Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

I listen to a lot of podcasts at work and at home. Some are fiction, some are nonfiction. Here are a few of the ones I've enjoyed recently.

Radiolab's Where Am I? - Fascinating interviews remixed with science studies and experiments about how our bodies know what belongs to them, and how they get confused, and out-of-body experiences. Really cool and interesting stuff here. MP3.

TED's Erin McKean redefines the dictionary - A very funny lecture sure to be enjoyed by word geeks. gunn, I'm looking at you. MP3.

Catherynne M. Valente's Wine is a Story - An experimental reading/song/music/poem remix/trailer of her short story, "Wine is a Story." Follow that first link to read about what she's trying to do. It's an interesting approach to story promotion for writers. MP3.

07/18/2008 - Friday, 1/2 work at NgithOwl

"Tree of Life" Writing Log

8,887 / 80,000 (11.1%)

Words: 557
Total words: 8,887
Overused word: color (I am starting to ignore 'tunnel', 'passage' etc.)
Gratuitous word: deathtrap
Type of scene: Looking for the seamy underbelly (or crust, as it were).
Challenge(s): Getting there fast without making the pacing seem rushed.
Which gambling hell is it anyways?

He stared at the small cavern on the other side of them. The pounded-flat scrap metal coating the walls shone brilliantly in the light of the miniature red and white lanterns affixed to every surface. A girl glided by holding two syringes strapped to a tray. Her bare breasts swayed buoyantly in zero-g. A bartender in a gold cling-suit juggled bottles of alcohol as he rotated in mid-air above his bar, using arms and legs to bring the bottles back into rotation. The clatter that Leander had heard came from a spinning red-and-black roulette wheel. Forestholmers didn't usually gamble, but he recognized the equipment from his tours of duty on other worlds. Men and women in gold cling-suits floated above tables, letting cards hang in motionless streams below them.

Notes: Fish keep popping up in this story. It's very strange. They're being all symbolic 'n shit.
Other writingy stuff:
* penthius freewriting, a high-potential food tasting *of* aliens.
* posted writing log


07/19/2008 - Saturday, no work
* Redmarked chapter 2 of Vicesteed and started making editing changes. Had idea for how to make it chewier and leave unresolved some subplot/serious issues for readers to continue chewing on after they read the book (Thanks, 4th Street!). It will require adding one chapter and working in a lot of side-notes, but I think it'll be worth it. At least, it will make the thinky portion of the book more interesting. (Vicesteed has action, romance, dark, mystery, and thinky as its components, as I see it.)
* Phil & I came up with list of ten things to always be considered when writing science fiction, with one bonus. He conceded gender and sexual mores, and I stomped on energy source. He also has said I shouldn't publish this online; instead, I'm supposed to save it for when I'm a multi-book author and am giving a presentation. Really, he supports my writing for the same reason he buys lottery tickets.

• 15:15 At about 2PM, my brain went, "Thunk. I'm done. Home now." So I called my ride and packed my bags. No closing ceremonies for me, & that's OK.
• 21:55 Windows Media player is now saying it can't sync wma files to my Sansa e260. I have the permissions; it should work! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
• 06:52 Have had interesting idea for writing/mixed media/photography creations called "Building Rough Draft: XYZ". Not sure where I'll find time.
• 07:50 5 min. before I had to be out the door, I called work to verify which place I'd be at, and had to change from shorts to business clothing.
• 07:51 Dt art gallery now has elephant-themed displays. Republican convention influence much?
• 09:26 Mark Bittman's impressively simple and comprehensive 101 picnic dishes: (NYT) tinyurl.com/5j2sue
• 09:37 Was reading "God's Demon" on the bus, sitting next to someone reading a bible study guide. Very noticeable title page, too. Awkward!
• 10:23 I am saddened to report that Burger King's "Ketchup & Fries Flavored Potato Snacks" do not, in fact, taste at all like ketchup & fries.
• 11:20 Testing, testing
• 11:22 Excellent. I can now Gtalk IM updates to Twitter through ping.fm.
• 13:16 Got my first "preview" Christmas catalog in the mail. ::checks calendar:: Er....

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Light snow is useful, because one can look out the window and see whether or not the postman has come without having to go outside. Blizzarding, as it was a minute ago, makes this less useful.

Idea for realistic head-trauma snowman: make snowman, cover head with birdseed, let birds do their worst, and go out the next day to apply realistic touches with red food coloring.

Context
deadcities_icon has been recently posting a fair amount about the structure of current reviews/literary criticisms, mostly in a SF/F context. He's now tentatively planning on setting up and curating a website for such things. He posted (http://deadcities-icon.livejournal.com/100653.html) asking whether or not others would be interested in such a thing. I responded and promptly went off on a tangent whose results I actually find somewhat interesting.

Yes, I love me some qualifiers. Anyways....

What are my needs for a review?

It must not ruin the book for me, should I choose to read it. Among other, more intangible notions, that means no spoilers. It also implies a certain level of required non-specificity.

It must provide insight into where the plot, characters, setting, and writing level/style (more than merely "good" or "bad") are situated in comparison to standard literary/sf tropes and other books/authors. Comparing the style in which The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is written to A.S. Byatt's early work [that's what I've thought of it so far, among other things that I will write up eventually] is much more useful than merely calling it "elaborate and slightly old-fashioned."

It must entertain, and it must be concise. In other words, well-written.

It does not need to even mention whether the reviewer found the publication in question to be enjoyable or not. That's not required, though it's not a disqualification either.

And it gets bonus points for a pretty picture, a summary of the first 1/4 to 1/3 of the plot, and a fair-use excerpt from the beginning with a link to a longer excerpt if available elsewhere online. Because I am fickle and flighty, like most folk browsing on the internet.

Keys: information indexing, tag clouds, and objective categorization of two of the most subjective things around--taste and style. Two sides of the same coin.

Why do I care? At all?

I'm very interested in the propagation and categorization of useful information. The marketplace of ideas and experiences. Cross-linking. To me, these are the things that good reviews/literary criticisms concern themselves with.

It's about the shiny, and the useful, and the relevant.

I also read a fair number of book reviews and summaries. I read widely and voraciously. ...and one of the things I've been planning on doing is writing up more book/movie/restaurant/experience reviews. Signal-to-noise ratio, and all that jazz.

Hmm. Someday, I'll find a way to use that last line as a title.

Waking up at three a.m. (let it be noted: I am a sound sleeper) because of an itchy sole is no fun. I daresay itchy souls are even less fun, but while my soul is relatively comfortable, my sole is not. So I took myself to the doctor today and discovered that I have a UV-reactive patch of skin on the ball of my foot. This means no barefoot activities for me for a week, to prevent others from also gaining UV-reactivity. This means no martial arts for a week. Graaaagh!

On the plus side, I was carrying a gravestone around downtown Minneapolis for about half an hour. I found this highly amusing. It is now firmly anchored in front of my house, but I made an interesting discovery while at the post office mailing off submissions: postage for a prop gravestone? relatively cheap. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Meanwhile, Fear The Power Of My Glowing Foot!

I've hidden a fish in my desk chair. It was fate. It was meant to be. My chair is now magic.

No, it's not a real fish. Silly. That would smell rather unpleasant.



I have a strong urge to rush about hiding shiny, strange, or otherwise Wonder-full objects. Not just in my house.


I still have half a bag of sparkly confetti left over from the booby-trapped Christmas cards. And a large bag filled with yo-yos. My bag of brass whistles is gone, but I have nearly a gross of mardi gras beads. Not to mention to dismembered doll parts that I've been collecting.

Guess it comes with being a writer. It only takes a line or two to make me twitch like a sensitized dope-sniffing dog. That could be part of something interesting....

One advantage of the larger operations is that they allow specialization, with simple assembly lines like those that Henry Ford brought to the automobile industry. The larger factories have some painters specializing in trees, others in skies, others in flowers and so forth, an approach that not only improves "quality" but also increases output and reduces costs

Original source: Own Original Chinese Copies of Real Western Art! - NYT. Linked from: BoingBoing.