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I failed to post yesterday’s First Sentence I Wrote Today, which means now I have two, two, two sentences to post!
Most of the new verbiage (also some nounage, and a bit of adjectivage–I try to be sparing with the adverbiage) was on Blue Fire. Yesterday’s first sentence was:
Illinen crouched in the darkness outside the Freefolk camp, watching the guards and the boy they called “Priest-Apprentice,” until Penrod howled the signal to slip away.
Today’s first sentence/paragraph:
Illinen had heard of the Watchers, scouts scattered along a line a day’s travel west of the Great Warren, hidden inside camouflaged shadow-shelters, peering out through pinholes, risking eyesight and more to make sure the Daydwellers did not come near the center of the Nightdwellers’ kingdom.
Words the past two days: 4,517
Total thus far: 29,908
Magebane I think I’ve got figure out at last–my big plot breakthrough of Saturday morning turned out to not be quite as definitive as I’d liked, but further thought yesterday has, I think, brought everything much clearer. So new stuff is finally happening there, though I don’t have a First Sentence I Wrote Today for it today. Maybe tomorrow.
Oh, and the photos? First one is what I saw while writing yesterday at the Atlantis coffee shop at the corner of Victoria Avenue and Hamilton Street in downtown Regina, the second is what I saw this morning while writing at the Aegean coffee shop just a block further north along Hamilton.
Saskatchewan, as has oft been noted, has a lot of roads: more than 190,000 kilometres in all, in fact, giving it one of the most extensive road systems in Canada.
Not all of those roads are paved, however. In fact, most aren’t. And as anyone who has had occasion to drive extensively on the rural road system can tell you, while gravel roads are better than mud roads, they have their own…interesting…characteristics, of which one of the most annoying is the “washboard effect.”
Washboards are fine if you’re a 19th century pioneer woman trying to clean the clothes or the abs of a 21st century male bodybuilder, but washboard-like ridges on a road are downright dangerous, reducing traction, causing extreme wear and tear on the vehicles vibrating over them, and threatening to extract the fillings of the unfortunate drivers.
Nor is this washboard effect limited to gravel roads: those annoying ripples appear on just about any road with a loose surface, from sand to snow.
Nobody has been entirely sure how this annoying phenomenon arises—until now.
A team consisting of Anne-Florence Bitbol and Nicolas Taberlet of Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon, Jim McElwaine of the University of Cambridge, and Stephen Morris of the University of Toronto, working in England and France, have managed to create washboard surfaces in the laboratory—and just as importantly, model them mathematically.
Seeking to find the simplest possible instance of the effect, they created an experimental setup consisting of a rotating table a meter in diameter, covered with a layer of sand between five and 10 centimetres thick. A hard rubber wheel attached to an arm was free to roll on this granular “road,” which moved beneath it at a velocity ranging from 0 to 10 km/h.
Unlike there would be a with a car driving over a road, there was no suspension involved, no torque from the engine, and no bouncy inflatable tire—but even so, the ripples formed, rapidly, after just a few passes of the wheel.
As the researchers put it on the experiment’s website, “The fact that our simplified systems produce washboard ripples is important since it shows that neither tyres nor suspension are necessary to obtain washboard roads, although of course, adding a spring, a dashpot, a tyre or an engine would affect the size of the bumps. In other words, it is not because of the suspension of cars that washboard roads exist. The ripple wavelength is not simply the speed of the wheel times the bounce frequency of the suspension, which seems to be a common belief.
Also surprising: neither the size of the wheel nor the size of the grains covering the road influenced the pattern (although the mass of the wheel did). In fact, the wheel didn’t even have to spin: even when it just plowed along the surface, the washboard developed.
In fact, ripples formed in sand both wet and dry, with both fine and coarse grains, and even in long-grain rice; with or without an added spring on the wheel; for various weights of the wheel; and at a large range of speeds. In scientific terms, the phenomenon is “very robust.
It’s not just seen on roads, either. You see it on ski hills (as moguls), steel railway tracks (as tiny bumps), and even in computer hard disks, where the hopping of the read head sometimes creates a washboard pattern
So if the fault lies not in our automobiles’ suspensions, where does it lie
According to the U. of T.’s Morris, the effect is related to the physics of stone skipping. A skipping stone creates a ripple that the stone then launches off of into the air, landing and creating another ripple, and so on. This carries on until the stone’s speed falls below a certain threshold
Similarly, a car’s wheel, travelling over a granular surface, creates ripples that it launches off of, landing and creating another ripple, and so on, and so on. The difference is that, unlike water, a granular surface “remembers” the ripples, which grow larger with each subsequent pass of a wheel
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to avoid a washboard effect: you just have to keep the cars travelling on the road below a certain critical velocity. For cars that’s around 8 km/h, which means there is a strong scientific argument for the government setting the rural speed limit to, oh, say, 5 km/h
I’m sure that would be acceptable to all concerned.
…was for Blue Fire:
It wore a scrap of green cloth as a shift and had yellow yarn for its hair.
Words today: 2,234
Total thus far: 25,390
I didn’t do any writing over the weekend of the sitting-at-the-keyboard variety, but after I woke up on Saturday morning but before I actually got out of bed I solved the big plot hangup that’s had me doing nothing but rewriting and rethinking on Magebane. That occasioned some more rewriting today, but I think either tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll finally start adding to its official word count as well.
I finished rewriting the bit of Blue Fire that needed it and will be pressing on to greener writing pastures. In fact, I made a start, so today from Blue Fire I have both a first sentence I rewrote and I first sentence I wrote. Will the excitement never end?
First, the first sentence I rewrote:
“The Nightdwellers?” Petra frowned. “They’re not exactly a new–”
Then, the first new new sentence in a while:
Petra stared at the table.
See, I told you it was exciting.
Meanwhile, it’s still all rewriting all the time over at Magebane, though I got through about a 4,500-word chunk of it today and am picking up speed as I work out a few things about my world that weren’t clear enough in my own mind–or in the text–before now.
Here was the first rewritten sentence of Magebane today:
Her tutor spoke to her only about her schooling, but she wasn’t entirely uninformed about events in the rest of the kingdom.
Still working primarily at the Wascana Country Club where, after a miserably cold, gray morning, the sun came out about the time I was working on Magebane…and I took another photo with my Blackberry Storm to show the view to my left as I worked. It turned into a fairly nice day. Still awfully cool for July, though…
Oh, all right, not the actual detectives themselves, but my latest book from Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Disease. That’s the cover at left.
Here’s the blurb from the back:
Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how these “disease detectives” are coming up with new wayts to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too!
I’d seen that before. What I hadn’t seen, until the books arrived today, was this very nice cover quote from Jonathan M. Samet, MD, Professor and Flora L. Thornton Chair, Director, Institute for Global Health, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (quite the title!):
“This book captures the excitement and significance of epidemiology and the hard work of being an epidemiologist. It is a great starting point for those who want to benefit world health by becoming an epidemiologist.”
Very nice. And now that I have my author’s copies, I can get the book entered into the Saskatchewan Book Awards before the first deadline of July 31.
A new review of Terra Insegura popped up today at the Errant Dreams blog, and it’s a pretty good one–four out of five stars.
A couple of excerpts:
Edward Willett’s Terra Insegura is a sequel to his Marseguro. As happens all-too-often with reviewing, I haven’t read that previous book. However, that does make me eminently qualified to declare that Willett did an outstanding job writing Terra Insegura in such a way that it makes sense to new readers…
***
While the world and non-villain characters are highly enjoyable, however, one of the high points of Terra Insegura is Willett’s skill with action. The pacing (other than a slight lag in the middle) is tension-packed, and the action scenes gripping. I was in the mood for some good old-fashioned SF adventure, and Terra Insegura delivered!
The shortlists for the Sunburst Award, Canada’s premiere juried award for science fiction and fantasy literature (featuring not only a shiny medal but $1,000 cash) were announced today, and…no, Marseguro is not on either the adult or young adult shortlist (though many other fine works are–I was particularly glad to see Dave Duncan’s The Alchemist’s Code on there).
However, I can take some comfort in the fact that one of the jurors, John Dupois, mentioned Marseguro on his blog. In response to a comment noting, “Not much hard sci-fi, is there?,” then asking, “Is this a bias of the jury? Or are Canadian authors just not interested?”, Dupois replied, ”a bit of both I guess. We did see a few more straightforward sf novels but they didn’t strike us the same way that the others did. Two that I enjoyed from last year were that were harder sf: Marseguro by Edward Willett and Omega Sol by Scott Mackay.”
So, although I made neither the shortlist nore the honorable mention list, at least one of the jurors liked my book enough to mention it on his blog.
I’ll take what I can get.
(And have I mentioned the deadline for voting for Marseguro–or anything else, for that matter–for the Aurora Awards, which you can do online here, is July 15? I have? Well, fancy that.)
…will appear momentarily, but first, a picture. This is where I worked on Magebane this afternoon–if you look close, you can see some of it on the computer screen. It’s the Spike Lounge at the Wascana Country Club. Not as odd a choice as you might think: it’s usually quieter than a coffee shop, the scenery is nicer, and they serve a wider selection of food and, um, beverages than a coffee shop. I’ve quite enjoyed working out there these past few days.
I was still rewriting today, but I should be moving on to new Blue Fire material either tomorrow or Monday at the latest. Today’s first rewritten Blue Fire sentence was:
Unlike the large wagon she shared–used to share, she thought coldly–with her Grandfather, this was just a smallish stores wagon, bags of rice and beans and wheat and other staples stacked around the outside walls, leaving only a small open space in the middle.
And today’s first rewritten Magebane sentence (Magebane is a bit further away from the resumption of fresh-material-writing, I fear):
Once on the main floor, she continued along the plain corridors that ran behind the walls of the lavish rooms that visitors to the manor saw.
…or, if you want to get technical about it, the first sentence I re-wrote, from Blue Fire, was:
There were still a half-dozen tents scattered around the grounds.
After today’s re-writing, the total word count stands at 22,016.
Meanwhile, as Lee Arthur Chane, the first sentence I rewrote for Magebane was:
If such thoughts are near the surface of the First Mage, so highly placed in my Father’s Council, he thought, how strong are the hidden currents of them in the people as a whole?
Over there, total word count stands at 27,155.
Moving along well on both rewrites, but it’ll probably be next week before I resume writing all-new material.
…as I went back to fix the Scene Where It All Went Wrong in Blue Fire, was:
For a moment Petra couldn’t figure out what the blackened object was; then his chair clattered backward onto the wooden floor as he leaped to his feet without conscious volition.
Not sure I like it much. That’s the way it seemed to flow best, but “without conscious volition” seems a bit pretentiously wordy for a YA fantasy…
Lots of new words, but lots of old words mixed in, so I can’t really give you a word count for the day. Current total word count, though, is 22,051, which is up a bit from yesterday. Don’t know how it will all work out as I work forward and readjust stuff I’ve already written so it works with the new scene I wrote today. With luck I’ll get through that tomorrow.
I worked at home today entirely, and didn’t like it one bit. The Web is too close and there are too many other distractions, because there are always a hundred things that need doing trying to pull me away from actually writing. So tomorrow I’ll be setting out with laptop again to find a nice Internet-free zone in which to set up temporary shop, and should make good progress on both Blue Fire and Magebane, though in both cases still in the rewriting rather than writing new stuff mode.
There’s a perception that science is always reversing itself. If you don’t like what science has to say about, say, the health benefits or risks of a particular food (eggs, for example, or coffee), you only have to wait awhile until a contradictory study comes out.
That’s because science progresses in fits and starts. Researchers put forward a possible explanation, a hypothesis, for the results of an experiment. Other researchers attempt to duplicate their results and refine the hypothesis. Sometimes the hypothesis is completely discarded, and a new hypothesis gains sway.
But in the media, this slow process is seldom reported. It’s much easier to pick up on the report of a single study—particularly if it has startling results—and present the hypotheses put forward by its authors as fact, rather than simply one possible interpretation.
I’m sure I’ve been guilty of that myself in this column, though I try to avoid it by using phrases which, if I could only charge a dollar to every reader for each use, would have long since made me rich: “One possible explanation…” “The researchers suggest…” and, of course, “More research is needed.”
By this time you’ve probably twigged to the fact that I’m about to tell you that something you may think is a fact is anything but—and you’re right.
Go to any gym, and you’re likely to see people engaging in the time-honored practice of static stretching, bending themselves into a pose that pulls muscles and tendons tight and holding it for a few seconds.
They do this because they’ve been told, at some point, that it’s important to “stretch out” before engaging in vigorous physical activity, in order to avoid injury.
Guess what? In all likelihood, they’re wasting their time.
This isn’t exactly news, or shouldn’t be. As Cynthia Billhartz Gregorian points out in a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it’s been five years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed 361 research studies done by its epidemiology program office and found no evidence that stretching either before or after exercise prevents either injury or muscle soreness.
In fact, some sports medicine experts say static stretching actually inhibits performance, decreasing power and speed, and can cause micro-tears in tendons, ligaments and muscles. Nor is stretching going to help you work out a strain: stretching it makes it worse, not better. Strained muscles should be rested, and then the focus should be on rebuilding strength.
So should you give up stretching altogether? (You know, just like you gave up coffee and chocolate before you found out both are good for you?)
No; but you might want to think twice about static stretching. Modern thinking—you know, as opposed to that old pre-2004 thinking—holds that dynamic stretching is the way to go: moving through stretches without pausing or holding a position, walking forward while grabbing the knee toward the chest, that kind of thing. A little jogging in place or skipping while swinging your arms, or going through the required motions of a particular sport at half-speed might help.
Now, static stretching does have some benefits. If you do it every day for three months, it will make you more flexible, for instance. “Senior athletes” can benefit by doing traditional stretching after—but not before!–their main workout, because it helps minimize the effects of arthritis and joint degeneration. And any athlete can benefit from static stretching after prolonged exercise because it reduces lactic acid accumulation in heavily exercised muscles.
But beforehand? Not recommended.
When you think about it, our physically active ancestors didn’t worry about stretching. As California doctor-and-author Dr. William Meller points out, “Can you imagine a caveman engaging in a program of stretching before heading out to chase down prey?” And I doubt most farm hands carefully stretched before going out for a day of tossing hay bales onto a wagon.
So why have we been stretching all these years? Because at some point, researchers decided it was good for us. Scientists continued to study the issue, however, and our knowledge evolved.
Which gives me great hope, because personally, I’m hoping for a study that says the whole “exercise is good for you” thing is similarly misguided.
If I find one, you’ll hear it here first!
…was for Blue Fire:
Amlinn’s Grandfather’s wagon–he realized he still didn’t know the old man’s name–glowed like a rare jewel in the final rays of the day’s sunlight, which set its red and gold paint ablaze.
Words today: 1,277
Total thus far: 20, 953
Now, this is an interesting sentence. (Also an awkward and rather convoluted one, but I can fix that. Also, need I point out the setting the wagon ablaze thing is a metaphor? It doesn’t really catch fire…but in a fantasy, you never know, so perhaps I should make it a simile instead. But I digress.) The POV character admits he doesn’t know the old man’s name. And why doesn’t he know the old man’s name? Because the author, looking back at what he had already written, realized that he–that is to say, I–didn’t know the old man’s name. So this is me writing my way out of my own laziness. However, about two paragraphs later I realized I couldn’t keep calling the old man “Amlinn’s grandfather” and that I would, in fact, have to commit to a name and let Petra, the POV character, learn it.
But then, everything I wrote today is quite likely going to drastically changed, because as I plowed through it, I felt resistance, the same kind of growing resistance that currently has me rewriting Magebane instead of writing fresh material. The fact is, I goofed. Twenty or so pages ago, in the heat of the moment, I abandoned my outline and wrote a scene in a different way than I had initially sketched it. And now I have paid the price, because the fact is, my initial idea, as written down in the outline, was, in fact, the stronger choice. Sometimes it isn’t, and then this kind of leap off the tracks of the plot as originally conceived leads to bigger and better things. But this time…no. I’m going to have to go back and rewrite that scene, and everything that came after.
So my total word count will be all over the map for the next little while. (A shame, really, since I just passed 20,000 words today–which should mean I’m about a quarter done.) I should still have a “first sentence I wrote today,” though, since I’ll be writing new stuff–it’s just that it’s going to be superceding stuff I’ve already written.
C’est la vie d’un auteur!
…and in particular of Julia Mackey’s play Jake’s Gift, is in today’s LeaderPost.
An excerpt:
Mackey says one of the main reasons she created the show was to let veterans know that a lot of people really do appreciate the sacrifices they made.
Another was to educate children, and Jake’s Gift, Mackey says, elicits the same “amazing” response from 10-year-olds as it does their elders.
“Those young kids really get it, and it makes them interested in history. They come up to me afterwards and want to know more about the war and Remembrance Day. That’s such an incredible reward.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but in addition to writing nonfiction, I also write fiction—specifically, science fiction and fantasy.
Now, the writing of fiction is a very odd thing, in that it involves the making up of characters: people who don’t really exist, but for whom the illusion of existence is created by the words the author puts on the page.
Quite often, these people are very different from the author. I recently interviewed renowned Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer for FreeLance, the magazine of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. The main character in his latest book, Wake, is a blind teenage girl, Caitlin Decter. Now, although Sawyer can draw on some experience at the age of 12 of being blind (eyes bandaged) for a few days, he has never been, nor will he ever be, a teenage girl.
But as he puts it, “The most interesting thing as a writer is to try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, get inside somebody who is not like you. It’s like being an actor. No ambitious actor wants to play the part that’s closest to who he or she actually is. They want to play the part that’s the biggest stretch for them.
“I’m writing my 20th novel. I’ve written a hundred significant characters. If they were all middle aged bald white guys who watched way too much Star Trek when they were young, they’d be boring.”
In a way, it sounds impossible, to “get inside somebody who is not like you.” But in fact, we all do it all the time, predicting how other people will react to a given situation, even if it isn’t one we’ve experienced ourselves…and scientists have just begun to figure out the brain mechanisms that enable us to do so.
And interestingly enough, the work is based on the study of people who are congenitally blind…like Caitlin Decter.
Our ability to figure out what other people are thinking is called “theory of mind,” and there are two main theories about how it works.
One, called simulation, suggests that when we try to figure out other people’s mental reactions to an event, we try to match experiences we’ve had to the experience the other person is having.
The other theory proposes that we each carry within our brains an abstract model of how minds work, just as we have a model of how the physical world works. Just as we know that if we drop a watermelon from a ten-story building it will splatter, even though we’ve never actually done it, we can figure out how other people will react to an experience even if we’ve never had a similar experience ourselves.
MIT neuroscientists Marina Bedny and Rebecca Saxe decided to test these competing theories by studying congenitally blind people who, since they’ve never had visual input, can’t reason about the visual experiences of others the way sighted people do. The example they give is that while a blind person could understand the experience of being happy at seeing a love letter from a boyfriend, she would have no memories of that exact experience herself.
However, Bedny and Saxe found that blind people performed just as well in predicting the feelings of other people as sighted people did. Not only that, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans revealed that blind people and sighted people used the same brain regions when predicting other people’s mental states—even though other studies have shown that the brains of blind people can reorganize themselves, giving over the cortex that normally processes visual information to language processing, for example.
All of which seems to indicate that we can understand other people’s experiences because we carry a model of how human brains work within our own brain, not because we’ve necessarily shared similar experiences.
Which brings me back to writing. There’s an old adage to “write what you know,” and yet writers—especially science fiction writers—often write about things they could never possibly experience, and readers are quite capable of understanding and enjoying those impossible experiences.
It seems to me that if we could only understand other people’s experiences if we’d had similar experiences ourselves, writing fiction—especially science fiction—would be impossible.
In other words, Bedny and Saxe, nice study—but I could have told you that.
Robert J. Sawyer spotted (and photographed) this “end-cap” display of Aurora Award finalists at McNally Robinson in Saskatoon. Note the multiple copies of Marseguro!*
*Oh, have I mentioned recently that Marseguro is an Aurora Award finalist? The voting deadline is July 15! Don’t delay, vote today!
…showed up today on the blog arch thinking. While she had some criticisms, it’s generally a good one. Some highlights:
…Willett really shines at world-building. He brought Marseguro (the planet) to life for me and I enjoyed getting to know Earth of the Body Purified (which reminded me of Heinlein’s religious dictatorship of “If This Goes On –“ and Revolt in 2100), however briefly the action takes place there.
…Willett is a strong writer with a great concept and good story. Anyone who wants to read a novel that talks about tough ethical questions and has characters whose lives are in shades of grey will enjoy Marseguro.
I look forward to the promised review of Terra Insegura.
…is from Blue Fire:
The wagons rolled on through the day.
Words today: 2,121
Total thus far: 19,676
You can add to that another 480 words (actually more like 980 to start with, but then I had to cut it by half) previewing the Regina Fringe Festival for Thursday’s LeaderPost, and another 1,400 words (which represented a 1,000-word cut from the first draft) of an interview with Robert J. Sawyer for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild magazine FreeLance. A productive day. I still need to write a science column and try to do some work on Magebane, but it’s getting late, so…no promises.
This is cool news: J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the late, lamented Babylon 5, has written a script for a movie adaptation of the Lensmen series by E.E. “Doc” Smith.
I devoured these classic space operas as a kid. The scale of, well, everything was enormous: ships the size of moons (long before the Death Star–Star Wars is small potatoes compared to Lensmen series, although there are a lot of similarities). Psychic abilities magnified by mysterious Lenses created by an incredibly advanced race to help in the battle against an equally advanced but EEEVIL race…men in space armor battling it out in hand-to-hand combat in boarding actions that took place in the open space between ships and on the ship’s hulls.
I doodled this stuff, and lived this stuff, and those who detect a faint whiff of pulpy space opera goodness about my own books have “Doc” Smith to thank (or blame) as much as Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.
Man, I hope this movie gets made!*
*As long as, you know, it doesn’t suck.
…was for Blue Fire:
Amlinn did as she was told, but she still half-expected to be arrested by the Priests the moment she set foot in the street.
Words today: 1,991
Total thus far: 17,553
No first sentence for Magebane today, or probably for a few days to come. It’s not that I didn’t work on it, it’s just that I realized, in my headlong plunge of the past few writing days, that I don’t know for sure what happens next, what should happen next, how the characters feel about it, or even for sure who was behind the assassination attempt that opens the book. I think you will agree I should clarify these points before writing anything new, and so for the next few days I’ll be rewriting and rereading and rethinking.
So, although I didn’t write brand-new fresh material today, the total word count increased by close to 500 words, as I added in information the reader (and the writer!) needs, plus did some general tidying up and enhancing of the prose. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to start writing forward again, but once I am, TFSIWT (Magebane) (as I identify it on Twitter and Facebook) will resume.
In the meantime, Blue Fire forges ahead!
For Blue Fire:
Bound, gagged, stripped and then dressed again with no more thought to his personal wishes or privacy than if he had been a dressmaker’s dummy, Petra could do nothing but fume and pray that Vekk would strike them all dead with Blue Fire for daring to touch one of his Priest-Apprentices.
Words yesterday: 845
Total thus far: 15,561
(I know, I know, how do you strip and then dress somebody whose arms and legs are bound? I’ll fix it in the rewrite.)
For Magebane:
The fact was, he hadn’t seen his father in the flesh for…what? Two months?
Words yesterday: 2,605
Total thus far: 25,610
