/life balance very important.
Based on where I get the job, buy a house, possibly with acreage and possibly for sustainability as a goal, but that’s income-dependent.
I worked hard in 2017/2018 to get my weight down from heavy to just big. Need to continue that progress so I can (goal here) do a twenty-mile hike in a day without turning to mush and my weight down by fifty pounds from current weight.
It’s a new swing around the sun…
I’m looking forward to applying the momentum built up so far.
