Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 370
December 8, 2010
Mid-week updates
I'm just trying to keep up with everything I have going on. I was finally able to complete something at work that I'd been wanting to get done for quite some time. Other factors (like servers going down) were getting in the way but it is done now so I can say I got something accomplished today.
I was planning on spending lunch today finishing up my critiques for the Arlington Writers Group tonight, but we have our group holiday lunch today, so I don't know how much I'll be able to get done at lunchtime. It might have to wait until I get home from work.
I have half a dozen other things on my list that I'm trying to squeeze in today, and maybe, just maybe, I'll get back to writing tomorrow. Story #8 has a promising start. The story involves some medical-related stuff so I sent a list of questions to my good friend, Richard Peterson, M.D., and he responded quickly to my query, giving me very helpful answers to all of my technical questions, so I can now proceed with the rest of the story, making use of the information he gave me, which is critical to the plot. I'm hoping to get that story finished, and one more–Story #9 which is my humorous attempt at jumping on the zombie bandwagon–before the end of the year. It would nice to be able to finish the year with 10 stories, but 9 is 3 times more then I've ever done before so I can't complain.
Still lots of other things going on this week, including the Little Man's school's first Parent's night on Friday. I'm hoping to keep up with posting, but if I falter over the next few days, well, at least you know why.
Little Man's language evolution
I've noticed over the last few weeks and explosion in the Little Man's vocabulary, both in what he can say and what he understands. At just a few days shy of 18 months, he understands quiet a bit. The other day, I asked him where his nose was and he pointed to his nose. I asked him where his eye was and he pointed to his eye. I repeated this with "feet" and "tummy" and he got them all correct. I was impressed, especially since we didn't teach him this. He must have picked up at school, which makes me very happy with the school. He doesn't say these words yet, but he understands them very clearly. He also understands "kitchen", "downstairs", "upstairs" and "bath" although he doesn't yet say these words.
But he has been saying more. "Mama" has evolved into "Mommy" which he says constantly and which he uses not only to refer to Kelly, but also as a general, "I need some attention here" catch-phrase. He can say "shoes", "puppy", "airplane", "happy", "up" (e.g. pick me up, although he pronounces it as "up-uh"), "bus", "choo-choo", "tree", "apple". Many of these are fairly new. If I ask him "where's dada?" he points to me. He can say "bottle" and "water". And of course, both "Yeah!" and "No!" are very big, too.
He knows what he wants and he generally understands how to get it. If we don't respond to his pleas in a timely fashion, he'll take up by the hand and lead us to whatever it is he needs. He is also getting good at predicting behavior. When I read to him at night, we always finish with the same book (The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton). On the last two pages are pictures of the moon. I usually ask him "where's the moon?" and he points to it. But recently, I'll finish reading what's on the page and before I can ask him, the Little Man points to the moon.
It's pretty amazing to watch his capacity for language grow like this. He can say a lot more words than he could just a few months ago, and he understands ten times the words he can actually say. Kelly and I don't talk down to him, and we generally don't talk "baby-talk" to him. We try to pronounce the words properly, even if he gets them wrong (he says, "wawa" for "water" and "me-me" for "milk") in the hopes that eventually, he'll learn the proper pronunciations more quickly. Sometimes we slip, but generally I think we do a pretty good job.
I wonder how much more he'll be able to say in six months?
December 7, 2010
Evernote
I am beginning to play around with Evernote as a tool to store all of my notes and to-do lists in the cloud and have everything easily searchable and at my fingertips no matter where I am. So far, I'm pretty impressed, and it's no surprise, since Evernote was one of the 25 best applications in MacWorld this year. (Scrivener 2.0 was another.) A while back I mentioned how I have gone paperless at work and in 2011, I plan on doing the same at home. Evernote Premium (which is what I am using) goes a long way to making this possible. I can upload PDFs and their content is searchable, even if the notes in them are handwritten. I can tag notes and provide all kinds of meta-data to improve the searching. I can clip articles from the web and store them. There are lots of nice features and plug-ins. I'm still in the early experimental stages but once I get going with this, I'll let you know how it turns out.
Coming to terms with current politics
I had my fill of politics during the four years in which I obtained my degree in Political Science. (A degree, I might add, which I promptly put to good use by becoming a software developer.) The problem with political science is that it is far more political than it is scientific. In fact, there is little about politics which is scientific and that makes it a difficult beast to understand. I used to be interested in politics and what was going on around me, however, over the last few years I have grown increasingly frustrated and disheartened by it, and the recent election and the events since have led me to the (unscientific) conclusion that not much good will come from politicians anytime soon, unless some drastic changes are made to the way politicians and the voters operate. I can think of two steps that will help set things in the right direction:
Term limits. The argument against term limits is that is prevents good men and women from continuing their service beyond their initial term. The argument for term limits is that is eliminates the "career" politician and in our current state, I think the career politician is one of the most destructive influences we have in government. Politics should not be a career. It is public a public service. We have made it into a career, but with a certain level of willpower, we can unmake it. Term limits across the board are in order, I think. Those people lucky (or unfortunate) enough to be elected should spend their time governing, not running for reelection. The decisions they make in office should be what's best for all of the country, not just the people who will likely vote for them next term. Setting hard term limits seems to me to be the only way to achieve this. Some might argue that in doing so, we rule out an entire class of potential leaders, but at this point, I am wary of any politician, Democrat or Republican, who wants to make a career out of politics. We need people who are willing to solve problems without much thought (or fear) of reelection. Realistically, of course, this is like the fox guarding the hen house. What politician in their right mind would vote for legislation that would effectively limit their career? The answer to this question highlights the state of our affairs, I think. But for the country to move out of the political stagnation we've wandered into, a term limit on politicians at all levels is the only way I see out of the quagmire.
Education. We have become a nation of issue voters, where typically one issue that has little to do with governing decides an election. This is our own fault of course. If voters were better educated, I think they would make better decisions. But we simply don't value education the way we should. If we did, we wouldn't be falling behind in rankings against other nations. Party politics uses hot-button issues to scare voters into thinking that a vote for Candidate A means that you will lose the right to X. A smart voter knows that this isn't true and they recognize that any politician who depends on votes based on a single issue isn't one worthy of governing, I don't care what party they belong to. We all need to be looking out for the big picture. We all need to learn to compromise where compromise is appropriate. Understanding the issues helps. An understanding of history helps. (Nothing we do is unique, it has all happened before in some form or another.) The smarter the voters, the better the politicians we will get.
I'm not optimistic about the next decade or so in U.S. politics. But the pendulum eventually swings back the other way. This are bad and then things are good. It is learning how to control the pendulum that is the trick we have yet to learn, be it the economy or other issues that face us. Either way, a message needs to be sent that we simply will no longer tolerate career politicians making decisions for us. It's a message that I doubt very much will gain the momentum or visibility it needs, but I see it as one way out of this mess we're in.
Review: The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (4-stars)
I haven't finished a book since mid-August, my longest drought on record, and there was no better book to break that drought than Jack McDevitt's The Devil's Eye. This is the fourth installment in Jack's series of science fiction mysteries involving Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath. Benedict is a trader of antiquities and Kolpath is his pilot and sidekick. Together, they solve mysteries that generally start with the discovery of some ancient artifact that cannot be explained. The stories take place more than 9,000 years in our future.
These novels are pure fun for me and the more I think about it, they are the type of stories that I enjoy writing. (In fact, my story, "Take One for the Road" coming out in Analog in 2011 is probably best-described as my attempt at a Jack McDevitt science fiction mystery.) Jack does an amazing job of taking a seemingly impossible event and pulling together a plausible explanation for it. In The Devil's Eye, the event is a memory wipe without explanation, and the results–well, I don't want to give anything away, but the story along the way has perhaps the biggest scope of any Alex Benedict novel so far.
The story involves political intrigue, travel to the far end of the galaxy, and grand cosmic events, all wrapped up into a tight mystery that keeps you reading to the very last page. The world that McDevitt paints in these novels is one that I wish actually existed. (The only other time I've felt this way is in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe.) Alex and Chase are like old friends. One thing I particularly like about this series is that it is a series only in characters. While there is occasional mention of events from previous books, the books are only very loosely connected and the novels themselves stand as independent mysteries, almost like the Agatha Christie Hercule Poroit novels.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Devil's Eye and I highly recommend it. I've already started on the next Alex Benedict novel, Echo, released just last month.
December 6, 2010
Google's eBook store
Just in time for the holidays, Google has opened it's eBook store. The claim 3 million titles available in electronic format and these titles appear to be available for most eReaders, except for the Kindle, which at present cannot handle the particular PDF format the store uses. I have a Kindle and naturally, that means I cannot read books I might buy from the Google eBook store on that device, but I can read them using other applications on my iPhone or my computers.
I think this store will be an interesting addition to the eBook arena. Google has a tendency of building useful applications, in my opinion. (I love their mail and calendaring applications, to say nothing of Google Docs.) But Google has also had a reputation for playing a little fast and loose with digital rights, trying to digitize books that it didn't necessarily have a right to do. In the material I've seen today, they have statements on copyrights, and what books are available versus what books aren't.
But moreover, Google's eBook store is, at present, in direct competition with Amazon because it doesn't work with the Kindle while Amazon, obviously does. To me it reemphasizes the need for a universal eReader format and support for such a format on all devices.
Not all of the books available in the eBook store are available in formats that allow free-flowing of text the way they are on the Kindle. That is, some books have literally had their pages scanned in and in these cases, the font sizes can't be adjusted and I think that will prove interesting as well. However, the store appears to provide much of the same functionality as other eBook stores with the ability to switch devices and find yourself where you last left off in the book you are reading. Your library is stored in the cloud so that it is accessible anywhere. It was not clear to me from my brief perusal this morning if this format allows for annotations, and if so, if the annotations are stored in the cloud. The books can be reviewed, just like on Amazon, and the reviews are available online.
It will be interesting to watch this evolve. Google has a way of doing innovative things with their applications and there are some interesting possibilities with their eBooks.
The Quiet Man
Occasionally, I'll browse the movies playing on Turner Classic Movies and record some of them. Last night, Kelly and I watched The Quiet Man starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. The truth is, I tend to like these older movies more and more compared to what we have today. I think we both thought it was a "cute" movie. What was most amusing about it was what you could learn about the era in which it was made (1952-ish). Many of the backgrounds seemed artificial and it made me wonder if it seemed so because we are so used to CGI and on-location films today–or if the backgrounds seemed equally artificial to audiences of 1952, but I don't think this is a question that can be answered. Even people who saw the movie in the theaters in 1952 would be hard-pressed to recall if the scenery felt authentic or not.
John Wayne (I haven't seen many of his films) came across as a little too Joe Western, which might have been okay had the film actually been a Western as opposed to a romantic comedy that takes place in Ireland. Maureen O'Hara was pretty good, I thought. We both laughed at how "un-PC" the movie was.
I like watching these movies, and I'm serious when I say that I tend to enjoy them more than the stuff that comes out in theaters today. That is not a hard rule, but there have been few movies that I have seen in the last few years that I really come away from saying, wow, that was great. It's nice to know there is an entire virtually undiscovered universe of film out there to take advantage of. And it reminds me that I need to scroll through what's playing this week on TCM and see if there's anything that looks interesting.
The weekend
No blogging this weekend as it was a mostly busy weekend with lots of activities going on. The weather had definitely become winter-like here in the Metro D.C. area, at least in terms of temperature. Saturday morning, after heading out early to get my haircut, the three of us piled into the car and heading into Old Town Alexandria to attend the Scottish Christmas parade. We found a good spot of view the parade, the only downside being it was on the shaded side of the street which looked about 10 degrees colder than the sunny side. The Little Man was bundled up so he stayed nice and warm. It turned out to be a fun parade and I think I was most impressed by the Scottish bagpipers. The Little Man liked the motorcycles and firetruck and the dogs (there were many) that walked in the parade. We took the Metro to/from the parade and of course, the Little Man also loved riding on the train.
Saturday afternoon was quiet and I really needed that. We got home and we all took naps. I managed to get a good amount of reading done–my first fiction reading of any significance in a long time. I'm more than halfway done with Jack McDevitt's The Devil's Eye which I am really enjoying. Stephen King's blurb on many of Jack's books if that he is the natural heir to Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, or something like that. It's true. His fiction reads like Golden Age science fiction with a modern-day spin and as sheer entertainment, I enjoy it more than just about any other science fiction that I read these days. I'm looking forward to finishing up The Devil's Eye and starting in on Echo.
Saturday evening we had a babysitter and Kelly and I went to dinner with Sarah and Jay at an Italian place in Crystal City. When we got there, the place was empty and for the first hour or so, we were the only ones in the restaurant. It was kind of nice having the place to ourselves. It's always nice going out to dinner without the Little Man because we don't have to worry about him pulling the table apart and we can relax and eat our meals slowly, which is exactly what we did. We were home by 9:30, but it was a nice three hours that we got to spend out with friends.
Sunday morning we headed out to a tree-farm that Kelly had found in Great Falls in order to choose and cut our own Christmas tree. However, when we got there, we learned that the "choose and cut" part was closed until 2012. We could have picked out a tree there, but we opted to head back home, stopping at Home Depot along the way to pick out a fresh cut tree. We got a 6-footer and brought it home, got it set in its stand. We then headed out for brunch with AJ and Denisse at our "usual" meeting place, which is the Cheesecake Factory in Clarendon. We had a nice brunch with an excellent waited who we've had before (one of the best waiters I've ever had, in fact). Then AJ and Denisse came back to the house with us to help us decorate the Christmas tree. I got a fire going in the fireplace, and made some hot cider. We decorated the tree while the Little Man napped, and then we spent a few hours playing Rock Band 3.
Sunday evening was spend in front of the TV, catching up on some recorded shows and movies.
It was a pleasant, wintry weekend. This morning I was saying to Kelly how these weeks just seem to roll into one another. One minute it's Friday afternoon, then next it's Monday morning and the cycle starts all over again. I'm looking forward to breaking that cycle in a few weeks when we head off on vacation.
December 3, 2010
Back to reading
I have been in the worst reading drought since I've kept my reading list–which goes all the way back to January 1, 1996. The last book that I finished was in mid-August. There have been lots of reasons for the dry-spell, but now that I've given up on being a novelist for the duration and focus on short stories, I'd like to be able to start to get through the backlog of books that have been piling up (virtually or otherwise) on my bookshelf and Kindle. These include:
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Vol 1
All Clear by Connie Willis
The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt
Echo by Jack McDevitt
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke
Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
Of course, there's also a not-so-small stack of New Scientist's and Scientific American's to catch up on as well.
Admitting defeat
Sometime around 10:45 last night, the NaNoWriMo novel died after a relapse of plot problems and increasing indifference. The relapse began on Wednesday when I realized that, despite finishing Part 2, it was more or less unusable. It wasn't the direction I wanted to take things. At the time, I didn't see this as critical. I was eager to write Part 3, but as I started down that direction, I realized that a rewrite of Part 2 would require some minor changes in Part 1 and who knows how it would impact Part 3. I found myself stalled, unable to move forward, and I eventually realized that this was a graveyard spiral from which there would be no recovery.
The novel died quietly in the night.
I don't see this as a complete failure for several reasons:
Part 1 is really outstanding and I plan to cannibalize it and make it into a long novelette or short novella.
I learned more about the novel-writing process than ever before
I wrote a lot, and for me, any writing is good practice
Most importantly, it taught me that I am not yet ready to write novels and that I should focus on what I am getting better and better at, which is writing short stories.
This last point is the most significant thing to come out of any of the NaNoWriMo's that I have so far attempted. Last night I realized that I should be focusing on my short fiction. I am not trying to be a full-time writer so there is no need for me to be writing novels. I don't think I have reached the maturity or level of experience to write a novel successfully. I think this might come with time, but that I shouldn't force it. I should stick with short fiction and focusing on writing more of that, and moreover, selling more of that. I love short fiction, and I am getting better at it and I should be taking advantage of my recent successes to write even more of it.
This is what I will be doing, therefore. My goals for 2011 will reflect this, and I will discuss that in more detail when I post those goals closer to the end of the year.
I am partially done with Story #8. I also have a small amount of Story #9. Story #10 will be the cannibalized version of Part 1 of the novel. I might not finish these three stories before the end of the year, but whatever I don't finish will carry over to next year. Next year my focus will be entirely on short fiction. I may even skip NaNoWriMo next year to maintain that focus. I want to get as good as I can get at the art before I move on to something else. Maybe I'll try novels again a few years down the road, but for now, it's short fiction.
This is an invaluable lesson. You can't be everything. I have friends and colleagues who are outstanding novel writers. I am not. But I'm getting to be a half-way decent short story writer and with more practice, maybe I'll even be pretty good at it one day.
I'll tell you this, though: when the novel passed last night, it came as an enormous relief. Admitting defeat was, in a way, cathartic. I am looking forward to getting back to short fiction.
