Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 7

The miracle of dentistry

I've mentioned it before, but I'll say it again: vaccines and not pooping in our drinking water may account for most of the gains of modern medicine, but dentistry is an interventionist treatment that actually works, and is constantly undervalued.

Over last weekend, one of my rear molars started to hurt. By Sunday night it hurt so much I could barely sleep. Fortunately, my dentist could take me Monday morning. He examined me, found that the molar had cracked, and sent me off to an endodontist...

Emotionally out of step

The other night I saw the movie A Monster Calls at a friend's house. It's about a boy, maybe 12 years old, whose father has left and whose mother is seriously ill. He's bullied at school, drifts through is days in his imagination, and eventually ends up living with his emotionally distant grandmother in a house where he is not allowed to touch anything. Oh, and he's visited by a talking tree man from the nearby churchyard who says he will tell him three stories, and then wants to hear one in...

"So, how's the novel going?"

Writers aren't exceptionally mean, even to other writers, but it does somehow seem that way, because of the way we leave our egos exposed. No wonder others are tempted to at least give them a good swift kick now and again.

"How's the novel going?" (unless you know the writer is a demon of productivity, in which case there are other ways of getting their goat) is one of the great questions. It seems to come out of genuine interest, maybe really does come out of genuine interest, but a certain...

My time at Odyssey

Last week I did a guest author stint at the great Odyssey Writing Workshop, held at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Odyssey is kind of a bootcamp for people honing their skills in all areas of fantastic fiction. For six weeks, 16 writers write, read, think about, discuss, eat, and sleep fantastic fiction, under the stern yet kind direction of Jeanne Cavelos, who created the enterprise.

I envy them. I never did anything like this earlier in my career, which might really have helped.

Je...

My Readercon schedule

I will be at Readercon again this year, July 13-16.  If you want to catch me, go ahead, I'm not that fast.  Otherwise, these are the panels I will be on:

Thursday July 13 8:00 PM    5    How to Moderate a Panel. Alex Jablokow, Victoria Janssen (leader), Kathleen Jennings, Tom Purdom, Kenneth Schneyer. The moderator plays a crucial role in making panels run smoothly and enjoyably for participants and attendees. This panel will cover how to get questions rather than comments from audience me...

The passions of Chalcedonians and Monophysites

Every commentator notes how partisan the American public has become. Positions seem continually more extreme, blue is bluer, red is redder, and no one is interested in what the other side has to say.

This may well be true. I live in a genteel blue area, and do know a lot of people with predictable doctrines (and many women I encounter specify adherence to these doctrines as a prerequisite for dating them), but no one seems particularly enraged at their opponents or uncomprehending of their po...

My new favorite ingredient: fermented bean curd

A few months ago I listened to Tyler Cowen's conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop on his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. The conversation takes place over dinner and includes one of my favorite economics/food bloggers, Megan McArdle as well as Ezra Klein and several other interesting people.

Well worth a listen. It makes me realize how often I'm just not paying attention to my food.

The podcast led me to purchase Dunlop's book Every Grain of Rice, subtitled Simple Chinese Home Cooking, also re...

Am I too lazy to get outraged?

Reply All is one of my favorite podcasts because it entertainingly explains all sorts of internet memetic activity in a way that even someone my age can appreciate. They've long had a segment called Yes Yes No where the boss comes to the two hosts (Alex Goldman and P J Vogt) with a mysterious tweet that he con't figure out, and that always turns out to be a deeply multi-referential deep dive into what the soul of the internet looks like that week.

Now, they've added "Why Is Everybody So Mad A...

Behind on everything, but...catching up?

I am the mercy of my internal astrology. I have some decent organizational structures, essential for a basically disorganized person who has a lot of things to get done.

But sometimes they work a lot better than other times. For instance, recently, I've been catching up with stuff. I am doing nothing different, making no particular effort, but big chunks of stuff that were hanging around, punks with cigarettes dangling from their lower lips, ominously refusing to leave, have suddenly realized...

Works and days

Most of us writers need to make money, since few of us make enough from fiction to buy lunch, much less support ourselves (much less support ex-wives, college-attending children, expensive tastes in alcohol, etc.) So we have day jobs.

Mine is freelance marketing writing. I really like it, and regularly recommend this line of work to fellow writers with an inclination for it. It involves a lot of the same skills, in addition to the writing part: understanding motivation, creating suspense, lea...