Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 47

Good morning, Claude; please continue this poem

I hear that Claude uses a different kind of processing and generates better results than ChatGPT. When it comes to continuing Swinburne’s poem The Forsaken Garden, it would be hard to be worse than ChatGPT, so I thought, hey, let’s see what Claude does with this exact same prompt.

Here’s the original poem:

**************************************************************

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

       At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

       The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

       The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

               Now lie dead.

*

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,

       To the low last edge of the long lone land.

If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

       Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?

So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,

       Through branches and briars if a man make way,

He shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless

               Night and day.

*

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled

       That crawls by a track none turn to climb

To the strait waste place that the years have rifled

       Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.

The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;

       The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.

The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,

               These remain.

*

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;

       As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;

From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,

       Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.

Over the meadows that blossom and wither

       Rings but the note of a sea-bird’s song;

Only the sun and the rain come hither

               All year long.

*

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels

       One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.

Only the wind here hovers and revels

       In a round where life seems barren as death.

Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,

       Haply, of lovers none ever will know,

Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping

               Years ago.

*

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,”

       Did he whisper? “look forth from the flowers to the sea;

For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,

       And men that love lightly may die—but we?”

And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,

       And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,

In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,

               Love was dead.

*

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?

       And were one to the end—but what end who knows?

Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,

       As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.

Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?

       What love was ever as deep as a grave?

They are loveless now as the grass above them

               Or the wave.

*

All are at one now, roses and lovers,

       Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.

Not a breath of the time that has been hovers

       In the air now soft with a summer to be.

Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter

       Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,

When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter

               We shall sleep.

*

Here death may deal not again for ever;

       Here change may come not till all change end.

From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,

       Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.

Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,

       While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;

Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing

               Roll the sea.

*

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,

       Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble

       The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,

Here now in his triumph where all things falter,

       Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,

               Death lies dead.

****************************************************************

And here is Claude’s attempt to continue this poem:

***************************************************************

The tide shall return, the waves ever-crashing,

To wash away traces of what here hath been.

The cliffs undercut by the surf’s endless lashing,

Shall topple and crumble, no more to be seen.

*

The garden once blooming with roses delighted,

The haven of lovers whose whispers took wing,

By cruel time’s hand shall be wholly united

*
With earth, air and ocean – from whence all things spring.

*

Yet perhaps in that merging, that dissolution,

When boundaries fallen, all forms are remade,

*
New life may arise from the old revolution –

The shores reforming, the seas redeswayed.

*

Then maybe this garden, its bower reshaped,

Shall blossom anew ‘neath a reborn sun’s grace.

Though all has seemed lost and forever unscaped,

New lovers may wander, embraced in that place.

*

For such is the cycle that rules o’er our being,

Death ushering life in its ceaselessly flow.

The tides shall return without pause or fore-seeing,

As Time’s mighty waters above us shall go.

**********************************************************

What do you think? I think this is somewhat better than ChatGPT, but —

a) Claude is also unable to count lines per stanza and echo the number of lines per stanza or the number of syllables per line, but was more willing to have stanzas of odd lengths. However, the places it put breaks between stanzas are really odd.

b) Claude was able to copy an ABAB rhyme scheme, which ChatGPT could not.

c) Claude made up two words! Did you notice? The first is “The shores reforming, the seas redeswayed.” The second is “Though all has seemed lost and forever unscaped,” Both fake words are at the end of lines, so what we see here is Claude trying to force a rhyme and possibly a number of syllables, and rather than pick a real word, it made up fake words. That’s really interesting!

When I asked, “Is “redeswayed” a real word?” here was the response:

No, “redeswayed” is not a real word. It seems I took some creative license in coining that term to rhyme with and mirror the meaning of “remade” in the previous line. As a made-up word, it does not have an officially recognized meaning, though in the context I intended it to convey the idea of the seas or shores being reshaped or re-formed into a new configuration. A more standard word choice would have been better there to maintain the authentic voice of the original poem. My apologies for that literary overreach! Please let me know if you’d like me to reattempt that stanza with a different wording.

It’s also interesting that Claude can use phrases like “I intended it to convey” to justify making up a fake word. Personally, I think “reedswayed” might pass as a real word, though not in this exact context. “Rede” is an actual word that is definitely not appropriate here — “rede” means “advice” or “advise” or “interpret.” If you read “re-de-swayed,” that meaning is still completely wrong for the context.

d) Like ChatGPT, Claude prefers happy endings. Love returns in both generated poems. ChatGPT included the line “That love, once departed, may return again.” Above, Claude includes “New lovers may wander, embraced in that place.” This is surprisingly similar.

Overall, a better job than ChatGPT, though still really terrible. The phrases are not as corny and silly, which is why I’m rating this as a better attempt.

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Recent Reading: The Cruelest Miles by Gay and Laney Salisbury

Okay, so this book, The Cruelest Miles, tells the story about the diphtheria epidemic in Nome and the race to get the serum there by dogsled. It’s a very readable book, well put together, background nicely integrated with the essential story, lots of drama, and of course we know from the beginning that the serum got to Nome, so thankfully that reduces the tension to a bearable level.

Nome’s residents knew exactly how much coal to order and how many turkeys, cans of evaporated milk, eggs, and medical supplies they needed for winter. They knew how to plug up their keyholes to protect against blizzards and how to reach the doctor or hospital if their children became ill. But they enjoyed a false sense of security, for the town’s isolation could quickly turn an average crisis into a catastrophe. If the weather turned suddenly, or there was a fire, or if a cargo ship sank, they might as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Diphtheria was a terrible killer prior to the invention of the antitoxin. It’s horribly contagious, and healthy carriers can spread it widely before the first cases are identified. It’s specifically a childhood disease, striking mainly children up through younger teenagers. It kills by slow suffocation. Imagine for one moment what that would be like, to have half the children in your community die slowly, over days, of a disease you can’t treat. You probably can’t stand to imagine that for longer than one moment.

There was one doctor in Nome. He had specifically ordered diphtheria serum. That part of his order failed to arrive. Then, after it was too late and Nome was isolated for the winter, the first cases of diphtheria began to appear …

You probably know that the sled dog diphtheria serum run from Anchorage to Nome is the effort that inspired the Iditarod race because everyone knows that. [I mean Americans; I’m not sure anyone else hears this story in grade school. For that matter, I don’t know whether children today still learn this story.]

Anyway, I knew that. I knew a little bit more than that. I knew that the guy who is most credited for the race was Leonhard Seppala, the guy for whom the modern Seppala Sleddog is named. I didn’t realize that nineteen other sled dog drivers and teams took part of that run, usually twenty or thirty miles or so apiece (Seppala took ninety, except he did a lot of his route twice: once to meet the driver handing off the serum and again to return.

Seppala’s dogs were original Siberian Huskies, which were a landrace from, obviously, Siberia. They were less beautiful but better sled dogs than modern Siberian Huskies.

A digression about sled dog breeds:

—Alaskan Malamutes are the big ones. They are about eighty to a hundred twenty pounds. They are meant for pulling heavy loads short distances at a slowish speed. They are not currently popular, which is good, as they would be difficult dogs for most people. They are affectionate, cheerful, demanding, independent, destructive if their energy is not channeled appropriately, often same-sex dog-aggressive, and really, really strong. Plus they howl. They do not ever have blue eyes.

—Siberian Huskies are the small ones who sometimes, not always, have blue eyes. They are half the size of Alaskan Malamutes. They are meant for pulling lighter loads much faster over much longer distances. They have diverged into multiple types in recent decades, including the very beautiful show variety that isn’t as fast or as high-drive as the original Siberians, and a longer-legged variety that has been selected to pull wheeled carts in the UK and has diverged enough in type and structure that it ought to really be called something else. Regardless, Siberians are very popular, as you may have noticed, but they are way (way) too smart and way (way) too energetic and way (way) too independent for most people. Almost everyone who thinks they want a Siberian is wrong. Do not just casually get a Siberian, even a show-line Siberian. Their attitude is, “That fence is just a suggestion, right?” Their other attitude is, “Dude, I love you and all, but I’ve got things to do.” They are called “Siberian Houdinis” by people who know the breed because they will find a way out of your yard and they will then run for miles and miles. They will be two counties away before they realize they are lost. They get lost – inexperienced and ignorant dog owners allow them to get lost – more than any other breed. There are far, far easier spitz breeds for the casual owner.

—Alaskan Huskies are the crossbred functional type that are not a breed. They were and still are created by crossing all sorts of other breeds into Malamutes and Siberians, including shorthaired dogs like German Shorthaired Pointers, and they are the fastest sled dogs in creation. They do not reliably have enough coat and they may need coats and booties, and they are not nearly as beautiful as show-line Siberians, but by heaven, they are fast.

—Seppala Siberian Sleddogs were re-created from Siberians and Alaskan Huskies after Siberians became less functional as sled dogs because they were being bred mainly for showing and as pets. I presume they are a lot like the original Siberians, given the name.

—Samoyeds are the jacks of all trade that do it all: pulling sleds, herding reindeer, whatever. They are easier to own than the dedicated sled dogs because they are not dedicated sled dogs. They are cheerful, extroverted, and too smart for some owners. I have literally seen a Samoyed train his owner to give him a cookie, like so: Jump on a person. Get commanded: OFF! SIT! Sit in front of the person, collect a cookie. Jump on the person again and repeat the whole business, ad infinitum.

Honestly, people only think they want smart dogs. Almost no one really wants a smart dog. But at least Samoyeds are happy and good-natured as they outwit you.

—Keeshonds are my favorite spitz breed. They are meant to be family pets and watchdogs, not sled dogs. They bark a lot because they are meant to be watchdogs, but they are also affectionate, willing, not as independent as any breed above, cheerful, extroverted, beautiful, and roughly two orders of magnitude easier to own than Siberians. They are also moving toward the edge of extinction because nobody knows about them. If you want a spitz breed, look here.

Image from Pixabay

Yes, there are lots of other spitz breeds, but that digression is long enough, so let’s go back to the book, which features sled dogs, especially the original Siberian, front and center.

The authors emphasize over and over the closeness between sled drivers and their dogs, especially their sled dogs. No doubt some drivers were cruel, but the authors pass over that rather lightly, especially because the drivers they focus on the most were anything but. Seppala in particular was a serious “dog whisperer,” though the authors don’t use that term. He apparently impressed his contemporaries by barely seeming to do anything, just cluck to his team and off they’d go. Probably part of that was just picking the right dogs to start with. As the authors correctly point out, wolves are horrible working animals and any amount of wolf genes makes for a bad working dog. In this case, that’s because wolves run in order to chase prey, but sled dogs run because other dogs are running. The Siberians of the time, and Seppala’s dogs for sure, were basically all the same size and specifically all ran in step, making for a smooth rhythm and a very fast, efficient team. They were far more efficient at running as a team than the crossbred Malamutes popular at the time.

Sled dogs also learned about the terrain, and the team leaders were selected for intelligence, drive, willingness, dominance (the authors don’t use that term, but it’s obvious because they describe the traits they mean: calm, confidence, and forcefulness. Those are traits that define dominance, which has nothing to do with aggression). Out on the trail, if a blizzard came up, the driver would have to turn everything over to the lead dog. In an early sweepstakes race, the very experienced driver who won was snow-blind for the last hundred miles; the lead dog got them to the finish line. Out on a frozen lake or on the frozen sound, the lead dog was the one who made decisions about whether the ice was safe to cross – often split-second decisions. If the driver got into dire trouble, the team leader was the dog who might be able to get him out, by figuring out a solution on his own because the driver could not tell him what to do and often did not know what to do. Many examples in the book.

Here is an incident Seppala describes, with his lead dog Togo, the same dog who was the team leader during Seppala’s part of the serum run. Seppala was crossing ice on the sound and the ice broke up, stranding him and his team on an ice floe. The only thing to do was wait and hope that the wind would push the ice floe toward shore rather than away from shore, which it did, or someone else would have tried to make Seppala’s part of the serum run. But the ice floe didn’t get close enough: a gap of five feet remained. The way to handle that is to tie a line to a dog, get the dog to jump the gap, and then the dog can pull the floating ice to shore. But Togo couldn’t jump that far, so Seppala picked him up and threw him across the gap. Togo understood all this and began to pull in the ice flow, but the line broke. And Togo jumped into the water, grabbed the line in his jaws, scrambled back out on the ice, dropped to the ice while still holding the line, and rolled twice. Then, with the line over his shoulders, he pulled the ice floe to shore.

Is this credible?

This story is on par with a story primatologist Frans de Waal tells in one of his many books (sorry, I don’t remember which). In this instance, what happened is a baby chimp was playing, got a rope wrapped around its neck, then fell off the height and hanged itself. The baby chimp was strangling, obviously, and the mother tried to pull the baby free, which was either going to strangle the baby faster or break its neck. A male chimp had been watching, and ran over, shoved the mother out of the way, lifted the baby up to relieve the pressure around its neck, and unwrapped the rope.

To me, that seems very much the same. The chimp had to understand the idea of “rope” and “wrapped around neck” and “lift to relieve pressure” and “unwrap.” The dog had to understand the idea of “rope” and “pull” and “get rope around body to pull better.” That last seems like a stretch, but sled dogs specifically learn to understand those exact concepts. This isn’t explained in this book, but I’ve listened to podcasts about sled dogs and the way they are trained, and so I can say that on a trail, when running, if a sled dog gets a line wrapped around its leg – not unusual – there is no time to stop the team and unwind the line. The dog might be crippled if it did not understand how to free itself. A dog that gets tangled while the team is in motion will throw itself down, shake the line free, and leap up without a pause. Sled dogs learn to do that when they are tied out as puppies, and it is one of the most important things they learn, crucial for the job of pulling as part of a team. To me, learning how to handle ropes and lines like this is exactly the kind of experience that could lead a really smart, really motivated dog to solve this problem. Also, as far as I know, no one ever suggested that Seppala made stuff up, so if he said this happened, probably it happened. Also, sled dogs did very smart things all the time. They had to, because their senses were so superior to human senses and humans were always being forced to hand all the decisions over to the lead dogs of their teams.

Okay, so that’s the dogs. What about everything else?

I cannot imagine living in Alaska, but most especially not Nome. The authors of The Cruelest Miles do a great job evoking the sheer weirdness of the world at -50F, where everyday expectations about how physics works start to be unreliable. I will add here that -50F is actually pretty close to -50C, so if you use Celsius, you can think of it as about the same.

“Traveling at fifty below is all right as long as it’s all right,” was a proverb known to many Alaskans. At this temperature, Alaska was a different world, a land with its own peculiar physics. A cup of boiling water flung into the air, for example, would become, as if by magic, a ghostly cloud of vapor. Steam rose from every finger on a bared hand as the vapor that passes continually through the pores became more visible. Spit froze, and opening the door to a warm cabin was an invitation to the phantoms: as the cold air rushed inside, moisture on the walls on floors would form into a chain of ice crystals, like tiny chandeliers in a woodshed. Outside, where the super-cooled air sucked out any lingering moisture, the landscape took on a fragile, glasslike quality. Objects would come into sharp focus and the landscape would fill with the fine, glittering crystals of hoarfrost.

During the actual serum run, temperatures were much lower, sixty or seventy degrees below zero. Oh, have I mentioned there was also a blizzard? It was some of the worst weather seen in that area for decades. A train took the serum from Anchorage to Fairbanks; sled dog teams then took the serum along the upper part of the route shown, from Nenana to Nome. Each of those little dots shows a waystation — a place where sled dog drivers could stop and recover. Each driver during the serum run was responsible for the distance from one or more waystations to another.

The people in Nome tried to get word to the last couple of drivers to stop and wait for better weather, but the last guy in the line didn’t get the message and kept coming. Because of the blizzard, he missed the last handoff and therefore took two legs of the run; that’s why he was the last driver and came actually into Nome with the serum. That was Gunnar Kaasen; his lead dog was Balto, who became famous because he was the one in the front as the serum came into Nome. He was a fine animal. But all the dogs that took part in the serum run were fine animals. The conditions on the run were so awful that a good handful of dogs died in the effort. (And some of the drivers sustained serious frostbite too; the serum run was brutal for dogs and men alike.)

So it’s a story with some tragedy mixed into the heroism. But, spoiler, the serum got to Nome, the epidemic was paused, and – I had no idea about this – a second run was made after the first to get more serum to Nome. A relative handful of children and a few adults are known to have died; probably a good many more died farther outside of town and were buried quietly, with no one ever hearing about it. But the epidemic was halted, and the bare outline of story – from 1925, so almost exactly a hundred years ago now – was still being told in grade schools when I was a kid.

Now I’ve heard the much more detailed account, and I definitely recommend this book. I have no great desire to ever go to Alaska except maybe on a luxurious cruise, but the Iditarod is a big draw, of course, and lots of people do go for that. The race doesn’t copy the route of the serum run because the whole race is for sled dogs, so there is no train doing half of the run, so the route looks like this:

So you can see that the route cuts diagonally across country and picks up roughly halfway through the east-west part of the serum run. This whole route is about a thousand miles, which is … wow … it’s a long way. Most teams used to take about 20 days to do this route, but today, most teams take ten days or so. This is partly because the sleds are better now — the driver can sit down now, which was not possible for drivers during the serum run. The Iditarod today is both safer and easier than it was at first. Not that I would ever have wanted to try to do it.

But beyond the race itself, this book also offers very nice details about clothing and tools; also about metaphysical beliefs of the Athabascans vs the Eskimos, plus which group should be called Eskimos and which Inuit – lots here I didn’t know. With the winter country in mind, I took notes. The Ugaro aren’t like any of the peoples described here, but nevertheless.

I also noted that most of the winter country can’t get THIS cold, or if it does, Ryo hasn’t described that. I do have some idea about how to design a person for really cold climates – I am thinking here, for example, of countercurrent mechanisms in the circulatory systems of the extremities, as cetaceans have in their flippers. But there are limits, and I can definitely say that most of the winter lands generally stay above fifty below and also, I see why the special climactic zone of the northern borderlands is crucial.

I have to add, it was a good thing for Aras that his first ill-prepared nineteen-day forced march into the winter country took place during the earlier part of winter, plus in the less-cold forest rather than out on the steppe. If it had been fifty below, that journey would have been impossible.

Overall conclusion: Great book, highly recommended.

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Finished! For certain values of “finished.”

Okay, so RIHASI is kind of finished, which is satisfying, of course, but this is “finished” in a fairly broad sense. Here is what I need to do this week:

A) So, it occurred to me that I really ought to have a scene early in the story where Kior gets to demonstrate competence. After reading through chapters two and three, I am putting that scene into chapter two. I should finish that today, it’s not like it’s going to be hard.

B) In the second to last chapter, I need to add a scene with an intimate conversation. I should be able to start that today or tomorrow and finish that scene maybe Wednesday. It shouldn’t take long; it’s not like it’s going to be hard.

C) Oops, I think I probably ended the book in the wrong place. I’m not sure why it took me 24 hours to realize that because I’m fairly sure that’s the wrong place. I need to go extend the ending a bit. It shouldn’t take long; it’s not like it’s going to be hard.

D) I wonder if maybe I need to switch half the last chapter to the other point of view. Wow, that would be annoying and tedious. I may need to switch it, save the file under a different name in case I decide to switch it back, and then give myself some time to decide which way I think it ought to me. That’s going to take practically forever, ugh.

E) I haven’t written the epilogue, but it will be short, I’m pretty sure.

***

So … this is the kind of finishing work and initial revision that is so important that it kind of derails the idea of “finished,” even though I THOUGHT it was basically finished Saturday.

However, moving along, moving along, it’s fine. Even if I need to switch the pov for twenty pages, although that’s horribly tedious, it doesn’t REALLY take that long, I just don’t enjoy doing it.

***

The puppies are indeed distracting. I’m up and down a good bit at night, rescuing a puppy that has accidentally gotten stranded behind Morgan or a puppy that is cheeping because it is cold. I’m keeping the temperature quite low so that Morgan and I don’t die of heatstroke, but that means being super, super alert for puppy cheeping and always, always responding immediately to a cold puppy. This is far less important now than it was right after birth, however, because (a) the puppies are two weeks old this morning and much more able to control their own body temperature than they were as newborns, though not nearly as capable of that as adults; and (b) the puppies are bigger and plump and thus less susceptible to cold.

Little Ruby needed lots of support from last Monday to last Friday, much less support on Saturday, and I did not tube-feed her Sunday at all. She is doing fine. ALL the big puppies started having trouble Friday, continued having trouble through most of Saturday, and were back to normal on Sunday. What happened? I have only one theory: that Morgan, though plump, was not able to make milk fast enough as the demand skyrocketed. I went right up to five times her normal amount of food. If she gains weight while nursing, that will certainly be unusual, but fine. When the puppies are being weaned, that’s the time to reduce her food.

I’m not sure that’s the reason, by the way. I looked back at Morgan’s two-puppy litter last year to see when the big, beautiful Blenheim quit nursing and got into trouble. Eighteen days. He did not nurse at all from day eighteen to day twenty-four. Then, boom, he was back to normal. No one knows what happened. We did put him on antibiotics just in case that might help. I don’t think it did, but who knows? He’s a year old and very, very beautiful; his people sent me a picture recently.

Also!

Three of the four puppies opened their eyes this morning. I took these pictures last night, so you can’t tell, but boom, open this morning. It’s the B/T puppies and the bigger ruby. The Blen will probably be next, and Little Ruby last, but we’ll see.

They are going to be SO DISTRACTING as the cuteness quotient goes through the roof!

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Naming Puppies: S litter

Okay, so this is my final litter, and I could therefore throw away the letter thing. However, S is after all a great letter. All sorts of fantastic words start with S. Let’s take a look at some of those words:

Sarabande ………………………… Sensational ………………………… Scintillation

Soliloquy ………………………… Songbird ………………………… Solace

Scaramouche ………………………… Serendipity ………………………… Spectacular

Serenity ………………………… Sybilline ………………………… Spellbinder

Remember that the registered name, or show name, cannot be too short, can be multiple words, and must start with the kennel affix; eg, a puppy could be named Anara Scaramouche or Anara Sweetie Pie (don’t tell me, I know that would be twee), but cannot be named Anara Sunshine — that’s too short to sound right as a show name. Some of the words above are too short, but could be included in a name. I do like one name that is multiple words:

Anara The Sky Is Everywhere

And then of course call the puppy Sky, which is a cute and appropriate call name. Also, that would fit either sex and any color.

However, a possible theme emerged when I started thinking about names, because there are a lot of music/poetry terms that begin with S, such as

Symphony ………………………… Sonata ………………………… Sonnet ………………………… Sestina

And while some of those are too short on their own, there is a remarkably easy way to make them longer and cooler, like so:

Anara Symphony Number Nine Ode To Joy ………………………… For a girl, and call her Joy

Anara Sonata Number Eleven Alla Turca ………………………… For either sex, and call her Alla or him Turk

Anara Sonnet Eighteen Summer’s Day ………………………… For a boy, maybe? And call him Day.

Sestina Sing While He May ………………………… For a boy, and call him something or other. This is one of Swinburne’s poems, so something from Swinburne’s name might be appropriate. Or nothing stops you from picking a pet name that has nothing to do with the registered name, of course.

Sestina Starlight Way ………………………… For a girl, maybe? This sounds more like a girl’s name to me.

Are there any other symphonies or sonatas or sonnets that come to mind for anybody? Or other ideas? I would like to use something from Emily Dickenson, but unfortunately I don’t think she ever wrote sonnets or sestinas, so I guess that’s not likely to work with the S theme.

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The Center of Ugaro Masculinity: Fatherhood

So, commenter Nanette sent me a personal email, and I asked if I could pull a lot of it apart and write a couple of posts with her comments as starting points,. She started off by really nailing the central aspect of Sinowa’s personality and, therefore, a super-important theme in Marag.

Nanette says:

Sinowa identifies as a father above and before everything else. … He lives and breathes fatherhood: how to be a good father, actively being a good father, and extending that sense of fatherhood out and around him in the community. Fatherhood is not about just his own sons, it applies to all sons. Fatherhood for him is about taking responsibility for shepherding boys/adolescent boys/young men/men up to be good responsible adults, including then becoming good fathers themselves.

Fatherhood extends to taking responsibility for doing what he can to ensure other men are also good fathers. … Fatherhood for Sinowa includes continuously monitoring all the men around him, and where they are younger, correcting them where needed. This includes making it clear what they did correctly and wrongly, why, and how to do better next time. … if he sees someone being a bad father, he has a sense of responsibility to do something about it.

This is completely true, of course. Also, not just younger men, as we also see; it’s just that correcting an older man can be much more difficult. But it goes beyond that, because this is part of Sinowa’s driving motivation from the first moments. Nanette captured that as well:

In Sinowa’s worldview, if a man is not a good father, he would be actively harmful in any leadership role in a tribe. A leader is automatically a role model, so how he comports himself and treats others automatically spreads to those around him. His desire to be the leader of his tribe is an extension of his identity as a father. (Which is really how to be an adult Ugaro man).

This part, I hadn’t conceptualized that way, though, I mean, it’s totally obvious. That’s why I liked these comments so much, because everything about this is obviously true, but this pulls out that truth with extra clarity. When I wrote about male and female roles in Ugaro society in the Tuyo World Companion, I did not say, “Being an Ugaro man means being a good father; a man who is not a good father cannot be a good leader.” But I sure could have.

And then in Marag, we see that people might not recognize that a man would not be a good leader, or isn’t a good leader, and this is explicitly tied to failure to understand whether that man is behaving well as a father, and specifically doing a good job with his sons.

I did not set out from the beginning to make male Ugaro, or Sinowa, so centered around fatherhood and being good fathers. But I did deliberately make Sinowa important to Ryo and then make Sinowa into a good father. I am sometimes dismayed by a horrible father/son relationship in fiction, especially a relationship which really matters to the son. I think reacting against relationships like that, on top of a preference for competent, kind authority figures in general, leads me to put good fathers or father figures into a lot of my novels.

Though, maybe I should add, I liked how the father came out in The Mountain of Kept Memory. The ambiguity of the king, Gulien and Oressa’s father, was fun to create and just interesting and different for me. But the king isn’t, generally speaking, a good father, isn’t a good person, and in some important ways isn’t a good ruler either. And of course, Keri’s father in The Keeper of the Mist is a pretty terrible father, and again, not a good person, not to mention very nearly a catastrophically bad king.

For me, I think it is just true that if a man is not (or would not be) a good father, he would be actively harmful in any leadership role. That’s why Arayo’s story in the Tuyo World Companion went in the direction it did: because Hokino’s knife isn’t important, and the relationship between Garoyo and Hokino isn’t all that important either. There’s no real problem to sort out there. Garoyo is long over any problem he ever had with Hokino. But the relationship between Arayo and Hokino is important — not just to them, but to Garoyo and to other adult men who see that there is a problem in that relationship. Repairing a father/son relationship matters to Ugaro men. Getting a boy or young man out of an especially terrible father/son relationship also matters, and this is going to be really, really explicit in Tano’s next book, by the way.

We can probably assume that motherhood matters to women too, and in a strongly parallel way. The relationship between Marag and her mother was interesting for me because it was pretty clear to me, but didn’t mostly make it into the book until a couple of early readers pointed out that I started to put it in, but lost track of that element and didn’t. I put it in during secondary revision. I wanted that relationship to be respectful and positive even though Marag and her mother are very different people and think about things very differently.

Eventually, I would like to write a story from the pov of an Ugaro woman, concerned primarily with women’s business, and then we’ll see more mother/daughter and sister/sister relationships.

But back to fatherhood for a moment. Nanette also added,

I’m in my 50s. I don’t think I have ever read a book before where the narrative is from the point of view of someone whose whole life is about being a father pretty much 24 hours a day.

On reflection, that is perhaps not surprising. I think the absence of stories that bring fatherhood to a central position has to do with the very strong, the incredibly strong, modern inclination to privilege romance over absolutely everything, with friendship, motherhood, and siblinghood coming along in VERY poor second, third, and fourth places, and fatherhood WAY below any of those. I can think offhand of one story that does bring fatherhood to the center, though that center is shared with romance: Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. And of course there, Valjean is totally focused on Cosette, so this is one child, not an extension of fatherhood beyond the one relationship. Also, it was written 162 years ago.

It’s quite noticeable that when Father’s Day rolls around and posts appear about good fathers in SFF, there aren’t that many books that spring to mind. I don’t know that I’ll remember to do a post like that — June seems a long time away — but I’m making a note because obviously Sinowa should appear on that kind of list.

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Puppy Update: (Cautiously) Optimistic

So, after the past few days, my best guess about Little Ruby is that she is a normal puppy who is on the weak side and cannot quite get enough milk to support herself. This is not that uncommon.

When Honey had four puppies, two boys and two girls, the two girls could not quite manage and needed a little bit of support, not much, all the way to weaning. In that case, both female puppies weaned super fast, starting at three weeks and two days, which is extremely early. Fat puppies that are getting plenty of milk often ignore all suggestions about weaning until they are practically ready to switch straight to hard kibble, about seven weeks. Average age for a puppy to wean is about five weeks.

When Leda had four male puppies, Tiny Boy Four could not quite manage and needed a fair bit of support right up to weaning. In his case, I shifted him from tube to a syringe with a nipple attachment at three weeks and two days. He would not try to lap, though he was amazingly cooperative about tubing, which is normally impossible with a healthy puppy by three weeks because the puppy fights too hard at that age. But at that point the swallowing reflex is mature enough a puppy can cope with syringe feeding. Prior to about three weeks, the risk of aspiration makes syringe feeding via a nipple attachment prohibitively dangerous compared to tubing, which is not fun for the puppy, but very safe.

Nursing, you may not have realized, takes a fair bit of vigor and strength. Weak puppies just can’t get enough milk and thus become weaker and the whole thing is bad news. In all the above cases, the weaker puppies did fine as long as they had the support they needed. They wound up perfectly healthy, normal puppies.

I was worried that Little Ruby Girl might not fit the same pattern, but now I think she probably does.

Little Ruby Girl is at the top here

Little Ruby is gaining as long as I provide support. She weighs just over 300 g compared to her big BT brother, Goliath, who weighs abut 560 g. Besides Little Ruby, the next smallest puppy is about 440 g.

When weighed before nursing and then again after nursing, I see that Little Ruby is taking in six to eight ccs of milk at a time, which is not great, but a lot better than zero. When I weigh her and see that she has gained eight ccs of milk, I’ve been topping her off with five ccs of formula, to bring her up to about what she should be getting every three to four hours. This seems to have given her the boost she needed, as her inclination to latch on to a nipple and nurse is now much, much better than it was on Monday, suggesting she has regained a good deal of strength. I mean, on Monday she was showing poor nursing reflex. That can imply something is really wrong. That she now consistently latches on and nurses with some vigor is a really good sign. That’s why I think she now looks much more like a weak but normal puppy rather than a puppy with some kind of abnormality.

I have a guess about what happened to push her back. Little Ruby insists on taking a rear nipple and when a bigger puppy pushes her off that nipple, she quits nursing. During the day, this is fine because I can keep that from happening. I think the initial problem started at night because I wasn’t awake to intervene for her, thus she was seriously weakened and got into trouble. In the wild, a puppy like this would of course die. Handled by an inexperienced or ignorant breeder, she would obviously die. If this is the only problem, in my hands, she will only experience a minor setback and will be fine. So … not sure this IS the only problem, but that’s how it looks to me now. (Sometimes there is a roller coaster; one does not relax until the puppies are actually weaned.)

I am now calm enough about this litter to think about names, so I’ll do a post about that soon. I’m also making plans for how to handle these puppies as they get big and start roughhousing. Sometimes a little puppy is spunky enough to not be bullied, but sometimes that’s a problem. Because this puppy lets herself be pushed around when it comes to nursing, even if she’s fine, I think she might be prone to being bullied. I’m planning to keep her separate some of the time if necessary, with Aunt Naamah, because Naamah is reliably very gentle with babies and will let a tiny puppy win when wrestling. That should be good for a small, less assertive puppy.

So, cautiously optimistic! We’ll see how it goes…

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So, tor.com, wow

So, first, this tor.com post indicates that “AppleTV,” whatever that is, is going to be doing a Murderbot TV series.

Several responses to this post:

A) WOW, are you SURE this is tor.com?

The site is now called “Reactor,” and I’m sure they had many staff meetings about their new name, and I hate it. It literally has nothing to do with SFF at all. I mean, it’s a tech word, sure:

Reactor, noun. An apparatus or structure in which fissile material can be made to undergo a controlled, self-sustaining, clear reaction with the consequent release of energy.

What the heck does that have to do with an SFF site about books and tv series and whatever?

The site looks so weird and different that I immediately closed the window and looked carefully at search terms and what google was handing me before cautiously clicking back in and confirming that I am not between 13 and 15 years old, and –>

B) What is with that 13-15 question? Are children under 13 not considered important for this question? Why not? I have to say, 13-15, that’s weirdly narrow and specific. Also, an instant pop-up question like this makes this look like a, shall we say, a site for “adult material.” I’m not kidding. When a pop-up asks, “Hey, are you thirteen?” I immediately assume the next phrase should be “because we’re going to slam adult content into your eyeballs.”

I have never before seen a pop-up that wants to know whether I’m 13-15 years old. Never, not once. What in the WORLD is that about and it is a TERRIBLE idea and tor.com — oh, I mean structure-in-which-fissile-material-can-be-made-to-react-dot-com — should re-think that pop-up because seriously, it makes that site look like something to back out of hastily, which was exactly my first reaction.

And also, of more practical importance,

C) Does anybody know whether things that appear on Apple TV eventually make their way to DVDs you can buy on Amazon? Because I have no idea. If the Murderbot thing turns out to be good, I would be interested, but almost certainly not interested enough to find out what Apple TV is and how to use it, because there are limits.

***

While poking around, I also noticed this post, about what Jo Walton had on her reading list for this past February, and you know what’s on there? There are twelve books in this post, and they include:

A) Derring-do for Beginners, by Victoria Goddard, which I have on my TBR list but haven’t yet read.

B) The Stand-in, by Lily Chu, which I have on my TBR list but haven’t yet read.

C) The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf, which I have on my physical TBR shelves but haven’t read.

D) Spear, by Nicola Griffith, which I have on my radar but haven’t read.

E) Scorpio, by Martin Kloos, which I have on my TBR pile but haven’t read. I should pull this one up to the top; there’s a dog.

It’s been eight years since an alien invasion drove a small surviving group of settlers to seek refuge in an underground shelter. Cut off from the rest of humanity, the ragtag band has maintained a narrowly functioning colony due to communal effort and salvage runs. Alex Archer has her own duties as a dog handler. While this off-world colony may be harsh, Ash, Alex’s black shepherd raised to sense threats, makes living in it a little nicer.

I’ve read other books by Kloos — Terms of Enlistment and then the second book in that series. In the second book, a specific major plot point hit me hard in the center of my suspension of disbelief, but I did like the first book very much. This one is associated, not part of the main series, and also, there is a dog.

Anyway, moving on, Jo Walton’s list also includes —

F) Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn, which is one of my favorite-ever comfort reads.

G) A book by Arthur Ransome in the Swallows and Amazons series, the first book of which I haven’t read but which is on my TBR pile.

I am like, SEVEN out of TWELVE are either in my hands right now, strongly on my radar, or one of my favorite ever comfort reads? This reading list is ridiculously strongly aimed at my personal tastes and interests and I mean, wow, who expected that?

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Recent Reading: Lavender’s Blue by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Meyer

This was the oddest reading experience, because I read the first 25% of Lavender’s Blue before I started working on Marag. Then I started working on Marag and stopped cold with Lavender’s Blue. This was at the point when Liz had been whapped with the rock and is lying dazed in her mother’s front yard.

So there’s Liz, lying there dazed, and there I left her for … let me see … nine weeks, give or take. So … I remembered the beginning well enough. Liz arrives in Burney, a great cop stops her for speeding, we find out Liz has quiiiite a reputation in town based on her pranks during high school, and we move on from there. The description says:

As Liz navigates her dysfunctional family, her flamboyant boss phoning in from Chicago, her still-interested ex, her bridesmaid dress from hell, a dachshund with issues, a disaster of a wedding, assault, murder, and three hundred and ninety-three teddy bears, Vince shows up to get her through, even though he knows that the real peril for him in Burney is the one who came with her own warning label: Liz Danger.

The last line is misleading. Vince does not at any point consider himself to be in peril, from Liz or anybody else. He’s a very emotionally stable guy. However, the rest of it is accurate enough. I really enjoyed the book, for the following reasons:

–Liz is fun, and whoa, her family.

–Vince is amazingly emotionally stable, solid, and competent, which I like a lot in a male lead.

–Vince’s boss, the chief of police, skirts the edge of almost seeming like a bad guy, but actually, though the authors are kind of giving him a bad guy role, they aren’t really doing that. I very much appreciated this.

–Ditto for a jackass of a kid, who kinda turns out to be not such a complete jackass. There is a fairly strong tendency for many people who might be thoroughly unpleasant to not be written that way. Not all of them, I don’t want to imply that, but several for sure.

–The actual writing is truly top-notch, and I will now focus on that.

***

Look, I know I’ve said this before, but crowd scenes are hard to write. I’ve also said this before, but Jennifer Crusie does great crowd scenes. In this particular book, these mostly take place in Liz’s car.

Liz is ghostwriting a memoir for a very rich celebrity named Anemone who … I’m not sure why she’s famous, actually. It’s not important for her to play her role in the book, which by the way is a GREAT role and I LOVE Anemone. We all need a rich boss like Anemone, especially if we suddenly get into trouble of some serious kind.

Anyway, there’s a deadline for this ghostwriting job, so Liz needs to leave town, and of course events conspire to prevent this. But in the meantime, she will go to her car with her laptop and phone, park somewhere out of the way, and try to work on this book. And it’s hilarious because half the town will turn up, climb into her car, and everyone will be having conversations with everyone else and there is this massive clutter of characters and dialogue and Crusie is REALLY GOOD AT THIS.

***

“Who the hell is that?” Anemone [on the phone with Liz] said.

“My Aunt MaryLou Blue just got into the car,” I told her.

“MaryLou Blue?” Anemone said. “You’re kidding me.”

“Put that phone down,” ML said.

“No,” I told ML. “I’m on the phone with a client and you don’t have an appointment.”

“MaryLou Blue,” Anemone said. “Who is she?”

“I told you, ML is my aunt.”

“She goes by ML?” Anemone said, and then added, “No, wait. That makes sense. Nobody’d want to spend her life as MaryLou Blue. She’d have to move to Whoville. What does she want?”

“What do you want?” I asked ML.

“I want to talk to you about Lavender. She’s going to ask you to be her maid of honor.”

“She already did.”

“Somebody named Lavender asked you to be her maid of honor?” Anemone said. “Who the hell names a kid Lavender?”

“You have to tell her no,” ML said over Anemone.

“Really.” That was interesting. “Why do I have to tell her no?”

***

Anyway, this goes on, and then Liz’s mother turns up and joins the conversation, and this sort of thing keeps happening, with two people and then three and four and up to five or so all joining in, one by phone so no one can hear her except Liz, and it gets super complicated and funny.

I will add, the story itself is fun, but not super light, because (a) there’s a murder, and (b) the family dynamics, whoa, and (c) there’s an element of loss and sadness that I won’t say is exactly pervasive, but it’s there. The story in this novel is about moving on more than anything else, and so there is stuff to move on from, as one might expect. But people do move on, and there’s a lot of room for a good future. Which I guess may be exciting, as there are sequels.

I liked Lavender’s Blue a lot and immediately bought the other two books in the series. Once again, I’m pausing for a moment of pleased anticipation because Crusie has a big backlist and you know how fun that is, I’m sure, digging into the backlist of a new favorite author.

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Update: Progress on Most Fronts

Okay, so, RIHASI is at 150,000 words now, and I am at last through that one difficult chapter and finally, at long last, moving into the last chapter.

Or maybe the penultimate chapter if I wind up breaking this chapter in half, which is pretty likely. Then the epilogue, then primary revision, what is the date today? Okay, I will probably be sending this book to early readers about Eclipse Day. That’s a guess.

Meanwhile! We are in the back half of the month. I will be pulling MARAG at my Patreon probably next week. If you would like to download the epub before it drops into Amazon and gets locked up there, now is a good time. Links are a pain when doing a blog update from my home via my phone, but the link to my Patreon is above top right of you are looking at a computer screen. Red banner, can’t miss it.

Meanwhile!

The four big puppies are doing great. But, sorry, I know everyone wants happy puppy updates, but the little one stalled out yesterday. I do not know why. She was doing better and better and now she is slipping backward. I have seen puppies stall before. Often you cannot tell why, except they were nursing well and now they aren’t. Generally aggressive tube-feeding turns them around. If something is really wrong, it doesn’t. What I can say right now is she doesn’t seem sick and definitely doesn’t have pneumonia. What I can’t say is whether she will be back to normal in two days or whether she won’t. (Sorry! I know! This is the biggest reason why I’m stopping breeding; it’s really stressful!)

The four big ones are fine!

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Friday Puppy Post

Because, hey, why not a regular feature for a while? Probably puppy pics will appear on Monday updates and random other posts as well.

Ruby Girl #2 and an unidentified Black and Tan — I didn’t turn the puppy over to look at the chest, so all I know is this is either Monster BT, who is gaining more than an ounce per day, a ridiculous amount for a puppy this age; or the other one, who is also gaining fast, but not that fast.

I tube-fed Little Ruby only 6 cc total yesterday and she gained 21 g for that 24 hours, right in line with all the others. She is still below the birth weight of the next smallest puppy, but she should be about that size tomorrow.

Morgan is now getting 2.5 times her normal food and that will probably be 3 times in the next day or so. Then 4 times by the end of next week. My goal is to keep her weight about where it is. I run a hand over her ribs every day to judge whether she is holding her weight. Monster Puppy is pulling as much from her as a normal three-week-old puppy. She is going to need a lot of food to keep up.

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