Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 281

The virtues of undersharing

Here is a post by Madeleine E. Robins on Book View Cafe: Life Lived Out Loud

Life is lived very publicly these days. For writers, who are told that Establishing a Media Presence is a requirement, it can be just another writing exercise. But when even middle schoolers worry about crafting an online persona*, the world has moved well past my mother’s adjuration not to tell Other People the family’s concerns. We’re all awfully comfortable with taking up, not just our own space, but the space of the people around me. I tend to lower my voice if I’m talking on a cell phone in public–both for the sake of my own privacy and so as not to thrust my business on the people sitting nearby. Not so the woman two seats away from me on BART who was chatting animatedly with someone about her visit to the gynecologist.

I am a private person by nature, I think; or at least I certainly am in comparison with the sort of person who would chatter away about personal topics in a public place. Seriously, I can’t even. But I also don’t worry a lot about “crafting a public persona.” It just feels natural to me to focus online on books and writing and puppies and flowers and funny cat videos and so on, and leave virtually all politics (say) strictly alone. But a lot of this is, I think, based on what I prefer other people to share, too. I will just never understand the urge to treat the entire world as a fitting venue for personal concerns.

But! I also have a more serious concern about social media and oversharing. Sometimes when scrolling through Twitter or Facebook I can’t help but wonder whether a) social media encourages a deleterious focus on the self and on one’s personal feelings; and b) this focus then tends to encourage rather than relieve feelings of anxiety, depression, and so forth.

I wonder whether some people who are heavily into social media don’t try to reach out for social support to people they aren’t genuinely connected to; people who can’t provide support in 140 characters; people who are not, in truth, close enough to be asked to provide support at all.

Granted, I’m not inclined to completely give up either Twitter or Facebook. I like both, though I’m enjoying Facebook more now that I have a phone that can actually reliably get to Facebook. I very much appreciate the glimpses into the lives of various relatives (goodness, Meagan must be SO ready to have that baby; I have never seen anyone more pregnant in my life!) and all kinds of pictures and links.

I just wonder whether it might not be better to recover, as a society, a sense of the difference between personal and public and between friends and acquaintances. To recover, let us say, a general feeling that reticence can be a positive virtue rather than a synonym for repression.

Though I won’t be holding my breath to see that kind of trend.

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Good News Tuesday —

It is Tuesday, right? Easy to lose track when you’re off work for a month! Alas, the spring semester starts today and thus I am headed off to work in a few hours. Actually in some ways I am quite ready to go back to work! In other ways, not so much.

Christmas break this year was only semiproductive. I did write 100 pp or so (yay!), but not the 150-200 I sort of intended. Too many days where my attention was just pulled in too many different directions, plus a real dislike for Chapter, um, I guess that turned into Chapter 9, at least for now. This is Shadow Twin, incidentally, which is now 97,000 words and thus I sincerely hope kind of near-ish the beginning of the end. I have finally connected the beginning with the middle, which is satisfying.

Ah, it may be obvious at this point that there is zero chance I will bring Shadow Twin out in January. Since I definitely don’t want to publish it too close to one of the traditionally published books, I am now aiming for, like, June. That ought to give me time to finish the thing and let beta readers take a look at it and then revise it and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, back to a brief roundup of a few items that caught my eye this past week:

Completely Artificial Hearts: Coming to a Chest Cavity Near You

Since the 1950s, ambitious researchers have tried to build artificial hearts but have always come up short. Now, four different companies think they’ve found the right technology, and they’re out to prove it. In 2017, clinical trials and animal tests could finally demonstrate that permanent artificial hearts are ready for the clinic.

About 5.7 million people in the United States alone are currently living with a diagnosis of heart failure, meaning their hearts are gradually becoming less effective at pumping blood. Some of the worst-off patients join the waiting list for a heart transplant, but donor hearts are scarce and many people die while waiting.

You know who else is currently living with some degree of heart failure? Zillions of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, who suffer from mitral valve defects at something like 14 times the average rate for dogs. While I am a big, big, big proponent of breeding away from this problem — which in fact is probably somewhat reduced in the breed by now because a lot of committed breeders have been working on this for decades — anyway, I am pretty sure researchers would find no shortage of Cavalier owners willing to volunteer their pets to try out really promising new therapies. Anyway, onward!

Scientists have figured out how to make wounds heal without scars

[W]hile there’s not a whole lot that can be done for scars that are already there, researchers have figured out how to make fresh wounds heal as normal, regenerated skin, instead of the usual scar tissue – something that was previously thought to be impossible in mammals.

Good, good. Nice start. Now let’s go on to figuring out how to regenerate limbs, eh?

Speaking of regenerating stuff:

Scientists have found a drug that regenerates teeth, and it could reduce the need for fillings

Not personally relevant for me, since I inherited my mother’s excellent teeth. Thanks, Mom!

I only wish I had also inherited her metabolism. Sigh. Can’t have everything.

Anyway: Researchers have identified a drug that can regenerate teeth from the inside out, possibly reducing the need for artificial fillings.

The drug was previously used in Alzheimer’s clinical trials, and it now appears to improve the tooth’s natural ability to heal itself. It works by activating stem cells inside the tooth’s pulp centre, prompting the damaged area to regenerate the hard dentin material that makes up the majority of a tooth.

My Dad has terrible teeth. For him and the many, many people like him, this would be a blessing.

Here’s something that’s just interesting:

NASA has discovered gigantic ice towers on Pluto, standing 500 metres tall

You know, the past couple years have brought in so much neat astronomical data.

…Pluto’s ice ridges are massive towers standing up to 500 metres in height – making them hundreds of times taller than the Earth-bound versions, which usually only extend about a metre vertically (although outliers reach up to 5 metres or 16 feet).

Snazzy pictures at the link.

Okay, that’s it for this week! Gotta go stop the boys from tearing up my old white sweater. I don’t care about the sweater, but I don’t want to anybody actually eating a significant portion of it.

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Recent Reading: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

This one’s been on my radar for several months. First somebody at Archon (I think it was Archon) told me all about Illuminae and then it reappeared as a Cybils finalist (along with The Keeper of the Mist, let me add).

So I finally picked up my copy and opened it up and . . . wow, what an interesting (and fun, and fast-paced, and emotionally compelling) book-shaped item Illuminae is.

You can think of Illuminae as an epistolary novel, though that’s not exactly right. It contains reports, often written in a chatty style; lots of email exchanges; journal entries; and the most fascinating use of color and shape on the page. Some of this was a tiny bit too cute, in fact, as spokes or swirls of words look really neat but are quite difficult to read. Also: grey print on a dark grey background is a terrible, terrible idea. Luckily there wasn’t too much of either.

Lots of drawings of various kinds, too. Every now and then it’s like the book tries to be a graphic novel. This is definitely a visually exciting book.

The bad news: you really must get this in paper. I can’t imagine some of those pictures and weird pages showing up properly on a Kindle. If you have read this in ebook form, please weigh in. Also, not sure whether this would work as an audiobook – I mean, you’d lose the drawings and stuff, some of which are kind of important, but it might work other than that.

Well, I see that’s a lot about the physical presentation. How about the story? All right, here’s the basic idea: prior to the first report hitting the inbox, way out in the far reaches of human-settled space, a corporation called BaiTech annihilated a rival corporation’s mining company. Several thousand people got away on three ships and are now fleeing the more powerful BaiTech ships, after them because they need to finish the whole annihilation thing before word gets out that BaiTech has chosen to deal with its business rivals by committing wholesale atrocity.

Okay, so. This book does not end on a cliffhanger, but neither does it tie up every possible loose end. Far from it. But Book 2 (Gemina) is out now – winging on its way to my door as I type this. I believe the series is probably going to be a trilogy, so I would just as soon Book 2 ties off fairly neatly. We’ll see.

So, what does this book offer other than the unique visual presentation?

The characters, especially Kady Grant.

Kady has lost everything in this disaster, or at least she believes she has. Except her boyfriend, Ezra Mason, with whom she broke up just that morning. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn they get back together. The relationship builds between them as the story progresses, though they are seldom actually on the same ship at the same time. Hence all the email exchanges, in which the reader gets to know them.

Kady is a serious computer geek. She is prickly, stubborn, independent, and as you might imagine, really, really pissed off at BaiTech. She is the primary protagonist, though we see into her head only in little snippets of her journal. For me, Ezra did not seem quite as developed a character as Kady, though he held up his end of the plot pretty well.

The pacing, all the way through.

This is quite a page turner, and you turn the pages all the faster as there is hardly any description to slow you down. Just what can be worked into email and reports and journal entries and stuff like that. During email exchanges, there can be fewer than a hundred words per page. Every now and then, many fewer. It’s a book you’re going to go through with a whoosh.

Also, stuff is happening right from the beginning, and stuff keeps happening. There are enough major plot twists to support three novels, all jammed in here. This definitely gives a nonstop-rush kind of feeling.

The plotting, sheesh

This story is put together well and, as I said, it’s fast paced. So the reader may not pause to reflect on how truly cluttered it actually is. Here come some very very broad spoilers, just in this one short paragraph below, so skip over if you want to avoid all spoilers:

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We have BaiTech goons pursuing our refugees. We also have zombie hordes attacking within two of the three ships. (Not really zombies, and also BaiTech’s fault, but still.) We ALSO have an insane computer that practically says, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” in so many words. I did say there was enough here for three novels, right?

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Okay, that’s it for even broad, vague spoilers.

Actually, cluttered as it was, this story doesn’t feel all that messy or chaotic. All the elements tie together pretty well. Lots of violence and tragedy, but not generally too ultra-graphic about it. Plus the reader zooms along too fast to really think too much about the clutter.

However, I do want to mention one more detail I personally did not care for: the bad guys.

BaiTech is a huge, rich, powerful, evil, soulless corporation. Wow, that’s so new and different. You sure don’t see huge rich powerful evil soulless corporations in the bad guy role just every day, right?

Apparently BaiTech committed this long-drawn out series of atrocities simply because it is so evil and all its employees are so evil? Or something? Even when – as is explicitly stated several times – it could have taken legal action against its business rival rather than murdering thousands and thousands of people. Sure, BaiTech clearly intends to leave no witnesses. Except you know what? The thousands and thousands of people on the BaiTech ships, each and every one of whom knows all about what has happened. Do the BaiTech higher-ups think they’ll all keep it buttoned? I haven’t seen such an implausible giant conspiracy since Myra Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy.

So, yeah. Even given the biggish reveal at the end, I have trouble swallowing the apparent motivations and impossible conspiracies of the bad guys.

OTOH, this is the first book of a series, you will recall, so possibly some more plausible motivation will emerge for the initial attack than atrocity-because-it’s-so-fun.

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A very interesting question, with no easy answers

Over at Janet Reid’s blog today:

This summer, I joined Twitter and followed several agents. I kept seeing the hashtag “we need diverse books” and/or diverse authors. Some advice I read even said to put your ethnicity into your query as a qualification. But I’m confused about what to do in my particular case. I am African-American and live in the rural South, but my book has nothing to do with my experience of being a minority in the South. Heck, my main character is Caucasian, and only one black person appears in the book at all.

But more and more, I’m seeing beta readers say things like “I will only read diverse books and/or diverse authors,” and I’m confused about where I would fit into all of this….

Yeah, that’s thought provoking. Or I think it should be.

Janet says: This is a really interesting question and I’m not sure if there is one answer, let alone a right answer. … I think right now I’d be more likely to look at something if the author wasn’t white, simply because I want publishing to look more like my neighborhood and less like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir….But it feels weird to me to tell you to list your ethnicity, because I certainly would not tell a writer to say they are Caucasian. Yet, my own desire to have more writers of color seems to mean you should.

Click through to read the rest of the post and the comment thread. The person who posed the initial comment does show up in the comments, whereupon you will learn that she has written a paranormal zombie novel. Hah. That certainly does suggest the story may not draw too extensively on the personal experiences of the author.

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Practical applications for explosives

Here’s an interesting post if you’re into weaponry and technology and most of all stuff that goes boom: Fire in the hole at Kill Zone Blog.

I’m going to continue my quest to help writers understand some of the technical aspects of weaponry so that their action scenes can be more realistic. Today, we’re going to talk about some practical applications for high explosives … Since TKZ is about writing thrillers and suspense fiction, I’m going to limit what follows to explosives used as weapons -– to kill people and break things.

Yep, that’s the fun part for sure. We then have short sections on grenades, claymore mines, and shaped charges like the kind used in missiles. None of this is in my area of expertise (at all), so it’s pretty interesting. Grenades don’t come up much in fantasy novels, but hey, posts like this might give me some ideas…

BEST USE OF EXPLOSIVES IN FANTASY: This makes me think of The Steerswoman. Not exactly fantasy, but it reads like fantasy — and there are definitely explosives. And explosions, big impressive ones. Definitely a fun element in the story, especially when you imagine being self-taught about explosives.

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I don’t think that word means what you think it means —

Gallup reports: Rumors of the demise of books is greatly exaggerated.

Which is all very well, but let me draw your attention to this bit:

Despite the abundance of digital diversions vying for their time and attention, most Americans are still reading books. In fact, they are consuming books at nearly the same rate that they were when Gallup last asked this question in 2002 — before smartphones, Facebook or Twitter became ubiquitous. More than one in three (35%) appear to be heavy readers, reading 11 or more books in the past year

… and come on. You call that “heavy readers”? I think you need to break down your 35% into actual no kidding heavy readers — shall we say fifty or more books per year, picture books don’t count? — and use some other term for people who read fewer than that.

Me, given that I’m writing, I read about 100 books a year. I used to read about twice that. I would call myself a heavy reader, but fifty and above seems like it should count as well. I bet those of you who read way more books than I do might draw the line higher than fifty. But seriously, who thinks that 11 books a year makes someone a heavy reader? Sheesh.

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The Skittering Lilt: or, beginning to edit your draft

At Bookview Café, Sherwood Smith has a post describing a group discussion about editing your own work.

It’s hard to beat “skittering lilt” as an image, don’t you think? Here’s the context:

The next few [suggestions] were more succinct: “Watch for mixed images (“The lilt in her voice skittered” — a visual reader is going to stop cold and try to figure out how a lilt can skitter), watch for clichés—especially using two for emphasis (“She thought about the rattling skeletons in her closet and the ancient bones of her past that stirred” two clichés for the price of one, and both saying the same thing, which has a numbing effect), and go through and read aloud your sentences. “If the rhythm starts repeating, you’ve probably got way too many semi-colons.”

Plenty of interesting suggestions in the post.

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Good News Tuesday

Just spotted a few items over the course of the past week — two weeks, since I was distracted last Tuesday and forgot to post. Let’s see …

First:

New Brain Cells Help Fight Cancer

A man with deadly brain cancer that had spread to his spine saw his tumors shrink and, for a time, completely vanish after a novel treatment to help his immune system attack his disease — another first in this promising field…The type of immunotherapy that 50-year-old Richard Grady received already has helped some people with blood cancers such as leukemia. But the way he was given it is new, and may allow its use not just for brain tumors but also other cancers that can spread, such as breast and lung…Grady was the first person to get the treatment dripped through a tube into a space in the brain where spinal fluid is made, sending it down the path the cancer traveled to his spine.

Very nice! My whole life, I’ve been expecting truly effective cancer treatments to appear. Hopefully that will actually happen soon. This sure looks promising.

Baby’s skull rebuilt at Stony Brook with help of 3-D printer model

The sonogram performed during her 36th week of pregnancy in early summer produced jarring news for Nicole Bono — her developing son’s head appeared to have an abnormal shape.

So they reshaped the baby’s skull. Cute picture at the link. Perfectly normal looking kid. Pretty nice; this 3-D printing thing is definitely good news for making bones and stuff. Really very impressive futuristic stuff.

Naps might be saving your brain

Hey, don’t knock it. Don’t we all want a good excuse to take a nap when we hit those low-energy hours?

A new study that analyzed 3,000 Chinese adults over the age of 65 found that those who took an hour-long nap after lunch performed better on cognitive tests than those who took a shorter nap, longer nap or no nap at all.

I do question the “shorter nap” thing. I often take a much shorter nap in the afternoon, like 20 minutes or so, and I’m quite willing to bet money that I would perform better on a cognitive test after a nap than before.

Here’s something interesting and quite unexpected:

It’s official: A brand-new human organ has been classified

I mean, seriously? After all this time, we’re discovering a whole new *organ*? In science fiction, it would be in or near the brain and it would have to do with psionics or something. In the real world:

Researchers have classified a brand-new organ inside our bodies, one that’s been hiding in plain sight in our digestive system this whole time. … Although we now know about the structure of this new organ, its function is still poorly understood, and studying it could be the key to better understanding and treatment of abdominal and digestive disease. … Known as the mesentery, the new organ is found in our digestive systems, and was long thought to be made up of fragmented, separate structures. But recent research has shown that it’s actually one, continuous organ.

What are we going to discover next, I wonder?

This one is just fun:

Satellite spots MASSIVE object hidden under the frozen wastes of Antarctica

It stretches for a distance of 151 miles across and has a maximum depth of about 848 metres….Some researchers believe it is the remains of a truly massive asteroid which was more than twice the size of the Chicxulub space rock which wiped out the dinosaurs….If this explanation is true, it could mean this killer asteroid caused the Permian–Triassic extinction event which killed 96 percent of Earth’s sea creatures and up to 70 percent of the vertebrate organisms living on land….However, the wilder minds of the internet have come up with their own theories, with some conspiracy theorists claiming it could be a massive UFO base or a portal to a mysterious underworld called the Hollow Earth.

I think it’s neat enough to find the explanation for the dramatic P-T extinction. But of course we all know what this REALLY is:

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Teaching to the test would work better if the tests were adequate

Wow, have you seen this article in the Washington Post?

Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems

The author [Sara Holbrook] of source material on two Texas standardized tests says she can’t actually answer the questions about her own work because they are so poorly conceived. She also says she can’t understand why at least one of her poems — which she calls her “most neurotic” — was included on a standardized test for students.

The test writers made inexcusably careless errors, like asking about why the author divided a poem into stanzas at a particular point without formatting the poem correctly, so that there were no stanza breaks. Also, Holbrook makes the point, rather vehemently, that none of the answers about the author’s motivation make sense unless the question writers asked the author what her motivation actually was. She put the stanza break in to signal to herself where to take a breath when reading the poem aloud, not for any of the “artistic” reasons suggested by the answers.

The same year that “Midnight” appeared on the STAAR test (2013), Texas paid Pearson some $500 million to administer the tests, reportedly without proper training to monitor the contract. Test scorers, who are routinely hired from ads on (where else?), Craiglist, also receive scant training, as reported by this seasoned test scorer. I’m not sure what the qualifications are for the people who make up the questions, but the ability to ride unicorns comes to mind.

Now comes research that reveals that a simple demographic study of the wealth of the parents could have accurately predicted the outcomes, no desks or test packets needed.

Yeah, not surprised. I thoroughly detest Pearson’s My Math Lab online homework, and that’s for math, a far more straightforward topic than poetry. (The online homework is designed in a way that discourages students from working to actually understand the material; it is also designed so as to create test anxiety. Good job, Pearson!)

Almost all the time, when I am helping a student to prepare for a standardized test, it’s for math. I’m grateful for that, because as horrifically underprepared as many (most?) students are in math, at least math skills *are* straightforward, far more easily tested than this Why-did-the-author blah blah blah on the English section.

It reminds me of how critics seriously discuss all the deep motivations that might lead YA authors to kill off parents in the backstory, when often enough I suspect the only actual motivation is to cut down on the number of secondary characters so as to simplify writing the story. I know that’s often an important motivation for *me*.

Anyway, it’s a long article, but click through and take a look if you’ve got kids in the current school system. I do think testing is important, or at least assessment is important; but if the tests are terrible, assessment stops being hard and becomes hopeless.

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8 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Titles Inspired by Poetry

I liked this post by Natalie Zutter at tor.com: 8 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Titles Inspired by Poetry

A few years ago, Jo Walton (inspired by a conversation with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden) took on the sort of challenge that we love doing at Tor.com: She counted up the number of science fiction and fantasy book titles pulled from two classic poems, William Blake’s “The Tyger” and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” to see which had inspired more titles….in this post, we’re doing a deep dive into some of the titles from each to see the different ways in which authors have interpreted the oft-quoted words of these poets.

Neat idea! I like poetic titles, usually, and certainly if you can find justification for using an actual line of poetry as a title, that’s one way to achieve this kind of title. I think this is the most interesting example:

“Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente

fitting that Valente should draw the title of her Nebula Award-winning novella from Auden’s poem, as it takes place in the dreamworld between human Neva and AI Elefsis, who communicate more in story tropes than in actual words. Elefsis absorbs fairy tales like any other piece of information, knowing that when Neva sends her the image of a woman transforming into a crone it means to change the subject, and that she must express human notions of feel and love with strikeouts, not allowed to fully possess them. But this quasi-language has given Elefsis the mistaken impression that all stories have a happy ending—an interesting bit of parallelism to the fact that “Silently and Very Fast” is the final line of Auden’s poem.

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