| Read The Sword-Edged Blonde |
[May. 8th, 2008|02:24 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Back to me" -- Kathleen Edwards | ] |
Read The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe--good book.
I rather expected to like it, because I'd have enjoyed either a fantasy-adventure story with Chandleresque trappings or a hard-boiled detective story with fantasy adventure trappings. This book, though, exceeded my expectations by being both.
I don't want to say too much about just what fantasy-story elements are there, because they'd be spoilers for the story. It doesn't spoil anything, though, to say that the detective is a former solder who saw some bad stuff--which is the same sensibility that informed a lot of the detective fiction of the 1940s and 1950s.
On top of doing both of those things well, it offers an extra bonus for me because the economic underpinnings of the world are rather more fully realized than in most fantasy stories. It's not overdone--very possibly most readers won't even notice--but the whole story works better because the author knows more about economics than most writers seem to.
If you like that sort of thing, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you'd like this one too. |
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| Fuel, travel plans, etc. |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|12:33 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Kingdom in the Sky" -- Da Vinci's Notebook | ] |
For years now I've been making changes to cut down on fuel use. I used to live in a rural village and had a commute of more than 10 miles, but about fifteen years ago moved here, cutting my commute to less than 5 miles. A few years after that, I started bicycling in the summer and taking the bus in the winter, cutting my (in our car) commuting total to maybe 5 miles a week. And, of course, since late August, I haven't been commuting at all.
Our fuel purchases gradually dropped, but I wasn't really keeping track, so I don't know when or by how much.
A few months ago, though, one of the local grocery stores started one of those deals where you get discounts in exchange for letting them track your purchases. It's different than most, though, in that what you get is a not a discount on the groceries themselves, but rather a discount on gasoline. The way the rules work, the discounts accumulate until you make a gas purchase, at which point they go back to zero and you have to start accumulating them again. The individual pieces of the discount are tied to specific shopping trips, and expire after 30 days. So, it makes sense to buy gas every 30 days, whether you need it or not.
With that in mind, we went to get gas today. We bought 5.5 gallons, and we got it at a 35-cent-a-gallon discount, bringing the price down to $3.209 per gallon.
I'm reasonably pleased with the idea that we use a bit less than 6 gallons in a typical month. We'll use more next month, though. Our anniversary is coming up, and we'll be going to Turkey Run for a bit of celebratory hiking and a couple of nice meals out. We'll probably visit an art gallery or two as well.
It'll be our 16th anniversary, which (as any software engineer knows) is the 10th in hexadecimal. |
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| Milestones that motivate me |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|01:22 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Code Monkey" -- Jonathan Coulton | ] |
When I'm really out of shape, I can't run any distance at all--just half a mile, maybe just a quarter mile. That distance improves pretty quickly once I start running three or four times a week, but I remember, from the first time I started running as an adult, finding that slow progress really discouraging. If it took me two weeks to go from being able to run a quarter mile to being able to run a half mile, how long would it take before I could run, say, 5 miles?
I learned, though, that there are certain milestones along the way.
First, for me, is when I can run for 9 minutes without having to stop and walk. Once I can do that, all of a sudden I can run for 20 minutes. Being able to run for 9 minutes means that my aerobic capacity is good enough to support my running pace--if it's even a tiny bit short, I have to stop and walk before 9 minutes are up. Once I can run for 9 minutes, I can run until my legs get tired. When I'm out of shape, that turns out to be about 20 minutes.
That's a crucial milestone. Until I can run for 20 minutes, the workouts aren't really satisfying, even if they're hard.
I hit that milestone last week sometime. This week I hit two more that I can remember from the last couple times I started running after a long break.
In order to run for my full 20 minutes, I basically have to run as slow as I can. So, my next milestone is when I can, for part of the run, run a little faster. That is, the point when "as slow as I can run" and "as fast as I can run" are no longer the exact same speed.
I structure my workouts around a weekly schedule that includes one long run and a few shorter runs. When I'm first starting, though, my short run is as far as I can go, so it's also my long run. Today, though, I hit another little milestone--I ran a second lap around Kaufman Lake. So, now I've got a long run, as well as a short run. They're both pretty short, but at least they're not the same. |
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| Reprioritizing exercise |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|04:08 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Papago" -- Ĵomart kaj Nataŝa | ] |
One of the things that I found most oppressive about working a regular job, was that it was so difficult to schedule in enough exercise.
The last time I was really fit, I was doing something like this:
 | Number | Workout | Typical
Duration | Minutes
per Week | | 1 | Long ride | 5-6 hours | 330 | | 1 | Long run | 1 hour | 60 | | 4 | Short rides | 40-50 minutes | 180 | | 3 | Short runs | 20-40 minutes | 90 | | 3 | Lifting/stretching sessions | 30 minutes | 90 |
Which comes out to just over 100 minutes per day on average.
Now, it's possible a fit 100 minutes of exercise into a day when you're also working at a job. Lots of people do. I tried all manner of optimizations and efficiencies. The "short rides" were made into my commute, which was only a few minutes longer by bike than by car--basically, I got that workout for free. The short runs were easy to fit in. The resistance exercise was harder, but I managed, getting to the fitness center before work at least a couple of times a week.
That long ride, though, was a real sticking point. It was really only possible to do that on a Saturday or Sunday, which left it vulnerable to the weather. The long run was a little more flexible--it was theoretically possible to fit a long run in after work, but I was usually too tired after work to actually do so. When the weather cooperated, I'd do the long run early on a Saturday morning. That gave me a full 24 hours to recover before doing the long ride Sunday morning. Of course, the weather didn't always cooperate.
The big advantage of not working a regular job ought to be that I can exercise anytime I want. In the spring, I can run in the afternoon when it's warm. In the summer I can run in the morning when it's cool. I can pick the nicest day of the week for my long ride (minimize the chance of being caught miles from home in a thunderstorm) and then organize the rest of the week's workouts around that.
I say "ought to," because I haven't taken full advantage so far. Last summer I was still working until the end of August, and then I was trying to focus on my novel while still cranking out four or five Wise Bread posts a week. I tried to get the running habit set up in the fall so that I could continue it through the winter, but didn't really manage it.
Now, though, it's spring, and I've decided to make exercise--that is, fitness--my number 1 priority. I'm not in shape to manage the workout I describe above--I can barely run for 20 minutes and just a 2-hour bike ride leaves me sore and tired. But I know from experience that things improve very quickly from this point. I should be able to do some real exercise by the end of June, and back to my old levels of fitness by late summer.
The thing that slips to the number 2 priority is the writing. I suspect, though, that this won't mean less writing. I know that 100 minutes a day for exercise is enough to get me fit, and I'm pretty sure that I can spare 100 minutes a day from sitting in front of the keyboard without cutting into the quantity of my writing (and it'll probably help the quality). |
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| Signed our lease |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|08:39 am] |
| [ | music |
| | "Get Ready to Roll" -- Janis Ian | ] |
The apartment complex offered us a deal: half a month's rent if we signed our renew lease early. So we did.
Along with executing the lease itself, a girl in the office updated their information sheet on us--contact info, emergency contact info (our moms), descriptions of our car and cat, etc.
We've lived here a long time now. For about 7 years, during and after my house collapsed, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Then, about 7 years ago, we moved across the parking lot and one buidling over to the two-bedroom apartment that we just renewed the lease for. So, for something like 14 years, they've asked every year, "Do you still work at Motorola?"
Once I reminded her that the Motorola site had closed last summer, she remembered it. (It was big news locally.) She asked where I was working now, and I said that I was a full-time writer.
I've had the opportunity to say that before, and it's always satisfying. This time, though, it gave me a different kind of shiver. I momentarily imagined them grabbing back the half-executed leases and saying, "Only people with regular jobs can live here!" They didn't, though. The girl wasn't quite sure what to write down, but Jackie suggested that she put "self-employed," and that took care of the form. They didn't seem concerned beyond that.
It was an interesting reminder, though, that we might have trouble if we wanted to move. I suppose I could offer to pay the whole year's rent in advance. (Interestingly, our lease is actually written that way--we owe the annual sum, which "purely for our convenience," they'll let us pay in monthly installments.)
In fact, though, we've been really happy here. |
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| Weaving demo at the Spurlock Museum |
[Apr. 12th, 2008|03:16 pm] |
Jackie and I spent an hour this morning at the Spurlock Museum, where a woman from Guatemala was demonstrating traditional Mayan weaving on a backstrap loom.
This is the same museum Jackie and I visited one day in midwinter, when I was feeling kind of depressed, but this visit was not for similar reasons--spring is here, and I'm feeling very cheerful.
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| I wrote a story |
[Apr. 5th, 2008|07:34 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "I'll Fly Away" -- Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss | ] |
One downside of working on a novel is that it's easy to go months without finishing anything. That got to be a bit much for me this week, so I took a break and wrote a short story.
Actually, it's easy enough to go months without finishing anything even without working on a novel. I've done that too.
Still, it's nice to finish something. Plus, I'm pretty pleased with it. I wrote it in scenes. One persistent mistake I make is to write sort of "continuous action," spending time doing things getting the characters from point A to point B. I managed not to do that this time. I'm also prone to writing viewpoint characters whose affect is awfully flat (often to the point that they seem to be some sort of sociopath). I managed not to do that as well.
There's still some work to do. I'm not sure I quite earn my resolution, and I'm not sure the resolution is exactly clear. But I need to get a bit of distance before I can tackle those things.
Still: Good to finish something. Good to be pleased with it. Good to be reminded of some of my common errors, so that I can be on the lookout for them when I return to the novel--I think it suffers a bit from the "continuous action" problem. It would benefit if I stepped back and figured out what scenes I needed, and then cut everything else. |
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| Article on story structure |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|06:02 am] |
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Shortly after Clarion, I wrote an article on story structure that was published by Speculations. Now that Speculations is no more, I thought I'd go ahead and put the piece up on my own site: Story Structure in Short Stories. |
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| Did my taxes, mostly |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|04:29 pm] |
My taxes were more complex this year than in the past several. My writing business grew substantially; I started using part of my apartment as a home office; I had a health savings account. All-in-all there was enough new stuff to make doing the taxes seem difficult. In fact, though, I pretty much did them in just a couple of hours this morning.
I haven't actually filed them yet. I need to get Jackie to go over them, to see if she spots any errors. Plus it's always worth just giving it a day or two--I often think of something I've missed.
Still, it's good to have them mostly done. I'd begun to fret about them. |
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| Spring biking and running, website |
[Mar. 14th, 2008|06:01 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Pizza Day" -- Jonathan Coulton | ] |
We finally got some spring weather, and seized the opportunity to get some outdoor exercise:
- On Wednesday we went for a shake-down bike ride. (Different from an ordinary bike ride only in that we selected a route so that our maximum distance from home was never so great as to make it impossible to walk home if necessary.)
- On Thursday I went for a run. We had also gone to the Fitness Center earlier in the day.
- Today we bicycled over to the library to return a bunch of library books. That ride was actually slightly shorter than our previous ride, but it was an actual, transportational ride, in that we'd have had to go to the library anyway, because our books were due.
Now it's going to turn cooler again for a few days.
Some hacker found a system exploit on the servers of the hosting service I've been using. By simple bad luck, they happened to do so just after I'd spent three days revamping my site. I discovered the vandalism just a few hours after it had happened, and spent an evening going in and cleaning up--which turned out to be entirely wasted effort, because overnight the hosting service reverted the system back to the latest backup. Sadly, their backup was 6 days old, so they also wiped out not only the cleanup work, but also all the changes I'd made over the past several days.
I had backups of all the old stuff and most of the new stuff (and the bulk of the time spent was to learn how Wordpress works, rather than actually creating content), but rather than recreate the system where it was, I decided to seize the opportunity to move to a new hosting service. So, I've done that. I'm about three-quarters of the way to getting things back where I'd had them, although several things are broken because I pulled the trigger on the move before everything was ready. It should be all set in a day or two. |
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| They like me |
[Mar. 13th, 2008|03:36 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Lay Baby Lay" -- Maria Muldaur | ] |
I wrote a Wise Bread post on the new $5 (which enters circulation today), and picked up links from two on-line forums:
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| Lanyard |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|01:26 pm] |
It's pretty easy to pick up lanyards for employee badges as schwag at cons and job fairs and the like. I've got two or three.
Of course, I don't need to wear an employee badge any more, but even before that I'd quit wearing those lanyards, because Jackie wove me a beautiful blue and teal lanyard out of silk. I wore it pretty much every day for years. Since the site closed down, it's been hanging up with Jackie's scarves, and I hadn't really thought of it much.
Jackie just now happened upon it and brought it and put it around my neck. It makes for an odd reminder.
Sure is a pretty piece of textile craftsmanship, though.
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| Frittering away time improving my website |
[Mar. 9th, 2008|08:29 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "This Masquerade" -- George Benson | ] |
When I created my first website (back in 1999), building a site of all hand-coded html was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It hasn't been a reasonably thing for a long time now. Converting it over to a sensible content management system has long been something that I wanted to do, but on any particular day there always seemed something more important to do.
For some reason, although there probably were other more important things to do, yesterday and today turned out to be days on which there didn't seem to be. So, I spent several hours both days creating a site with Wordpress.
It's got a new picture of me, looking all unkempt and shaggy. The long hair started as a frugality move, and hasn't gotten cut yet because I'm interested in seeing what happens if I don't. The long beard is because the last time I trimmed it the temperature plummeted below zero for days and I decided not to trim it again until the spring weather arrived.
Check it out:
http://www.philipbrewer.net/ |
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| Area of special competence |
[Mar. 5th, 2008|10:16 am] |
| [ | music |
| | "Lazybones" -- Hoagy Charmichel | ] |
The office where I used to work had a dispenser that provided steaming hot water suitable for making tea. It was really handy, and I felt its lack when I didn't have access to it any more--and had to resort to making hot water in a tea kettle.
I make hot water several times a day, in all different amounts, depending on whether I'm making a mug of tea or a whole pot, or whether I'm making cocoa instead, and whether Jackie wants hot water for something at the same time. Over the past few months, I've become really quite good at filling the kettle with just the right amount of water for whatever we're planning to do with it. (No point in spending energy heating up water that will just sit in the kettle or get poured down the drain, after all.)
The thing that surprises me is how pleased I am with this utterly trivial skill. |
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| Clever name sought |
[Feb. 3rd, 2008|02:42 pm] |
Champaign-Urbana, alone among snowy places I've lived, has no culture of shoveling sidewalks clear of snow. Many people do, but it is a rare block that is cleared from corner to corner. Many businesses not only leave their sidewalks uncleared, they actually pile up parking-lot snow in the sidewalks, making them completely impassible.
There have been moves locally to mandate sidewalk clearing, but the efforts have bogged down from public resistance--nobody wants the government to tell them they need to shovel their sidewalks, and there's concern about people who simply don't have the physical capacity to do so.
Keeping a sidewalk shoveled for a winter is less work than keeping a lawn mowed for a summer, and there are laws about letting your lawn go. The fact that people in the political argument kept saying, "What about seniors and handicapped people who can't shovel their sidewalk?" while seeming to have no concern for seniors and handicapped people who can't walk three blocks to the pharmacy to get their prescriptions, convinced me that step one needs to be to change public attitudes.
As recently as the 1960s, drunk driving was considered an appropriate topic of humor. You can see movies of the day where you're clearly supposed to laugh as some alcoholic gets poured into his car and sets of weaving down the road. They don't seem funny now, and the reason is that MADD and other groups changed pubic attitudes.
So, I want to change public attitudes locally. I want people to stop shrugging when they see an unshoveled sidewalk. I want people to look at an unshoveled sidewalk and say, "Look at those guys--so lazy that they'd rather see children and seniors and handicapped people out on the road with cars than go to a bit of effort or expense to clear their sidewalks."
To that end, I'm going to create a Flickr group with photos of local businesses that have managed to get their parking lots clear, but left their sidewalks impassible.
And finally to the point of my post: any clever suggestions for the name of the group? I was thinking something like "blocked sidewalks," but I think a clever name might make a big difference in the group getting traction. |
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| Reading another book on writing |
[Jan. 13th, 2008|04:58 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "John Henry" --Kristina Olsen | ] |
I've read a lot of books on writing over the years. I sometimes wonder why I feel like reading yet another, as they all say much the same thing. They all exhort you to write every day. They all tell you to write in your own unique voice. They all have descriptions of first-person and third-person. Basically, they all have stuff I know.
Even so, I like reading books on writing. I hardly ever read one without learning something.
See, the thing is, there are at least three ways to learn something from a book on a topic that you already know thoroughly:
- It contains some new information--something none of the other books thought to mention, and that you hadn't discovered on your own. (You go, "Wow! Who knew?")
- It contains something that other books said, but that this book states particularly well. (You go, "Is that what all those other books were trying to say! I get it now!")
- It contains something that the other books said perfectly well, but that you weren't ready to learn the last twelve times you read it. (You go, "Why didn't someone tell me that before? Wait, I guess they did....")
It's that #3 that keeps me coming back to books on writing. It happens every time I read a book on writing. I'm sure I could go back to any of the old books on writing that I read and find the exact same information, but each new book still manages to teach me something new. The first few had new information (#1), and the best few had information stated especially well (#2), but every one has stuff that I'm only now ready to learn.
This latest time, I read Walter Mosely's This Year You Write Your Novel. It's a fine, fine book for someone who is, as I am, working on a first novel. It doesn't have much in it that's new. Not much that's not in Crawford Killian's advice on novel writing that's free on the web. Not much that's not in Anne Lamott's awesome Bird by Bird. In fact, the overlap with Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction is considerable, even though it's on short stories and Mosley's book is specifically on writing a novel. And yet, like always, there are bits that speak to me.
Mosely vividly describes the sensation (familiar, I'm sure, to any writer) of reading something that you wrote a while ago, and finding good stuff that you didn't remember putting there: the exciting bits, the perceptive bits, the funny bits, the clever bits. Reading about it reminded me how much fun that step is--how satisfying it is to read a draft and find treasures there. It was a reminder I needed, if I was going to get over the hump of actually getting a first draft written.
If you like to read such books, Mosely's is a good choice. Among its other virtues, it's short. Rather than being comprehensive, it focuses in on the things a first novelist needs to be focusing on. (There's only half a paragraph, for example, on writing in second person. Only two pages on getting published.)
I liked it. |
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| Musings on my word-count goal |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|10:02 am] |
| [ | music |
| | "Johnny B. Goode" -- Peter Tosh | ] |
In the weeks between the announcement that the site would close and the actual date of the close, I was trying to write 1000 words a day, and generally managed it.
Once I actually was a full-time writer, though, I tried to bump that up to 2000 words a day. That hasn't worked at all.
I'm a bit sad at the idea that I don't seem to be able to be more productive as a full-time writer than I was while also holding down a day job.
Now, I didn't expect my output to scale linearly. (I was probably writing for about 2 hours most evenings during that period and I certainly didn't expect that I'd be able to write 4 or 5 times as much just because I'd have 8 more hours that I could write in.) But I did expect to be able to write some more My experience so far is that I can't.
Since that seemed at least a little odd, I pondered a bit over how I might do some kind of cross-check, and then I remember that there was one other period when I was writing more-or-less full time: the six weeks I was at Clarion. Looking back at my Clarion journal, I found that I didn't note down daily word counts regularly enough to do any statistics on those numbers, but I do have the word-counts of the stories that I finished. I turned in stories totaling 24,550 words, which works out to 585 words a day. Of course, that's word counts for polished drafts. When I adjust for words written that didn't make it into finished drafts, plus a few days of writing after I turned in my final story, I probably was averaging something in the ballpark of 1000 words of rough draft per day.
Now, I was doing other stuff at Clarion--reading and critiquing my classmate's stories, plus class work. But then, I'm doing other stuff now, too--in particular, the writing for Wise Bread.
Anyway, I feel a bit better now. I'll mentally down-shift a bit and go back to targeting 1000 words of fiction a day. It won't make any difference in how much I'm getting written, and maybe I'll be happier about it. I ought to figure out how much I've written for Wise Bread.
(Actually, a quick check was very easy. In my folder of rough drafts of Wise Bread articles, I've got 66,237 words of prose. Dividing by the days since mid-July that comes to something under 400 words a day.) |
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| Bicycles |
[Dec. 19th, 2007|09:50 am] |
I can't quite bring myself to do much winter cycling. Between the cold and the dark and the ice, I just never manage to get out there.
But, when the sun shines through the study window and lights up the bicycles, I really miss getting out for a ride.
The blue one is Jackie's Univega Activa trail, a hybrid that I bought her as a birthday gift just after we got married because I wanted her to bicycle with me. The black one is a Specialized HardRock, a low-end mountain bike that I bought shortly after I moved to Illinois, even though I live a really long way from any mountains. The grey one in the back is a Univega Gran Turismo, a touring bike that I bought when I was living in Salt Lake City, probably in 1984.
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| A bit of sun |
[Dec. 14th, 2007|12:12 pm] |
I've slept until 7:30 on each of the past three mornings. That's very unusual for me in general, but absolutely typical for this time of year.
When I was working, it was quite burdensome to have to get up in time for work each morning, just for a month or so before and after the solstice. It was never that I really slept in, it was simply that I don't naturally get up until it's light out, and this time of year it doesn't get light out until 7:30. In the summer I'm often up before 5:30.
Two days ago we ran various errands (lifted weights, went to the library), but took time for a second walk (besides the pre-lifting warm-up walk) in the park behind Bo Peep's where we stopped for lunch. It was sunny in the morning, but clouds rolled in at about the mid-point of our walk. I hadn't brought my camera, but I captured this image with the camera on my cell phone just before everything turned dark and gloomy.
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| A day for the soul |
[Dec. 7th, 2007|02:01 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | "Still Crazy After All These Years" -- Paul Simon | ] |
I'd had some hope that the "being a full-time writer" thing would mean no season depression this year. It was only some hope, as many people through the ages have suffered with depression even without day jobs. But, as work tended to be the thing I fixed on as what I was unhappy about, I thought maybe not going to work would mean less seasonal depression, even as the nights get long and cold. And it may yet mean that.
However, I woke up this morning, feeling discouraged about all the various things I do and mean to do, and with no particular reason to feel discouraged--things were fine yesterday. I suspect it's just the season.
Anyway, another advantage of not having a day job is that I don't have a fixed schedule. So, this morning I told Jackie that I wanted the two of us to get out and do something together. We took the bus to campus and went to the Spurlock Museum, which is having a little tiny exhibit on Archaea (microbes that are genetically distinct from bacteria). It had a Nobel prize! I mean, the actual gold medallion, there in the display case. I'd never seen one of those before. Researchers at the University had won it for their work on Archaea.
The Spurlock is actually a fine little museum. It's like museums used to be. For example, it has plaster cast copies of great sculptures from all over the world--the Venus de Milo, busts of Julius Caesar, Socrates, Nero, friezes from Athenian temples, etc. Nowadays, museums don't want copies of great stuff. They want originals, even if they're crappy, third-rate stuff that doesn't exemplify anything other than that people 2000 years ago made crappy stuff too.
After the museum, we went to Harold's fried chicken. Jackie ate at the one in Hyde Park a lot when she lived there. They'd opened one here months ago, and we'd been meaning to go, but hadn't made it until today.
So. Good to get out. Good to take the bus rather than drive on the slushy roads. Good to walk on campus. Good to see the exhibits at the Spurlock. Good to eat Harold's fried chicken.
I got some fiction writing done this morning, before we headed out. I may do some more this afternoon, or I may do a Wise Bread post, or I may just read.
Tomorrow there's supposed to be freezing rain. I always say, if the weather can't be good, it should at least be bad enough to be interesting. Maybe that will qualify. |
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bradipo's journal
