Tricia Sullivan's Blog, page 9

Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke

My daughter Rhiannon, who is seven, has recently started reading the Anna Hibiscus books.  Thanks to a recommendation by stephanieburgis we picked up the first one and Rhiannon breezed through it and asked for more straightaway. She is now reading 'Hooray for Anna Hibiscus' and it looks like the author is producing more in this series all the time.

I went to find out more about Nigerian author Atinuke and I think I am a little in love.  She writes; 'Throughout my childhood I wanted firstly and desperately to be a Boy, then an Adventurer, and lastly, An Author. Two of these were impossible (I was told) and one was dangerous. Forget it. So I carried on reading instead.' And...'I wrote 10,000 words one year to get over a lost love and got into Oxford instead. But the writing I had to do there was so dry that I left. I decided to go Adventuring instead. I lived and travelled in England and France, Morocco and Germany and Spain, sleeping like a nomad on beaches and mountainsides. I sang for my supper, painted portraits, weeded gardens, worked as an artist's model and lived in a round mud hut in the wild wet woods of Wales. One day, pregnant with my first son, I told a story to some bored children at a festival and that's when my proper job found me! I haven't stopped telling stories since.'

How cool is that?

And here is an interview with Atinuke on You Tube



Rhiannon says, 'I like it when they go on holiday to a different country. I like Double and Trouble. I liked it when it snowed.'

testing the vomit threshold

Trained in the sitting room today because it was so cold in the gym. I'm keeping these clips for my own records, hoping so very hopefully to improve. But to anyone who clicks through to the footage, please do not judge us too harshly for the amount of dust flying around the room.  I swear the camera was picking up stuff you could not see if you were there! That's my story & I'm sticking.


I was determined to get through as much of the Tabata as possible. I didn't post all of the footage because some of it was ground and pound and the camera didn't pick up anything but the top of my head as I attempted to batter Steve. It's just as well, because in all honesty it was less of a battering and more of a squirrel-like pitter-patter of my fists. I got through the standup Tabatas OK, but when he had me do low round kicks and knees on the free bag I came very close to vomiting. Was useless after that.

I was going to learn some ground skills today but we tried that after the Tabatas and...it didn't go well. When Steve's shoulder went into my abdomen I was like, 'Uh, I am green, man. I am gonna so puke on you in a second.' I will look for a follow-up session tomorrow.

Learned a little trick to get into the clinch from punching; very simple but I'd never have figured it out for myself.

Now my arms are all trembly. I know I did something.

Pad combinations:



Knee entry on pads:


Tabata part one:


The last few tabatas and 'I feel so sick':

gonna b ded

I have to train today.  I missed last Thursday's MA training, worked out hard on the bike over the weekend, got a cold, took two days off, and did the bike yesterday. Now Steve tells me that in addition to learning some grappling I'll be doing new Tabatas today.  He worked two pro fighters with them yesterday and laughed as he characterised the results: 'They were dead.'

These guys are superfit to begin with so the Tabata seems to be an all-purpose, one-size-fits-all murderer. I can't say I'm looking forward to this.

twitter vow

I have been staying off Twitter since December because I find it can crash me out really badly. It can be a depressing place to go when you are a writer out of work and your whole twitter feed is publishing-related. All I have to do is see one thing that upsets me personally--or five or six things that are mildly irritating--and I can end up emotionally destabilized for hours. Yes, I am that fragile. So I've been avoiding.

But yesterday I was faced with a few hours of Mathcad, which I detest, and so I tiled twitter to one side of the screen and Mathcad to the other and...it was fun and nothing spooked me.

Still, I don't want to make it a habit.

Today I've got to work up the math I learned at my tutorial last night and finish checking and rewriting my assignment so I'll be ready to start on the new calculus unit. Steve is going to Liverpool to train some guys from Wolfslair, which will mean a certain amount of time wasted driving back and forth to the train station for me...but mostly it means I'll be in the house Alone With the Internet.

Yesterday was super-busy and I didn't get to write, and today is not looking promising either. Maybe I will allow myself an hour.

But NO TWITTER. (yes, I am crossposting this to twitter. that's different)

I need a sticky

The BSFA nominations are out.  Congratulations to all the nominees! 

I am fighting off a cold.  Within five minutes of getting off the bike yesterday I’d curled up in a ball and slept for an hour in the middle of the day, woke up with sore throat and headache.  So I banged some of that Vicks preventive squirty stuff up my nose and in my misery with the dregs of our Sky subscription watched three episodes of Stella in a row.  (Our TV gets cut off today for reasons of budget.) 

Today’s better.  Thanks to having Midnight Oil in my I-tunes, I am still writing and I don’t want to jinx anything so I won’t say anything.  Except.  What jinx-free thing can I say?  Writing this book makes me even more poignantly conscious how much it felt like dying to write Lightborn.  Writing this new book makes me aware that no matter how scary the process can be, if the excitement is even one fingernail ahead of the fear then I am doing all right. Right now excitement is high.

And that’s what it’s about.  How could I forget? I need a sticky for the inside of my eyeballs.  Gratitude is the attitude for me in 2012.  I’m so grateful for every damn writing session.

And here’s a tidbit: Ian Whates has taken my very tiny story ‘Electrify Me,’ for his Dark Currents anthology, to be released at Eastercon.  The list of contributors includes Nina Allan, Finn Clarke, Emma Coleman, Aliette de Bodard, Jan Edwards, Andrew Hook, V.C. Linde, Una McCormack, Sophia McDougall, Adam Nevill, Rebecca J Payne, Rod Rees, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lavie Tidhar and Neil Williamson. Good stuff, right?

And here’s the cover, by Ben Baldwin.

 

boring general tracking post

Just a few things to note down, mostly for my own tracking purposes.

I've been writing every day this week, mixed progress.  Novel is moving forward and I have hit some very good patches of focused concentration, which in a way is more significant than the external markers insofar as my confidence goes.  Yet I have this sort of restless mental overcharge after writing, and I don't quite know what to do with myself.

I didn't get any martial arts in this week due to a minor neck injury, but I have been doing other general fitness training and I'll get two fight training sessions in next week if I possibly can.

Tyrone and I watched the first episode of 'Wonders of the Universe' last night.  It was so depressing!  I felt bad watching it with him.  Too much 'heat death of the universe' for a nine-year-old. He took it OK, though.

I also, in my great devious cleverness, blew Steve's mind last weekend when I downloaded a DungeonMaster emulator and got Tyrone playing it.  Steve walked in Saturday night after a long train journey and saw it on the screen and I wish I could have captured his face.  It was a mixture of 'stunned' and 'a miracle has occurred'.  I even found Steve's old game manual that I saved in a file when we left Horsham, with all his notes and potion recipes.  (Yes, I lost all my books and book contracts but saved Steve's Dungeon Master files.  My priorities were a little messed up). He was hardcore into DungeonMaster and used to call up the cheats line and tell them tricks for parts of the game they didn't even know about. In overall personality, Tyrone takes after me far more than Steve, so this is becoming a wonderful bonding opportunity for the two of them.

Happy weekend!  I'll be cleaning and doing math...

PS: the cranky

Further to my hasty post about The War of Art, which I rapidly sucked in yesterday just a few days after reading Drive by Matthew Pink, I find myself lingeringly cranky.

It's the shallowness of these commercial nonfiction books, I think.

I am writing somewhat intensely right now.  Obviously I'm not writing as intensely as I would like to be, hence the sniffing around for resources that may improve my performance. And I seem to be at a point where I will suck the marrow out of any old bone just to get that little bit of extra impulse towards what I am doing in my work right now.

But I'm starting to see that these light books are like a sugar rush.  The ideas are great at first, but I feel cranky afterward.  Because most of what's in the books is the noise of the author selling his ideas. The ideas themselves can be flimsy on closer inspection. Too many empty calories.

I feel less justified in being  cranky about Drive, which is an interesting little book about motivation.  Unfortunately it's aimed mostly at the corporate working world and so misses its mark with me.  But there is one thing about this book that cranks me out, too, even though I did take some good points from it.  And that's this: the book is all about motivation at work but it only operates on the level where everyone is already being compensated adequately.  In fact, the author even says something to the effect that where money stress is involved, motivation is impossible.

Now, the link to this book came via Tobias Buckell's blog which references a post by Nicola Griffith, who quasi-humourously suggests that somebody throw some money at professional artists so we can do our best work instead of constantly wondering where our next meal is coming from.

And looking back on it after a few days, I'm thinking how Drive was like a banquet of insights set behind a glass wall.  Because of course very few artists/writers of my acquaintance are working without money troubles.  In fact, never mind artists, people in general in the West are in some scary places with economic reality. Having a day job does not guarantee security at all. And the hysteria and frenzy in the publishing industry these last few years has been fairly ick. Horrible working environment. Me, I'm without a source of income at present.  I'm studying for a new career so I can get back to where I was before I moved to this country at 27: employable in a professional capacity. And I made this move because I felt it was essential for me to decouple moneymaking from my creative work. Having them in one basket was making me not just poor but NUTS. Reading Drive,with its focus on the intrinsic value of work, did give some reinforcement to that personal decision.

And War of Art does offer some very good insights about the mental traps that can stop us. But there's a big streak of ignorance and the more I think about it I'm sensing also fear running through it, too--because it's quite an authoritarian sort of book, which to me always suggests a frightened underside. So...as before...recommended with caution.

As for me? Lesson learned. Through process of elimination I may have finally convinced myself that I know what I'm doing at the keyboard at least as well as any writer of self-help books of whatever stripe. No more downloading shiny things. When I need a break from writing I'm into my very small surviving set of paper books, rereading tatty old Guns, Germs and Steel for some actual nutrition.

notes on War of Art, or How the Resistance Tricked Me into Writing This Post

O, I am so fucking tired of the war paradigm.  It’s so fucking stale, but fuck me if I didn’t download War of Art and read it.  (It’s Myke Cole’s fault, btw.)  And I have to admit I liked it and found it nourishing.

A few reasons to carry an airsick bag, though.  Obviously, this is a really white male book.  Big into the Greeks and shit. For that reason, parts of it made my lip curl. And I couldn’t help wondering, for all the macho talk about war and suffering and work, how much punishment the author could really take—or would want to. I am not a man and I can’t claim to know how men’s heads work, but as a woman who has physically been through some shit I think the author takes a little too much pleasure.  Everybody breaks. Something feels off here.

Also, the forward by Robert McKee annoyed me.  McKee (himself over-invested in grandiose statements about how Real Writers behave, ugh) claims talent is inborn.  Please.  Look up Michael Jordan’s career sometime, dude.  And Pressfield does get hung up on this stupid dichotomy between the Amateur and the Professional.  Separating the Men from the Boys, anyone?  Yawn.

Here’s another one ‘That is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.’

Seriously? She’s crying because she’s been a vessel for a miracle? Dude, did you just inhale your chewing tobacco up into your prefrontal cortex?

NOTE TO MEN: Please don’t write about childbirth or make childbirth analogies unless you’ve done your fucking research. 

But I’m making it sound like I didn’t like the book.  I did.  I liked it a lot. Recognised much. There are some very good insights, especially a definition of creative blocks (or Resistance with the capital ‘R’ of personification) and its manifestation that every writer should have taped to their wall.  It made me want to make one of those flow charts for each of the excuses Resistance offers, all of which would have an arrow coming out the other end called ‘do your work.’  Some of these tricks on the part of the writing devils can be quite subtle and I have met most of them at some point.  Old friends, some of them. 

It’s the kind of book that makes you want to pick up a shovel and get going. Recommended.

the camera ninja

My weekend was busy.  Steve took the car to the train station both days and we barely saw him, so it was the kids and I in the house for two days and we didn't all kill each other! Small miracles.

I'm getting my act together with the maths now. Don't know why I'm so quick to panic when I don't understand something immediately. Luckily the assignment doesn't make any big demands and although I can see there's lots more to eigenvectors, I think I've mainly got to grips with what I need to do for now. I also did a fair bit of physical training on the bike, tended the fire, cleaned the house, played D&D with the kids, made DVDs, read, etc.

Last week we finally released the DVD of the session I filmed in December, and it's been a relief to see some money flowing in from that.  I realized at the time that the last sessions I'd filmed of Steve working with Floyd and Mark were back in 2000/2001; I was pregnant with Tyrone during one of them and had to keep sitting down. NHB1 from 2000 is one of our best sellers and an excellent film on principles of standup, but the new one has turned out better.  Steve is also physically in better nick now, however counterintuitive that may seem to the ageing process.  At 68 he is a real handful in the gym. 

I wanted to make a smaller clip to show you guys what the training was like, but I haven't had time so if you're interested in such things, here's the clip we're using as a sampler. I had so much fun filming it, getting around the gym, getting the angles, and getting out of the way. I am the Camera Ninja! 


Also, this morning I worked on the novel! What could be better? After being dutiful all weekend I think a few hours on my own laptop were well-deserved.

technology & education

So after whining about ye eigenvectors this a.m. I spent some time watching You Tube tutorials.  I've been aware of the Khan Academy math tutorials for a while, but it was only today after watching three on the trot that I decided to check out the channel, and it turns out Khan Academy is a very big deal.

Am I the last person to have heard about this? If I'm not and you're not familiar with Salman Khan, have a look at this video. As a former (and possibly future) educator I found myself saying, 'Yes, yes, about bloody time yes!' and I find these ideas hugely exciting.



Also, on the accountability front, here is a snippet of today's training for accountability purposes.  Today was mostly technical work done outside in the yard.  It was very bloody mentally difficult.  I complained to Steve that it was too much coming at me all at once and he laughed, 'Better too much information coming at you all at once than never any coming at you at all.'  We finished inside with a hated Tabata (actually only half a Tabata, only about 2 minutes) on BOB.  Our BOB is very short because the kids climbed on him and broke his fittings. So I will be well equipped to fight short men with no arms who stand still and have soft heads.