NaNo-advice

By which I mean advice for NaNoWriMo, not advice x 10^-9.

I've done NaNo five times, personally, and "won" it all five times, which is to say I've managed to produce 50k words in a month. Of those five times, twice I've gotten completed novels. Of those two novels, I've deemed one good enough that I've been willing to plunge into query letter Hell for it.

NaNo is a good experience if you want to practice writing, and writing at length. As was said at the How to Get Your Work Rejected Worldcon panel, a lot of people want to have written a novel. Most of them don't want to actually write one. Because writing one, particularly the first time you do it, can be kind of hard.

So from me to you, a little advice:

Find what works for you. Everyone ultimately has a different writing process, and what works for me is not necessarily going to work for you. I know some people who find NaNo meetups and write-ins are incredibly  useful. I've never had any luck with them because I can't concentrate when there are people around. But if they work for you? Great! This means you need to experiment and figure out how to set up conditions so that you can actually get writing done. Which may sound unhelpful at its face - what do you mean, I can't tell you how to do this? - but this is also permission to ignore advice from other people if it just doesn't work for you. Experiment!

There is nowhere this is highlighted more than the great Pantsers vs. Outliners debate. Some people can write a novel without an outline. I have no idea how they do this - my first NaNo was a seat of my pants affair, and it was a 50K train wreck by the time I limped to the finish. (I would not recommend padding your wordcount by overdescribing everything, by the way, unless you want to end up hating your story. Or unless you really like waxing poetic about tatami mats.) Of course, on the other end of the spectrum you have Kevin J. Anderson and his terrifying novella-length outlines. (Not making this up.) Personally, I like writing about a page of bullet points, which I then don't actually hold the story to. Which means that I will sometimes redraft an outline four or five times as things develop and then ending looks like it'll be somewhere else.

Figure out what works for you. If you get lost easily and can't figure out where you're going, outline. If knowing how the story will end means you're bored with it before you start, don't. And don't let anyone tell you that you're doing it wrong so long as it works for you.

That said, here are four more pieces of advice that I think are universally useful.

Don't look back. When you're doing this thing for the first time, you should feel like you're throwing yourself down a mountain, and the only way to keep from dying is to just keep running as fast as you can or risk losing your footing. Trust me. If you go back and let yourself edit particularly, you've lost the battle already. You're distracted from getting words on the page. Just keep writing. And if you realize that you need to change something you already wrote, just write yourself a big note in the middle of your page and keep going. Edit later. Write now.

By the way, you also don't have to write in chronological order.

Unplug the internet. The internet not-so-secretly wants to keep you from getting anything done. Trust me. When you are writing, you should be writing and that means not checking your e-mail. Turn off wifi on your laptop, put your droid or iPhone on silent, and let the world go for a couple of hours. It'll be fine without you.

Write the interesting parts. If you are struggling to write because you're bored by what you're writing, skip it and go write something interesting. Come back to it later, and maybe you won't find that part so boring. (Or, if it is boring, you should probably ask yourself if it's necessary, and if so, how can you make it not boring. Because if you're bored writing it, a reader is probably not going to find it more interesting than you did.)

Write every day. It's a point for debate if you should worry about word goals strictly. I met some people at the Mile Hi Con NaNo panel that had success with binge writing. Well, more power to them. But writing every day is still non-negotiable. Even if it's just ten minutes on your lunch break where you add two lines of dialog, that's good enough. The point is that you need to make this a habit. You need to feel like something is deeply wrong with the world if you haven't sat down and put some words on the page today. And once you skip one day, it's easier to skip another, and then next thing you know it's December and your characters are still sitting in a tavern and trying to decide if they actually want to bother saving the world or not.

Happy NaNo-ing, guys! I'm looking forward to rejoining the ranks next year, once the specter of grad school has released me from its icy clutches. Good writing, and remember - don't look back! There are zombies!

(Oh yeah, and happy Halloween, too!)

Moving to Houston

I've accepted a job offer in Houston, after a lot of discussion and back and forth with Mike about the pros and cons and oh shit he has to find a job too. While I'm really not feeling good about having to move, I'm super excited about the job itself. It's with a company I've been hoping to be hired by pretty much since I started doing this whole geology thing, and I'm going to be doing work that I find extremely interesting. (I get to look at actual rocks! And thin sections!)

My projected start time at the new job is beginning of February, since hopefully that will provide sufficient time to finish writing my thesis, get it defended and get all the edits in, as well as deal with more mundane tasks like finding an apartment, selling the house, all that. I'm actually a little excited about the house selling part, since this seems like a great opportunity to thin out our possessions. The company is paying for the move, using Atlas. Which means that someone else gets to pack up my house and move all the boxes. This is apparently how grownups do things, who would knew?

We're planning to come back to Colorado and visit very often, hopefully even as much as once a month. So you haven't gotten rid of us yet! And right now it's definitely my plan to be back for Mile Hi Con next year as well. (It'll be even easier to get to Worldcon, come to think of it.) 

It's exciting, and scary. Just like all adventures.

Scientists convicted of manslaughter for failing to be psychic

Words cannot begin to express how upset, angry, and filled with contempt I am by this:
Italian scientists resign over L'Aquila quake verdicts

Two scientists resigned their posts with the government's disaster preparedness agency Tuesday after a court in L'Aquila sentenced six scientists and a government official to six years in prison. The court ruled Monday that the scientists failed to accurately communicate the risk of the 2009 quake, which killed more than 300 people.

We wish we could predict earthquakes. We really, really do. So many lives could be saved. But there is as of yet no way to make those kind of predictions. A series of small earthquakes? Depending upon how you define it, those occur all the time. Hell, we can only sort of predict the imminent eruption of a volcano, and the mechanics of that, the pressures that dictate an eruption, are relatively simpler and there are far more "tells" - seismic activity, increased outgassing, etc.

Nature agrees: 

There will be time enough to ponder the wider implications of the verdict, but for now all efforts should be channelled into protest, both at the severity of the sentence and at scientists being criminalized for the way their opinions were communicated. Science has little political clout in Italy and the trial proceeded in an absence of informed public debate that would have been unthinkable in most European countries or in the United States

Hey Italy, while you're jailing people for failing to predict disasters, how about extraditing the horrendous human beings who played fast and loose with the financial markets and caused the global economy to shit itself? That had far more potential for being predicted and arguably has caused even more human suffering. What about jailing people who have refused to listen to repeated warnings about global climate change?

Or I suppose this pattern could continue and the next time a doctor fails to predict a heart attack, or a traffic cop fails to predict an accident, they'll end up in jail.

This is ridiculous. Contemptible.

Final Presidential Debate Liveblog

So, going in to this, I have one thought: if President Obama can't manage to win a debate on foreign policy against Mitt Romney, he doesn't deserve to remain president. Frankly, Mitt Romney has been incoherent in every foreign policy statement I've ever heard him make - which basically boils down to "Uh I have no idea let's bomb shit in the Middle East. And Benghazi! Yeah!"

I'm planning to drink every time Benghazi and Iran get mentioned. Chugging when Obama mentions we killed Osama bin Laden. I shall also chug if Mitt Romney has the solid iron balls necessary to try to lie about the President calling Benghazi an act of terror again. Because I'm really just wondering how much of Fox News alternate reality we'll hear.

Anyway. T-minus ten minutes until we start. I'll update about every 10 minutes or so and become no doubt less coherent as the night goes on.

And I did a reading like a big girl

Mile Hi Con this weekend was a tremendous amount of fun. This is the first time I've gotten to be on panels at that convention, which was exciting. On Saturday I got to participate in a panel where we basically got to bitch for an hour about horrible movie science.

(Spoiler: What I find most annoying is, mundanely enough, movies putting GEOLOGISTS in white lab coats.)

I got to have a good rant in that panel as well, when someone asked if movie makers should be held responsible to not put crap science in their movies. I have opinions about this, but it deserves its own entry. Hopefully later this week!

Saturday there was also a panel called the Stop the Apocalypse Now game show, which was hilarious. The panelists (Dan Dvorkin and CJ Henderson) plus an audience volunteer were each given a random item on a card (eg: golf clubs, an abandoned mine, an x-ray spectrometer) and then given one minute to figure out a story to tell about how they could stop a Syfy-worthy cheesy apocalypse scenario with that item. I used my x-ray spectrometer to mutate a gibbon into something the size of King Kong so it could kill giant condors. Because in the age old battle between monkeys and birds, monkeys WIN.

So yes. That was incredibly fun. I told the panel moderators that they should make a real game of it, or do PDFs that people could print up like Cards Against Humanity because it was hilarious. Best story of the panel was CJ Henderson using the Dead Sea Scrolls to defeat an army of evil Peeps that had been animated by the Necronomicon, rendering the Peeps kosher in the process.

Sunday I was on the NaNoWriMo support panel. Hopefully some good advice was dispensed. Mostly it just made me miss NaNo. Soon, my pretty... soon. Once I'm not in school any more, I'll finally have time to hammer at writing like that again.

And then after... I HAD A READING. LIKE A REAL WRITER. OMG.

I shared the reading time with Carrie Vaughn, and because of her the room was packed. It was utterly terrifying. But Carrie was incredibly sweet and supportive and wonderful. She also let me go first, for which I will forever be grateful.

I read two short stories for the crowd - The Jade Tiger first since I realized it would be smart to tell everyone that hey, I have Steampunk novellas coming out next year! And since it's all the same characters, hopefully people liked them and will want to read more. And actually, at the end of the reading when we opened up for questions, someone in the crowd actually did ask me a question! And it was about when the first novella would come out, and what it would be called. So exciting! (Answers: Murder on the Titania and in March if memory serves.)

Then I read Comes the Huntsman. That story is so difficult to read aloud for so many reasons. But I did it! And I didn't actually cry, though I got choked up. Goddamnit it's always section 10 than gets me, every time. I guess I sounded so shaken up that when it was done Carrie told me to have some chocolate. (I'd brought Halloween candy because I know it's smart to bribe your audience.) Everyone was immensely kind.

I hope I get to do it again.

Mile Hi Con Schedule

Mile Hi Con is this weekend! And I'm actually on a few panels, since I'm pretending to be a real writer at the moment.

Saturday: 
Science Travesties in Current Media - 1600, Grand Mesa B-C

Sunday: 
NaNoWriMo Support Group - 1300, Mesa Verde A
Reading - 1400, Mesa Verde C

I'm excited about all of this, but I'm just floored I get to do a reading. And holy shit, I'm sharing time with Carrie Vaughn.



Please, please, please come and say hello!

Looper (and the most unintentionally[?] hilarious preview ever)

Saw Looper today with my best friend and it was seventeen kinds of awesome, but first, this:

Have you seen this? Has there ever been a more unintentionally(?) hilarious trailer in the history of the US with the possible exception of the one for Battleship?

The first Red Dawn was an intensely silly movie, but at least it kind of made more sense, being toward the end of the Cold War and all when Russia was still pretty scary. Obviously, remaking it can't involve Russia any more because they're sort of our friend (except for the part where they cockblock everything we do ever in the UN Security Council but wevs) so what are we picking instead?

North Korea? Just... North Korea?

That realization makes the trailer utterly hilarious. Come on people. North Korea can't even manage to hit Japan with a single missile. Shots of squadrons of airplanes and tanks rolling down highways? What is this even? Plus some kind of magical secret weapon operated by a very serious Asian man in a nice set of fatigues. (You can tell he's North Korean because he has only one facial expression; that's a country that can't support fripperies like soldiers that can be both stoic and angry.) Also, I can't help but wonder why the hell North Korea, if we lived in a magical world where they had these kind of resources, would be invading the United States instead of, gosh I don't know, South Korea.

It's ridiculous. I'm guessing that's why never once in the trailer do they say it's North Korea, because it's such a howler. Instead, it's just a giant army of scary Asian guys invading part of America because... reasons. One can only surmise that they hate our freedom. PFFFFFFT.

Bonus points if you imagine Chris Hemsworth dressed as Thor while he's doing this, by the way.

But anyway. Looper. This is without a doubt the best science fiction movie I have seen in years. While I'm sure you could spend ages nitpicking apart the time travel fuckery that is central to it, that doesn't change the fact that it is a good story, told about fascinating characters.

If nothing else, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis make an intense team showing how much a man can change in thirty years, and also how little. The character of Joe is still capable of the same kind of horrific brutality in the before and after, but for incredibly different reasons. It leaves you wondering just how much the reasons even matter, however.

Pierce Gagnon is excellent as Cid, the creepiest child that has ever existed on film outside of a horror movie. And Jeff Daniels as Abe makes a wonderful mob boss. He's so weirdly avuncular that you can't quite understand why anyone is afraid of him up until he cheerful breaks a fuck-up's hand with a hammer. Then you realize that he can be that jolly because he's an absolutely horrific person.

Abe: I'm from the future. I'm telling you to go to Shanghai.
Joe: I'm going to France.

It's a wonderful exchange.

The only complaint I really have about the movie is that it's 2044, and apparently women still only exist as strippers and waitresses. Or the embodiment of redemption for the grizzled hero in the form of ladies they sex up. That, I find exceedingly disappointing. I would have been happy if there'd just been a few female extras in long black coats wielding ludicrously huge handguns for Bruce Willis to mow down toward the end of the movie.

Go see it. It's excellent.

SPOILERS NOW YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

One of the things I liked most about the movie is that it chose the right moments to surprise me. There were some plot elements that were easy to call (like Cid, the creepiest child that has ever existed, being the future Rainmaker) and others that just took me off guard. I didn't really think Old Joe was going to go around mowing down kids until he actually did. I didn't think Young Joe would break the cycle by killing himself until the very end, when he started his final, short monologue. In fact, I thought the end of the movie would be Old Joe killing Cid's mom, and thus the future and this endless loop of violence being preserved. (Making the movie more like 12 Monkeys and infinitely more depressing.)

Okay, and yes, now you can argue about how in the context of time travel and causality it doesn't really make sense as a solution and then the plot continuing forward but shut up it was an excellent story.

It was obvious that Cid was going to be the Rainmaker, but the answer as to why he could be a one man wrecking crew was unexpected and a bit scary. As was the revelation that he'd made his adopted mother explode, I thought. Seeing Young Joe hug the blood-covered little terror was a turning point I didn't expect, because he didn't even point his gun at the kid. It was all incredibly well done, I thought. It was a good counterpoint to earlier, when Joe sells his best friend out so he can keep his hoard of money.

That sequence, by the way, was utterly horrifying, seeing what happened to Old Seth once the "doctor" had his hands on Young Seth. It certainly added to the suspense of Young Joe having to escape from Abe.

The other part of the setup I really liked was in the first loop, where Old Joe escapes and then Young Joe potentially dies. Then in the second loop, we see how Old Joe gets to the place he's at, see why he's doing what he's doing and why he's also such a giant badass. Then the real loop starts, to be finally broken at the end by Young Joe.

Good, good writing. Good, good acting. Loved it. I'm happy to give up on accuracy about the time travel if it'll be used to tell a story this intense.

What I did with my day.

Today I turned this:

Into this:

Using these tools:

...four times. Six to go. And then they'll be ready for XRF analysis, which will tell me what mean annual precipitation was in that location nearly 54 million years ago. 

This is the exciting part of science they never show you in the movies. 

HELLO I HAVE PRESENTS FOR YOU

Because the world needs more Joe Biden gifs. You're welcome.

MOAR

Vice Presidential debate liveblog

Okay, going to not quite liveblog this, since we're probably going to start just a bit late and DVR is magical. But I'll still update as we watch, about every 10 minutes or so.

So, I am looking forward to this debate. A lot. More than any presidential debate, for certain. (The president has to have decorum. Joe Biden is there to say the shit we're all thinking, right?) The VP debate from four years ago was the drunkest I'd been in quite a while (thank you Sarah Palin). I doubt this one will be quite that fun, though I think if I drink every time Paul Ryan lies and Joe Biden smiles in an eerie, toothy way, I'll be smashed in no time at all.

I honestly love Vice President Biden. That man has never met a script he wouldn't immediately run away from as fast as possible. And he will always have a special place in my heart for baldly schooling Sarah Palin on Dick Cheney being the worst vice president ever. All the while grinning to show what shockingly white, wolfish teeth he has. I felt like he went out of his way to be nice to Sarah Palin so he wouldn't look mean; I think this will be a test of that hypothesis since Paul Ryan is made of plastic and has no feelings for Joe Biden to spare.

So yes. This ought to be fun. Waiting to see how many things Paul Ryan says that the campaign will then immediately deny because lying baldly and then walking it back quietly later is an excellent strategy.

Five minutes until starting time!

AND HERE WE GO

Suicide is cheaper

A lot of you may not know this, but I used to be an EMT-B. I volunteered on a 911 ambulance service, and spent most of my time running out of fire stations in Commerce City.

Commerce City (aka Combat Shitty) is an industrial area of Denver where there are a lot of poor and working poor. There's a lot of violence and chances for industrial accidents. It's one of the places you go if you want to see trauma calls and gunshot wounds.

That's not all you see there, though.

Sometimes you get a call out to one of the little trailer parks, because people do live here even though no one really wants to, and it's for chest pains, possible heart attack. It's an older man in a uniform (you decide what kind) pale and sweaty and shaking, his face like dough. He's got a crocheted afghan in a startling color combination covering his lap, and his wife (you guess she's the one who made it, she's got that look) wrings her hands nearby. She's the one that called you. He's as mad as he can manage when he can barely breathe.

The paramedic hooks up the EKG.You don't know how to read the bouncing lines, but even you know it's not good. Okay, let's go. We need to get you to the hospital.

"No."

You're probably having a heart attack. This could kill you. You need to come with us.

"No. It's too expensive. I can't."

He's got kids, and grandkids, and too much debt already. That's what he tells you. And you try to tell him that life is worth a hell of a lot more than money. Grandkids, right? You want to play with your grandkids.

"I don't want them to pay my bills."¹

Your paramedic calls the hospital and has one of the ER docs talk to the man, try to scare him or cajole him into coming along. The sick man's wife wrings her hands some more, rubs his shoulders, but she doesn't argue with him, doesn't help us. She's in the shadow of that same specter.

And that's all you can do, in the end. You can argue, cajole, even threaten a little, and it doesn't matter. The man knows who he is, where he is, when it is (that's called AAOx3) and he has the right to refuse your help, by law

So you pack up your things and walk, really slowly, to the door. You drive away so slowly that cars honk at you. Because you're hoping, you're goddamn hoping that poor man will collapse while you're still only a couple miles from his trailer, and his wife will call you, and you can come screaming back and save his life whether he wants you to or not, like you're some kind of goddamn hero.

This happens every goddamn day. Heart attacks and car accidents and sickness, and they won't go because they're so fucking scared of debt collectors harassing them, harassing their families. This is one of the reasons I stopped being an EMT. I couldn't handle seeing people kill themselves like this any more, because I want to believe we live in a world where life is still more important than money. I couldn't handle feeling complicit and responsible for someone's life when they had to make a shitty, impossible decision like that.

So yeah, maybe people without insurance don't get thrown out of the doors of an ER to bleed out in the snow. I guess that's the image Mitt Romney is going for because it sounds incredibly ridiculous.

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’  ” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.
“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

We do have people who die in their apartments (or trailers, or houses, or by the side of the road) because they lack insurance. But it's not necessarily because no one will take them. It's because they won't fucking go in the first place, because suicide is cheaper. Because if you're going to die, it's better to not leave your already grieving family drowning in debt and destroying what pride they have left in searching for charity that may never materialize.

Every goddamn day.




1 - Debt collectors can't legally go after anyone but spouses (and in some states not even that) in a case like this, unless it was the kids/grandkids that signed the hospital admissions. This does not stop unscrupulous debt collection agencies from trying however, and many people do not understand their legal rights. (Also, families can be put in the position of supporting the person who is trying to pay the debt, which is a whole other ball of wax.)

Like a rock star.

I don't know if I'll ever get used to this whole limo service thing. Coming out of the concourse to find a guy in a nice tie and jacket holding a sign with my name on it makes me wonder who the hell's life I fell in to. There are people that do this often? Really? 

And this is the start of my second interview trip. I hope this rock star feeling is a good sign. 

Then the nice man in the tie and coat drove me to the Houstonian. "You're going there?" he asked. "Yeah," I told him. "Someone else did all the reservations. I have no idea where I'm going. Is it nice?"

He laughed like I'd asked him a joke. "Oh yeah. Really nice."

Wow. Driving up, there went my plan of slinking off to a convenient McDonalds for horrible dinner on the cheap.

I don't think I could ever get used to letting someone open a car door for me. But I'd sure like to try.

And then another really nice guy in a suit told me that I got a free upgrade to a suite and everything went sort of fuzzy and glowy, as if I'd been hit in the back of the head with a tennis ball.

I think the bathroom is larger than my bedroom at home. 

I had an amazing dinner (lalala I can't hear you, credit card) where earnest men in nice uniforms were very interested in how I liked everything and the state of my iced tea glass. (Though who would've thought, their beer list really wasn't that impressive. Huh.) I had the one vegetarian entree on the menu. (This is how you can tell you're in Texas.)

And now I'm writing this to you on free internet. Since apparently we've gone past cheap hotel free internet, through expensive hotel holy shit you have to be kidding me internet, and into a whole new zone of that glorious series of tubes.

A chocolate and a JK Rowling quote. No, I love you, Houstonian. (Even if I have things to say about her new book, which can wait until I'm done slogging through it.) 

This is my fantasy life. Can I be this cool for real some day?

Just asking questions.

I would just like to note that this "just asking questions" crapwave about the unemployement numbers is driving me absolutely batty. Jack Welch (former CEO of GE) is the poster child for this one:

When Matthews asked him if he had any evidence to prove his assertion correct, Welch admitted that he did not.
“I have no evidence to prove that, I just raise the question,” he said.

The reason I'm headdesking so hard is that this is the exact same thing men who wear tinfoil hats and claim we didn't land on the moon say. Well, I don't have any actual evidence. I'm just asking questions. As if that makes it any less dishonest with a side of passive aggressive cowardice. (Since of course, hiding behind the claim that you're just asking questions is a way to dump responsibility for making a ridiculous or laughable accusation.)

Asking questions is fine, when it comes with a mind open to answering evidence. "Just asking questions" is cowardice pretending to be inquiry. Bleh.

I would pay good money if someone with a bigger platform than me would baldly point out that Welch and his friends sound like they're going to start disputing the moon landing and the fact that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

And speaking of questions, I'm having a horrible time with this assignment I'm working on. I'm the worst ever at coming up with research questions for proposals. Particularly because everything I've come up with so far is way too similar to my thesis research, and that's not allowed.

At least I have my powerpoint done for my second interview. It's a thing of beauty. So many pretty pictures.

First Presidential Debate Liveblog

Okay, so let's see what snark I can come up with between drinks. I have come well prepared with beer, cider (thanks Isaac) and THE KRAKEN.

Pre-debate show is on. Still can't believe they closed down I-25. Way to make everyone in Denver hate both candidates.

Second interview

I got a call for a second interview! And it's with one of the companies that I'm super excited about. (Hi, I'm not being ambiguous or anything, no sir, not me.)

I'll be flying out to Houston on Tuesday next week for the interview. I feel all sorts of grown up and business-y now. Please think good thoughts for me on Wednesday, as I will be trying to convince a really awesome company that they should hire me and let me pay off my student debt by doing fun things.

Because I learned that when I worked for AT&T. If the work isn't fun, it's never worth the money.

Here's hoping they don't make me lip sync for my life.

But "good luck and don't fuck it up" seems an appropriate sentiment.

Also, unrelated: Aloo gobi and plain yogurt may be the best breakfast ever. Discuss.