Monthly Archives: May 2006

Absolute Write taken offline

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Via Miss Snark: the Absolute Write website has been pulled.

Making Light has the story.

Absolute Write was an excellent resource for writers: it publicized the activities of scam agents.

It’s not clear precisely why the site was taken down. The hosting service was apparently threatened by Barbara Bauer, one of the agents whose carryings-on have been documented on the blog. However, the hosting service owner has also just revived her own rival site . . .

The good news is, according to the comments on the Making Light post, the AW owner is already making plans to have the site restored to a new host.

Update: Absolute Write is now here.

Lactic acid reflux

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If you’ve ever been sore a day or so after a workout, you’ve probably “known” that the cause of the pain was a build-up of lactic acid in your muscles.

After all, that’s what “they” always told us.

Well, turns out, “they” were wrong. (NY Times article; registration required.)

Not just a little wrong. Really, really wrong. Not only is lactic acid no culprit where post-exercise muscle soreness is concerned. On the contrary, lactic acid is a good thing.

Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

But here’s the part of this article (reported by Gina Kolata) that really made me roll my eyes. George Brooks, the guy that figured this out, was pilloried by other scientists.

Dr. Brooks said he published the finding in the late 70’s. Other researchers challenged him at meetings and in print.

“I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected,” Dr. Brooks recalled.

Look at those dates. The late 1970s. Some thirty years he has to fight for this.

I’ll tell you something. You hear all the time about how the public mistrusts journalists, and the public mistrusts Congress. Well, the public isn’t very well-served when scientists heap scorn on other scientists for challenging received wisdom, either.

And lest you think, “no big deal, it’s only muscle soreness,” may I introduce you to Gilbert Ling, a highly credentialed scientist who’s been arguing (also for decades) that one of our most treasured beliefs about human cells — that they are sacks of liquid that use a “sodium pump” to transmit molecules across their exterior membranes — is also totally bogus.

Ling furthermore claims that our erroneous assumptions about how cells work has perverted much of contemporary medical research.

Is he right? I don’t know.

Can we lay people trust other scientists to set aside their egos long enough to give his arguments the merit they deserve?

I’m not holding my breath.

/end rant.

Draft one, done

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Completed the first draft of my current work-in-progress yesterday. Surprisingly emotional moment for me, which I hope means the book’s ending will have an emotional impact on readers.

It’s short, at 57K, but one of the items that I backburnered this round is the further development of a couple of the minor characters, so the revision process is going to bulk it up some.

All the same, it’s doubtful that it will hit the 80K range which seems to be the minimum target of most commercial fiction.

I plan to blog about the ever-perplexing “length” issue soon but not today. Trying to keep my attention on writing, still, not writing about writing ;-)

Worlds within worlds

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I’m fascinated by the question of whether there really is a line between one’s inner and outer experience. How much of what we “objectively” experience is “in reality” ha ha ha a projection of our inner lives?

I’m not going to prove out the answer to that question on this blog. Leastways not right now :-D However, when it comes to fictional worlds, the conclusion is foregone. By definition, the world a novelist creates is an inner world — interior to the writer as it’s created; interior to readers as it’s read.

Yet it must also depict what appears to be an “outer world” from the perspective of its characters.

And here’s where the fun begins, because from the perspective of the characters, that outer world must be an extension of their inner worlds. Perhaps, in real life, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. But in a novel, it must always, always be something more, because the novelist can’t spare a single word. Williams’ “no ideas but in things” is not a pretty platitude. We are slaves to it. We must wield every “thing” in our novels as the ideas that they are. If we don’t, the novel becomes cluttered with dead weight, and quickly renders itself irrelevant at best, unreadable at worst.

A SORT OF A SONG

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

William Carlos Williams

I’ve been writing professionally for years, and making quite a decent living at it, but the writing I’ve done for my day job has been article-length stuff. And then I did a non-fiction book and was amazed at how it stretched my mental muscles, to manage something so long. But even non-fiction can be broken down into chunks — that’s what an outline is, after all, the book’s subject matter divided into pieces, and each piece treated as a discrete piece of writing.

Not so with a novel. With a novel, even if you work from an outline, you can’t really treat each piece discretely; they are all part of the whole, and sooner or later as you work you are going to have to hold that whole there, in your mind, and all at once. The characters’ inner and outer lives, every last scrap of them, and by that I don’t just mean the part that will end up on the page — the part that ends up on the page is the tip of the proverbial ice berg, thank you very much, the tip you’ve laid down just so, to suggest the shape of the behomoth below the surface — what you must hold in your head is 1000 times more. 10,000 times more — you must hold in your head the world, and the worlds within the world.

Even reading a novel doesn’t come close. When you read a novel you are fed the tip, and from that you make inferences. And inferences are light, and easy to wield — even when they are charged with feeling — it is like watching the worlds from a window.

Much easier.

Writing novels is hard.

Writing novels is hard.

(Somewhat related: the perils of abstraction in writing.)

Proud parent

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My daughter is taking Suzuki piano and this morning she did her Book 1 recital — she performed all the pieces in Book 1.

Afterward, her teacher told me that she was “outstanding.”

“She couldn’t have done better.”

I’m in heaven.

You should have seen my kid beaming up on stage after she was done.

I’m in heaven.

But is a bark ever just a bark?

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In England, that country’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now offering a course in barking for dog owners, reports Nicola Woolcock for the London Times.

The course doesn’t teach people to bark. It teaches people how to interpret their dogs’ vocalizations.

The different noises made by dogs have been identified as grunts, whines, yelps, screams, howls, growls, coughs, barks, tooth snapping and panting.

While this cacophony might sound overwhelming to the untrained ear, dog owners will learn whether the sounds mean that their pet wants a walk, a wee or a fresh can of food.

The authorities hope that if people understand what their dogs are trying to tell them, they’ll find ways to keep their dogs quiet, and thereby reduce noise complaints.

The training is being offered by Peterborough City Council in an attempt to cut down on complaints about antisocial noise. The council’s pollution control team receives more than 1,300 noise complaints a year. Of those, 15 per cent relate to the barking of dogs.

Nationally, the figure is even higher at 25 per cent of all complaints.

Whether this training will help is debatable, although not because the idea doesn’t have merit. It does, in theory. It’s a topic covered in Outwitting Dogs, the dog training book I co-wrote, in fact. Dogs bark for different reasons, and sometimes you can figure out the cause by paying attention to everything from the bark’s pitch to how repetitive it is, to whether there are identifiable triggers that get it started. Then, once you know the cause, you can take steps to eliminate it, or train an alternative behavior.

But the real problem is: how do you get the people who have “problem dogs” to attend the class?

Maybe it will be mandated if a dog’s noise has resulted in a formal complaint.

But if not, it’s a good solution — to the wrong problem.

A lonely, poorly-socialized, or poorly-trained dog often ends up that way because his human is ignorant, busy, or clueless.

And ignorant, busy, clueless humans aren’t going to be the ones who show up to take a class in interpreting barks . . .

Sign, sign, everwhere a sign

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Damn Interesting has a . . . damn interesting . . . article up about the efforts being made to devise warning signs for our radioactive waste dumps.

We need to erect a warning that could be understood by people tens of thousands of years in the future. To keep these future people from, you know. Digging that crap up and poisoning the entire planet with it.

It’s like a perverse twist on “we can send a man to the moon, but . . .”

We can’t even guarantee that the CD we buy today will be readable in 15 years, but . . .

Phew.

Home Sweet Sprawl

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I have a recurring nightmare in which I return to my childhood home and discover that the wooded property that flanks it to the east–a couple square miles of scrubby ash and white pine–is being developed. In some versions of the dream the first McMansions have been erected. In others, I just find the crude construction roads, harbingers of the building to come.

This matters to me because it was my favorite playground when I was a kid. Then I grew up and now, although I still appreciate the pleasures of flipping over rocks to look for salamanders, I’ve discovered other pleasures as well, like well-stocked supermarkets, and an art museum close enough to easily accommodate after-school visits.

And so my ideal, now, is to somehow combine the two: to somehow partake of the best of both rural and urban pleasures. This sensibility is captured in an article I found today on sprawl, by Robert Bruegmann in The American Enterprise Online:

At the turn of the century, it was primarily wealthy families who had multiple options in their living, working, and recreational settings. An affluent New York banker and his family could live in many different communities in the city or its suburbs. They could summer in the Adirondacks or at Newport, winter in Florida or on the French Riviera. They had the luxury of ignoring their neighbors and choosing their friends elsewhere.

Today, even the most humble American middle-class family enjoys many of these choices. The privacy, mobility, and freedom that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society are now widespread. So if the question is, “Why has sprawl persisted over so many centuries and accelerated in the modern era?” the most convincing answer seems to be that growing numbers of people have discovered that it is the surest way to obtain the rich, satisfying life all citizens crave.

So there you have it. When we accumulate a bit of money, we often spend it by moving into a relatively rural area–or buying ourselves a second home in a rural area. Which means someone else may return to her childhood home and find that her wooded playground is gone.

Is it fair to claim my woods is more important than someone else’s dreams of a rural getaway?

No. It seems to me the answer is “no.”

It also seems to me that steeped as we are in time — and in the constant chipping away at anything resembling permanence that marks time’s passage — we often try to cling to things, to force them to remain “as they always were.”

But that ties us into knots.

We have to let go. Painful as that can be, sometimes.

Why nibbles aren’t enough

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When you’re shopping for an agent, “they” say, you have to query a lot of them. Dozens, anyway.

It’s the “only my mom knows how special I really am” approach to finding an agent. You have this book, you know it’s adorable, now all you have to do is find that one agent out there who can See what’s Really There– the one agent who will Believe.

Then every once in awhile you come across a writer who sent out a few queries and whoops, next thing you know, he/she has offers from multiple agents.

Kristin Nelson blogged today about that experience from her perspective as an agent:

I wish it wouldn’t happen as often as it does but when I see a great project, chances are good that other agents think it’s good too. I offer and the writer mentions she already has a couple of offers on the table.

“When I see a great project, chances are good that other agents think it’s good, too.”

So what’s that say about a project that’s been shopped to, say, 20 agents, or 50, or more, and none have responded with particular enthusiasm? (Assuming, of course, that your query letter is literate and you’ve done your due diligence about which agents you’ve approached.)

It’s not easy to accept the fact that the wonderful book you’ve written isn’t good enough. But agents aren’t dumb. On the contrary, they are the ultimate novel quality feedback machine: they screen novels for a living, they have a vested interest in spotting projects that can sell.

So personally, I’ll know I’ve hit my mark when I have multiple agents vying to represent me. That should be the target, IMO. It’s my target, anyway, I’ll say that.

The answers are in

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Evil Editor has published the answers to his match-the-title-t0-the-synopsis contest.

I picked three right (my picks here). No prize for me! :-)

Here are the fake synopses I contributed:

Little Girl Blue
Will a sex-change operation finally enable a ravishing but desperately insecure house paint heiress to blow her own horn?

The Midnight Diaries
With her carrot supply dwindling, night vision blindness threatens to destroy Angela Fastling’s only defense against clinical depression: journaling in secret after dark.

The Monster Within
Two star-crossed veterinary techs find they have more in common than love when an outbreak of feline tapeworm triggers panic in their once-sleepy town.

Portal to Murder
Desperate for original submissions, a blogging literary agent snaps when her admonitions to “drop the portals, folk” fails to discourage a timeworn sci fi device.

Raise the Buried Dead
Belle Jackson’s photographic memory of local obituaries attracts the attention of Congressional aide Philip Tyler. But why?

EE edited the last one. My version began with the phrase “In this voter fraud thriller.”