Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 40
January 6, 2014
Progress report: day six (frozen edition)
It’s cold out there. Dipped below 0 as I got up and settled into my office and took the above picture. Lots of frost on the window. Got freelancing done (it’s CES week, putting in some extra afternoon hours, worked on some eBook stuff) and worked on the short story Code some more in the later afternoon.
I’ve really gotten into the characters and think I have a nice little odd couple going. Had to delete some exposition, but it’s saved in a file. So it doesn’t add to my word count just yet, but...
It’s chilly out here [photos]
the current Katabatic wastes of my front yard…
As I mentioned in the last progress report I broke my unchained days of walks outside due to falling asleep. Today when I woke up the first thing I promised myself was to just get out the door.
Now, it’s -10 outside, -33 with windchill.
What does that mean? I don’t even.
But I mentioned on twitter that since I’m about to write a book about Antarctica, it’d be great research. So I dutifully armored up:
-One Uniqloo heat-tech undershirt
-A long sleeve po...
Progress report: day five (a day late)
A slow Sunday spent with the family yesterday. I fell asleep after dinner, though, and woke up with a start sometime after midnight. Contemplated my daily walk, but with the temps dropping and snow plows slamming about I decided to stay in. So did I break my unchained days of walking. In retrospect I should have gone downstairs to the recumbent bike, but as I said, I was really fuzzy-headed.
I took a while for my brain to boot up. But I was really, really determined to have unchained days of w...
January 5, 2014
Canadian libricide
Fuck…
“Back in 2012, when Canada’s Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.
Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives’ war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmen...
January 4, 2014
Progress report: day four
Typing this one up from the laptop in the passenger’s seat of the car as Emily drives us up to see her family for Christmas. When I realized it was a trip all the way up to Cleveland (3.5 hours in the car) I bagged my laptop to take with us.
Snagged my fourth day in a row of writing. I think 700 words in the car (hard to focus with kid’s music, other people talking, but it’s doable) brings the story ‘Code’ up to ~2,000 words and I’m going to tap out now and call it a successful day.
We’re at a...
Global renewable electricity capacity has an interesting growth rate hinted at in chart
“TheNational Renewable Energy Lab(NREL)released a report –2012 Renewable Energy Data Book–in October of 2013 regarding the status of renewable energy globally and in the US. The report has an abundance of great charts and, in reading through the pages, I discovered that renewable energy accounts for 23% of all electricity generation worldwide (4,892 TWh)(on page 41). I’ve brought out a few of the relevant charts and findings. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.”
January 3, 2014
Progress report: day three
The blank page is always tough, isn’t it? Late last night, way too late last night, I finished up the rewrite of the short story David Klecha and I are putting together. Today I needed to start another one I owe, while also getting further along in the work on the pseudonymous novel. From now on I’ll call PS Book One. Because I struggle to spell pseudonymous. It just took me five tries. And that’s with the help of spellcheck.
An editor asked for this story. I’m in an amazing place in my career...
ACA Signups: the 538 of the ACA political newscape
ACASignups is like the 538 of the ACA roll out political landscape (the graph in particular makes me swoon):
“What about the big guns?
Why is ACAsignups.net being run by Charles Gaba and other volunteers, including myself?Why hasn’t a major media outlet made an endeavor to keep a running, daily (or at least weekly) total of ACA enrollments?Why is news routinely reported uncritically and without context? When HHS announced that there had been 1.1 million signups through HealthCare.gov as of Dece...
Jamie Todd Rubin on 7 Lessons Learned from 300 Days of Writing |
Jamie Rubin has things he learned from 300 days of writing. The most I chained together was last year’s 150, so I’m hoping to be able to get where he was:
“A few days ago, I passed another writing milestone for 2013. I’d written 300 out of the last 302 days. As of this morning, I’ve written 303 out of the last 305 days, and 160 consecutive days. Writing those first 5 or 10 days feels good. When I passed 50 days, I was sort of surprised. At 100 days, I felt like I’d run a marathon. At 200 days,...
Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized at Brain Pickings
Interesting! I tend to be up around 10:30am, so between James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald…
“I reached out to Wendy MacNaughton — illustrator extraordinaire and very frequent collaborator — and asked her to contribute an illustrated portrait for each of the authors.
The end result — a labor of love months in the making — is this magnificent visualization of the correlation between writers’ wake-up times, displayed in clock-like fashion around each portrait, and their literary productivity, dep...
