C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 113

Books are peculiar creatures. No two write alike…and it’s rarely straight forward.

I’ve limped along since May or June on this book. It flew at first. Then—I swear it was two sentences. Break. Two sentences. Break. Erase two sentences. Write three. Break.

That has been the progress for two months. Enough to make a writer tear her hair out. Usually I’d think I was distracted. Well, there was A-Kon, that trip south…after which things began to go like this. But it’s not as if I don’t sort of know where the book is going. What’s the matter with my focus, eh? I pride myself on being able to focus down and get to it. Nothing’s going on in the house, really? Tranquility and pretty good weather. Walking for exercise. Gardening. Tending the pond.

I tried writing just one viewpoint in the set and leaving out the other, just to maintain continuity, to go back and write the other viewpoint as a sequence and then shuffle them into proper order later. With attendant rewrite to trim up loose ends.

Two sentences. Break. Two more sentences. Break.

Well, damn.

Then, all of a sudden, I decided to do the forbidden. Vault over the stuck spots. Write the denouement.

Part way through it I start flipping back and adding bits to scenes all through the book. Revelations start spilling every which way.

So I just write this book backwards. Sort of. I got only part of the way through the denouement before I decided it was time to go back to the beginning and write forward knowing what I know now.

Ah, the blissful expectations of the novice writer of old, who would sit down to the keyboard and envision doing a clean outline and just writing straight through to the end.

I’ve had that happen a couple of times. A couple…in how many years?

An op-ed piece regarding Facebook that’s pretty well on target, imho

…as Facebook attempts to play the same shell game with Wall Street as it does with its customers. I think this is very well stated.

Facebook shell game not the best idea

Here’s a more technical link, but it has information for laymen as well: reasons for Facebook’s market decline

And this is the ‘product’ which Facebook is currently hyping to Wall Street as a way to wring more money from its advertisers: if you read between the lines, it’s encouraging friends to send ‘sponsored stories’ to each other…somewhat like me quoting the articles above, but these would, one suspects, be Revlon articles touting some new lipstick or Ford’s with some new automobile.

And imho, this is why people don’t trust Facebook: it’s gimmick-du-jour, all of them with as many angles as a carnie pitchman, and all of them using people’s relationships with each other.

In this one, apparently companies are approached, probably via their pages, to be sure their ‘shared’ ‘stories’ get prime placement in people’s newsfeeds, ie, these articles are ‘special,’ in ways Facebook will end up revealing to companies, but apparently not to ordinary users. It’s simultaneously forcing Timeline on all users, promo’ing ‘sponsored articles’ to its shareholders as a big moneymaker, while ‘investigating’ claims of false clicks on its smallest business accounts, the little hundred dollar ads on the sidebars.

Here’s what they say about ‘sponsored stories.’

” What are Sponsored Stories?

Sponsored Stories are posts from your friends or Pages on Facebook that a business, organization or individual has paid to highlight so there’s a better chance you’ll see them. [My note: read: they'll be stuck ahead of your grandmother's post to you in your incoming post, the way certain merchants pay to have their products on eye-level shelves at the grocery.] They are regular stories that a friend or Page you’re connected to has shared with you. “

Curiosity rover lands 10:31 Pacific time.

If you have any anti-science types in your circle and they start yattering about sending ‘all that money to Mars’ remind them of the fact a crushed car bale—is around $250 a ton if it were pure steel. With plastics, not so much. That’s ALL we ever send off the Earth. The money stays on earth, buying hamburgers and paying housepayments for American workers, while the new processes and materials we produce along the way create new jobs and save lives. NASA returns a dollar for every dime we spend. So it costs us NOTHING to send stuff into space. It actually pays us. Being at it constantly with the research and the testing—is good for our economy. It’s creating something out of pure thought—a lot like writing books, until you get to the printing part. And that’s the most economical creative process there is.

NASA page

Does Olympic tape help?

Olympic muscle tape

You may have seen striped or patterned athletes in the Games. Called Kinesio tape, it promises to relieve muscle pain and strain.

Some swear by it. Some don’t.

I got some sports tape, sort of a tape-on elastic bandage after a shoulder injury, and it did help—for one thing, reminding the user ‘don’t do that’ is a biggie, but not so sure that works with Olympic athletes. It did help the shoulder heal. It was so bad that it would send stars through my vision if I had to stop short or catch my balance and that shoulder kept moving a tad. Now I have full range of motion (I did a lot of pushing that, and yes, it hurt.) And no pain at all. Took most of a year to get the range back.

A welcome to friends who are coming over from Facebook…

After Facebook’s latest shenanigans, the Timeline stuff, and the possibility that they may ‘lock’ access to past files, so that, for instance, if you loaded a picture in 2011, you might not be able to remove it—a situation hinted at in the letter they gave Jane about the ability to remove anything you don’t want displayed— That could simply mean that things will show up on your Timeline you don’t want revealed; or it could mean you can edit up to mid August, and then past mid-August might not be so accessible.

All of which is a debatable interpretation, and will be proven in a few days one way or the other. But do you know? I’ve stopped caring. I’ve stopped trying to figure out what they’re up to now. For us, we have been through just one Facebook upheaval too many, and Jane and I made the decision to pull our presence out of FB for all but the most commercial of purposes.

We are ‘content creators.’ IE, our income comes from creating content. I’ll contribute freebie writing to truly fannish or friendly places I like, and my area on Facebook tried to be that, but looming over the whole affair is a very mercenary operation that I’m not sure I want to support, or pose myself as an ‘attraction’ for the benefit of Facebook’s bottom line. Facebook encourages people, with their pretense of warm-fuzzies and benefit to the user, to reveal their politics, their religion, their family members, their pets, their sexual preferences, for gosh sake! their relationships, their friends AND their friends’ email addresses, things you would NEVER post on line…and then they have, along with Amazon, apparently subscribed to the novel legal concept that if they insert a clause stating they have the right to change the agreement they make with you to their advantage without notice—[I can't wait til that concept comes before the Supreme Court, but it's going to take a lawsuit by somebody with funds to carry it through]—it’s legal.

The agreement used to say that they don’t sell certain information. Now, if you look carefully, they’ve modified that statement in the personal options section to read that they don’t sell that now, but may in future. And think about it! getting you to update and recheck those little blanks that they’ve voided with a ‘software update’ is also a way of resetting the legal clock and getting you to ‘sign’ their new terms with that pernicious statement in it.

I don’t appreciate such goings-on. It would be bad enough if it were social-only and a bit of fun.

But our livelihood depends on our income from what we create in words and image, and we are giving them no way to claim any ownership of what we write or paint or photograph, and we are not going to sit there attracting more members into their sticky spiderweb.

So I went through and very carefully swept our backtrail, removing images and information and doing everything but closing out the account. I had to ask myself what to do about ‘friend’ requests, and after a little soul-searching, I decided to go ahead granting them until I hit the 5000-friend wall and can’t take any more.

Interestingly in today’s news Facebook is worried about its nearly 10% of ‘fake’ accounts, accounts of duplicate name, accounts for pets, and alternate identities. Facebook is always up to something. I weary of trying to figure what, precisely, but I very much doubt this new concern portends anything of advantage to their users, and something much more of advantage to the marketability of the information they are finagling out out their members.

Some people say, oh, get one of the ‘cleaner’ programs that reverts your display to pre-Timeline format, or that cleans out your ‘like’ list. Reports from one user says that her computer now locks every time she attempts to view a Timeline-style account, a condition that will only get worse as Facebook puts everyone on Timeline, perhaps as early as mid-August; and other users say that people who think they’ve cleaned out their ‘likes’ with such programs are mistaken: the ‘likes’ are masked from view, but not masked from Facebook admin level, so they can still be sold—and these, in my own opinion, are about as good as flying a “Spam Accepted!” flag. They call it ‘tailoring ads to what a viewer will like.” I don’t like ads at all, even for what I like. So I erased each and every one of them. Jane has left a little more of her stuff there than I have, by choice, but we are through with the site, except for what commercial use we can derive from it for ourselves.

So if you need us, find us here. I did get used to doing a little science and writing commentary while ‘there.’ And I’m going to try it out here. Which may or may not last, depending on my mood, or just what comes to my attention.

For our new folk on the blog, if you wish to de-lurk and comment, welcome. You have to join to comment—which keeps spam out of this site—and if you want an avatar that isn’t a space alien, go to gravatar.com and set up your avatar there. That avatar will then appear on this site, on Jane’s site, and on Lynn’s, or any other WordPress site, all for the one entry. We don’t sell lists, don’t spam, and don’t flame. The only rule is—be courteous and don’t talk politics. This is, in effect, my living room, and I defend its tranquility. Sit back, have a cuppa, be welcome, and enjoy the company.

Catseye—a supernova shines again.

supernova shines again

That’s really traveling, that energy….

I don’t know if you’ve been catching How the Universe Works on the Discovery networks, but it’s really one of the best in a long time.

Gluten-free diners on the rise? Maybe hybrid wheat?

Gluten-free?

Wheat is one of the most ‘altered’ food crops since ancient times…so hybridization is nothing new, but this is an interesting study, and points out one of the problems with genetic alteration (in this case, not genetic alteration in the lab, but a crossbred strain) and with two other features of modern agriculture—monoculture (everybody growing the same breed of the same crop) and mass production (you take agricultural products from all over the nation and mix them together first at the granary, then at the processing plant (the mills) and then again at the producer (the bakery).

We may be close to an era when farmers and manufacturers are asked to keep records of what strain of wheat or strawberries or peanuts they’re selling—and they can legislate it. But—there are gentle breezes that blow pollen from one field to another; and there are bees and butterflies, and change happens that has nothing to do with recombinant DNA. There are just some risks that come with district-spanning distribution. You cure famines with one hand—and you produce problems in the wider population with the other.

While many people are scared to death of ‘frankenfood’, things that have been genetically altered, I suggest we have a) the very beginning of a science, and there WILL be mistakes. b) we should be careful, because of paragraph A. But also c) genetics is also how we track down what may have changed and figure out what we can do to ‘defuse’ the problem, ie, create a variety without the problem, and we can do it a lot faster and more safely in the annual generations of wheat, than in ourselves.

Food genetics is not a black and white issue, and labs aren’t the only place gene combination takes place. It goes on in every field.

There’s a new segment of Seeking North available (free) on Closed Circle.

Lynn’s given us a long one.

I hear Chanur is now available on audible.com

along with Serpent’s Reach and others. I wonder how they handled the knnn transmissions, eh?

It’s all coming back to me…the website is getting modernized.

I’m turning it into a specialty site. I’m adding a Writer’s Section, taking out the old progress reports—revising things that have changed. I may add sections as I think of them. But it’s where I can park tolerably static info that people want to consult. And I have fixed the counter: I at least remember fairly well where we were when the thing broke this time. It’s broken about 3 times prior. The old savvy is coming back—I had something that persistently wouldn’t display, and went under to the html and found a non-symmetrical p lacking a closing /p. HTML hates statements that don’t finish. Fixed it. Bingo! It displays. I started out with a marvelous little book called HTML for Dummies, and this dummy has not forgotten everything.

So those of you who navigate through the website to get here, things are now improved.