I read a story on Strange Horizons not too far back called “Two Dreams On Trains” by Elizabeth Bear, set in drowned New Orleans. I didn’t like the story that much but the idea of a drowned New Orleans seemed kinda cool. Not any more.

Another observation. Anybody see any dramatic footage of daring rescues of white folks stranded on top of buildings? Me neither.

In the tsunami, I heard a lot about tourists and other celebrities who were in danger, but not so much about the people who did the majority of the dying — the poor folks (i.e. the financially not well-off) who, for whatever reason, didn’t get the evacuation message or didn’t comprehend it.

It’s going to be the same thing in Louisiana. A disaster of this proportion hits everyone, but it hits some harder than others. This isn’t to suggest that emergency warnings deliberately don’t reach poverty-stricken people, but there’s clearly a socio-economic component to those people losing property and those people losing loved ones.

I also stumbled across this from Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog*:
* White people find things
* Black people loot things

Compare the pictures. Compare the captions. Spot the difference?

Of course, there’s no racial element about this photo from the NY Times: shirtless black guy with shotgun rides bike through Wal-Mart. This, under the banner “Life-or-Death Words of the Day in a Battered City: ‘I Had to Get Out’” and quotes like:

“We have a major looting problem,” said Col. Terry Ebbert, the chief of homeland security for the city. “These are not individuals looting; these are large groups of armed individuals.”

Scary, huh?

Why’s the white dude in the photo apparently so calm, then? Oh, because it’s a toy gun. And in case you missed it above, the white guy is “finding” merchandise and probably looking for an open check-out lane. That gun-toting gang-banger? He’s looting. Who says the news isn’t educational?

Louisiana is not a rich state, and if you walk three blocks from the French Quarter in any direction and you’ll see the “other” side (aka “the majority”) of New Orleans; there’s a lot of poverty a stone’s throw away from tourists drinking themselves silly and flashing their boobies. Shacks — literally, shacks — surround the city. And quick, name another city in Louisiana after New Orleans, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge (or maybe you didn’t get Shreveport.) Point being, there are a lot of places you’ve never heard of that are gone; and while the destruction of New Orleans is a tragedy by itself, the heart sinks further to imagine the people and places I never knew existed that have been wiped off the map.

* - I mistakenly called it Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s website, when in fact it was Teresa’s site first. Oops!

All you need to know is Spurs got screwed and lost their first game of the season. Look, I know that the league wants to crack down on violent tackles but it’s getting ridiculous. If you throw a guy out of the game in the first thirty minutes (like Jenas’ foul against the Ars*, like Mido’s foul against Chelski) it damn well better be for a foul of the career-threatening variety. By booting a player so early in the match, you’re virtually guaranteeing the opposition three points which is total b.s. Any coincidence these decisions came against two teams in the mix for the league title? I thought not.

I had the misfortune of watching Bolton vs. West Ham on Saturday. It was a showpiece for profligate finishing. Marlon Harewood should be hanged by the neck until he is dead for his part in the display.

Other random footie notes: Soccernet’s new layout is a monstrosity; nice that the Ars* doesn’t have another game until mid-September (my, they sure do seem to get the luck of the draw quite often, don’t they?); poor Michael Owen; holy goals by Real Madrid in their opener against Cádiz; and in case you hadn’t noticed, after four games no one’s scored on Chelsea and Newcastle hasn’t yet found the net — both disturbing figures.

I’m not sure how comments work for Blogger/Blogspot or LiveJournal, but there are definite disadvantages to using a program like WordPress for blogging. I have to moderate each comment posted to my site to help filter out spam — I had about 100 messages in the queue over the weekend. Anyone interested in online Texas Hold ‘Em, viagra, or discounted porn DVDs?

If you tried posting a comment lately, be aware I might have deleted it during my house-cleaning. I did manage to save one (that’s you, Eric!) comment from the trash. I hope there weren’t others.

That also explains the delay from the time you commented to the time it appears on my site. I have to see that it’s waiting in the queue and then approve it.

So I just read that Angelina Jolie has been cast in ‘Beowulf.’ Hmmmm. Beowulf.

This would be entirely laughable but Neil Gaiman is contributing, which at least sparks a ray of hope. It’s supposed to be a blend of animation and reality a la ‘The Polar Express’ also by director Robert Zemeckis. Hmmmm. Beowulf? My guess is that most people know Beowulf as ‘the story where that warrior guy kills Grendel. While that does indeed happen, that’s only a fraction of the story.

‘Beowulf’ is an unusual poem in that it’s relatively short but doesn’t deal with a particular event. ‘The Iliad’ for instance is all about one specific period of the Trojan War; a lot happens before and after ‘The Iliad’ but, for all intents and purposes, the story has to do with a specific event during the course of the war. ‘Beowulf,’ on the other hand, is challenging — to reader and scriptwriter alike — because it has no middle section and therefore doesn’t have a plot, or least not the way modern readers think about plot. It goes something like this:

1) A little pre-history that describes how this king’s hall becomes ravaged by Grendel
2) Beowulf, as a young man just hitting his prime, comes to save the day
3) Beowulf kills Grendel
4) Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother
5) Beowulf lives the rest of his life in which there are virtually no details
6) Beowulf gets killed by a dragon

In the middle there, there’s a long digression talking about wergeld and bloodfeuds and things like that. That’s the only point in which women are really in the story — they’re sort of used as collateral to make peace between warring tribes. The Beowulf poet, who is a Christian, uses the digression to basically point out that mankind needed some other moral authority to live by because these family feuds were never really settled and the war continues. But this is not part of the linear action of the poem.

So how in the world are they going to make this make sense? I dunno. My guess is that they’re going to make Angelina Jolie the love interest of Beowulf somehow; she’s certainly not going to be cast as Grendel’s mother. This tinkers with the story’s structure and besides, the religious undertones of Beowulf would be nearly impossible to get across on film to a modern audience. Are they just going to butcher the story a la ‘Troy’ did to ‘The Iliad’? Probably.

I hope to God they try to market ‘Beowulf’ as a good read for the masses. I don’t think sales of ‘The Iliad’ jumped after that movie and I would have to say ‘Beowulf’ is several times less accessible to the modern reader.

Yeah, I’m not so good at moderation. I tend to be all or nothing. For last few weeks I’ve been really good at writing, not so good on my reading. This week, however, the pendulum has swung back and I’m gonzo for reading. If I took the day off work today, I’d spend the whole thing reading. I know I would.

Yesterday I started “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay and was instantly sucked in. I can tell it’s going to be quite good. It was up for a Nebula back in 2002 against Andy Duncan’s “The Chief Designer,” which is one damn fine story. Incredibly, both of these stories lost to “Bronte’s Egg” by Richard Chwedyk. I’ve got that one on deck next — either that story is out-of-this-world good or the Nebula voting is broken. Of course, both could be true, too.

I also grabbed as much M. Rickert as I could find, which is 15 stories in all between F&SF, Ideomancer, and SCIFI.com. I’ve heard a lot about her lately (again, where have I been?) and decided to check her out. John Joseph Adams, the slusher over at F&SF, mentions her in the same breath as Jeff Ford (who happily recently started his own blog, and it tends to be hilarious) and that’s enough to make me curious.

Between all the stuff I’ve loaded onto my palm, I’ve got a bunch of other books on deck: Kelly Link, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler. Whew! Innundated with short fiction! I learned a ton (or at least I think I did) by reading through Terry Bisson’s and John Kessel’s collections. I look forward to learning more from these Grand Masters of Funk.

I’m also looking forward to Jeff Ford’s newest collection “The Empire of Ice Cream” that comes out in April ‘06. This post on Night Shade’s message board has all the pertinent information and that last post is 100% Jeff. Oh my God, that’s funny…

One of the biggest perks of working for the Univeristy is having access to their resources. I don’t think you fully appreciate it as a student. Memorial Library on UW’s campus is a shrine of knowledge. I’ve been up to the Special Collections room more times in the last two years as a non-student than I ever did as a student.

I mentioned earlier how libraries around the world will scan and email you an article from their collection, which is awesome. Just yesterday I put a ton of books on reserve (collections by Theodore Sturgeon, Karen Joy Fowler, Lucius Shepard, and Harlan Ellison) that will be shipped to the med school library for me to pick up — awesome. Last week, I used the library’s access to the ProQuest database system to look up all of Charles Coleman Finlay’s stories he published in F&SF and, when I found them, downloaded them into my handheld to read over lunch — awesome. And I also wanted to find out the circulation data for both F&SF and Cicada magazines but didn’t know the easiest way. So I called a librarian who pointed me to Ulrichsweb.com and found the answer (35,000 and 14,000 respectively) — totally awesome. [and I could spend hours reviewing that site -- there are soooo many interesting-sounding magazines that come up under sci-fi/fantasy]

Absolutely nothing else new. I could say something about the MLS-Select team getting pummeled by Real Madrid but Frank Dell’Apa says everything that’s necessary in this excellent article. Over on Fox Soccer, Jamie Trecker continues a fine streak of articles on MLS/US Soccer that completely miss the point. I won’t link the page because it’s too irritating to read. There’s finally some decent soccer commentary coming out of American journalists but stay far, far away from Mr. Trecker — his articles are loaded with half-truths and misinformation.

It’s been this way for years and he thankfully went underground for awhile but recently (tragically?) resurfaced at Fox Soccer. He sucks — his “solutions” always involve millions upon millions of dollars that, frankly, the league doesn’t have. They can’t even find owners for all twelve teams, how in the hell are they going to afford to pay “quality” players million-dollar salaries? I agree, it would be great if MLS could attract more quality players but the simple fact (and this is what I can’t stand about the man — he knows this) is that the MLS cannot afford them. At least not right now. If you sign even a dozen outstanding big-salaried players — that’s just one per team mind you — and the level of play rises (which is a suspect conclusion) there is no way in hell the stadiums will fill up any more quickly, that the television money will come in, or there will be anything more than casual interest in the sport. Then you’ve got the same @#$%!ing problems and you’ve lost millions on players rather than something permanent like, oh, I don’t know, stadiums — which Mr. Trecker thinks is just more window-dressing for a shoddy product.

The guy is such an idiot it’s giving me a migraine…

I wish there was a correlation between checking email, checking the mailbox, and faster response times. Like if somehow the whoosh of opening the mailbox could somehow bring the answer forward a little more each day. Lord knows how many times I check my multiple email accounts per day, but it’s many.

However, I’m also in the curious position of not wanting to find a particular response in my mailbox, and that’s from F&SF. I’m at 25 days, which is twice the average response time, and leads me to believe my story wasn’t rejected out of hand — but a response in the next week or two would almost certainly be a rejection. No response means at worst it’s still being deliberated. (Well, I guess the worst case is that it slipped between the couch cushions and no one’s looking at it.) For that one, I’m more than content to wait. Although there’s no point in getting my hopes up — just ’cause they’re hanging onto it doesn’t mean they’re going to buy it, and the Black Hole says F&SF has rejected stories after as many as fourth months.

It’s nuts to think how much I’ve learned about the writing biz in the last eighteen months, mostly due to the Clarion experience. Before Clarion, the whole publishing thing seemed like a complete mystery. For awhile after Clarion, it seemed incredibly complex with dozens of variables to gauge how you were doing. More than a year on, things seem incredibly simple, at least for me — you write the best story you can, you send it to a place you believe would have reasonable interest, and that place accepts it or rejects it. Simple.

Response times and personalized rejections might let me know whether I was close or not but, unless I specifically get a request to do a rewrite (which I never have,) they don’t mean much else. A long response time can just as well mean the slush reader is procrastinating rather than meaning they’re sleeping with my story under their pillow. A form rejection letter can mean that the slusher has to run to the grocery, pick the dog up from the groomers, and finish proofing the next issue all before 4:45 and therefore didn’t have time to write any nice notes the stories she’s rejecting today. On the flip side, a personalized, gushing rejection is still a rejection — and I’m not writing hoping for positive rejections, although it’s always nice to get an editor’s opinion of where the story might be going wrong.

Quite simply, progress can be measured by one criteria: sales to discerning/reputable pubs. That’s it.

My timeline for making such sales is from now until the end of my life so there’s no hurry. I’m just a little more antsy than usual because I’d like to get a thing or two sold before the end of the year to bolster the ol’ CV when it comes time to apply for grad programs. That, and it would be nice to have a string of things appearing in a variety of places in a small amount of time to help inflate the street cred.

And it’s all about the street cred, isn’t it? Sure as hell isn’t about the money!

(PS - I’m fully aware that the next step in my writing career is to not blog all of my amateurish musings on how things work. With any luck, it will come soon.)

Scattershot post today. A little bit of everything.

1) I started paging through “A Brief History of Time” yesterday and before I knew it, I’d read the first two chapters. I’m not a big science guy (mostly due to my allergic reaction to math) but I do enjoy scientific theory. One my favorite college courses was a history of science that focused on Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. Einstein’s special theory of relativity helped me connect some dots philosophically in regards to free will and fate. Determinism has got to be one of the most misunderstood philosophical concepts — mostly because a) people falsely assume that the central argument is that we’re all automatons, and b) our me Me ME! society demands that we believe we are all living special lives that are bubbling over with potential. That second part stems directly from a belief-system that tells you God is an old man with a long white beard who has nothing better to do than sit on a fluffy cloud and watch you flail around in the course of your life, making a Santa-esque checklist of whether you’ve been naughty or nice.

[whew! That was so not where I was going with this post: Wikipedia has a decent run-down of determinism if it at all interests you, including a section that specifically speaks to its relationship to quantam mechanics -- note that many of the arguments against determinism deal with the problems of morality, the human soul, and...erm, a God who has endowed his beloved creations with absolute free will. If you're willing to accept the universe perhaps wasn't "made for me," things start making sense. To me, anyway. When I get more time (maybe when I retire,) I want to explore the relationship between quantum mechanics and Buddhism -- a hot debate, in some circles at least.]

2) I’ve had to put down “Titus Groan” until I have more time for reading. The book demands your attention and lately I’ve been reading in twenty-minute snatches and this is the wrong kind of book for that. Every page is so incredibly rich that you really need to immerse yourself in it for hours at a time rather than come back to it every lunch or bedtime. I have a habit of ripping through books while on airplanes so I hope to put a serious dent in Mr. Peake’s work on the flight to Fresno in a few weeks’ time.

3) Speaking of which, “UHR 2006 - Yosemite” planning is coming along. Giddy with excitement. The trail is long (20+ miles) and steep (about 6K feet elevation gain) but even the topo map is drool-worthy.

4) I will never buy computer components over the Internet again. I bought all the stuff to assemble a new and rockin’ machine but all the money I saved by using a discount place in California is being winnowed away trying to diagnose a single problem. The motherboard won’t POST unless it has the RAM, processor, and video card installed in the case — and right now it’s not POSTing. So that means it could be any one of those components and I have no way of isolating the problem so I have to pay a local computer shop to do the testing. I’ll still come out ahead by a few hundred bucks in the long run, but this has been a massive hassle. The last time I did this, I was living in Seattle and bought them from a place in Bellevue. They helped me out with the one issue I had. The cost benefits of buying the cheapest stuff online is now being defrayed by shipping costs and having the tests performed. Irritated.

5) An MLS All-Star team faces Real Madrid tonight in Madrid. I get a little tired of all the “we’re a respectable league and we’re going to show them” babble that accompanies a game like this. I love MLS and I do believe it’s one of the best second-tier leagues in the world but let’s face it — the European clubs don’t want to release their players for World Cup qualifiers for Christ’s sake, and MLS can’t wait to release it’s best players with the playoffs coming up to play a friendly. Besides, what’s the point of getting respect? It’s like when Wisconsin football plays non-conference games against MAC teams. Is the MAC better than I give it credit for? Probably. But they’re still an inferior conference that plays in tiny stadiums that have no history. Those teams will never make it into the big-dance BCS bowls and are therefore insignificant. This has got to be the average European soccer fan’s opinion of the MLS, too.

6) Great article on Steve McClaren’s boring, boring Middlesbrough. I though Boro would be a serious contender for honors this season and so far I’ve seen their first two games and have been bored to death. 0-0 to Liverpool and a 1-0 loss to Tottenham are strange results for a team full of big names, even if many are has-beens.

7) No word back on any stories I’ve submitted. Hope is a precursor to disappointment.

8) The more I look at UW-Milwaukee’s graduate program in Creative Writing the more excited I get. I’m aiming to get in almost exactly one year from now into the Master’s program and the tentative plan is to carry on to the PhD.

9) We’re making the switch from cable to satellite. I had Dish network back in 1998 when that was the only way you could get soccer but the move to Seattle necessitated the switch back to cable. When we came back to Madison we went with cable because it was the easier choice but, true to form, the cable company jerks you around and their rates keep climbing (just as the satellite television ads say.) The best part is that Dish network comes with DVR, which is almost equivalent to TiVo. No more missing those mid-day soccer matches!

10) I can’t think of a number ten, but you can’t leave a list at nine items, can you?

I just shipped “Minotaur Horns” to Cicada today. I’m sick of looking at it. I made some significant changes from the earlier draft, mostly based on what the Clarionites who read it had to say. I changed the ending somewhat and added some words there which extends an already longish denouement. Not by much, but a little. It started at over 6K words, trimmed it to 4.1K, and finally settled at 4.5K. Does it work? No idea. We’ll see what the folks at Cicada have to say.

That makes seven things out. I’ve got an eighth almost ready to go but it needs some serious editing. It’s only 2K words long and the narrative switches POV five times, each one showing a different reaction to a coal miner’s death and multiple resurrections. Whether I pull this off successfully is highly debatable and, because most slush is utter junk, toying with conventions is always a dangerous game. A slush reader is quite likely to think the first POV shift is an amateurish mistake rather than a structural ploy and there’s no tactful way of saying, “Please pay attention,” in the cover letter. Better to just make it as engaging as possible and hope I’ve built enough trust to get the benefit of the doubt. Andy Duncan switches POV in “The Grand Guginol” and I will check that out to see how he succeeded. That story sold to Weird Tales but this one will probably go to either Strange Horizons or F&SF .

I like having this number of stories out. I think this is the most I’ve had out at the same time. I need to reshuffle them once the rejections start rolling in — the one currently at Asimov’s will go to SCIFI.com next, for example, and once Asimov’s “opens” to me once again (you can’t send to a magazine if they already have a story of yours pending, in most cases) I’m going to send yet another version of “Black Jack Davy,” which is beginning to feel like an albatross around my neck. Right now it stands at 9K and it probably needs to lose a good 3K words. The nice part is that cutting is much faster than writing, and I think most of the writing is decent but there are too many sidebars that take away from the immediate action.

All of my stories out right now are between 1K to 5K words. Before I send out another longer story, I think I need to look at what holds longer stories together.

I would love to sell another story before the end of the year to add to the ol’ CV before applying for grad school. Come What May, I guess…