Boing boing has a new post that I think is intellectually dishonest.
The first commenter on the post seems to agree with me: "That was an over-the-top and misleading synopsis."
I say all this because I respect the author of the post and call him a friend and have read and enjoyed many of his works, and I visit boingboing many times a day to see what wondrous and marvelous things they have to share. That said, we have to be honest enough to call a spade a spade.
And if I am going to call out someone else on this issue, I need to call out myself.
Which leads me back to my post a couple days ago about the new "Star Trek" movie.
Because Brianna and I saw it again.
And I was wrong.
It's actually a very good Trek movie.
The problem is that it jumps around so fast and is so complex that major plot points only get a sentence or two of screentime and if you miss them, you're lost. But it's there. (I did, however, notice a couple new minor plot holes the second time, but overall, my opinion went up a lot the second time.)
But my point is that, upon a second viewing, Into Darkness is a really good Trek movie, and it's between that and First Contact for which ranks Number 3 all time.
YoungerSon's Eagle Project was officially signed off by the troop and handed in at 11AM yesterday morning, 13 hours before the deadline. Now it's in the hands of Council, and he still has to go through his Board of Review, but he's essentially done with it for the next few months until they schedule a Board of Review.
And as to that deadline?
As of today, I no longer have any minor children. YoungerSon is 18 (officially at 3:37 PM, but...today's the day).
Up very early on quite short sleep to fly from SJC to LAX to ABQ, then vehiculate to Taos via Santa Fe. We'll see Lisa Costello on our way through Santa Fe for appetizers or dinner, depending on the timing. I'll be all day door to door.
Yesterday was my second and final day at the Nebula Awards weekend. Not to bury the lede, the award in my ballot category of Best Novella went to the excellent Nancy Kress for After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall.
My parents and the_child were there, along with my Aunt B— and Uncle L— from Texas.
Dad and Mom
Jersey Girl, Dad, Me, Mom
There was a comic convention going on next door, so some crossover happened.
These are not the SF writers you are looking for
Still we had fun.
Me and Jersey Girl, who'd never attended an SF event before
And though I did not win, I got to give away the Best Short Story Nebula to a charmingly shocked Aliette de Bodard.
I'll post more later about the emotional experience of this weekend, and how it has intersected with my illness. For now, suffice to say I had an amazingly good time. My family was pretty happy to be there. My thanks to chair Dave Gallaher, SFWA President John Scalzi, and everyone who worked so hard to make this all come together as fantastically well as it did.
Colorado GOPer Accused Of Storming Away From Aurora Victim’s Dad — Conservative policies have ugly, ugly consequences. Republican support for widespread private gun ownership with minimal responsibility or accountability kills 30,000 American adults and children every year. Running away from that doesn't change anything, it just confirms once again the moral and political cowardice inextricably interwoven with the pro-gun position.
QotD?: Ever been to New Mexico?
5/19/2013 Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (con time) Hours slept: 4.25 hours (fitful, yikes!!!) Body movement: n/a Weight: n/a Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0 Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
I have finally found some time to work on Hobgoblin, yay! I’ve edited up through chapter 6. Of course, it’s not till chapter 8 or so where it starts to really need work, but this feels like good progress.
Also I got some more anthology stories edited and out; not quite halfway done with those.
Also-also I got some acquisitions-editing-reading done. (I still LOVE it that I can lie on the couch and read, and that’s work!)
You can tell from all of the above that it was too rainy to go play in the yard today…
Originally published at Shannon Page. You can comment here or there.
I recently read Sam Harris's essay on lying (it's a Kindle single), and it's absolutely fascinating. The usual school of thought on lying it's that it's bad, except white lies are OK. But he rejects most of that as a rationalization, and that telling the truth is still kinder. He also references a book I read two years ago, M. Scott Peck's PEOPLE OF THE LIE, which discusses the repercussions from an explicitly Christian viewpoint. But it's still fascinating for a non-believer like me (and Sam Harris). I'm still working on being more honest in my life, and I'm still angered by the sheer amount of bull**** I've been fed in my life. To get some distance from it, gives me some scope to the enormity of it. And for the folks who thought I was overreacting you have no idea just how many lies I was told, and how manipulated I was. So happy I am living in truth now, and the lesson I'm taking away is it's better to walk away and be in pain than to be pulled into a lie, and be in pain later, and for longer.
I'm trying to make a rush on Critters to get my ratio back up because I was supposed to have a story go out but I've been neglecting them and my ratio dropped and blah blah blah. Lazy Writer; No Critiques this week. So I'm slamming a couple out. Slamming, of course, is a strange word for it, but it's a combination of things my Best Art Teacher taught me, and what Jay Lake, Tina Connolly, Kirsten Lincoln, and Mischa DeNola have taught me over the years: I'm a better reader than a writer. My strength is apparently in giving read through reactions, because I'm generally aware of what I'm reading and how I'm processing that reading. I'm not absorbing, but trying to second guess, make connections, and I'm usually aware of this.
It also makes it difficult to read published works because I can't always turn this off.
It also means that the momentum of a story is easy to throw off, because I'm reading and typing at the same time. Good stories with strong momentum lead to shorter critiques on my part, because I'm actually trapped in reading the thing.
I've read three stories is present tense this week. Did I miss the memo? Is this the new thing?
Anyway, one of these stories has an unreliable narrator, and it seems to me that the writing is lazy, more than the the narrator being unreliable. Like the good bits came to the writer and were stitched together to make a straight line, but the good bits don't lead into one another, but ping pong across a divide. The challenge this story faces is establishing an unreliable narrator and making it clear that the narrator is unreliable.
And, to be pedantic, what does an unreliable narrator mean? I have characters who are not reliable, but due to the stress of the story they may not see things as they are, and as I'm usually writing in first person, I'm deliberately misleading the reader. Is this truly an unreliable narrator, if it only happens at peak times, or is this simply a mistaken narrator? What does it take to establish an unreliable character? I've posed the question on Twitter.
I'm not sure how to do it. I suppose if the character is doing something already known to impair judgement, that establishes the unreliability, but right now I can't think of any other way.
Sat 5:00 – 5:50 PM, One Person’s Freedom Fighter . . ., Upstairs Programming 1 (259)
Break Sat 5:50 – Sun 10:00
Sun 10:00 – 10:50 AM, The Role of Religion in Science Fiction/Fantasy, The Cave (Downstairs)
Break Sun 10:50 – Sun 2:00
Sun 2:00 – 2:50 PM, Gender Roles and Societal Change, Upstairs Programming 2 (260)
Getting excited about it now, thinking about my reading. A snippet from How Beer Saved the World and a snippet from Netwalker Uprising…both of which hopefully will come up on the Stanza on my lovely new phone (Never fear, I plan to bring hard copy as well…)
It's a sign of how much working from home agrees with me that I slept in only an hour this morning, waking up before Amtrak's #5's normal pass of Fernley at 7:45. (It was two hours late this morning; I was there waving at it as it passed.) There was no reason to wake Lisa. I dealt with morning business over coffee and generally relaxed. After Amtrak's passage, I decided to walk down to the taco stand on Main Street and get one of their breakfast burritos. As I was walking back, I saw Lisa standing on the front porch. She had woke up while I was away, had noticed that one of our local rabbits was nibbling on some greenery right outside our front gate, and went to get the camera to take a picture. The rabbit had moved on by the time she came back, but she took a picture of me coming home instead.
Both Lisa and I are anxious to get moving to Oregon. Today we are running errands for things we need for the trip. Meanwhile, we've been making a list of things we'll purchase while we have an opportunity to stock up from stores that aren't in Nevada or the Bay Area and from the land of no sales tax.
In the non-tomato months, we buy hot-house specials...often cherry or grape tomatoes, or the very flavorful campari cocktail tomatoes. We had too many small campari tomatoes (that's a Wikipedia pic...these are about the size of golf balls), and they'd started to become wizened...what to do? You can toss them in sauce (since it doesn't matter for sauce if the flesh is at all firm), but we've got enough frozen sauce that we didn't need to make more, and I didn't want to waste the veggies.
The answer? Take the slightly wizened tomatoes, halve them, put them on a baking sheet, spray lightly with olive oil, lightly salt with sea salt, and bake them at 200°F for about 2.5 hours. Voila! You get great not-really-sundried tomatoes that go really well in lots of things. Put in some sort of container and refrigerate until needed.
Once they've been dried, these tomatoes have an amazingly intense flavor. Added to some garlic, olive oil, fresh spinach, and a bit of lemon juice and zest, they'll make a great dressing for cheese raviolis that are in the freezer. Serve them with chicken that's been in a lemon-oregano marinade. Mmmmmm.
Next, dinner tonight. I wanted Windy City tube-steaks (aka, Chicago-style hot dogs) for dinner. The dogs are substantial enough (with the base at .25 lb., plus many veggies and a roll) that one needs only a single side dish. We opted for potato salad, but we absolutely cannot trust deli potato salad not to be sweet. So we need to make potato salad...but not too much. One bag containing 8 small red potatoes for "steaming" turned out to be ideal.
Yesterday, Jersey Girl in Portland flew down to San Jose. We ran into Richard Lovett on the plane, and shared a cab to the convention hotel. Once there, the afternoon became a blur of old friends and new that I couldn't possibly do a sane job of listing. At the author signing, I was seated between John Scalzi and Joe Haldeman, with Connie Willis and Stephen Gould on the far end, safely out of range from me. Signing was busy and a lot of fun
DNA transfer between myself and Francesca Myman of Locus while Catherine Shaffer looks on approvingly in the background
Post-dinner, we hit the reception at which the Nebula nominee certificates and pins are handed out, along with drinks and photography. It was fun to stand with Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu and Lawrence Schoen. We were only missing Nancy Kress. And I am in awe of both Aliette and Ken for their across the board strength on the award ballots this year.
(Most of) the Best Novella ballot lining up to be photographed for the later restraining order
Eventually I retired early for a crappy night's sleep.
Today my parents show up, as does my aunt and uncle, as does the_child. My profound thanks to Crystal Black for making her trip possible. Plus a ton more friends.
Tomorrow, I am off to Rio Hondo at the crack of doom.
Brain Stimulation Can Boost Math Skills — The study was small-scale and is not something that should be replicated at home, because of the possibility of harm/ Ya think? (Via David Goldman.)
Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds — Of more than 4,000 academic papers published over 20 years, 97.1% agreed that climate change is anthropogenic. Reality's well-known liberal bias is not an inherent property of the physical universe. Rather, it's an emergent property of conservative privileging of ideological thinking over evidence-based thinking. Conservatives would serve themselves and the country as a whole a great deal better if they relied less on arguments from authority and more on arguments from reality.
Justifiable Cause — The Obama administration is making the case for conservatism better than Mitt Romney ever did. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The Great Benghazi Conspiracy and Republican Forgeries — As I said on Twitter and Facebook yesterday, GOP makes up fake White House Benghazi emails, cons news with fakes, now can accuse White House of covering up when real emails are released. Classy. The worst part, it works. Keeps their white men angry over outright lies.
QotD?: Have you handicapped the Nebula ballot?
5/18/2013 Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (WRPA) Hours slept: 4.25 hours (solid, but yikes!) Body movement: n/a Weight: n/a Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0 Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Not my idea of a good time, but I'm flying to California on Sunday to be in court on Monday (ongoing issues with the parental estate) and flying home again Monday evening. No Fun 4 U. Particularly not loving my Sunday itinerary, which involves an early flight to Phoenix, and a tediously long layover, just to get to Fresno only by late afternoon. I will pack several books and some knitting, and wave down to all my Californian friends as I pass by.
Studio Foglio is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to print the next paper edition of Girl Genius. I'm in at a relatively low level myself. (I do wish I had the money to drop on the pair of $10K one-of-a-kind support levels; we'd have Phil and Kaja & The Experiments as GoHs of FernleyCon.) Somewhat to I think everyone's surprise, the main goal funded in about one day, and here on Day 3 they're already edging up to stretch goal 3. But if you haven't yet pledged, don't let that stop you: don't we all want to see "Phil in his 'Mr. Hyde' personality, demonstrating the use of [their] astonishing new orange peeler"?
Oh my gosh you guys, I was so sleepy last night when I posted, I forgot to tell you about the horrible discovery I made about my next-door neighbor!!
Actually, let me backtrack, because what I learned also helped me solve a mystery that had been driving me nuts. Ever since the weather got a little better and I’ve been keeping windows open, I’ve been hearing this random, occasional “pok” sound. Like a very, very slow ping-pong game. I could NOT for the life of me figure out where it was coming from, though it was obviously nearby.
Though sometimes it sounded farther away, and sometimes it sounded really close. I actually almost peered into a fenced back yard down the block last week, because I thought I heard it coming from there, but when I walked by, there were people in the yard, and, well, I wasn’t going to peer through their fence when they were back there.
So the mystery continued. I started thinking I was going to have to move away, just to preserve my sanity. POK…. POK……….. POK.
POK.
But then yesterday I was out in the yard, puttering around as I do, and I saw my next-door neighbor in his yard. He had a bag of peanuts, and he was filling a couple of little container-device-things that he had nailed to trees.
And as soon as he filled one, a squirrel ran up, lifted the lid, got a peanut, and scampered off, leaving the top to fall back down with a little “pok”!
MY GOD, MY NEIGHBOR IS FEEDING THE LITTLE BASTARDS! (in fact, probably lots of neighbors are, which is why the sound gets closer and farther…)
And of course they leave the peanut shells all over my yard. AND BURY THEM IN MY POTS.
Because of course the little bastards aren’t satisfied with peanut-feasting all over the neighborhood: they still have to come into MY yard and dig up my pots and chew on my plants and kill seedlings and generally wreak mayhem.
I still may have to move. This neighborhood is not safe! Who would have thought my very NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR had gone over to the dark side?
Oddly, now that I know what the POK sound is, it bothers me both less and more. At least I’m not crazed with wondering any more. And I suppose I could silver-lining it and tell myself that every POK I hear is a squirrel not at that moment in my yard, but I’m not quite that Zen yet. I just imagine them writing all their friends all over the country: “Hey, free peanuts in southeast Portland! Right next door to a bunch of juicy plants and freshly dug soil! Come on down!”
Little bastards.
Originally published at Shannon Page. You can comment here or there.
Bottom-line: STID is a fast, action-filled movie that's surprisingly dull and stupid.
I had the exact opposite reaction to ID that I did to the Trek reboot (hereinafter "Trek '09" or simply "09"). I went into 09 planning on hating it and being mad about all the changes (the Enterprise is built in space, not in Iowa; Kirk can't drive stick, as we know from "A Piece of the Action", etc.). The only think I've ever shouted out in a movie theatre was during a trailer for 09 when I said, "I withhold judgment!" Which got a big laugh. But it walked out of 09 in love with that movie. The alt timeline was a brilliant idea, the fan nods worked. Brianna and I spent hours discussing whether this or Wrath of Khan was the best ST movie of all time.
Opposite reaction for ID. Thought it would be fun, left disappointed and confused, a little angry and befuddled. There is a GREAT movie in there, struggling to get out.
The best part of some shows (I'm looking at you, UFO and Space:1999) is the opening credits, with exciting music and quick edits and lots of explosions and action. So why can't they make the whole show out of that stuff? Because Star Trek Into Darkness.
There simply isn't enough mortar between the action pieces to hold it all together. Ok, so why are our guys being chased by spear-throwing aliens on some planet? I dunno. There's no more explanation for this in than in the trailer. In fact, the whole sequence is barely longer than the trailer and thus provides no plot or substance. I am a fish and this movie is dangling the hook in front of it, but never sets it.
When I watch a movie, there's a moment - hopefully - where you forget you're watching a movie and become emotionally involved. I didn't get emotionally involved into ST IV (the one with whales) until Kirk said "Double dumb ass on you." I didn't get into the second AvP movie until that horrible pregnant lady scene - by which point the movie was almost over. Hopefully that falling in happens early - like the first moments in Predators when Adrian Brody wakes up - and he's dropping like deadweight through the air. Wow. This never happened in ID. In fact, I felt like ID was consciously trying to push me away several times.
Example - this next bit is mildly spoilerific but isn't really, because if you're reading this you've already seen a Trek movie. (Almost) every Trek movie is about Kirk becoming captain of the Enterprise. Again. TMP, where he takes command from Decker. Khan, where he takes command from Spock. III, where he steals the decommissioned Enterprise and then blows it up. IV, where they give him a new ship because they took away his old ship because he was rash and impulsive and couldn't take directions and then somehow saved the day because he was rash and impulsive and... You get the picture.
The fun of watching Kirk is getting to see a ten-year-old in charge of a huge war machine doing crazy non-sensical stuff and getting away with it.
So when a big part of the emotional center of ID is whether or not Kirk will (a) grow up and (b) get back his command, Is there really any dramatic tension? Really?
(In contrast, 09 did this really well, because Chris Pike sold it - Kirk, your dad saved hundreds of lives in fifteen minutes, I dare you to do better. Great line.)
Enough about heroes. Now villains. Why is the main villain (see how I am carefully not revealing who it is, if you don't know) fighting Kirk? After watching the movie, reading some reviews and spending hours discussing this with Brianna, I am still not sure. There was one scene in the movie where the action stopped and the villain gives a half-hour lecture to explain why he's pissed off and it made no sense. Villains drive the plot. Their motivations and goals need to be clear. And here a villain causes a lot of death and destruction in the last five minutes of the movie... Why? No idea. Motivations and goals, people. You left me on a dead planet. You killed my father. There's no personal enmity from the villain toward Kirk so... Hum.
No personal vendetta between the main villain and Kirk but there *is* between Kirk and the villain, because the villain hurt someone Kirk cares about. And then Kirk goes from being really pissed off about that to not really caring in ten minutes. And really horrible crap happens at the end of the movie and no one really cares - it's just background noise to the main fight. Horrible crap and five minutes later we have a happy ending. Mental whiplash. I mean, 9/11 happened and our country is still seriously f&&ked up a decade later.
All summed, this was an exciting, action-filled movie. I just feel no emotional connection to this movie whatsoever.
Do I have any desire to see this movie again? Not really. But I would like to see a version that's half an hour longer wherein they explain some stuff.
How does it rank?
Great Trek: Khan, 09, First Contact Good: IV (whales), ID, III, Generations Eh: VI, TMP Omg no: remainder
An Australian politician has apologized for liking an illicit picture of a teenage boy on Facebook. In the picture, the boy was partaking in the time-honored Australian tradition of "sneaky nuts," whereby he was furtively exposing his genitals.
That ornament* to the Senate House of Representatives Louie Gohmert performed the difficult feat of making Attorney General Holder look good. I am happy to join in on the Gohmert pile-on.
Yesterday Lisa Costello departed for New Mexico, where she is attending a conference in Santa Fe. This morning, Jersey Girl in Portland and I skedaddle to San Jose for SFWA's Nebula Awards Weekend. My Dad and (step)Mom will be there tomorrow, as will my Aunt B— and Uncle L— from Texas. the_child also flies down to San Jose tomorrow to attend the Nebula Awards banquet and ceremony with the able assistance of Crystal Black.
I'll do some socializing and maybe some business whilst in San Jose, then I'll have the fun of watching myself lose the Nebula. Let's put it this way: I don't even have an acceptance speech prepared. In the extremely unlikely event that I win, I'll wing it. Luckily for both me and my potential audience, I am ferociously good at winging it.
Crack of Sunday, I light out for New Mexico my own self. This trip is completely unrelated to Lisa's, as I am heading for Rio Hondo, but our automobile will pause whilst passing through Santa Fe on the way from Albuquerque to Taos for us to have a snack and visit with Lisa, who by amusing coincidence will still be there. After that, I'm for a week at Rio Hondo. (I'm not sure about the connectivity at Rio Hondo, so blogging may be erratic next week.)
Mark your calendars! Powell's Books will be hosting JayFest, a group signing and book fair in support of, well, me.
DATE: Thursday, June 13, 2013 (two days before JayCon XIII) TIME: Book fair 6:00-9:00 pm, group signing 7:00-8:00 pm PLACE: Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, Oregon
Authors in attendance will include David D. Levine, Phyllis Irene Radford, Devon Monk, Barb and J. C. Hendee, Shannon Page, Mark Ferrari, J. A. Pitts, M. K. Hobson, Diana Pharaoh Francis, and Tina Connolly.
Ten percent of the proceeds for each book sold during the book fair will go to the Clayton Memorial Medical Fund, which helps professional science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers living in the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska deal with the financial burden of medical expenses.
Brain Training Helps Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy — The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers. I play sudoku online rather obsessively when I am in chemo, as a form of cognitive self-check.
Eyeball — A throwable building-mapping sphere from Bounce Imaging was recently chosen by PopSci for a 2013 Invention Award. The "throwable, expendable, baseball-size probe," in PopSci's words, "has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of near-infrared LEDs to light up dark rooms (for the cameras)." Wow.
Survey of 12,000 studies finds strong agreement on climate change — We already knew 97% of climate scientists backed the scientific consensus. It's amazing the lengths liberals will go to in order to spread their climate change lies, even to the extent of using reality-based "facts" and "data".
CBS: It was congressional GOP who faked Benghazi email — Conservatives can almost never win on the facts, so of course they lie. That's the entire idea behind FOX News. And the Bush administration. (WMDs in Iraq, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) Why should it be any different in the GOP congressional delegation? Water is wet, too.
QotD?: How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
5/17/2013 Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (0.5 revisions on my novella for METAtropolis: Green Space, plus WRPA) Hours slept: 6.25 hours (solid) Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike) Weight: 249.2 Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0 Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Muddy yardwork, at least. But it makes the weed-pulling easier. I miss that hot weather we had! Though I can’t argue with getting the garden watered for free.
I have about a billion strawberries that are allllllllmost ripe. Just a day or two of sun should do it.
Sun? Hello, sun? Any time now! I want to take my socks back off!
Originally published at Shannon Page. You can comment here or there.
Awhile back, I was ever so delighted to hear the Coen Brothers were working on a script of a movie based on Dave Van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
Inside Llewyn Davis is the result. It is said to be loosely based on Dave's book. It's "the story of a singer-songwriter who navigates New York's folk music scene in the 1960s." It only covers a week of Llewyn Davis' life, so I'm not expecting to find a Lee Hoffman equivalent in the cast, but that won't stop me from looking for her. I certainly enjoyed reading about her in Dave's book.
T Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford (lead singer of the English band Mumford and Sons) were involved with the music; I'll be listening to that, too. Come December, that is. But only because I'll be in Massachusetts this weekend and not in France.
Why France? Because Insider Llewyn Davis is screening this Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was invited to compete for the Palme d'Or. So cool.
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Lisa had been driven to distraction by actions of others yesterday. (I may or may not choose to write about it later, but not in a public entry.) In an attempt to get her mind off of things, I got my coveralls and boots on and asked her to help me clear our yard of more wood debris.
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Authors in attendance will include David D. Levine, Phyllis Irene Radford, Devon Monk, Barb and J. C. Hendee, Shannon Page, Mark Ferrari, J. A. Pitts, M. K. Hobson, Diana Pharaoh Francis, and Tina Connolly.
Ten percent of the proceeds for each book sold during the book fair will go to the Clayton Memorial Medical Fund, which helps professional science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers living in the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska deal with the financial burden of medical expenses.
Happy birthday, akirlu. I don't know if it's anybody else's birthday because lj is malfunctioning, presumably as a result of unprotected contact with Facebook.
I posted this to dw because lj will accept crossposts but not direct posts.
More generosity flows my way. @howardtayler has done some amazing things for me this week, with an able assist from his colorist Travis Walton. Howard teases his work here. Suffice to say this will be public soon, and you can all marvel at Howard's skill and wit, and understand how impressed and humbled I am by his support.
Airline Mileage
Yesterday's airline mileage appeal was a bit of a fiasco. I'd not checked into the airline policies for a while, and they have both monetized and restricted mileage transfers between private individual. Thank you so much to everyone who made the effort. Another reader found points.com, which I will be investigating today or tomorrow in hopes of arriving at a more useful solution. In the mean time, the original Big Project has proceeded down another path. I have several other Worthy Projects in mind, so if I can get this straightened out, the appeal will continue, albeit on slightly different terms.
Regorafenib
I've been told that my prescription for Regorafenib has been approved. This drug is a specialty pharmacy item, which means it falls outside the usual infrastructure of pharmaceutical benefits. This includes pre-approval letters and me dealing with a designated mail order pharmacy for my medication supply. It also potentially included a whopping co-pay, but it turns out my carrier's pharmacy plan treated this as simply being at the high end of the formulary. Which is modestly annoying, but that's same $50 co-pay I have for Celebrex, Levitra, et cetera.
My Next Scan
I have been corresponding with my oncologist about my next CT scan. Those are supposed to be eight weeks apart right now. That's the minimum spacing recommended for clinical benefit. I also believe there are significant radiation exposure concerns with excessive scanning. In my case, I won't live long enough to experience that set of problems, but nonetheless the health and safety guidelines exist. The problem is, they want me to have the next CT scan eight weeks after I start taking the Regorafenib. As I am going out of town tomorrow for eleven days — the Nebulas in San Jose, then Rio Hondo in northern New Mexico — I won't be able to start taking the Regorafenib prior to May 27th at the earliest. And even that date assumes the specialty pharmacy comes through in a timely manner. Which puts me to eleven weeks or longer between CT scans. And creates the situation that we have 3+ weeks of tumor growth prior to the beginning of any hoped-for effects from the Regorafenib. I think we'd have both a growth rate assessment and a clean baseline for evaluation the new medication if we did a scan shortly after May 27th, but that is far too soon per the generic clinical guidelines. No answer yet, but it's one of the things I'm worrying about.
Tasking All the Things
Remember that big list of mine, of things that need doing before I die? [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] Well, it's grown. And we're doing them. So an enormous amount of administratrivia is happening around Nuevo Rancho Lake. So far, most of the customer service reps, managers and whatnot we've dealt with have been very gracious. I feel like Robert DeNiro's Harry Tuttle in Brazil [ imdb ] being consumed by paper. Still, progress is being made.
My Coping
I've had several people note that I'm pretty cheerful lately. The not very hidden subtext is them wondering why I'm not wailing and rending my garments. Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm not wailing and rending my garments. I suppose because there's no time for that sort of thing. I don't have much life left to live, especially in something like normal health, and I have too much to do. Love my child, write my stories, be good to Lisa Costello and Jersey Girl in Portland and mother of the child and my family and my friends and my fans and my co-workers and and and. It is true that my current good nature is a very thin veneer, subject to cracking at even a glancing blow. Beneath that is a bubbling stew of anger, grief and terror, spiced with a catalog of other negative emotions. Nonetheless, here I am. And forward is the only direction for me.
Thank you all for reading, for caring, for reaching out.
One of the things I love about writing is research. One of the things I love about research is interviewing experts. An acquaintance (and fan) is an asteroid geologist and runs a meteorite laboratory. I asked her about the kinetic strike on Seattle that occurs in my METAtropolis: Green Space novella, "Rock of Ages". Here is part of what she sent me, redacted somewhat for clarity and confidentiality:
Will insurance cover genetic testing, preventive surgery? — Women who discover they carry a hereditary gene mutation that dramatically increases their risk of breast and ovarian cancers face big decisions and the possibility of tens of thousands of dollars in medical costs. This story is a version of what I went through.
The Spies Who Blundered — Alleged undercover CIA agent Ryan Fogle is one of many spies to bungle the job.
My Despair — Another of those sad, strange posts on Feminist Mormon Housewives where someone of apparent intelligence and progressive sensibilities finds their common sense and observations of the real world in profound conflict with their faith. If I were a faith-holder, I don't think I could tolerate that much cognitive dissonance.
Christian denominations and marriage equality: A simple quiz — Slacktivist Fred Clark makes a point that many anti-gay bigots in pietist clothing would prefer to ignore. Christianists find it so much more comfortable to hate inconvenient people than to actually pay attention to their own morality.
What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct' — In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check "black" on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn't hold up. Ta-Nehisi Coates is far more elegant than I ever could be on this topic.
Tullahoma father being reckless when baby daughter shot, police say — Because guns make us all safer. Without the smiling protection of the NRA and the GOP, this dad wouldn't have been able to exercise his theoretical defense of essentially liberties by blowing away his own child.
QotD?: Can you remember getting any older?
5/16/2013 Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (0.5 revisions on my novella for METAtropolis: Green Space, plus WRPA) Hours slept: 8.0 hours (solid) Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike) Weight: 248.2 Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0 Currently reading: The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
We successfully finished maintenance on cluster #7. All accounts’ owners from this cluster can now log into their journals.
We are working on restoring the user cluster #9, it will take approximately an hour. We will keep you informed. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.
When the liberal says "race is a social construct," he is not being a soft-headed dolt; he is speaking an historical truth. We do not go around testing the "Irish race" for intelligence or the "Southern race" for "hot-headedness." These reasons are social. It is no more legitimate to ask "Is the black race dumber than then white race?" than it is to ask "Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?"
So, I’m pretty new at this editing thing–at least professionally–and I know all my experienced editor-friends are smiling gently at me and rolling their eyes.
But hey, everyone has to learn sometime, right?
And I AM learning so much, it’s marvelous. Working with these stories, pondering what makes a good story work and what makes an unsuccessful story not work–it’s subtle, but also obvious; subjective, yet not. It’s already finding its way back to my own writing, as I finally got back into the edit of Hobgoblin today, and saw things I hadn’t seen the last sixteen times I went over it. Easy-to-fix things. At least so far.
The thing that has amused me the most this week has been something that is entirely DUH-level obvious once you realize it, but I hadn’t seen it till I got there. I was remembering reading all the anthology submissions, which I did as they came in–the good, the bad, the ugly. I read every word of all of them (and there go my friends rolling their eyes again)–but I needed to do that, for my own sense of what I had. And, as I mentioned, to think about why stories work and why they don’t.
So I chose sixteen stories (and I’ll post the table of contents when all the contracts are in), and notified the authors, and then prepared to edit…dreading, before I got into it, the amount of work to be done. Because I’d just had this experience of reading this huge pile of good, bad, and ugly, all jumbled up. And thinking about each story, what it would need…
I’ve edited three stories so far, and…well…they hardly needed any editing at all! Because, DUH, I chose good stories. NOT ones that needed much work–by me, or by the author. I mean, of COURSE. But I didn’t see it till I was sitting there with the stories going, Gee, that was easy.
Yeah, okay, I’ll get there.
In other news: I almost have peonies blooming…any day now:
But then I met Miss Q for tea in Ladd’s Addition, and afterwards we walked through the rose gardens, which are in full bloom:
We took the time to stop and smell the roses. They were lovely.
Originally published at Shannon Page. You can comment here or there.
Okay, on and off the past couple of days I've been earwormed by a snippet of melody with lyrics I can't catch, by an artist I don't know, and the problem is that I actually really like it, and would like to hear the rest of the song, and I cannot reproduce enough of it to Google, and I can't even hum the melody correctly. It's. Driving. Me. Batshit. Female singer, reedy bell-like voice, and the melody is happy, almost triumphal, with a distinctive, repeating meter on the chorus. I think it must be pretty recent, pop or maybe country, and I keep thinking the final line of the chorus is something like "You come shining like the sun." But that doesn't yield anything that sounds right upon googlage. Batshit, I tell you.
To followup on the previous post, the same symptoms for user cluster #7 are also present for users on cluster #9, so we're in the process of fixing it as well. Having 2 clusters to work on rather than 1 unfortunately means that we expect it to take approximately 6-8 hours for everything to be resolved. We do, however, know how the problems with each cluster started and it is not something which will cause any additional clusters to have these issues. We'll post here again either when the issue has been resolved, or if we have any significant developments to update you on.
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