Reading comprehension, style and emphasis, and what the reader wants

I've been going back and forth with my editor on Gupta, and while we agree on what the point of the story is and who the characters are, the way in which things are expressed are our primary points of contention. Most of the grammatical and punctuation stuff has been fixed (Ice Cube likes to say, Don't you fuck with my commas; I feel very much the same way, but in this case, yield to experience).

My goal has never been, and hopefully never will be, to write a book or story, or novella, or even essay or something like that, which every single person reading it understands it from start to finish, that all the motivations are clear, all the meanings are apparent, there are no unexplained acts, and there is no skepticism (whether regarding the plot itself, plausibility of characters, certain acts or beliefs, conjectures, and the like).

My goal, since I decided I could write, was to write what I found was most valuable to me. I don't write, and never intended, to write to make money. If we go by Toby's numbers, even if I were to push out a novel this year, I'd still be working full time for this year and the next year, and if my publisher (let's say I get lucky and Tor picks me up) buys my next book, I'll still be working full time and writing full time (I can put down 5,000 words in a full work day, but I have to be really composed and have the ideas sketched out beforehand. Usually, it's far less, like 500-1,250 words a day). So, something like fifty or sixty hours a week at work, followed by another twenty writing, and then the overhead of writing, such as going back-and-forth between myself and an editor or agent or indeed Tor. Tack on another 2-3 hours per week (dividing the monthly aggregate). So I've spent something between 75-80 hours in a week to pick up about a $2/hr raise the first year, maybe a $4/hr raise the next year, and then, maybe, possibly, something like a $20/hr raise the following year if Tor picks up three books.

But for those three years, I've made $48,000 for 3,000 hours or so of work – or about $16/hr. Take taxes out of that, and we're not even talking about enough money to cover my car/motorcycle insurance.

So, I write what I like, and if I run it by somebody and it strikes them the way Banks' Against a Dark Background or Stross' Accelerando (to say nothing of lots of short fiction) struck me, that's a win. But consider how hard it is for most people to really enjoy Accelerando, and if you've read Against a Dark Background, it's a book that, well, I know very few people who would actually, really, understand and appreciate it for what it is.

What I write involves a lot of futility and death, horrible circumstances, and a future so dystopian compared to my contemporaries that "dystopian" isn't really apt. It's sort of, well, describing the Reynolds Revelation Space books, only humanity never wins, the plague conquers everything, and you're lucky if you ever see another person. The idea is, you read the story or book, and you're reading it because it's confusing and deliberately ambiguous. If you put it down for that reason, you're not my readerbase.

If you read a sentence and say, wait, that doesn't make sense, what is he getting at here? You don't really comprehend what's going on because it's (to use my earlier phrase) "choppy and cross-cut" or "irredeemable," and the "reading comprehension" meter goes to about zero. But still, you'll continue, and you realize, my goodness, this is unpleasant, but let's see where he's going with it, afterwards you might be finished, and you might have sick feeling in your stomach. You may put the story or digest down and kind of push it out in front of you and say, "Wow, that kind of sucks..."

That's precisely the point. Don't read anything I write if you're looking for the Foundation series, or Ringworld. I don't really believe in happy endings or redemption, but I do believe that you can convey a message in a story that "hurts the feelings" of the reader, but still conveys that message to the reader, and that is important to the reader. Because it's always been important to me.

Somebody wrote The Wasp Factory, zillions of people read it, a bunch put it down, a huge majority probably said, "oh, ew," and a small portion of the people who finished still said, "oh, ew," but were also stunned. It didn't make sense. It wasn't clear what was going on. That was the whole point. You read because you don't know what's going on, but the pieces that don't quite fit together are so compelling individually that you read. And even if, when you put it down, you still don't understand, at least to me, that's time well spent.

status

I have been spending many, many hours editing with, uh, an editor. Gupta at the moment, although I suppose the title will change. I will be very unavailable as I reconfigure my home network after it gets pushed out to publish. Tissue will be available from Amazon in November. I'll post a link(s) then. I also have four (five?) other short stories in need of publishing, following which SFWA membership, and then it's probably novel/novella time.

Nameless editor, if you read this, thank you. While I am awake at 0300 on a Saturday, I am being productive.

Tense inconsistencies

So you're writing in first person voice.

I headed up the stairs, and reached for a rusty doorknob on a rotten door with peeling paint that had probably been green one day. In. I look around, and I see, she's there, she's got a gun, and really, she wants something other than money. I realized, then, she probably just wanted me killed.

What have we got here? We have present-tense when the narrator walks into the room, describing the situation. This is to smack the reader and say, hey, this is happening! It's not a tense inconsistency. The rest of it could be past-tense as we often do (heck, almost always do) in a first-person voice, but why is switching to the first person for emphasis tense inconsistency?

Good news, though, working with editor. Maybe she'll explain it to me. Gupta is going to see light. Pwomise.

Death wishes

I got so angry today, angry at myself, angry at the world, angry at life, and angry at circumstance that I drove home aggressively, impolitely, most certainly illegally, threw down my keys and wallet when I got home, and went straight for the Bourbon before killing her. A character I love, who I thought about for weeks before sketching her out and writing her story. A character who had potential to live on in subsequent stories, who had the personality required to keep me interested, with charisma, determination, beauty, and great strength.

And I killed her. I took a story I had written and shelved, and I ripped its guts out mercilessly. I took any bit of goodness from that story and I replaced it with fear and uncertainty. I turned a loving mother into a destructive, uncaring killer.

She died. She died for nothing, arbitrarily, horribly, cruelly, and solely to circumstance. This is the part of the script where the character says, "no, not like this!" She was lovely. I don't think I can ever re-read the old story again. Anger lingers; life is fleeting, and fickle.

I needed to destroy something beautiful, and maybe something adult in me told me that doing it to myself on the motorcycle was not the right thing to do. Sitting here with the bourbon, I wonder if I'd rather have her back and me out on the bike with a death wish and a Connecticut-sized chip on my shoulder.

Productivity, achieved, sunlight consumed, pub visited.

short: yup, kitchen sync.

We took the Ninja out on Sunday. It was beautiful out. We had a little trouble getting it to idle, but the gas in it was maybe six or so weeks old, and it's got this finicky choke (I know how to operate a choke from the 70's Datsuns, but this is a 250cc, not 2200cc...), which of course works opposite the throttle. What this means is, if you get the choke to the point where the bike idles at 2000rpm, then you crack the throttle, you lean it out, and it stalls. It was 72° or so out, so not cold as in Virginia-in-November cold, so I can't imagine taking it out in that weather (even though I had planned to), as it'd just be a nightmare to get it warm enough. To get an idea of how warm we had to get the bike, we had to get the needle about half-way up the guage, rather than past the second "line," which is usually where cars become happy.

Anyway, it could have been bad gas (we put two gallons of 87 in it – $6, love it!), a cold bike, or carbs that need a little help. We'll find out by probably taking the bike out tonight.

It really seems the bike is happiest right around 7,000 rpm, nice and hot, and, I guess, fourth gear. At least on the street. Fourth gear on the Ninja, of course, is way different than fourth in the STI (7,000rpm in fourth in the STI is in "seriously illegal" territory). It's so much more intuitive to turn and lean the bike out on the street than it was in the course we took at Apex. At Apex, there just wasn't enough room to lean the bike, even on their eight-foot-delineated slalom. I asked if I was leaning the bike too far at the time (I was riding a DR250) and the instructor replied "no. No way." It didn't really feel stable, but then I couldn't have been doing more than twenty, and it felt like it was going to low-side any second.

But watching Sandy tear ass around a parking lot (I have to admit I'm quite a bit more aggressive on the throttle, but she did get it moving), you lean a lot more than it feels. We're not dragging knees or even pegs, but the pavement on the lot felt a little iffy (it had some cracks in it, some loose gravel, etc., and this is the first time we've been out on the street), and there was no need to push it, so we didn't. When she handed over the keys, she saw me turning around light poles and the like, and realized, yeah, you really do lean a lot if you're turning at thirty or forty. A lot more than it feels like, because as anyone will tell you, once you get those wheels moving like that, it's stable as a rock.

We practiced all our fast/low speed stuff in a big, unoccupied parking lot, both to check the bike and ourselves out. We both felt confident, and the bike demonstrated more than adequate brakes (I found myself mostly using the rear lightly and easing onto the front – the front doesn't apply gradually, it's "a little" followed very quickly by "dive"), and then took her out on the road.

Lots of fun. Lots of lots of lots of fun. So much fun, in fact, that chasing Sandy around the parking lot in the Subaru, I realized she could very much out turn me, definitely out-brake me, and the acceleration was about a wash (the last of which we knew). But after having the bike out for maybe thirty or forty minutes, I got back in the Subaru and looking at turns, my shoulders started to pull in the direction of the turn, and I really, really, wanted to lean. And, well, that doesn't work well in the car.

It was beautiful weather. I got a little sunburned. We had to get up to thirty or so before the wind took the heat off us (I have black leathers and helmet), and after this we bumped into some "family" friends, purely by chance, commiserated, and then headed to the pub (a self-proclaimed "dublin chipper," but not exactly auténtico) for Guinness, chips, and cod. After which we went shopping (with the bad knee, it's been really hard to do things like shopping), and stocked up on the staples – rice, bok choi, tofu, pocari sweat, microwave noodles, and other ingredients we were low on – which we haven't done in probably two months.

After this wonderful morning of activity, we had guts full of fried food, a trunk full of groceries, and simply headed home. Sandy undertook the refrigerator jihad as the new-and-fresh replaced the old-and-oh-my-god-what-is-that, and I sat, doing my knee exercises and copyediting my "unsellable" story, Fair Trade.

Speaking of which, it may well be sellable, and I like it a lot. It's social commentary, a rich story, and the characters and environment are palpable enough you can really smell the sweat and feel the humidity when you read it. And I've retained an editor. So maybe she'll be able to square it up enough that I can get Gupta finally published, Arizona finally published, and I'll scour both Ralan (thanks, Toby) and Duotrope for a market for Fair Trade. Hopefully nobody at DSS/OPM will read Trade and consider it anti-American sentiments; the elements are there, but it's fiction, and frankly is more a commentary on the liberalist movement than a criticism of the US government.

But that's enough for now. Cheers, friends, I feel a lot better. Say hello, or I may just seek you out and harass you with greetings.

Productive? Or just writer's masturbation?

I think I just wrote a story nobody will want to read or publish. I foresee no market for it; I see few people who would agree with the statement it makes; and in general there are no dashing heroes and cackling Bavmorda-esque villains. Unless you consider American triumphalism, exceptionalism, and hegemony "villains," in some vast global sub-war-conflict (not submarines, silly).

Toby says that as writers, people have to, you know, write. And it takes a lot of writing before one hones the craft into something others want to read. So perhaps I have written something I'd like to say, but nobody would care to read. And it sits in my own personal "slush" pile, an exercise completed solely intended to exercise the part of my brain that writes. Physical therapy for the cerebellum, if you will.

I didn't really have anything else to do on a Saturday, I suppose. It's raining and the Ninja is chained up in the garage. Maybe tomorrow I'll do something more productive, like get out on the bike.

edit: and I haven't written 5,000 words in a sitting since I spent three days in a San Diego hospital while my mother recovered from surgery (a couple years ago). I wonder what this means for the quality of the story, or my attachment to it.

Corollary to "1958"

short: navel gazing and commentary (really, rebuttals) on a couple of soliloquies on race and gender in fiction.

[ there will be no menion nor pictures of Sarah Palin in this post ]

I am deeply troubled by an analysis of my own writing after reading a post At Aaru Tuesday, and its followup with brief commentary from China Miéville. Two of the stories that I am most happy with, one accepted for publication, and the other quite close (two rejections; however, both editors said it was engrossing, "had brilliant moments," but ultimately either "needed polish" or "wasn't right for [her publication]").

Both stories portray a mostly less than 1:1 ratio of men to women. In one story, the only woman is in fact a prostitute, working for an organised prostitution business, and the other concerns not only a prostitute (who plays a mostly minor role, but exposes a very big piece of the story and is as such important), but a fretting mother.

Which means I fail the "1958" test, and badly. I have wondered myself, not a few times, why my own writing includes prostitutes as prominent female characters, and can't come up with any good reason other than some deep-seated psychological issue with women (which I guess I haven't figured out yet).

 

Vin Diesel, both biracial and cast in a movie with a strong female character.

I came across this while reading Toby's analysis of the "problem," and he seems to make no judgement on the commentary from, other than to agree with it, elaborate on the exact nature of diversity in science fiction, and to say, in closing,

To find currently published writers of color, keep up with the Carl Brandon society. The awards list mentions how hard it was to find works, and if you know the markets, you’ll see a lot of them were combed from *outside* our field.

There are a number of ways we can look at this, of course. First, Charlie Stross is a good example of an author who portrays women as well-developed characters, as non-mommy/prostitutes, and who figure prominently in his books. He also, in Accelerando, portrays a devout muslim and delves deeply into what that actually means for the character (so deeply, in fact, that in at least one place, it's quite disturbing). At the same time, he holds up Sterling's Schismatrix as one of his favorite works, and the root of Reynolds' entire career (well, nearly). Schismatrix is an older work, so I think we can say it's fair for it to be a little less enlightened, and it is written by a much younger Sterling than we see today, but it really doesn't get enough of a pass to be exempt from the "1958 test."

Charlie is, at the moment, something of a darling in the SF/F community, speaks often on panels, and so on, so I think he makes a good argument that progress is being made. Of course CJ Cherryh has been writing prominent female figures (and in fact, often weaker male characters) her entire career, spanning many dozens of books (Cyteen being a phenomenal example).

There are a number of other arguments which seem to question, if not invalidate the test itself.

First, as Banks has been very clear about in his Culture books, both sexuality and gender become much more ambiguous "in the future," where most speculative (there's that word again) fiction authors place their characters. Personally, I see this as inevitable. Gender is near irrelevant as things like the environment become more prominent factors (oxygen breathers living in a primarily vacuum universe; war, such as Haldeman's Forever War). Gender is, even today, a hindrance to both sexuality and progress as we see women indeed oppressed throughout the world, and the boundaries of sexuality being pushed as far as they can go (as in the case of the Marquis de Sade, or warning, nsfw: Buck Angel). I see this trend only increasing. If we put fiction a hundred years in the future, how much further will sexuality have changed? How much will gender actually matter?

 

Reiko Ayelsworth, both biracial and portrayed as (usually) a strong character on 24.

One interesting, contrasting, scenario is Stephen Baxter's enclaves of feminity in the Coalescent, Exultant, and Transcendant books (sort of, kind of, part of the Xeelee Sequence). Sterling's is of course the Geisha "guild," which is organised prostitution whose currency is hours of "treatment." Cherryh paints a similar situation in the Chanur books, where a matrilineal/matriarchal society are the only space-faring members of a species because males are, well, testy and untrustworthy.

I can't describe either the "gender doesn't matter" or "gender is a serious matter" as being plausible because as such fiction is indeed speculative, we'll only know when we "get there." Discussions of whether this is okay or representative or not in the future are thus kind of moot before they've begun (unless you're talking about contemporary or historical fiction, in which case, we're not discussing speculative fiction anymore, which was the whole concern to begin with).

There's another point that, of all people, my mother brought up with me after reading early drafts of Limits, which will probably not ever be published, "why did you write the main character as a woman?" The explanation was, I had been inspired by women I found to be incredible people in my "real" life. As an engineer, especially as a programmer or systems administrator, there are very few women around, and the ones that are there, clawed their way in, and are very, very sharp. Val (from my time at that ISP in Reston) will probably not ever see this, but she's an example of a woman who is comfortable in a largely male organisation, can hold her own, and in fact put ornery men in their place, quite effectively. I have met perhaps a dozen others. They inspired me, and the woman I wrote as my character was an amalgam of these very strong women – but I would stress I saw them as strong people, not as strong women – and I tried my very hardest to avoid what my mother referred to as the typical problem of men who write women: "they tend to drool a little." I went even further, describing the woman, and who I felt she was as a person, and ran drafts of scenes with her in it through women I know and respect (hi, Cheryl). I tried very hard to place a woman in the forefront of this story to expose the weakness of men in the trade, the strength of women in general, and a character who was different from the typical Super-male we see in most male-written fiction.

Which brings me to another, I feel important, point. As a man, it's very hard for me to write a believable woman. If I write a main character as a man, and have a complementary woman, but both characters have the same motivations and reactions to conflict, have I not entirely removed the issues of sex and gender, thus not addressing either? I feel writing as such should also fail this "1958" test, although it is not mentioned in the post outlining the test itself. I don't know how women feel about certain – most – things. I don't know how a woman would react to a gun pointed at her head, whereas I know exactly how I would react, and when I write a male character, I can extrapolate from that based upon the character sketch I have (always) written beforehand. I could go as far as to say that if I tried to maintain a 1:1 or better ratio of men to women in my writing that I would be doing women a disservice by portraying them in ways they would find implausible, or indeed I may drool a little bit (yes, if you write a description of a woman, especially as viewed through male eyes, you must describe breasts and other secondary sex characteristics), and women find this as bothersome in fiction as they find it in life.

Brandon Lee, biracial and cast prominently and as a strong character.

An unworkable solution to the above problem is to co-write books with women. I can't ask a woman to write my women characters because it is so hard to get everything put together in a novel (or short story) that adding an additional author, at least in my eyes, would make the whole process interminably tedious and difficult. Even though it may succeed as accurately portraying female characters, it might fail to feel "cohesive" and be described by readers as "choppy" or "poorly sequenced," or "inconsistently voiced," all of which are fair complaints. Gentry Lee and Arthur C. Clarke wrote quite a few women characters in their Rama books, and in each acknowledged the active participation of Lee's wife in "reviewing" and "commenting" on these women characters, yet they failed to be much different at all from the male characters, and in fact, the primary (woman) character is obsessed with her husband through much of the second and third books of the series, which, again, fails the 1958 test, despite clear "female intervention" in the writing of the book. This, to me, hints that perhaps there is some merit to the notion that women do indeed spend a lot of time thinking about men, making babies, and so on. But, as I said above, I wouldn't know.

The last argument, as I ran my concerns by my wife, may be the most to-the-point and salient. When I grew up, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy (back then, it was Asimov and Piers Anthony, largely, and as I grew older I started to delve into the works of Anne Rice and Poe), whereas she read a lot of historical fiction, romance, contemporary fiction, some fantasy, and Anne Rice as well (I am not sure why everybody seems to have read at least a couple Rice books). Her comment was that in quite a few of the books she had read, that in almost every case, the male characters were written as weak, or were indeed prostitutes, and provided a contrast to the women characters which made them indeed stronger, having better motivations and actions (generally un-doing or preventing the things that men had done to fuck up the story). Anne Rice is particuarly "guilty" of this (although I feel the word guilty is unfair) – again not considering the Roquelaire/Beauty books.

 

"Fergie," both biracial and portrayed as a gender role model (as well as sex object) and successful woman.

I'll address Toby's last point very quickly, as I think while it's valid today, it loses its validity in its entirety in much of fiction whether it be fantasy, historical fiction, or future-fiction. Demographics of race diminish substantially as people mix. While he correctly complains and explains about the portrayal of race and the attitudes towards race in fiction, he entirely misses the point that as time progresses, the world becomes a smaller place, and we lose race as an identity entirely unless it is fiercely protected – and this happens, often with great loss of life, but not nearly as often as its opposite – by intermixing of people. It is inevitable that humanity will become space-faring. Whether we send men (and, yes, women) to Mars or Luna (or Callisto or Enceladus), or FTL shows up and we gallivant around the universe, the makeup of such crews will at early stages include people of different races, necessarily. We have had Japanese, Russian, Israeli, American, and other nationalities and races in space already (NASA, ESA, and JAXA have all declined, probably correctly, to comment on "sex in space"). As time progresses, and as men and women spend time in tight areas, sex happens, and race diminishes.

I am caucasian. My wife, however, is Chinese. Our children, should they ever happen, will not be anything like the first example of this "hybrid." We see this all over the world, from my friend Ryan Ozawa in Hawaii (perhaps the greatest example I know of), to places like San Diego where primarily Caucasian sailors travel the world (San Diego is/was a huge Navy town) and bring home asian wives (forming both strong Filipino communities and breaking down the barriers between the races). This trend will continue as people breed, and race will disappear. Toby, you are Caribbean, to use your term, but I see your vision of the future,

But the genre I work in is something different, it’s the imagination of humanity, its daydreams, its nightmares, its pleasant fantasies, it’s hopes and its inventions. It’s not like the other literatures. And I want people like me to look into the imagination of humanity and see people like himself looking back at him. I may not be perfect, but I am excited that it is something that I’ve been managing to publish and gain a readership for.

wholly unlikely. You may see in science fiction people who look back at days when we stood on this tiny lump of rock eight light minutes from an insignificant star in an insignificant corner of an insignificant galaxy, and wonder about how we could have thought that somebody who was born on one island (let's say, for example, Grenada) or another (how about Ireland or Pitcairn) was somehow different from the other. Asimov goes as far as to describe in the far-flung future of his Foundation books that Earth itself is forgotten, and humanity spans a great light cone, as humanity, not enclaves of race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

But that's my opinion, and to use your term, which I like, I want people like me to look into the imagination of humanity and see humanity looking back at me, not enclaves of ethnicities and genders isolating themselves from one another, trying to retain boundaries that, even today, are close to meaningless. Toby, you and I have so much more in common with eachother, or even this Angry Black Woman (whom I do not know) than we do with CJ Cherryh's Kif or your average butterfly that I cannot imagine you see a future in which humanity is not "humanity" as such but rather "different groups of humanity."

Sorry. I don't buy it. (although I will admit to feeling a twinge of guilt)

Writing outside your element

short: I gripe about pre-writing niggling issues.

One of the hardest things I've had to do as a writer is write outside of where I live and what I do. While I wasn't a big fan of Stephen Hunter's The Second Saladin (Salahedin, if you prefer), he managed to write a believable Kurd and have a believable sort of mindset and cultural background for the character. The same is true of Ken Follett's Lie Down With Lions, it was easy to become entirely engrossed in the Panshjir valley. Ahmad Shah Massoud, while he did not play a big part in the story, was also entirely believable.

And perhaps the best example comes unsurprisingly from Richard K. Morgan. Black Man, or Thirteen in US markets, portrayed his typical "Kovacs-style" male, and his typical female characters, but he also described South America beautifully. He knew that in areas, you weren't going to get along with just Spanish, that you needed Quecha, and that you were going to contend with age-old Incan/Mayan/Azteca biases. Furthermore, he knew the geography and weather.

For me, this is one of the most difficult parts of writing anything, whether it's a short story or a book. The easy example is writing a believable Portland and a believable Barbados or Kwajalein. I spent hours in Google Earth, looking at the terrain, doing fly-throughs from low angles of attack to see what the terrain looked like, and to find where people actually lived, and what their level of urbanisation/gentrification is. Furthermore, you can find from their lat/lon coordinates and general weather reports what the weather is like to be at a certain time of the year. You can find their languages from the iKipedia, as well as the various cultural conflicts (which every area has, from Los Angeles to Bogota). But it's hard to find more subtle things like plausible names. Follett had it easy because in general, the book was about three American characters. But you can't write a book about the middle east and have everyone named Mohammad or Ahmad or Abdul. Just as my last name is fairly uncommon, it's still something that's plausible for its cultural reference. It also happens to not be especially cliché.

So how do you accomplish this? Research. Where do you do the research? That one's tough, too. You can read someone else's work on the subject. You can also read history of the area. You can read almanac and encyclopedic articles on the people/area you're focusing on. But this is a long, time consuming process, and can in fact take longer than the actual writing of the work. I know at least a couple authors who have done nine months of research to write a book that took perhaps six weeks to outline and make a rough draft of, and six months to get ready to print.

This whole process of writing is so misunderstood by the (reading) public, and by new authors, and I dare say even writing, published authors. This is the point where you get complaints about "wooden," "cardboard," and "thin" or underdeveloped characters. Sure, it was a story, and you had all the requisite elements (sans character development...), but it necessarily fails to be engrossing because the environment isn't enough to engage the reader.

And I want to state again, because you may have missed it above: geography is a character in any work. Whether it's the inside of a building or a mountain (e.g., Lovecraft, Poe), or a planet and/or space environment (your average space opera, but notably Cherryh and Reynolds), if the geography (I suppose I should be using the word "setting" here) does not play a role in the story, to me, it's near worthless. (conversely, one can say if it plays too large a part in the story, as it does in Robert Reed's Marrow, it can become quite tedious)

Anyhow, I rant, or perhaps explain, this situation today as I endeavour to write a story in an area I know little about, and I did not invent myself. Start with the research, even though I have the characters and the story in my head; I can't just write about Billy Bob the Basque sheep farmer.

...and nobody was surprised

Happy to have only the TV we want to watch on the AppleTV, as opposed to having to wait for it on Cable or to Tivo or DVR or whatever it, I've been combing through the selection of television on the iTunes store to realise that, well, most of television is just utter shit. And now that I can conveniently download it with my Apple TV or with my Mac, it doesn't mean there's going to be any content worth downloading. It just means I'll be able to get at that crap easily.

Fuck. There are a lot of bad books out there, too, but the really good books are better than the best of television shows and most movies (Aronofsky being particularly good), and there are so damn many of them. Why aren't there more "gem" television shows? What is it, in particular, that causes television to be full of complete crap?

Pornography, Erotica, Speculative Fiction, and heads in asses.

short: this is long. really long. don't bother. but there's sex. and gore. so, you may be interested. (this was written before Tissue was accepted for publication)

I am taking a break from writing the TDMA module (which, as I keep saying, is really close to being done now) to talk about something that should keep some of you far, far away from this "piece," whether it is because you are at work or you are offended by the subject of pornography, erotica, taboo, and where their lines begin and end, what their ultimate goals are, and, more importantly, where and how it affects fiction.

I do this because I haven't been able to get it out of my head for days. I wrote a story I like a lot, Tissue, that had a whole lot of traditional nipple-grabbing and face-sucking sex in it, but I felt very clear that it was not a story about sex, or whose primary purpose was erotica (I'll get right to the erotica, I promise.). Furthermore, I didn't feel it was pornography, and that frankly it was hard science fiction, definitely noir, and had, perhaps, enough "horror" in it for it to actually be submitted (I use Duotrope – thanks JM – to find homes for stories, which classes publishers as SF/F, Horror, or their other genre; there are very few that are described as being multi-genre) to a horror digest.

So if you're squeamish about porn, it kind of gets slippery here, and, again, you may want to stop. I've told google that I do not consider this to be kids material, and since I think my top keyword search is "futanari," the chances are pretty good they understand that.

My Mac is equipped with a dictionary. I love it. I want it attached to a big old "dictionary" hotkey at the corner of my keyboard because I use it so much (primarily because my vocabulary is bigger than MS Word's, and secondarily because it gives me a little insight into a given words etymology – if I'm lucky), but they'll never do this for me. Fie! Fie on Apple! My single piddly feature won't be included in their next computer! Wait for that rant, folks. It's coming. (Apple claims this is the "New Oxford American Dictionary" – and thesaurus, which I'm not much into. It also claims to source Apple's dictionary, which may be /usr/share/dict/words or maybe something even more sinister. But this should establish where all this is coming from. At no point in this document will I reference either wikipedia or wiktionary.)


But I seriously digress. Erotica is the simplest topic to discuss here, as its definition is the simplest:

literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire.

 Well, okay, then. This places the onus on the author to create something intended to arouse the reader. I think the first example of direct description of sex out there which comes to mind that is not intended to be erotica, but rather humour, is this piece:

Females can be a little harder. The most obvious way a female dolphin has of displaying her sexual interest is the pink-belly effect. Their genitals become very pink and swollen, making the genital region very prominent. They may be restless, or they may be acting as normal. If you are out of the water, they may swim up to you and roll belly up, exposing themselves to you, coupled with pelvic thrusts. If you are in the water, they may press their genitals up against yours, nibble your fingers, nuzzle your crotch, or do pelvic thrusts against you.

I am almost entirely certain this is intended to be humorous. They're a positive, pro-sex site, but in the terms of "out-call prostitution should be decriminalised" and decries the suicide of Jeane Palfrey (the madame in this case) as being wholly unnecessary. So, dolphin sex? Humour. Of course, if you're brave enough to actually go looking for "dolphin sex" (use the quotes, please) on your favourite search engine, you will find various incidents of dolphins and people having, er, unfortunate encounters. Take from that what you will, but the piece above is clearly humour, written to amuse rather than arouse, and as such is not erotica.

This is where it gets slippery, and I don't mean in the dolphin sense of the word. Pornography is defined as

printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

What this means is that if I write a piece of humour (let's say, about having sex with a dolphin), and someone subsequently comes along and is aroused, there's a grey area. Sort of. You see that tricky phrase there, "intended to stimulate?" I wrote the piece as humour. The guy who finds it erotic may disagree with me, and somebody (a third person; a law officer, an editor, a friend, and so on) who doesn't find it humorous may feel that I wrote it with the intent to "...stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings."

Which is where we get to the quote everyone knows,

MR. JUSTICE [Potter] STEWART, concurring.

It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476 , in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts,

• 1 that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography.
  
• 2 I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

We got Sandra Day O'Connor after Stewart, and I kind of tremble at the thought of her take on this sort of thing. The emphasis of course is mine. The problem here is Potter has, in about as honest an opinion the SCOTUS (I regret they do not offer anything older than the recent few years' worth of opinions online, and my best source for this is secondary) has ever offered, he says simply that pornography is something indefinable, except by the viewer.


So what does it mean when a submissions guidelines or an editor's/agent's preferences say "no erotica" or "no pornography," such as in the two following cases:

We accept all types of Horror, Noir, Dark Fantasy, Twisted Sci-Fi, Absurd, Bizarro...anything weird, creepy, makes you shiver or look behind you, think twice about going into that dark room or makes you say,"That is so wrong," we want it. No Erotica.

 

I am not looking for run of the mill vampire stories or dry poetry that no one but the author can understand or enjoy -- but I'm not an ogre either and have been known to be flexible when the occasion demanded it. While I am not a stranger to erotica nor do I have a problem with it, no stories with excessive sexual content or profanity will be considered for publication. Yes, you may certainly swear, but not every other word -- and if you need to have a sex scene, please do it tastefully and without explicit detail when possible.

Now, I have found this promising description from Clarkesworld,

Horror can be supernatural or psychological, so long as it is frightening. There are no barriers as to levels of profanity, gore, or sexuality allowed, but high amounts of profanity, gore, and sexuality are generally used poorly. Be sure to use them well if you do use them.

But again, we see it is the consumer that determines whether the work is pornography (because erotica is defined as such by its author; if an author writes a non-erotica piece another person considers to be "intended to stimulate," it can be defined, I guess, as both – this is a precarious position for the author, as "erotica" is not illegal, while some forms of "pornography" are).

It seems very much to me that editors are trying to appear as though they are not prigs or luddites or timid when it comes to sex, but it really is just a token gesture. To say that you're "not a stranger to erotica" and then go on to say, "please do it tastefully," what the hell is "tasteful" supposed to mean in this question? Is it that the adjectives I should use are warm fuzzy ones and I shouldn't ever characterise sex as a struggle, as painful, as regretful, or even life-changingly ecstatic? Are we really saying, "sex is okay in fiction submitted, but please make sure it's all missionary and fade to black when her bra comes off"?

And so, I recently asked an editor about their pornography submissions "specifications," if you will. To paraphrase a personal email, he replied that paedophilia, outright rape, bestiality and its various derivatives, and glbtq-bashing. This kind of surprised me. To be honest, I had no idea that people were writing gothic horror short stories about child-rape. Really. What? I mean, infinite monkeys and typewriters and all, but surely sixty billion fingers on six billion appropriately configured keyboards wouldn't be coming up with such garbage and actually submitting it to an editor? Can you imagine that editor having to read (at least, to that part...) this stuff?

So it's no real wonder everyone's got their knickers in a twist about what is pornography or erotica or whichever, and I think there's some serious confusion about the two terms and that they should not be used interchangeably (as they most definitely are being used). I've never aspired to be an editor of anthologies or novels or a literary agent or anything like that, but the fact that there's fiction out there looking to get published that might come across my desk, well, gives me the willies. Which just goes to show you that pornography is decided by the consumer, which in this case, would be me.

 

Wait, what?

But we still haven't got to my favourite topic yet, and since everyone is so looking for it, I've got to talk some about futanari. Put shortly, folks, futanari ("futa") is manga and anime involving girls who either normally possess penises (with or without scrotums and/or vulvae) or, uh, "sprout" them under various duress or conditions. Now, I'll be perfectly honest here: this really is the best thing since lesbian porn. And, leave it up to the Japanese to invent it, naturally. But there's always a catch, right?

In the Behind Moon - Dulce Report (pardon my poor translation) manga, we have your average hentai publication. The plot is simple, mostly. It's almost a vampire tale. We are introduced to a woman who is undergoing her normal day-to-day activities, and is interrupted by a strange stirring in her underpants, and by the time she gets to the restroom, lo, there is a penis, and she has an insatiable urge to masturbate (naturally...). This sates her for a while, and presumably she's concerned, but, hey, what do you do about surprise penis-sprouting?

Before she can get to her general practitioner or swami or whatever, she meets a friend of hers and they have discussion over lunch or something. You can see where this is going. Oh no, the penis-popping is contagious, and the two part ways, and sooner or later, we get to the part where there are two women, each having a penis (and a vagina!) involved in about every kind of intercourse you can have (I mean, really...).

 

These guys are keeping you safe from dickgirls.

And as in every other good Japanese tale, this is one of good and evil. There's a small army of men with Gendo Ikari mirror-glasses and GLOCK 21's arriving just a second too late after futa-copulation. They arrive to the scene of one poor futa with her tongue lolling out and no penis, or to neither of them being around. Drat!, they say, chasing around Shibuya looking for the "first futa" or whichever (remember, this is similar to a vampire story...). Eventually they find her, one of her companions, and for reasons inexplicable, really, to the reader (at least, not to me), they extract from her what makes her turn into the futa and put it in a vial for safe keeping. Like, just in case, right?

As an American, I can look at this a number of ways. Sure, it's probably pornography, in that, well, gee, it's (here comes that quote again) "...[stimulating] erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings." But we can look at this in a number of other ways, as well. First and foremost, it's really kind of funny. Chicks-with-dicks, in industry parlance, has been around forever, but it's never been done with the wide anime eyes and enormous three-foot penises and "inside-view" frames. It's so over the top it's outright comical. Come on, get over your stuffy morality for a second; big floppy three foot dicks coming out of women who chase eachother around to infect others with said members is akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes (the original, please, re: both). I frankly laughed at the sight of Christian Bale running around naked with a not-quite-concealed erection and a chainsaw, chopping people up.

How does something so completely exaggerated, so entirely out of the realm of plausibility be characterised as anything other than parody? So, with Dulce Report, we can see notes of parody and hyperbole of the entire sex industry, a critique of the typical homogenous male-female sexual relations of, er, casual erotica. That is, if you're willing to look at it, and really ask what it represents.

If you weren't already either irritated with my blathering on, or beleaguered by all the "oh, ick" kind of stuff I've mentioned, to further confuse this issue, there is horror pornography, one genre of which is guro. Where exactly does this fall? Is it indeed horror? Well, this little girl is covered in blood and dragging a severed head, and I have to say I'm not even a little titillated. Does that mean it's not pornography? Well, it's guro, and there are people out there who are really in to this stuff.

But more to the point, I haven't just randomly picked horror here as a parallel. People recoil in horror at calling "vampire fiction" erotica or pornography because it acknowledges that there are people who are aroused by such (really) taboo topics as sex with the dead, a want to die, drinking blood, and the less-taboo topics of torture and general bdsm. Nevertheless, editors, agents, and publishers see it for what it is, and are happy to call it that. But when you saw Interview with the Vampire in the theatres (yes, I did read it – in 1991), was anyone calling this "erotica" or "pornography"? No, it was mostly a "period piece" or "horror" or even "groundbreaking film making bringing Anne Rice's to the general public." (!)

Let's look a little closer, at perhaps my favourite part, even. When one reads the book, the currents are a lot stronger, but in the film, it is clear that when Louis turns Claudia (a young child huddled next to her dead mother) for reasons that aren't quite clear to him, she becomes immortal, and travels with both him and Lestat. Yet, as she remains a small girl, she "grows as a woman" (ages; or however you care to word that; I've got the wrong parts to describe that sensitively). She is (in the film; the book describes her dress in somewhat less detail) dressed in more and more adult, sexually attractive clothing. Claudia, a very young Kirsten Dunst, is being portrayed, literally, as a child sex object – no, an aggressive, assertive sexual predator – in a film we are told is noir or horror or whatever. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and all that doesn't really detract from the fact that we've had erotica in all kinds of taboo forms pawned off on the public in ways that were not considered pornography including that most heinous of sins, child pornography (the book goes as far as Claudia presenting Louis with two drunk children for them to either convert, or kill, but nonetheless do some various sucking and touching on; this is very briefly glossed over in the film). Even the relatively controversial issue of homoerotica (which is unmistakable in the book, but less so in the movie) is entirely dismissed because, hey, that's a vampire film or a horror film. Nobody gave Brokeback Mountain a pass because it was a western!

So, I would say that Anne Rice writes erotica (and don't get me started on the Beauty books). Pretty plain and simple. It's its own special genre, "vampire fiction" or "vampire erotica" (Servant of the Bones not being especially erotica, nor The Mummy, admittedly). My guess is there are any number of other people who would instead call it horror, and an equal number of people who would call it pornography, and both would be right.

[ there are no rape images here. ]

There's one last place to go here, and it's that one thing that really pisses people off: rape. A discussion of rape is so complex that it is, unbelievably, entirely outside the scope of this document, and in fact has a far larger scope. So I'm going to deal with it lightly. Not because I don't wish to discuss the subject, but rather because there's just no good way to discuss it thoroughly without completely missing or misrepresenting things.

I so very often praise Iain Banks for his fiction. I think of any science fiction author, save perhaps CJ Cherryh (and this gets confusing because I've read a lot of her anthologies) or maybe Stephen Baxter (because the bastard writes his books in threes), I've read more Banks than anything else. And Banks is a masterful writer. He has an incredible talent for eliciting disgust, or horror, or stupefaction, or even humour, with the most eloquent prose that it seems somehow formed to the page. It's as if you're reading across a multi-paragraph story of a brutal rape or murder or torture, and it is just so well-written, it hardly even seems that one is reading; it is simply learning what's going on. You're sucked in, and part of the story. (boy, I gushed a lot there, sorry)

The point is, Banks, in The Algebraist, depicts an incredibly intricate rape scene, involving a penis that has been modified to wound the receptacle it resides in, as well as secreting any of a number of fluids eliciting various physiological or psychological effects on the raped. This scene is the most detailed, but it is not the only one, and in fact, it is quite clear that said character is quite the rapist, and that's just the way things are.

But what's he doing here? Is he really writing a story about rape because he thinks it's okay to brutalise women (or men...), to kill them with your penis? To control people under punishment of imprisonment and rape? No. Banks rapes to show an element of a character, to show the flow of control from one to another, or indeed the absolute control of the rapist over the raped, and the fear of everyone of the rapist (something of a, ahem, villain). He further does this to show a change in character of the raped. I think anyone, regardless of their opinion of rape, would agree that rape is the sort of event that changes a person's take on things. If Banks were simply to say, "Joan was raped in 1983, so she carries a gun now," it might pass as an explanation, but if we have an interlude that shows Joan's reaction, the face of her attacker, how and when it happened, we understand the character better.

And as readers, we demand character development. I have bad news for the editors who don't like rape: it sure as shit develops character, on both sides of the equation. The key point here is that we're not writing a story about a dude raping a woman in a cardboard box, walking offset, fin. It's part of the story folks. This is fiction, and fiction is full of things that happen in life. And, yeah, people get raped. Sometimes without genetically altered penises.

So I've ranted on and on and on here for a long time and covered a lot of aspects of what we consider to be erotica, horror, and pornography. The reason I do this is all three are seldom left to themselves. We have "vampire erotica," "gothic horror," "midget pornography," and so on. By the same token, we have "hard science fiction," "space opera," "steampunk," and so on.

Life is full of all kinds of things like rape and death and dismemberment, just as it is full of incredible things like life and learning. One can write a bleak but beautiful Clarkeian tale of wonder at the sheer vastness of the Universe (and not get anything wrong, clearly; Clarke was an amazing author), but I personally think it is unreasonable for somebody to say, "we publish science fiction, but no erotica" or "we publish horror, but no erotica," or "we publish gothic horror but not pornography." These adjectives are mercurial, misused, misunderstood, overused and unnecessarily close the minds of otherwise reasonable people.

I say this because when I write something, I might write something grisly and horrible, really horrible. An example of this (not published, but written, and finished, ready to be published) would be a man beaten to death via punches to the face, including the noises of sucking air through blood and sinuses breaking and the whole bit. But folks, it's not horror. If you read a 5,000 word story, and 1,250 words of sheer brutality are enough for you to reject it – regardless of what that violence meant – what are you doing reading submissions for a living? By the same token, I've written sex and death and other fascinating parts of life into my work, and I'm continually dismayed to see under submission guidelines that they don't want "that kind of work."

They don't know what they're missing. Fiction is, and always has been, especially speculative (note I used that word here) fiction, to provoke the imagination. Clarke bowled us all over with some of his early work, Kubrick did it justice, and the envelope continues to get pushed further out in every direction. Look at Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as films that are – at the epoch of their filming – grisly, strangely edited, and irredeemable (nobody gets away clean, there's no happy ending). Yet, today, the "Tarantinoan" doctrine of both cross-cut chronology and his dialogue is so common that editors and agents (in particular the departed Miss Snark) will tell you they want nothing of it. Push it further, they say, do something different, but these same damn people are saying, no, don't send me anything that might offend my delicate sensibilities, there are enough kidfuckers and wolves-on-women writers out there that they're not interested if there's violence or sex in a submission.

In contrast to the above, I do have a happy ending to offer this obscenely long soliloquy. I had asked the aforementioned editor about his "erotica" guidelines, using the quip, "is Hellraiser considered erotica because nipples were shown as hooks were thrust into them?"

His response, thank god, was, no, send it on. There may yet be hope for this industry so hopelessly caught up in its own ass.

Tissue gets published

Tissue looks like it will be published. The editor has asked for it, and the bio/pic, but I'm kind of bummed about some of the last few half-rejections so I want to say that I'll believe it when I see it.

At the same time, I think it's probably time to feed Gupta or Arizona to a couple other outlets; they are good, publishable stories, and I've been ignoring markets because I've been too sensitive about what they say their requirements are. Toby Buckell has a great philosophy on the rejection thing – basically since it's the only part of the process (aside from writing, of course) that you have control over, that he essentially celebrates these rejections.

I'm not afraid of rejection. What I am afraid of is sending something that might be a little racy or grotesque to an editor and getting rejected and told, why the hell didn't you read our submission guidelines?

But recently, I have been thinking that there is stuff out there a lot worse than what I'm writing. And by worse, I mean things like paedophilia, not that I'm an excellent writer. So, I'll be submitting some of these polished bits to more markets, and I'm finally proud to have publishing credit(s). Neat. Oh, and it appears for all the effort I go through to be a hard science fiction author, I'm a horror author. It's weird.

Jesus it's like fucking twitter these days.

More AppleTV grief for those of you who aren't already sick of me complaining about the company whose products I most loyally use (perhaps, save, Subaru). Linux machines are beautiful, in their ugly, shattered-obsidian kind of way. They're all sharp around the edges, but if you look at them right the sun will glint off them beautifully; their curves and blades will draw the eyes to the mysterious patterns in their makeup; and, of course, they're dense as fucking obsidian.

But the one thing they're very good at doing is taking a difficult situation and making it less difficult. Consider the case of a firewire iPod which I used with my Macbook (remember the flambé Macbook, gordon?), as it had a 1394 port: I now have a Macbook Air. Not only can I not charge this iPod with a usb cable (which is the only port my Air has), actually using the usb cable harms the battery by continually attempting to deplete the battery due to the voltage differential between usb2 and 1394a. After a few hours of being plugged in to my Air, it was toast. We had to ransack the house looking for a wall-mount firewire adapter, and re-charged the poor thing, and it was (or appeared to be) happy.

What next? I cannot use it on my Air. Sandy does not have a Mac laptop, and this is a Mac iPod, so her Vista machine is not going to play nice without torching all that music I so carefully put on there (even if her Vista machine had 1394 to begin with...). No, the iPod goes straight to the Linux box. Yup, Linux says, "okay, that looks like an iPod. I'm gonna go mount that on /media/taint (yes, the iPod is named "taint." Don't ask.), and you go ahead and do what you like with it.

I then pointed JuK at it, which happily ran through its collection of quad-letter obfuscation and reassembled my playlists and id3 tags so that I might listen to it locally. Cool. But, you know, that whole obsidian thing. The Linux machine is pretty cool (Kubuntu + KDE 4.1) but dammit, I'm not going to be moved off the couch and away from my Air, because, well, I'm writing.

So we do the only reasonable thing: sudo aptitude install mt-daapd, or the "firefly" media server. It pretends to be a daap server on your network. I pointed myself at its very pleasant configuration page, told it to go scour through the iPod itself, build a sqllite database in
/var/run, and serve that stuff up over daap.

Ah. And this is where it gets great. I grabs my little white remote, I points it at my Apple TV, and I says, "Music, bitch." To which it naturally replies, "Music? Whatever are you speaking of?"

This is the part where I realise that in order for your Apple TV to read streaming content off the network, it has to pair with those instances of iTunes (and only now do I remember doing this on the Air), even though it knows that those .m4p files over there are my .m4p files, and it has my credentials and an interwebs connection and can frickin verify all this and connect it all if it wanted to, it chooses not to.

Which is the other problem. The Apple TV is plugged into – you guessed it, the TV. So, hey, it might be nice to be able to say, I'm going to play music off my mt-daapd share from my Linux machine here on my Air here in iTunes, to a remote pair of speakers, attached to the Apple TV (essentially using it as an Airport Express). But, no, it doesn't do that, either. For no good reason other than possibly competing with their lowest-end piece of hardware.

Fie, I say! A curse on their engineers! May their villages be plagued with locusts and their endians be all wrong! Curse them until they look to the mountain and see its gleaming obsidian sides and realise there's more to life than simple competition. Sometimes working is pretty cool, too.

Beef!

Boy, and you thought I was going to talk about "downers" and the new cattle ban. Or maybe you were going to say, "aagh, goddammit, stop it with all the blog posts!" Either way, the first point is this. In the documentary, Beef, Dr. Dre (I really hate the pseudonyms but whatever) is quoted as saying, "Cube was the smart one."

Cube is the smart one. If you want to reach as far back Death Certificate, it was clear that gangster rap was evolving, and there was a lot of meta-rap ("beefs"), but it was clear that Cube actually – another quote of his from the same film – was the first one with a pen. The guy is good. I recently purchased Raw Footage, and I am rather surprised to see, wow, It's been almost twenty years of this genre, he's been on the leading edge the whole time, he's still innovating, and he's still writing incredibly insightful (although he's a pretty angry dude) lyrics (he'd probably use the term rhymes).

And now for something completely different. Really. So I have a tiny hard disk on my Air. Well, it's 80gb, but it's not 160gb, or some of the bigger ones, that's for sure. It's mostly full of video I get from the iTunes store, and about 1/4 that volume in music (an entire record takes up a lot less room than e.g., a single episode of No Reservations – Nari, you are officially Sandy's hero). I watch most of it. Some of it's podcasts, and I purge those pretty frequently. But here's the deal. When I delete something I've watched off my Air, the AppleTV also deletes it. WTF? I have 300-some gigs of iTunes content (we just bought a MacPro, most of whose job is going to just be handling all that content). I'm pretty religious about hitting my USB teat and "time-machineing" my Air, but I didn't realize the AppleTV was ditching content until last night. I may have lost episodes I paid for (Time machine keeps dailies for a week, weeklies for a month, and then months forever, or something; the point is, I can download something one day, back it up, and it won't make the next "forever" slot, and I lose it.)

The AppleTV is fucking cool. But I am really, really irritated with all the stupid shit they did to it. On purpose even! They fucked the thing up by design! Beef. Beeeeeef.

Quick observation

Yeah, yeah, too many posts, my rss reader is full of crap from Alex. Sorry. Just a quick observation. Why is every single epic anime series about a select group of people with super powers attacking extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial badguys whose job it is to eat or turn said people into more of the badguys?

We've been watching Tokko (we'll finish it tonight, real bittersweet given the Sakura/Ranmaru relationship), and I can't help but thinking, whoa, did we just make a left turn down Evangelion street? Was that some Bleach there? Are Sandy and I going to be, gasp, dining at La Tasca (this link will probably go away, check here) next year at Otakon?

The shame of being weaboos. Shaaaaame.

Pushin' another one out.

We've been watching a lot of Tokko. This is Sakura. She's the sweet one, but she'll still cut you in half.

I'm really going to have to scour duotrope (or maybe even Moeller can suggest) a place to put it, but I've squeezed out another short story. Those on previous proof/galley runs, lemme know if you want it. Those of you who have had early drafts, it's a bit more polished now, but the real sheen it needs comes from many more eyeballs than I have. That, and I have to print it out and read it. I don't know why this step is required, but I just can't verify that it "works" if it's not on paper.

The problem is it's science fiction, and really the primary focus of the story is SF, but there is a lot of sex in it (and it's, um, not missionary), and enough knives and hooks to merit a little bit of a horror tint to it. I'm leaning more in the horror digests. The sex, it is important to understand, is window dressing for the underlying point that is, while superficial (but interesting! I promise!), novel (chuckle), and even fun.


Readers will recognize afterward, oh, wow, yeah, I totally forgot some of these senses are quite this intense. But, I probably give too much away.

Tissue awaits.

Caffeine

I'm the last one to say I've kicked caffeine (although, mostly, I have – I drink mostly rooibos or licorice tea, but occasionally have assam), but is this really necessary?

 

  

This in addition to the "Mean Bean" and other coffee incarnations of El Monstro.

The new last.fm

I don't know when I last looked, but wow, I like the new Last.fm look and feel. I normally can't stand the overflashification of the web, but they done good.

Oh, and goddamn do I love Alkaline Trio. That is all.


(presidential race? what?)

Captain Obvious here

Well duh. He's a fucking crook. He's taking millions of non-profit dollars and rolling it in, on-the-sly, into a for-profit company. He's even got saps like me helping (although I hardly do more than fix a typo these days).

What ignorant assholes these people are

Drinking overproof whisky and bourbon

 

short: this is a really long rant about whisky and how to drink it. there will be lots of pictures and it may even come off as snobbery. If you're interested, read on, but pour a dram and a comfy chair, and maybe even have a look over your "liquor cabinet" before (I don't really have a liquor cabinet – I have more like a "spirits cabinet" in the same sense people have a "wine cellar", but I do have some mixers) hand.

I wanted to put this on the web both to showcase an excellent bourbon/rye/whiskey (Willett), post a pretty picture or two, and also to clear up some mystery. I specifically want to talk to all you alcohol-jocks out there: you're the ones who can out-drink everyone, who think that drinking The Macallan at cask strength straight from the bottle is manly (there are women alcohol-jocks out there, but thankfully very few).

It is these same people who insist on knowing what I drink when they meet me at a party, or even at work. I generally reply, "whisky," to avoid the discussion of what their favourite malt is. I get a lot of "I like Glenfiddich" (pronounced to rhyme with "rich," not "prick"), followed by, "but I don't drink that garbage 7-year stuff – I mostly drink the 12- and 18- year ones, they're more expensive, but they're worth it.

You never hear an Aberlour (a great, low-priced, available everywhere whisky) or Highland Park (same) or Talisker (again, everywhere, inexpensive) or Bowmore (although admittedly, some of theirs is pretty bad).

But, really, replace the Glenfiddich with the Macallan or any other popular malt (even Lagavulin or Laphroig, which I hear more often than I'd expect). It's all the same. Because they don't drink solely Jack (not we don't say The Jack or The Jim) and you get somebody even worse. You get a self-proclaimed connoisseur. These people are reformable, but most of the time, they're very set in their ways, and it's hard to convince them that the Macallan is overpriced, and while tasty, you can spend that $200-700 on much, much better spirits.

These are also the same people who tell you you're somehow less of a man (or, if you have ovaries, that You're Doing It Wrong) if you mix water into your whisky. This is utter bullshit, and we'll start the as soon as I address the first problem with these people. They'll tell you that you ruin a scotch by putting water in it. Consider, for a moment, what the Scots call Scotch. The Scots call it whisky (American whiskey is usually spelled with an 'e', although I have no idea why this is). What do you call a single malt from Japan (e.g., Yamazaki)? Do you call it scotch because it's a single malt? No, folks. This is whisky. All of it. Let's get that word, "scotch," out of your vocabulary before we go any further.

Now then, let's continue.

 

First and foremost, all of these drinks can be absolutely wonderful. You could even get teenagers to drink them (remember Boone's Farm?) if you prepared them correctly. There are some beautiful malts that are best consumed with a little water. Remember, your nose, tongue, and throat are not especially thrilled about being given a 40% solvent solution. That's why you have that sensation of burning, that you exhale, and even make noise or shake your head. It burns because, duh, it's a solvent.

So we add a little water. Let me stop here for a second and say that any reference I make herein to water is distilled water. Straight H₂O. Water from the tap, no matter how well it's filtered, and water from your fancy water provider, has all kinds of stuff in it that you don't want in your whisky. Furthermore, some of those chemicals react with compounds in the whisky and you can destroy some of the parts that make the drink unique. In my experience, this is especially important with the malts where water is very important, like the very northern distilleries like Talisker, Jura, and Highland Park.

 

Note the application of ice and distilled water in an appropriate glass. Given the serious alcohol content of this particular whisky, this will probably be half water.

The water does not hurt the whisky, but it dilutes it enough that you can swish it around on your palate (just like wine and coffee tasting) and get to feel and taste all the subtle tones to it. Some people here will say they taste apples or freshly cut grass – not me. But I do taste a lot more to the drink than having it straight. The other thing is, you can "nose" the whisky without the same burn in your sinuses you'd get from the full strength.

So while you might drink your whisky neat (and I do), it helps to add a drop or three of water, depending on how much you've poured. I wouldn't recommend more than a finger when you're tasting. You can add more than a few drops, say a teaspoon (5ml), but you need to be careful not to dilute it too much or it will lose its character. The point is to take the bark and bite out of the spirit so you can really get to know all the parts of it that make it unique.

Remember, whisky in the vat is anywhere from say 58 to 69 percent ethanol. A hugely critical component of what makes a whisky taste the way it does is the water they use to bring it down to the 40-45 percent you drink it at. This (and of course other factors) adds an enormous amount of character to the whisky. Think of what the difference in spring water is between the island of Skye in Scotland at a spring in Kentucky. The whisky you drink at 80 proof is already "watered down," which is your first argument with a liquor jock.

So if you're going to add your distilled water to a whisky, why bother buying the cask-strength whisky and just buy the 40% (80 proof) stuff to begin with? Well, in my opinion, the cask strength stuff has more taste to it. You get more of the flavour of the whisky, and especially since you can control how much water is in the whisky, you can drink it at 30% or at 50%.

One thing I like to do is to have distilled ice cubes (very small cubes; I think we got ours at Williams-Sonoma, but wifey usually does the shoppin') and drop a few (say, 2-3) into a cask-strength whisky. I figure you're probably adding 10-15ml of distilled water to maybe 75ml of whisky. Additionally, it doesn't cool it so much that you miss all the flavours, but it's a pleasantly chilled beverage (especially in the case of a bourbon; I'd never cool a Talisker or Highland Park).

Then, now that you've sampled your whisky, you may be ready for a full-strength taste. If it's 59% or above, prepare for a burn (although the Willetts are pretty good about this). However, you get a more realistic mouthfeel (they all differ, from smooth and watery to thick and syrupy), you get to feel and taste all the individual elements from the toasted barrels to the finish on the casks and the water used in the malt. But, really, you're not going to get very far drinking cask strength whisky or bourbon straight. You're going to get hurt.

So, do yourself a favour. Keep your distilled water around, and dilute your cask strength drinks lightly, but enough that they don't destroy your taste buds. This goes whether you're drinking that 49% Macallan or a 63% Willett.

And enjoy.

On knees

short: knees.

I was told repeatedly today that I have a "sports injury," and that normally, "these things heal themselves." The diagnosis, after the MRI and X-ray imaging is thus:

Basically, my quadriceps have tendons to attach to the top of the patella, and keep it in place. In my case, one of those tendons has become very loose, and so if I take the normal amount of tension off my quadricep (such as bending my knee, bringing my heel towards my butt), that tendon actually pushes the patella out of the way, and it hurts.

Further, there's been some damage to the joint as the patella moves around (consider: if the patella is at the top of the joint, and there are tendons and ligaments at the bottom of the joint, and the patella moves that way, it presents a danger to them).

Unfortunately for me, the doctor that I've been seeing (because he performed surgery on a friend ours who is in great shape today) doesn't really do that tendon, and because there's there's not a lot of damage to "his" side of the patella, not only does he not want to perform the surgery, he sees little reason to, because as they say, "these things normally heal themselves."

In order for this thing to heal itself normally, it needs to be exercised. Which is why he prescribed physical therapy. What I didn't mention here is that I called all the PT places, and, well, they're booked weeks or months in advance. So while it's possible that PT could fix this (and in fact "normally" does, right?), it's damn near impossible to actually get in and have it done.

This is driving me crazy. While sometimes I may seem like a bit of a homebody and not want to go out much, I do like to go out and see friends, I like to drive my car and ride my motorcycle, I like to hike, go for simple walks around Mount Vernon, and so on. So having this full "soft" cast from ankle to groin has prevented me from strengthening that muscle (the quadricep and associated tendon). But this places me in a quandary: do I remove the cast and risk dislocating my patella frequently with the hope that exercise (or just me being me, really) will strengthen the muscle?

The pain when my patella "pops out" and my "leg falls out" is immense. It's enough to have me balled up on the floor, not the "fuck! I dislocated my knee again!" that it was earlier this year. Maybe that's where we're heading; a dislocation that doesn't hurt as much and a little bit of courage on my part.

And then there's everyone else. Everyone else has been told that I have fucked up my knee. Well, I did. But if I take the cast off, all of a sudden, it's business as usual, and I'm going to have to explain every single time that I'm not under a desk fixing an ethernet cable, or that I can't sit at someone's desk, "actually, you do that, I have an injured knee," when there is no physical evidence of such. Then, I'm either a liar (the injury was not as bad as I said it was), or I'm shirking my duties and being difficult. Either way, I'm pretty fucked.

My best bet here seems to take the cast off, walk around as normal, and go see the "sports medicine" doctor that today's doctor recommended me. Of course, I'd seen that guy before, and he was not real thrilled about doing any work on it, either. They both consider this elective surgery when I'm rolling around in pain.

Speaking of pain – can I ever talk about doctors without talking about pain? – the doctor today told me that he didn't need to refill the meds he'd prescribed me for my knee, which were sorta doing the job. His logic was simple. "When you came to me a month ago, you weren't taking them." Of course, two weeks ago, I re-dislocated it and a month ago I was on a fentanyl patch. But he says if I'm going to need a recurring prescription to take care of the pain, that it is chronic pain, and he just doesn't do that. "You need to find a chronic pain specialist if you want to continue to stay on the meds." So I guess he's making a distinction between "acute" and "chronic" pain? Frankly, I fail to understand. One can visibly see that my knee is swollen. One can see on the MRI that my patella is damaged. He picked my knee up and manipulated it and damn near dislocated it, saying, "ooh, you don't like that, do you?"

So, I'm without pain drugs and will probably go through the miracle that is DT's, again, and my knee... well, suck it up, big guy. We all have pain from time to time, and this pain you're having now is not acute enough for me to give you drugs, and I don't treat chronic pain. Why, John Wayne here would never ask for a percocet or an oxycontin, or even a fentanyl patch. And he'd certainly never ask for four shots of dilaudid in the emergency room. Sorry, son, this borders on drug-seeking-behaviour, and I hate to break it to you, but your pain doesn't matter to me.

What am I going to do about work, casts, exercise, driving, and so on? I don't know. Take it slow and steady I guess. Maybe go back to the neoprene "sorta works" brace and try to keep my knee from folding while at the same time trying to get the exercise that will strengthen it – and also schedule an appointment with that "sports medicine" surgeon who is going to tell me to do exactly that.

So, let me repeat it here, unless somebody misunderstood me the last fifty times. Fuck you, doctors. Fuck every single one of you. Fuck your fraternity. Fuck your sanctimonius decisions about who is really in pain and who really needs your help. Fuck your whole slimy profession, in which an hour consultation is really fifteen minutes, for which you're going to bill the insurance company $300. You all drive $65,000+ cars, so you're not hurting. You went to med school because you god damn knew you were smarter than everyone else, and now that you've got the robe, scalpel, and prescription pad, you're the fucking man. Everyone has to do what you say, because that's what the federal government says. Cross a doctor, and you go to jail, do not collect $200, and so on. And forget finding another one and asking that one if maybe there's something they can do; these fuckers have their own private shared list of "problem patients," and the ones who don't are the worst criminals – the ones who will see you for months on end with no intent on fixing an ailment or curing you, but rather milking you like the insurance cash cow that you are.

The people in pain, the people injured in this country, are at the mercy of a group of people who do not believe they are as weak as the in-pain and injured. They laugh off your pain and complaints, "ouch," or "cough, cough," as if it's kind of funny that you've brought them a lung full of yeast or a dislocated patella. Because, really, they're doctors, and doctors make the decisions, not patients.

failure

I had such a huge rant planned for today on how people drink whisky wrong and how to correct their heinous ways. But I got sucked into my TDMA module, and I think it gets closer to release. I'm not sure the namespace, but it will probably be Net::TDMA, and it will probably be optimised for HF radio.

The rant is still in partial completion, and will make its way here eventually.

But for now, exhaustion. I see orthopede tomorrow. Ass kicking will ensue with the non-broken leg.

Yeah, that's it.

I only need an ankle. An ankle. Just one ankle. Nnngh. I need to get back on the fucking bike. I've got my transmission figured out; that's the hard part, I can handle the rear brake just fine. And it would get me to and from the office – as well as out to the "remote" offices – and I wouldn't have to beg a ride every time. Sadface.

Want. Bike.

What did you say?

People don't even realise the television is on anymore. They'll walk into a room, turn it on, proceed to ignore it or leave the room, vegetate for an hour or two, any combination of the above, and just leave, as though the normal state of the television is not merely "on," but rather "default."

Sick.

The new ZR-1 vs the "old" Z06?

With this monster in showrooms, and people waiting for it like people once waited for the Z06, maybe those Z06's will come down in price (the C6's are already dropping deeeeeep in KBB) to where I won't have some salesworm trying to squeeze 20k over its value on me. And, nnnngh, top-mount intercooler.

Side note:

We can, however, share some photos of the cars we drove today around the Lutz-ring at General Motors' Milford Proving Ground.

Bob. Robert, baby. Why do you have your own lutz-ring and I don't have my own asphalte du mort to rip ass around on? What gives? You get to have your cake, and you get to eat it? And get paid to eat it?

Check please!