Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 91

Hoya

Our hoya is getting ready to bloom again. This is from the last time.

Untitled Poem

This is one of those days
when you write and unwrite.
Nothing seems true.
Everything is pretentious
and dishonest.

Even this poem is full
of abstract nouns
and verbs that say nothing.
Only 'write' is active,
and it isn't enough.

Astronomy Post of the Day

Why are some hills on Mars so layered? The answer is still under investigation. Clearly, dark windblown sand surrounds outcropping of light sedimentary rock across the floor of crater Arabia Terra. The light rock clearly appears structured into many layers, the lowest of which is likely very old. Although the dark sand forms dunes, rippled dunes of lighter colored sand are easier to see surrounding the stepped mesas. Blown sand possibly itself eroded once-larger mesas into the layered...

Update

The Great Re-carpeting is almost done. The books are reshelved. The doodads and objets d'art are mostly back in place. I still have four bags of papers to go through. I pulled them off my desk, and I don't want to them to go back on the desk.

I've decided to buy two small file cabinets and put them in my large closet. The papers will go into the file cabinets or into a shredder. My desk top will have a computer, a printer, bills to be paid and manuscripts I'm working on. Everything else will ...

Creative Job Search

Patrick took a two-day class on "Creative Job Search" at the state Workforce Center. He had a conversation with the instructor at the lunch break today. She told him she likes her job, but it really bothers her to know that 25% of the people in her classes will never work again. "They've created an underclass, and they expect us to fix it."

She said the hardest part was the young kids who've lost their jobs at McDonalds, and aren't going to work again. "In five years there won't be entry level...

Astronomy Photo of the Day

What's lighting up nebula IRAS 05437+2502? No one is sure. Particularly enigmatic is the bright upside-down V that defines the upper edge of this floating mountain of interstellar dust, visible near the image center. In general, this ghost-like nebula involves a small star forming region filled with dark dust that was first noted in images taken by the IRAS satellite in infrared light in 1983. Shown above is a spectacular, recently released image from the Hubble Space Telescope that...

Astronomy Photo of the Day

Two hours before closest approach to Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 robot spacecraft snapped this picture. Clearly visible for the first time were long light-colored cirrus-type clouds floating high in Neptune's atmosphere. Shadows of these clouds can even be seen on lower cloud decks. Most of Neptune's atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium, which is invisible. Neptune's blue color therefore comes from smaller amounts of atmospheric methane, which preferentially absorbs red light...

Whining

I am now going to do some whining. I had a short novel (or long novella) published in May, 2010. It has gotten several very nice reviews. But one of the reviews made me crazy, because it said the story was fluff.

I mentioned this to Mike Levy and he said, "Well, it is fluff. There is no character development." Or words to that effect.

The story is about a planet where one sex has enslaved and exterminated the other sex. Because the surviving sex, the murderers, are female and capable of parthe...

Who Needs A Publisher

A neat article from Newsweek on people who are self-publishing on Kindle and making it work. One guy, who had been turned down by every possible print publisher, ended up selling 4,000 books a week on Kindle and was picked up by Simon and Schuster. Another guy is making $100,000 a year. By eliminating the publisher, he can sell books for $2.99 and make a profit.

Publishing 1

Norman Spinrad has done a couple of posts on publishing recently. One was interesting, in that it told me things I didn't know. According to him, bookstores "buy to net," which leads to "the death spiral of publishing."

Suppose Barnes & Noble orders 10,000 copies of a book, and 80% sell. This is pretty good, especially considering they can return the unsold copies for credit, unlike every other kind of retailer. When a new book by the author comes out, the buyer at B&N looks at the records an...