Suzette Haden Elgin's Blog, page 10

Writing science fiction; the new novel...

Two things have come along that are going to slow me down with the new novel...

One is a consulting contract that it wouldn't be fair to my family for me to turn down. It will take a sizable amount of my time for a while...

The other thing is my belated realization that the novel would be far stronger if I went back to the beginning and rewrote it from the first-person point of view of Briar Jamison, my linguist protagonist. Letting the descriptive sections be written on the basis of her person...

Eldering; living with my meandering spine...

I have very severe scoliosis -- curvature of the spine -- and it has grown steadily more severe as I've grown older. I think that the progression of the curvature with age is essentially guaranteed. Mine is the result of spinal polio when I was nine years old, way back in 1945.

When the extent of the damage became obvious three years later I was taken to the Missouri Crippled Children's Hospital -- that's how things were named in those days -- where the doctors said I'd have to spend 18 month...

Eldering; losing your doctor...

If you've been reading this journal for a while, you probably remember reading that I have been blessed with the world's most wonderful doctor, that I've known her since she was a medical student and that she's saved my life a couple of times.

Well... now I've lost her. Not because I've misplaced her, but because she has finally accepted a job that she'd been wanting for a very long time, and it's a job that doesn't allow her to also have a private practice.

Which means that I suddenly was face...

Eldering and chocolate...

Thanks to Andrew Tobias and one of his readers, I have this Good News item for you:

Peter Kaczowka:  
"Eat LOTS of chocolate.  Per Wikipedia, the world's longest-lived person, Jeanne Louise Calment, lived on a diet of olive oil, red wine and chocolate, living 122 years and 164 days.  There's no need to eat cocoa powder, Lindt makes a delicious 90% pure chocolate bar.  Calment ate nearly 5 oz of chocolate a day, more than an entire Lindt 90% bar which weighs 3.5 oz and has 550 calories.  Calment...

Linguistics; political language; Frank Luntz...

Everybody seems to be familiar with George Lakoff's "magic words and phrases and metaphors" techniques, but I don't see/hear/read much about Frank Luntz, his counterpart on the right. I don't know whether that's because there's a genuine information gap about Luntz, or because of lack of interest, or if it's something else entirely; in any case, it seemed to me that it would be a good idea to do a post about him here.

It was Frank Luntz who came up with the term "death tax" to replace "inheri...

Personal note; status report on new novel...

I'm pleased to be able to report that the new novel [Alien Tongues:] is going well, and that I now have eleven chapters completed -- one (done today) in first draft, most in thirteenth or moreteenth draft. I'm still not satisfied with the descriptive sections, but I think they're getting steadily better.

Personal note; weather woe again...

We have a winter storm watch again, from Saturday morning through Monday morning, with temps going down into the 20s and 4 to 8 inches of snow predicted. The scientific forecaster discussion is topping that off with warbles about sleet. And it will all start with thunderstorms after midnight tonight.

I am not looking forward to this latest fandango. The fact that we'll get to 70 degrees today is evidence of Climate Schizophrenia. Or maybe Climate Bipolar Disorder.

Eldering; why I'm doctor-and-hospital-averse...

I suppose I ought to explain, briefly, why I'm so unwilling to go to doctors and into hospitals...

For starters, I've had anaphylaxis twice -- once from pencillin, once from demerol -- and I have no luck getting doctors to pay any attention to me when I try to tell them that. I'm a little old lady; doctors know they don't need to listen to what I'm saying. [With the demerol episode, although I lost consciousness and had severe tetany, no doctor came anywhere near me while it was happening.:] I...

Eldering; noises and more noises...

For me, being old is rarely boring, because there's always some new and unexpected physical development coming along that livens things up. If you've been following my eldering posts for a while, you may remember how shocked I was when I discovered that I'd grown frail. I expected aches and pains in old age, and various nuisances in old age, but I'd never expected to find myself frail.

The latest New Thing is all the new noises inside my head. Like many people, I've had tinnitus -- "ringing i...

Personal note; recommendation...

I just want to enthusiastically recommend the current issue of Oxford American -- its "Southern Food 2010 issue." It's wonderful. It's like a whole magazineful of excellent LJ posts, one after another after another.

Oxford American's website is at http://www.oxfordamerican.org .