Monthly Archives: June 2006

More migraine options

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Glenn Reynolds insta-blogged yesterday about this gadget, that uses a magnetic pulse to stave off a budding migraine.

There’s also this, which I found out about through my friend Dave Harney, who publishes Rochester Healthy Living: an FDA-approved device you wear on your front teeth at night to reduce jaw clenching. The company claims in trials, 82 percent of the device users had a 77% average reduction in “migraine events.”

Here’s the manufacturer’s website.

Here are some interesting facts about the link between headache and jaw clenching (one caveat: these aren’t sourced . . .):

* [The j]aw clenching muscles of migraine sufferers are 70% larger in volume and generate significantly higher bite forces that control subjects . . .

*Tension-type headache patients contract their temporalis muscles (clench their jaw) during sleep, on average, 14 times more intensely that asymptomatic controls.

*Simple minimal voluntary jaw-clenching (of less than 30% of maximum effort) for 30 minutes (with two rest periods) still results in a headache for 63% of migraine sufferers. Jaw clenching during sleep can frequently exceed voluntary maximum.

I haven’t tried the device, but I plan to. Ever since I learned about it I’ve made a conscious effort to relax my jaw and that seems to be helping me avoid full-blown migraines. I really think there’s something to this one.

Blue Meanies Attack in Massachusetts

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Okay, this might seem contradictory, since I’ve blogged about how horrified I am that parents don’t feed their kids more nutritious food.

But banning fluffernutter sandwiches????

First of all, the “nutter” part of the sandwich is peanut butter, which is a source of protein, B vitamins, calcium, and Vitamin E. Granted, the fluff is empty calories, but how is it any worse than jelly?

Put the thing on whole wheat bread, sure. But ban it?

How is a fluffernutter sandwich any worse than the other crap they hand out from school cafeterias? Mac and cheese (white macaroni glopped with processed cheese food stuff)? Chicken finger (breaded deep fried chicken scraps)? “Pizza pockets” ( more white bread with a bit of ketchup and five molecules of cheese inside)?

I swear, they must hand out stupid pills to legislators right after election night.

This is also a terrific example of why you can’t rely on government to sort out issues that require focused, case-by-case, parental decisions. Sometimes you have to sugar things a bit to get kids to eat them. I dress up cooked carrots with sugar sometimes, to get my daughter to eat them. I use sweetened salad dressings to make green salads appeal to her.

I also favor keeping soda vending machines out of schools (especially at the grade school level). There’s no redeeming value to soda, except as an occasional treat.

But banning fluffernutter — that’s just silly. Do-good idiocy run amuck.

The world’s deepest hole

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Man. Oh man. Seven miles.

The Russians did it–it took them twenty four years. They were stopped by the heat.

Despite the scientists’ efforts to combat the heat by refrigerating the drilling mud before pumping it down, at twelve kilometers the drill began to approach its maximum heat tolerance. At that depth researchers had estimated that they would encounter rocks at 100°C (212°F), but the actual temperature was about 180°C (356°F)– much higher than anticipated. At that level of heat and pressure, the rocks began to act more like a plastic than a solid, and the hole had a tendency to flow closed whenever the drill bit was pulled out for replacement. Forward progress became impossible . . .

A bunch of old theories about the Earth’s crust were disproven by that drill. I can remember being taught some of them in school — like that the crust is granite over a layer of basalt. Nope. ‘Tisn’t either.

The article’s by Alan Bellows.

This is my lawn

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In the back yard.

long long grass

Notice the length of the grass. And that it’s going to seed. I’m neglecting everything. Except my job, my kid, and my novel.

I’ll pick up the blogging pace again soon, but priorities is priorities ;-)

Birdie birdie in the . . . plumbing aisle

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You’ve probably noticed them: birds flying around in malls, or airports, or “big box” stores, like Home Depot or Walmart.

Here’s an interesting article about this phenomenon in the Baltimore Sun (registration required).

Turns out these stores are idea habitat. No predators. Plenty of niches for nesting. Spilt grass or bird seed makes for easy forage, and for water there’s always a puddle around (or, I suppose, a working model of one of the ubiquitous fountains these stores sell for peoples’ gardens).

The stores’ doors don’t post a problem — the birds just figure out how to get through when we humans open them: they “hover near store entrances waiting for shoppers to trip the [motion detection] sensors.”

Most of the birds I’ve seen are English sparrows, but other birds that commonly make their homes in these stores are starlings, pigeons, house finches and mourning doves. And then there are the unusual ones. The article mentions occasional sightings of crows and owls, and a red-tailed hawk that “took up residence inside a North Carolina Home Depot store” and became a regional phenom — people would come to the store just to see it.

Not everyone is thrilled about them. Food stores can’t tolerate them (the droppings pose a potential health hazard) and some people just aren’t . . . nature types.

Phil Miller of Perry Hall is a sales representative for a company that makes lighting products carried by Home Depot. His job takes him to hundreds of locations.

“It’s a pain in the neck,” he says of store birds, which leave droppings on high-stacked inventory boxes that he has to move around. Miller was recently in a Delaware Home Depot that had caught the fancy of a mockingbird, a breed notorious for its mimicking ability.

“That thing was going for hours and hours,” he says. “You couldn’t even hear the radio. It made every sound possible.”

Sorry, but my sympathy is with the bird ;-)

Upstate, downtimes

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For an interesting conversation on the flight of young, educated people from Upstate New York, hop over to Vodkapundit and check out the comments on a post that looks at a NY Times article on the subject.

Here’s one that jumped out at me:

Work for a software security company. We just closed our Toronto, Long Island, Albany and Waltham, MA offices and moved them all to Virginia due to the high costs in taxes and wages (from the high cost of living).

For what we were paying approximately 200 employees in those locations we can employee nearly 300 in Virginia. For the same amount of money I can hire 100 more people, produce more product and make more profit. I still have 2 programmer and one tester position open.

These are not low wage jobs. These are professional software development jobs of people making well into 5 figures (none under 50K) and some into 6 figures.

The region is being run into the ground, and our politicians are either too stupid or too corrupt to care.

But don’t worry. They’re going to get us our $230 million Renaissance Square. It’ll be such a nice place for the last seniors living here to hang out & listen to the crickets chirp.

The world’s readers

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From The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner:

It’s easy to forget, in this ultra-accelerated culture of ours, where even fusty book publishing is caught up in the national fervor for celebrity and where the value of all things is equated with their dollar value, that what most editors truly want is good books. No matter how much it may seem otherwise, no matter how many mediocre or just plain bad books get fed into the great machine, most of us are in awe of a brilliant manuscript and will do everything in our power to see that it reaches readers . . . [E]ditors are . . . the world’s readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

“Hi, Concept!” “‘Lo, Concept!”*

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The subject of “high concept” came up this week on TWLAuthorTalks, where agent Kristin Nelson is a guest (and is going to be critiquing pitches this afternoon!)

If you’re a novelist — for that matter, if you’re involved in any aspect of the entertainment biz — you’ve probably at least stumbled across the term. And hopefully after you stumbled you did more than glance at it and kick it out of the way, since it’s one of the cornerstones you’re going to need if you want your career to get anywhere.

The members of TWLAuthorTalks’ spinoff forum, PitchClinic, have been refining our pitches this week, with an eye to showing off our novels’ high concept aspects.

We also talked a bit about what high concept is. Diana Peterfreund posted this link, to an article she wrote about high concept for her lit agency blog. Here’s an excerpt:

A high concept story has the following qualities: easily understood from a few words, and promising tremendous public appeal. When you describe a high-concept story, you can see the whole story — its premise, promise and execution — in a few words. A high concept story also “has legs” — in other words, it doesn’t need a name to sell it. It doesn’t need to be written by Stephen King or have Reese Witherspoon attached to star (though neither of those hurt, and you’ll notice that these two most often produce incredibly high-concept products).

It isn’t easy condensing your 70-100,000 word masterpiece down into one catchy sentence, but as we’ve also noted on the forum, the benefits far outweight the pain. It forces you to really focus on what your novel is “about.” If you can’t find that sentence — if it’s just not there — it may mean that you have to re-think your book. It’s that important. (More to come on that topic . . .)

*Bonus points to anyone who gets this reference hee hee hee

Above the knee? Below the knee? How long is long enough for that novel you’re writing?

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Where’ve I been, you ask?

Why, working! And editing my novel :-)

Plowed through a good 150 pages today, starting to get tired, so thought I’d take a quick break now to blog about . . . novel length.

My WIP is now at 65,000 words, and I’m betting it will finish at 67-68K.

The count has been creeping up during this latest round of editing, as I add some scenes and flesh out a subplot that I’d set aside while I worked on the main plot. Still, it’s on the thin side, so naturally I sat up and paid attention when I read this, in a post titled “Too Short” over at agent Kristin Nelson’s blog, Pubrants.

My agent friends and I just recently discussed an interesting trend on our chat loop: queries for novels with really short word counts (like 50,000 or 60,000 words) that aren’t category romance, cozy mysteries, or YA.

Queries for “full-length” novels.

In fact, according to one agent friend, she says that about half the queries she receives highlights this short word length.

We are all stymied by this.

Where are writers getting the info that this might be an appropriate length for a work? That it would be a marketable length? Standard word length is usually between 70,000 to 100,000 words for a novel. Fantasy can push up to 110,000 but for a debut, it’s going to be a tough go if the word count is higher.

About the same time the issue of manuscript length came up on Deanna Carlyle’s Chicklit Yahoo forum. The discussion offered a new twist: using a computer word count (i.e. MS Word’s utility) gives a shorter length than calculating word count the old-fashioned way — i.e., use Courier 12 pt text, then multiply your page count by 250 — Courier 12 pt gives you an average of 250 words/page.

So a couple days ago, just for fun, I reformatted my WIP from the default font — Times Roman 12 pt — to Courier 12 pt. It jumped from 265 pages to 340.

Is that the secret to legitimately “padding” your official MS length?

Unfortunately, the answer is “probably not.” I actually had a chance to put this question to Kristin Nelson herself, since she’s the guest this week on TWLAuthorTalks (still time to click and join if you want to ask her a question yourself!)

Kristin said that agents and editors use MS word count — and that although published authors can get away with shorter books, first-time novelists are going to have a hard time selling anything that falls outside that 70-100,000-word rule (excluding the genres she noted in her blog post).

She does give a ray of hope for those writers whose work is coming up too long–or too short. If your novel is good enough, word count won’t matter as much.

If your novel is good enough.

I’m not worried about my WIP btw. Partly because I’m totally enamored of it, right now — flaws? What flaws? lol

But mostly because I made a conscious decision, with this book, not to worry about length. I’m focusing on the plot and the characters. I do tend to write rather spare prose, and frankly I don’t want to cure that. I want this book to move, and I want its bones to show.

One day I’ll know whether I can sell it, at whatever length it comes out to be, but until then, it’s just not a problem I’m going to let climb into the boat ;-)

Literary mags

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When literary agent Jenny Bent was the guest on the Yahoo Forum TWLAuthorTalks last week, someone asked her what literary journals a writer should target to help build his/her reputation.

The journals Jenny listed are: Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, A Public Space, Zoetrope, Atlantic Monthly, Virginia Quarterly Review.

Well guess what? Several of these journals are participating in a promotion — they’re discounting their subscription price if you subscribe to three or more. Details are here on the Emerging Writers Network blog.

Agents read these journals, keeping an eye out for promising new writers — and being published in them is a great way to move your query to the top of an agent’s stack. Need I say more? ;-)