Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 366
December 27, 2010
The vacation cold
The Little Man has been sick with an ear infection, which entails fevers and some whining, but otherwise, he is a very good sick little boy. In fact, looking at him, you couldn't tell that he's even sick. He's cheerful, happy, playful. All the things I am not when I am sick.
I have managed to contract a vacation cold. It's not a terrible cold, but it's mildly annoying and I am not a very good sick person. When I am sick, I want to be alone, locked in a room somewhere until I recover. I'm trying to be better about this and this cold that I have isn't a particularly bad one (yet!). But when I have a few sniffles and the Little Man is dealing with fevers and aching ears and running noses, the contrast in our behaviors really stands out and I feel somewhat ashamed of myself.
I spend the night on the couch last night to avoid transferring the cold to Kelly and I feel okay this morning, but I am trying to take a page out of the Little Man's book and remain cheerful, happy, and playful, despite my malaise.
December 26, 2010
Jumping back into All Clear by Connie Willis
I've been in one of those "I can't decide what I want to read" phases. I've jumped around and sampled a lot over the last few days, but nothing is sticking. So I decided to go back to Connie Willis' novel All Clear, which is really just the second part of Blackout which I read earlier this year and loved so much. I started reading All Clear back in October when it was first released but ran into 2 problems: (1) too many other things going on; (2) too confused about where things left off in Blackout. The problem is that the book was written as a single novel and then split into to parts because it was so long. Starting All Clear 6 months after finishing Blackout, I was lost as to who the characters were and what was going on in the rather complex historical/time-travel plot.
Problem 1 is easy to remedy since I am on vacation and today happens to be a particularly quiet day down here. Problem 2 I just attempted to remedy by reading a synopsis of the characters and plot of Blackout to remind me of who everyone is and what's going on in the book. I am (according to my Kindle) about 12% of the way through All Clear and I have a pretty good memory of what I have read there so far so restarting won't be difficult, and now that I've refreshed my memory of Blackout, I should be good to go.
And so, without further delay, it's back to All Clear, beginning from Golders Green–July 1944.
Holiday writer's woes
It was my intention to complete two stories while here on vacation but the progress so far has been almost nil. I think it has to do with my overall vacation mentality. First, it's tough to find a chunk of quiet time where I can go and sit and write, but when I do find the time, I don't feel in the mood to work on either of the two stories. This seems pretty typical of when I am away from the house. I don't have the same kind of enthusiasm for writing as I do when I am ensconced in my office at home. I think in part it is because I have trained myself by force of habit to be at my most creative sitting in my chair at my desk. It makes it a little frustrating when I'm away from home, however. I feel like I should be cranking away at the stories but can't seem to get myself started on them.
Do other writers out there experience this same phenomenon, too?
White Christmas
Last night, we watched White Christmas for the second time in a week. White Christmas is one of my favorite movies and it is my favorite holiday movie. The difference last night was that we watched it with Rosemary Clooney's commentary, which was great. One feature of the commentary that I hadn't seen before was that it automatically added subtitles to the movie so that you could still catch the dialog even with Clooney talking about the movie.
I enjoy watching movies with commentary. If it is well done, you can learn a lot about the making of the film, the actors, the crew. (I learned what "woodshedding" was last night, for instance.) Rosemary Clooney did a good job on the commentary and the movie was just a fun to watch with her commentary, especially what she had to say about Bing Crosby (my favorite all-time entertainer.)
December 25, 2010
My Daddy, The Writer
How about this wonderful gem of a gift from the Little Man for his daddy:
It's got all of my published stories listed on it, as well as the magazines in which they have appeared. (Click the image to see a larger version.)
Very cool!
Christmas morning
The Little Man has an ear infection and managed to have a bit of a rough night last night. He slept in this morning, however, much to the chagrin of everyone else who wanted him up so that he could open all of his presents. He finally got up about halfway through our gift unwrapping and he seemed to have a wonderful time opening all of his presents.
When he first woke up, he was a bit out of it and not too sure what was going on. But after he opened his first few presents, he got the idea pretty quickly. He got close to a dozen Thomas trains and a track on which to run them. He got some of his favorite Cars cars inlcuding Mater and Lightning McQueen. He got his own laptop computer and a Little People farm set. He got a work helmet and toolbox. The number of toys was nearly overwhelming and he seemed delighted by it all.
He is now sitting on the floor in his Santa Rocks pajamas playing with his trains, exploring and he has a big smile on his face. A very merry Christmas, indeed.
December 23, 2010
Vacation Day 2
Yesterday began with a busy morning, moved into a lazy afternoon, and ended in a delightful evening.
Kelly and I went Christmas shopping while the Little Man stayed home with the grandparents (and ended up sleeping most of that time!). We headed first to some local outlets, and then to a local mall and spent a total of about 2 hours doing some last-minute shopping. By the time we got home, I was famished. Fortunately, there was plenty of pulled pork left over and no one else seemed to be eating it, so I had not one but two pulled pork sandwiches for lunch and they had to rank among the best sandwiches I've ever eaten in my life. (Prior to this, the last memorable sandwich I had was a roast beef sandwich in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.)
Everyone decided to go swimming in the afternoon. Everyone but me. I took advantage of that time to catch up on some sleep. (We'd had a bit of a rough night because the Little Man ended up in bed with us for most of the night.) So while everyone else headed for the pool, I took a nap. It was one of those rare naps where I simply dissolved into sleep, no dreams, no rustling about. And I slept for nearly an hour and a half.
In the evening, we headed to Doc's Beach House for pizza and beer. It's right on the beach. The weather was pleasant and we sat there drinking pitchers of beer and polishing off 2 large Chicago-style pizzas until I felt completely stuffed.
We got home and got the Little Man off to bed and then watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and before I headed off to bed for the evening.
Another fun, relaxing day. And today hasn't started off too bad either, with particularly good weather.
The Bridge of the Gods
Okay, someone really needs to reprint Isaac Asimov's excellent essay, "The Bridge of the Gods" which is all about light and rainbows. I've been seeing stuff all over about remarkable "double-rainbows" as if this is a new or even a rare phenomenon, but as Asimov explains in his essay, there is a very good explanation not only for the formation of a double-rainbow, but the geometry behind it.
Brute force writing
Yesterday, I read an interesting interview with Nancy Kress (in Locus) in which she talks about the three things she's learned about writing over the years. It got me thinking about what I've learned from my own writing. I typically describe myself as a "brute force" writer, by which I mean that I learned to write stories by brute force. I just kept trying and trying without any particular guide or direction until I slowly began to figure out what worked and what didn't. Through this method, it took me fourteen years before I sold my first story.
I looked back on that story recently and I was pleased for two reasons: first, it's not a terribly bad story; second, in the three and a half years since it was first published, I can see that I have improved quite a bit since then. In the past, it was always difficult for me to recognize just how I've improved but in the last few months, I'm beginning to see patterns in what make stories work. This has made me more confident in my own writing, and I think it has also made my writing much better.
So what are some of these patterns that I have identified? Interestingly, they are similar to some of the things that Nancy Kress mentioned in her own interview. (This made me very happy because if other people have discovered them, it means that I am just late to the game, but that I'm on the right track.) When I write my stories, I always know my ending. I learned this lesson from Isaac Asimov. Before I'd learned this lesson, I'd rarely complete a story, let alone write a good one. But in knowing my ending, I know what I am working toward. Not everyone can work this way. Some people say that when they know too much about their story ahead of time, it spoils the writing of the story for them. For me, at least, knowing my ending is an absolute must. This does not mean the ending can't change, but it sets up a target at which I can aim.
I also think of my stories in scenes–something that Nancy Kress mentions in her interview. The concept of scenes made all of the difference for me in the first story that I sold. A scene is a microcosm of the story as a whole, each scene possessing its own beginning, middle, and end. When I think in scenes, it also makes it easier to identify the transitions between the scenes and better pace the story.
I learned how to bring the scenes to life when I took James Gunn's online writing workshop back in 2008. Until then, my scenes read more two-dimensionally then they do afterwards (this includes the first story that I sold). In Gunn's workshop, I learned how to bring a reader into the scene how to add to the common sense of basic description. Smells and sounds, touch and taste all play a part and this has gone a long way to making the scenes I write today come alive. Again, there are probably a lot of writers who pick up on this much more quickly than I did. But like I say, I'm a brute force writer.
One of the key things that I think I have divined about writing a short story is that there needs to be multiple elements working toward the same conclusion. Nancy Kress touches on this in her interview as well and once again, I'm glad I'm figuring it out at all, even if I am late to the party. There needs to be connections that take place so that the conclusion of the story is not just a resolution to a puzzle, but that there is a deeper underlying impact to the characters in the story. In the story that I recently sold to Analog, I have this working in a conscious way for the first time.
I look at the stories that I write today and I see big improvements from my stories from just a few years ago. But that's not to say that there is not room for still more improvement. The only way I see to improve is to write more stories and to continue to tweak the techniques that I use, to fine-tune some and overhaul others until the story that comes out on the page really sings. The best story that I have written to-date (in my opinion) combines all of these elements in a way that makes for a powerful conclusion (I got chills writing the scene and I still shiver reading it). That story is still out, but I have high hopes for it. And I have high hopes that the stories that follow it will be even better.
December 22, 2010
Vacation Day 1
Yesterday was our first day of vacation and it was pretty much what I hoped for. The early part of the day was spent traveling. We were all up early, shortly after 5am, in order to catch an 8am flight out of Reagan-National. The sidewalk outside the house was a sheet of ice when we left and the temperatures were in the 20s.
There were no delays at the airport. We were through security quickly–and without any fancy screening measures. The Little Man was very excited to see so many airplanes and a little more excited to ride in one. His 9th flight went very smoothly. He slept for a little while and looked out the window quite a bit.
The rest of the day was very much vacation-like. We settled in, had some lunch and went for a long walk while the Little Man napped. I got in some reading, but no writing during the day. I spent some time combing through the December issue of LOCUS and read a great interview with Nancy Kress. We had an absolutely delicious dinner. Kelly's mom made pulled pork and you could smell it cooking in the house all day long. And it was wonderful.
We tried to keep to the Little Man's routine, reading to him before bed and then putting him into his bed at the normal time. He fussed like usual but went right to sleep, much to our surprise. The only problem was that when I finally went to bed, I walked into something and woke him up and after that, he wouldn't stay in his bed and had to come sleep with us. That made for a bit of a tough night's sleep, but it was still a fun and relaxing day.
