Greetings from the floor. About nine or ten years ago I hurt my lower back helping a pregnant co-worker move large objects that I had no business trying to move. Yesterday morning I was thinking that it had been a long while since I'd seriously re-aggravated the injury. But the universe hates smugness, so of course I re-aggravated the injury, somehow, yesterday afternoon. Looks like today will be heat and ice, pills of some kind, maybe liquor, and inertness. Might as well write since I won't be good for much else. I'm on an airplane tomorrow, so my goal is complete recovery by then. That's a pretty modest goal, I think.

***

How to Survive Writing a Graphic Novel, an illustrated treatise in 13 panels by Grady Klein, all applicable to writing a regular old prose novel as well (via Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog).

I was hoping to rebound from yesterday's hypoglycemic kung fu class with a kick-ass class tonight, but we were doing rolls, and rolls are my absolute least favorite thing to do in martial arts. But since this is a new school, and a new start, I figured, hey, why not treat it as something new instead of something I already know I hate.

So, I'll say this: My rolls at the end of class were better than my rolls at the beginning of class. I'm calling that a success.

***



It's an old hoax, so maybe it's already been all over the Internet, but I'd never seen it 'til yesterday. I get so much sensuwunder buzz from this pic, I can't even tell you. (via National Geographic)

Bears in ill-fitting hats. An entire Flickr stream of them. (via Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog)

It's a jerboa, found in the Gobi Desert and caught on video for the first time in all its burrowing, kangaroo-hopping glory.



Meanwhile, I'm revising the last chapter of my book. In the first go-round (as well as the second and third go-rounds), I trashed the entire planet pretty badly. Readers have commented that a less apocalyptic trashing of the planet might be more satisfying. For me, having cut my SF-nal teeth on the Planet of the Apes movies (as well as the novelizations, and, especially, the action figures), post-apocalypse is pretty cozy territory. Grr. Argh. Contemplate.

Shadow government entities gang-rape a woman, imprison her in a shipping container without food or water, lose the medical evidence proving she was raped, and deny the victim her right to seek recourse in a court of law.

It's Halliburton, of course.

I want to sprinkle these on my breakfast cereal.



"These Solomon Island leaf frogs are among the few frog or amphibian species to skip the tadpole phase and emerge as mini-adults." (National Geographic)

Ben Boxer's Legend of Brunhild in comics format.

Paul Jessup Kincaid on the continuing vitality of the short story:

And Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror originally edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, now by Datlow with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, have both lasted well over 20 years, and both promise, year after year, more than 250,000 words of fiction. That’s a lot of short stories. A few years ago, when there were just (just?) four best of the year volumes to consider, I counted up the number of stories published between them, plus the stories listed in the several pages of "Honourable Mentions" that both Dozois and Datlow and Windling included. The total came to not far short of 1,000.

One thousand short stories published in just 12 months!

Somewhere recently, Ellen Datlow said that most (or maybe it was just many) short story writers have a career span of 4-7 years, because they tend either to disappear entirely or transition to novels. I could be misquoting her (sorry, Ellen!), but I think that was the gist of it. I know my short story production has rather drastically declined since I started focusing on novels about a year and a half ago, and I started publishing shorts in pro markets around 2001 or so, so I think I'm due to fade away now.

So, if you ever liked my short stories, I'd like to say to you good-bye now.

Or else, since I finished the first draft of the Norse novel this week, maybe I could spend the next couple of months trying to bang out a few short stories.

I think I'll do that.

I'm going to get started on that right now.

***

I think cryptozoologist Ivan Mackerle has crafted for himself a very interesting life, even if he's never found a cryptid.

Reports have surfaced of Amazonian cannibals there, he says. “Women walking naked through the jungle with spears.” In order to repopulate, Mackerle adds, “Sometimes they grab men from villages. … Then the men are ritually killed and eaten.”

A military officer from Jakarta has investigated the reports but failed to find any Amazons. It’s likely a myth, Mackerle says with a youthful snicker. “But it’s very good for the newspaper, a good story with all the sex and nudity.”

The Amazons are a pretext, anyway. There’s another reason Mackerle is going to Papua New Guinea: Unconfirmed reports of pterodactyls soaring through the jungle’s canopy. Their skin is fluorescent, they say; as the dinosaurs whisper through the air at night, they glow.

"This customer is continuing to abuse a game."

From an employee training video for Space Port, an 80's mall video arcade franchise, and gosh but it's unintentionally funny:





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKBtQ6t9hbw

(via Malls of America.)

Did you know that Canada has weird gravity?

That link above, if you haven't clicked it, is about how Canada's weird gravity is the result of glaciation. The story is full of references to real scientists doing real science, so it's probably legitimate.

I had no idea that Canada has weird gravity. I've spent a few days both in Toronto and Vancouver, and I'm a huge Rush fan, of course, as well as a Steve Nash fan (go Suns!), and I never knew that Canada has weird gravity.

And while I'm sending people to LiveScience.com, here's their list of the top 10 immortals. Peter Pan comes in at number ten. Connor MacLeod is number four. I disagree with some of their other choices. Especially their number one, who isn't actually even an immortal.

***

One denouement down, two to go. So, like, five or ten pages, at most. Writing's been slow going the last few days, but c'mon, five or ten pages by Sunday? It's first draft, so they don't even have to be good pages!

Ed and Steve rock "One Week" in Ed's bathroom:

Woke up, got to the coffee joint, wrote, went to kung fu, sweated and huffed, came home, went out for burgers and sweet potato fries, got a haircut, back to a different coffee joint for more writing, bopping my freshly shorn head to "Hump de Bump" by the Chili Peppers, maybe we'll rent "Children of Men" tonight, maybe we'll go to the comic book shop for Buffy, who knows how we'll roll.

( Cup/page pic below the cut )

Via Warren Ellis, who think it's "glorious," M John Harrison on worldbuilding:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

It's not that I'm a particular fan of worldbuilding per se, and it's not something I tend to focus on in my own little stories (sometimes to their detriment), but I don't think Harrison's mild rant against worldbuilding is particularly glorious.

If worldbuilding is dull, then so is character. So is theme. So is action. Anything that's done dully is dull. So, maybe Harrison's saying that worldbuilding cannot be done well. Which is, well, a weird thing to say. I like Moorcock's worldbuilding. I like Maureen McHugh's worldbuilding. I like China Mieville's worldbuilding. I bet if they engaged in dull worldbuilding, I wouldn't like their worldbuilding. But they don't, so I like their worldbuilding.

Harrison says that worldbuilding "literalises the urge to invent." Maybe it does, but I don't see how this is criticism. Is there something wrong with invention? Is character development bad because it literalizes the urge to saw open people's skulls and dip their brains out with an ice cream scoop?

Harrison says that worldbuilding is "the great clomping foot of nerdism." Again, maybe it is, but I don't have a problem with that. I was in marching band. I take kung fu lessons. And like Harrison, I, you know, write science fiction. I'm a nerd. Actually, I use the term "geek," but insisting that I'm a geek and not a nerd is the equivalent of saying I write speculative fiction and not scifi, which will do nothing to prevent the cool kids from laughing at me. Which is okay. They can laugh. I can take it. So telling me that worldbuilding is a form of "nerdism" doesn't help me understand what's wrong with worldbuilding.

I get that dull worldbuilding is dull. But if Harrison's saying all worldbuilding is dull, he's like people who say science fiction sucks because it offers only wooden, stereotyped characters, when it would be more accurate to say that sucky science fiction sucks.

So, if done well (I repeat, if done well), what's wrong with worldbuilding? I must be missing something. What am I missing?

At first I thought they'd given me the best mug in the joint today, but when I look back, Knott's Berry Farm was my least favorite of the Southern California amusement parks. The train robbery used to scare the shit out of me, and the fake '49-ers would get snippy with me for my lack of gold panning skills. It's like, buddy, I'm five years old, give me a break, maybe when I'm a grizzled old alkie like you I'll befriend a mule and get really good at this.

I was much more interested in the alligator farm across the street from Knott's. My grandmother kept pointing at the big gators, and I was sure one would leap up and chomp her arm off.



***

And while I'm feeling nostalgic, Malls of America has a nice post about Old Towne Mall, formerly of Torrance, California. It was a goofy place, really, styled like a turn-of-the-century Main Street, USA, but I loved it.

In the late 70's, a big Friday night for my family might involve a trek out to Old Towne, with dinner at the food court (pizza for me), a trip through the cheesy dark rides, some smash'em up in the bumper cars, and if I was really lucky, a foray into the comic book shop, the only one I knew of at the time. I remember spending birthday money on Warlord #1. At ten bucks, it was easily my biggest purchase to date. (Later I'd buy the Rankin-Bass illustrated version of the Hobbit for an astronomical $30. Fortunately, I had bookstore gift certificates.)

Fascinating article in this morning's Washington Post, for which the editors arranged to have famous violin virtuoso Joshua Bell play his Stradivarius before rush-hour commuters at a busy DC subway station. How many people would stop and listen? Would a big crowd gather? Would it grow out of control? How much money would they throw in Bell's violin case (his more traditional performances command about $1000 a minute)?

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

The article makes interesting observations about art, context, work, modern lifestyles, obscurity, beauty, and it's very nicely written to boot.

WaPo requires registration, but you might try this:

user name: fonkdiddly@fonkit.com
password: fonkyou

Or try BugMeNot to get another login.

***

Happy Easter. I'm eating pumpkin pancakes.

Tangent Online has posted a review of Fantasy: The Best of 2007 (this is the one Richard Horton edits for Prime Books, for those keeping track), which includes impressive works by Ben Rosenbaum and snurri (David Schwartz) and M. Rickert and Peter S. Beagle, among others, and my "The Osteomancer's Son" as well.

Amazon still says the book ships in one to two months, which I take to mean Prime hasn't actually released it yet, but I'll be keeping an eye out for it whenever I'm in a bookstore, because that's just how I bump.

***

If you like looking at really great photography, you should be checking out the_flea_king's (Jeremy Tolbert's) LJ everyday, everyday, everyday. Dude's got enviable talent. Check out his Flickr, too.

***

I've got a cold or allergies or some kind of airplane-induced sinus malfunction, and with the coffee joint being as empty as it is, my sneezes are sounding like an artillery battery. It's distracting me, and I'm going to blame my lack of writing productivity this morning on it. I was hoping to get to the zombies today.

I will do some contract work instead.

***

Really good sparring sessions last night, ranging from a new yellow belt who had a lot of energy and really kept me on my toes while giving me opportunity to practice a less-is-more strategy, to matches with another brown belt who's way better than me, and a black belt who could twist me into a very tight knot if he felt like it. But in both of the latter two cases, I managed to survive and get in some good shots. I'm learning to use more techniques from my forms instead of just the block-kick-punch all the time. It makes sparring a lot more challenging, but also way more interesting. Fun stuff.

***

( cup/page pic below the cut )

Got back from LA in time to catch part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and it was like some kind of Marvel Amalgamation offshoot, featuring Van Halen's Michael Anthony playing maracas with REM's Bill Berry, and Eddie Vedder and Michael Stipe trading off vocal leads with Sammy Hagar. I was only disappointed that Peter Buck didn't pull off some licks from "Cabo Wabo" and then maybe go into "Eruption." And then this morning I saw Geddy Lee in an ESPN commercial, and while trying to find out what that was all about, I learned about Geddy's cameo on Gilmore Girls, and isn't showbiz just crazy funny? I watched the clip twice and failed to spot Geddy both times, but you can't miss Sebastian Bach riffing off "Hollaback Girl."

***

( Yesterday's cup/page pic below the cut. )

The Venice Boardwalk has a freakshow again!

I mean, of course, it's been a freakshow for a long time, but it's been many a decade since it's had a freakshow. Well worth the $3 admission to duck in, check out the exhibits (shrunken heads, a chupacabra, two-headed raccoon, some sea monsters, one of which looked very much like the alien the Russian fishermen ate [pic below]), and chat with the proprietor. She said they're hoping to get a bigger space in which to feature some live performers, but I actually prefer my gaffs and curiosities locked up securely in glass cases, thank you.

I tried to sell them my dad, but no takers. So instead we kept walking the Boardwalk with my parents. Nice time. Mom seemed healthier than she's been in a long time. Dad bought three baseball caps for $9.95. He almost picked one with a cannabis leaf, which would have been awesome, but then he went in a different direction and I was spared the shame of being caught getting a cheap laugh at my visually impaired father's expense.

I think my next novel project is going to be my weird beach YA, and visiting a seaside freakshow just amped up my enthusiasm for it even more.



***

megmccarron had recommended Venice Grind as a comfortable Westside coffee joint with free WiFi where one might get some writing done. Worked out nicely.

I'm sure one of the chief benefits of writing for a science website is occasionally you get to write headlines like this:

Gorillas Gave Humans 'The Crabs'

***

Heading out of town this afternoon to celebrate my friend Todd's big 40. I've known Todd longer than anybody outside my immediate family. Most of the Rush concerts I have attended were with Todd. I was best man at his wedding and logged many thousands of miles with him in his Toyota Tercel, cruising the streets of LA because we didn't have girlfriends and nobody invited us to the cool parties. He was there when I was almost run over by Run-D.M.C's Jam-Master Jay. We used to drink tequila shots with Tabasco sauce and dine on pizza pups at Fedco (not at the same time). We once had a dirt clod fight and I accidentally brained him with a rock. I still remember the thock sound it made when it impacted his skull. Ah, good times. :-)

***

One of the tricks I've used in the novel is that, when I'm stuck, I bring in this one pair of characters who know everything, whose dialog is easy to write, and who always vex my protagonist. I brought them in again, and now they're just sitting there, staring at me.

Unreliable little bastards. Maybe I kill them now.