Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 80

complications

Sometimes life is like a novel. Sometimes life is like a bad novel. Mine is starting to look like a novel written by a beginner who's trying to learn writing from a book. He's stuck on the chapter about Complications.

Computer died, hard drive beyond repair. Day shot trying to fix it, before it admitted "The hard drive cannot be repaired." Local Apple store no help, leaving Friday. Prescription meds stolen from suitcase en route. (Didn't know because I was carrying a week's worth in my ...

London walkabout

We've been having a fine time in London, sort of nonstop. Judith Clute met our dawn plane and shepherded us into London. We had a rest and a walk and then went off to join Geoff Ryman at an exhibition of neophyte art -- essentially the graduation projects from people who had just been granted B.A.s by St. Martin's College of Arts. A radical joint where, I have to say, almost all of the students' projects were long on "statement" and short on any visible artistic ability.

Same all over, I gu...

war is smell

Here's an oddity, a blast from neolithic bloggery. I was searching the computer for the words to Tom Rush's "The Alligator Wrestler," to play it for Judith Clute, and wound up in the middle of an old text file of GEnie blogs . . .

8 Aug 96 GEnie --

My own combat experience about dead bodies was complex, and like all such old
memories, you have to wonder what is accurately remembered and what is an
attempt to make patterns; make sense. I recall that freshly dead people --
say, dead less than an ...

paranormality

(In sffnet, an old argument has resurfaced . . . )

Blues, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, anybody who actually has a paranormal ability can make an easy million dollars by demonstrating it in front of a panel of objective observers. Here's a list of the people who have tried, and failed:

http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=43 (The application for the challenge is at http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge/challenge-application.html)

That seems to me a strong, if n...

the Gulf disaster

Finally, a sober analysis of what's happening, and what's going to happen, in the Gulf of Mexico . . .

http://www.xkcd.com/748/

Joe

foreign matters

Off to England in a few hours. Finished writing my thing for the Hemingway conference yesterday, so one less thing to worry about.

Email this morning from my graphic-novel artist collaborator Marvano . . . he found an interview with Ridley Scott in a trade mag, which says

- They are currently on the 4th draft of a screenplay for the sci-fi The Forever War, based on a novel by Joe Haldeman. He hopes to make it in the future.

Good news, I think, though I don't have time to check the contract. ...

on writing

When I first went to college, at the University of Oklahoma in 1961, OU gave a master's degree in professional writing. You could specialize in various things -- fiction, nonfiction, newswriting, whatever -- but no matter what your specialization was, you had to write a minimum of one thousand words a day. You had to carry at least the past week's worth of writings with you at all times, because any professor or instructor could ask you to hand them over at any time.

They didn't have to be g...

Birthday dinner

We had a fine birthday dinner with Bill Hutchinson and and his wife Jenn at the Ginger Tree, a local pan-Asian joint. Then went to the frozen yogurt place and hung out as if it were a bar, Bill and I talking about schools of logic while Gay and Jenn spoke of more worldly things. Bill's a collector of antiquities and curiosities, and for my birthday he gave me three interesting pamphlets, about a hundred years old -- Elbert Hubbard on Bellini, Raphael, and Corot.

Hubbard was sort of a public ...

Birthday groanings

The writers' blog RedRoom wants people to submit essays about positive things about growing older -- how did they know it was my birthday? I have to admit, though, that their suggestions left me a little cold -- "Don't send greeting cards that belittle growing older," "don't think everything was better in the past," and "If you're wearing the same hairstyle you were ten years ago˜change it!"

Like sure, if I had any fucking hair left. Thanks a bunch.

Joe

Hello? I'm from your novel.

Odd coincidence yesterday morning. Writing on the novel in the morning darkness, before figure studio, I introduced a new minor character. The protagonist, in her thirties, says the woman is "about my age . . . and stout and muscular." Then the woman on the next page says her husband "was coming back from town on a motorcycle when the bombs dropped . . . . "

So I pedal off to studio and the model drops her robe -- and she's a biker babe! Stout and muscular, with biker tats and a broken nos...