1) Can YOU crack the Zodiac Killer’s cipher? The original documents are now available online.
2) Pop quiz: Comic book character or wrestling move?
4) I hope I hope I never get a book cover like these. via genreville
5) This book on hoarding sounds fascinating!
6) Take a look at the 15th, 20th and 24th pictures. (Not to mention all the nice happy people).
Revised it, cleaned up the manuscript this morning, and just now emailed it to my editor.
Phew!
Now I whip up a list of reviewers who need ARCs and try to come up with a selling title for it.
Heading home early.
1) Important indicator of an improving economy: The line at Starbucks is getting way long. I had to skip my refill this morning to get to day-job on time.
2) Remember that editorial note I mentioned before? The one that’s kicking my ass? I skipped breakfast today to get extra time to work on it, and I’m still losing. I’m doing something wrong, but what I don’t know.
3) Medical and dental insurance costs for my family and me for the year: $23,381.28. One year. Three people. Core plan. And that’s just the insurance–it doesn’t include what we’ll be paying for copays, deductibles and care that’s covered at less than a hundred percent. Outrageous? You bet it is. I hope Obamacare does something to bend the curve, but if it’s not enough, Congress should get back .
4) I’m collecting recipes for the Week of Pizza (aka, the week my wife is out of town). Cream cheese, sugar and fresh fruit? Check. Olive oil, capers, pepperoni, salad fixin’s? Check. Olives, pineapple and ham? Check. Bacon and eggs? Check. It’s going to be an odd week.
5) Currently, the Amazon.com sales ranking of Game of Cages is better than the ranking of Child of Fire by a factor of two. Yeah, I know the rankings “don’t mean anything” but I wonder if it’s time to switch my most prominent user icons from the CoF image to the new book:
My editorial notes on Man Bites World were really simple and straightforward–ambiguous dialog! contradictory description! repetitive narration!–right up to the last one. The very last comment I had to deal with bowled me over.
It’s a line of dialog that makes sense in my head, but none of the meaning it’s meant to imply comes out on the page. It is, essentially, a declaration of war on the status quo in the Twenty Palaces setting, and that’s not something you clarify in a ten-minute revamp.
For four days I’ve been trying to make this work. I’m going for a nice walk now to think about it.
I’ve never eaten at a Claim Jumpers restaurant, and thanks to this article I never will. That’s two days’ worth of calories they’re serving there. The baby back ribs are 8 times the calorie load of a KFC Double Down!
And that doesn’t include the sides.
As I mentioned in a previous post, posting calorie counts is a sensible thing to do, although the evidence that it has any effect is pretty iffy so far. Posting calorie counts like these ought to be law. The article makes it clear that doggie bags are expected, but do people know that they need to split the Whiskey-Apple Glazed Chicken into three separate meals (at least)?
Thing is, picking a restaurant or ordering from the menu is a tiny decision (except at fucking Claim Jumpers). By itself, no big deal. As a habit, it is a big deal.
But a lifetime is built out of all those tiny choices. Careers are built that way, and many people don’t look at these choices in a systematic way.
This ties in with the teaching article I posted about a while back: For a long time, people were convinced that very good teachers had this ineffable, unmeasurable thing called “talent”. They were “good teachers” and they seemed to spring from Zeus’s head fully formed. It’s only recently that researchers are making a strong push to truly analyze the behaviors of talented teachers to see what techniques they use. Once the behaviors are well understood, they can be taught to everyone.
Which ties into writing, too. I’ve posted before about how I think of writing “talent,” and I think it’s very much a teachable thing (at least to a certain degree).
All of these amount to making numerous tiny decisions: Which side to order? How to ask the students to pay attention? How to describe this characters? Each task comes with differing degrees of complexity, but there are smart choices to be made and unfortunate ones, and the unfortunate ones drag you down.
That’s why I spent a great deal of time studying other writers. I needed to get past my ideas what what worked/didn’t work and see through to the successful strategies.
With food, though, that’s extra hard. So many of the strategies I see are about changes people can’t make (such as moving to a walking-friendly neighborhood), can’t afford (join a gym, buy more veg), feel like punishment (did I mention the gym? And the veg?) and fly in the face of their own physical demands.
A lot of it seems to be anecdotal, too. Jared ate veggie sandwiches at Subway! Bill gave up all white food! I’d like to see a detailed, large-scale analysis of how people who succeeded in losing weight did it, without the moralizing.
1) Fantasy art or currently erupting Icelandic volcano?
2) Camera technology detects buried corpses from a plane.
3) A Choose-Your-Own Adventure, Lego Animation Style: Ronald Has A Spider On His Head.
4) Despite the URL, this link is totally safe for work: a celebration of portraiture. I love these pictures more than I should. I especially love the top one in the “Cowboys” entry.
5) I can’t see this at work; somebody please watch it and tell me if it’s cool.
6) Third edition POKETHULHU rules now available as free download.
7) A Hobbit hole too small even for Bilbo. At first I was all “Call me when you make something you can live in,” but as I scrolled through all the pictures, I was more and more impressed.
School lunches declared “National Security Threat” by group of former military officials.
Instead of going after underfunded school lunch programs, they’d have more success legislating against food advertising aimed at kids.
You know those times when you think: “I’ll just open up that game and see if I can’t finish off that really tough level” and the next thing you know you’ve retaken Guadalcanal?
Yeah. I shouldn’t be having those times.
… but I want to talk about it a little. The blog linked below doesn’t list the reviewer’s name (at least not where I could find it) but the Google Alert that directed me there said it was written by one “David Marshall.” Check this out:
“Poor unpublished Harry Connolly” pretty much describes me when I was doing the last polish on Child of Fire. I would have made “Poor” my first name and “Unpublished” my middle if I could have afforded the courthouse fees. But I couldn’t. I was poor.
Of course, now that I’m published, I’m as rich as a Wall St. con man, and I’m famous on the internet. The review I linked to above is a pretty positive one, all things considered, so why comment on it? There are lots of reviews out there. What strikes me here are two distinct points the poster is making (roughly speaking):
1) That I published Child of Fire, which is not the beginning of Ray’s story, for a big wad of cash, with any existing prequels held back for even larger wads later on, and
2) That I structured Child of Fire as a thriller for commercial reasons but I could have written something more satisfying (which I read to mean “not a potboiler” and “more art/less formula”).
Formula!! ::clutches pearls and faints::
Let’s break it down! (Detailed blathering, including the bad-literary version of Child of Fire behind the cut) Continue reading
