Tom Simon's Blog, page 3

Checking in

I see that I have let my blog lie fallow for more than a month, which is never a good sign. In case my 3.6 Loyal Readers are still alive and wondering what became of me, here is a brief summary:
In the latter part of April, my uncle died. He was a good uncle, a fine man whom I liked and respected (though I doubt he thought much of me), and he was the only uncle I had left, and I miss him. His death was the harder to bear because for a year past, I had been trying to get my father’s guardian to let me drive my father up to visit his brother; but there was always some impediment — usually the weather; my father’s guardian is a terrible worry-wart in some respects and has the idea that I can’t drive except in perfect conditions. So that last year went by, and my father never got that last visit that he wanted so badly.

On top of that, my father’s own health has taken a sad turn for the worse, and my mother is deteriorating as well. My father is merely what they used to call senile, before they invented fancy clinical names to describe a condition that they still cannot arrest or cure. My mother’s mental condition is a bit more exotic; a psychologist friend of mine describes her as ‘full-goose bozo’, and I fear this may be the most technically accurate diagnosis. I will spare you the details, and her the indignity of having them discussed in public.

My own reaction to these events was something else again. I shut down. For about three weeks, apart from errands of dire biological necessity, I was pretty nearly fit for nothing but to dig through old computer programs I had written and tinker with them, and lose myself in the minutiae of debugging. I even stopped commenting on blogs. This is more serious than it sounds. People who know my usual online demeanour will attest that I am the furthest thing from a lurker by nature. Commenting on blogs is one of my vital signs, like brain waves and respiration; when it stops, I am at least a quarter of the way to being clinically dead. The plain truth of it is that I was so mortified and heart-stricken that I could not think of anything to say.

Needless to say, I didn’t get any fiction written either — or any blog posts. The most I managed (and that only in the last few days) was to write some silly-ass vignettes about Why What Did That inside the ‘universe’ of one of my old games as I did test runs to sniff out bugs. That, however, was enough to prove that I was still physically able to string four words together. Since then I have had a number of ideas for things to write, but not the energy or the hope to actually write them.

Tonight I am going to try to write a short piece on comparative advantage in world-building, which I suppose will be more useful as a blog post than as an argument conducted with my sitting-room walls. If that goes well, tomorrow I may graduate from crawling to walking again. Or I may not. Time will tell.

Éala Éarendel: A study in names

A meditation on words, slightly late, but suited for Eastertide. Any howling errors herein are wholly my own; though I reserve the right to be an intellectual coward, and blame them on my recent concussion.



 

There is no such thing as an expert on language. There are experts on individual languages, and experts on different aspects of language as a phenomenon; but the field of language as a whole is, and always has been, far too large for anyone to adequately survey in a human lifetime. Tolkien came as near it as almost anyone: he was intimately familiar with the whole 1,500-year history of English, plus Old Norse, Latin, and classical Greek, and had a firm working knowledge of German, French, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, Hebrew, and several other languages, including the latest reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European. Yet he wrote, with perfect sincerity, to Fr. Robert Murray: ‘I am in no ordinary sense a “linguist”’. He understood better than most professional linguists the internal workings of language, but he also had a sound knowledge of his own limitations.

It may be unfair to compare Tolkien with Noam Chomsky, who does unabashedly call himself a linguist, and is often regarded by his younger colleagues in the field as the linguist. Unfair, but for my present purpose, necessary. Chomsky does not show any signs of great familiarity with any language but English. He attempts to lay down ‘universal’ rules of grammar, but his universals, when closely examined, tend to be disturbingly parochial.


Read the rest at .…

‘Book bomb’ for Ben Wolverton – spread the word!

Amplifying the signal. Go, and do likewise. Dave Wolverton (a.k.a. David Farland), a fine writer and superb writing teacher, is in trouble, and his family needs your help:

As many of you know, Dave’s son, Ben, was in a serious long-boarding accident last week. He is 16 and suffers from severe brain trauma, a cracked skull, broken pelvis and tail bone, burnt knees, bruised lungs, broken ear drum, road rash, and is currently in a coma. His family has no insurance.

We are having a book bomb this Wednesday on behalf of Ben Wolverton to help his family out. You can view the event’s facebook page here.

For those that don’t know, a book bomb is an event where participants purchase a book on a specific day to support the author, or, in this case, a young person in serious need: Ben Wolverton.

Many of you have expressed sympathy for Dave and Ben and have asked if you could help. Now you can. We need you to help Ben get the most out of this book bomb. Right now we are focused on spreading the word and telling others about it. If you could share this event on facebook, twitter, pinterest, your blog, or through email, please do. This is a way everyone reading this can help, whatever their financial situation.

On Wednesday, we will have the book bomb. If you haven’t yet purchased Nightingale or Million Dollar Outlines, please consider doing so on Wednesday. If you have already purchased them, you can donate money to Ben and his family here.

If you have a blog and would like to do a post about this book bomb, please email me at kami_marynda@yahoo.com, and I will send you some information you can use.

Please consider “attending” our event on facebook.

Thank you.

Much of the material in Million Dollar Outlines was covered in the workshop I took with Mr. Wolverton in 2011. I can vouch for its value. However, I haven’t bought the actual book. It looks like I’ll be doing that on Wednesday.

News from the bottom of the stairs

I was going to go out tonight to get a bite at Denny’s and work on the next bit of the Octopus, but a hitch has come up. We’re having freezing fog here, and the back stairs of my building were covered in glare ice. I slipped on the stairs and took a concrete step in the middle of the back. Almost passed out from the pain (and a certain amount of whiplash). I have just been on the phone with Alberta Health Link, which provides 24-hour medical advice, and while they don’t consider it strictly necessary for me to go to hospital, they do warn me that I’ll have bruising and more pain for the next couple of days – and that I should go to the nearest ER if I start having symptoms X, Y, and especially Z.

Halfway up the stairs
There’s a stair
Where I slip.
There isn’t any traction there,
Feet don’t
Grip.
I fell on my bottom,
I hurt at my top,
Because of the stair
Where I had
My
Drop.

(With apologies to A. A. Milne)

Creative discomfort and Star Wars

The fact is that this script feels rushed and not thought out, probably because it was rushed and not thought out.
—‘Harry S. Plinkett’ (Mike Stoklasa)
They’re already building sets. God help me! I’m going to have to start this script pretty soon.
—George Lucas

It is not actually true that ‘all good writing is rewriting’. It would be nearer the truth to say that all good ideas are second ideas — or third, fourth, or 157th ideas. Writers are notoriously divisible into two warring camps, ‘outliners’ and ‘pantsers’. One of the most common triggers for a rewrite happens when you come up with a brilliant new idea halfway through a draft — and that idea makes a hash of everything you have already written. This, in the war of the writers, is a powerful weapon against the pantsers.

Jeff Bollow, for instance, in his book Writing FAST, recommends that you get your ideas right first, and write the draft later; but he also tells you never to use the first idea that comes to mind, for that only trains your mind to be lazy. If you do your brainstorming properly, and don’t start actually writing until your ideas are solid, you are much less likely to have to tear up a draft and start over. John Cleese touched on the same point in his 1991 talk on creativity:

Before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself the question, ‘When does this decision have to be taken?’ And having answered that, you defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time, which will lead you to the most creative solution.

And if, while you’re pondering, somebody accuses you of indecision, say: ‘Look, babycakes, I don’t have to decide till Tuesday, and I’m not chickening out of my creative discomfort by taking a snap decision before then. That’s too easy.’

That creative discomfort can make all the difference between great writing and dreck. One could argue the point endlessly, for there are examples to the contrary — snap decisions that turned out to be brilliant, slowly gestated ideas that still turned out useless. I would maintain that such cases are outliers: so much depends on the talent of the individual writer, and on sheer luck. What we want here is a controlled experiment. We could learn a great deal by taking the same writer and putting him through a series of similar projects. In half of them, he would have all the time he wanted to brainstorm, to throw away ideas when he came up with better ones, to tear up drafts, to indulge his creative discomfort. In the other half, whenever he had to make a decision, he would simply take the first workable idea that came to mind. Unfortunately, we can’t hire a writer to go through such an experiment. Fortunately, the experiment has already been made. The writer’s name was George Lucas.

Read the rest at bondwine.com . . .

Writing Down the Dragon: Now live on Smashwords

After long delays, my collection Writing Down the Dragon and Other Essays is now available at Smashwords for the absurdly reasonable price of $2.99. It will be appearing shortly at other ebook retailers, as the files propagate through the distribution system.

 

BUY IT HERE.

The End of Earth and Sky: Free at Amazon, March 12–16

Starting Tuesday, March 12,  The End of Earth and Sky will be available for free at Amazon stores worldwide. Please do check it out if you haven’t yet — and spread the word! Blog about it, review it, let your friends know it’s free.

The promotion ends at midnight Pacific time, Saturday, March 16.

Paul Johnson on Auguste Comte’s prose style

Comte . . . has some claims to be considered the worst writer who ever lived, and his works read just as badly, if not more so, in French as in translation. In 1824, in reply to criticism, he insisted that style was of no importance. He said he wrote ‘scientifically’. Later, however, he laid down rules of style: no sentence longer than five lines of print; each paragraph to have no more than seven sentences; all books to have seven chapters; each chapter to have three parts and each part seven sections; each section must have a lead paragraph of seven sentences, followed by three paragraphs of five sentences each.
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern

Here, over a century before the New Criticism was ever thought of, we see the ultimate and sterile issue of the ‘sentence cult’. Once you consider a book merely as a ‘text’ made up of syntactic units, rather than a story or discourse made up of incidents and ideas, the idea will irresistibly suggest itself that literature consists solely of the manipulation of syntax, and has nothing to do with content.

A perfect book, according to Comte’s rules, contains exactly seven chapters, 21 ‘parts’, 147 ‘sections’, 588 paragraphs, 3,234 sentences, and therefore, not more than 16,170 lines of print. It need not be about anything at all. Indeed, it will help if it is not: for if you actually had something to say, you might be tempted to use an incorrect number of sentences to say it.



Crossposted from bondwine.com.

Patricia C. Wrede & Marie Brennan on epics

My own essai on managing the length of epic fantasy, ‘Zeno’s mountains’, appears to have incited Marie Brennan to write a piece of her own: ‘How to write a long fantasy series’. This, in turn, inspired Patricia C. Wrede to write a two-part essay on ‘preventing epic bloat’: ‘Epics, part 1’ and ‘Epics, part 2’. If you are interested in epic fantasy and the writing techniques that pertain to it, I can recommend them all.

(Mary Catelli has also been good enough to leave a comment to the second part of Ms. Wrede’s essay, pointing the way back to ‘Zeno’s mountains’. I thank her for her thoughtfulness, and hope that some of Ms. Wrede’s readers may enjoy my little screed, in the brief time that remains to us. You see, closing a chain of links so early, by pointing back to the first URL in the chain, could cause the entire space-time continuum to collapse on itself. Or at least the Internet. You have been warned. By the time I get to say ‘I told you so’, it will be too late.)

Crossposted from bondwine.com.

Reading too damned much—

—or at least, too many bits and pieces of books in an unfocused way.

At the moment, I want to quote a bit from Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, never you mind why, and I’m not sure where my copy is. It is not in my bookcases, at any rate. I went looking for it in my bedroom, and put away seventeen of the random books lying on the floor. There are still books on the bedroom floor, and I have not found the one I am looking for yet.

Sometimes I really annoy me.

Crossposted from bondwine.com.