Look out! Octopus!

9:03pm: In other news.
I've figured out why Weird Tales hasn't gotten back to me about a short story I sent them a few months ago. It's because I sent the story to wierdtales@gmail.com. I before E only gets one so far.

Also, I've finished a draft of another novel. This is something that I finished in 2007, and then put on the shelf, because I wasn't happy with it. Basically, it hit a weirdness peak about halfway in, and didn't spread out infodumps, so they all sort of clustered in the end. And there was a significant lump of a scene that just plain didn't work.

So, I've fixed those problems. Or at least I think I have. Anyhow, it certainly doesn't have a weirdness peak in the middle; there are all sorts of crazy things that happen throughout the book now. It's fantasy, but it's sort of anime influenced fantasy, so it's got machine guns and ornithopters as well as magic and Quests to Save Mankind. If anyone wants to read it, drop me a line.

(This month, I think I'm going to try short stories. Too much novelling these last couple of months.)

11:32pm: Scurrilous Tales of My Youth.
When Orthodox Jews get married, it's not a one party thing. There's an engagement party, there's something called a vort, there's an afruf, and a shabbat kallah (those last two are usually held on the same weekend), then there's the wedding, then there's the shevah brachot, which last the whole week after the wedding.

Yeah, we party pretty hard. Admittedly, most of these parties aren't what a reasonable person would call fun, but there's usually food. And speeches.

Which brings me to the point of this anecdote. You see, a few years back—maybe I was a teenager, I can't remember exactly—one of my relatives got married. And, at one of those parties, a respectable and refined older gentleman gave one of the speeches. And the subject he decided to give the speech on was the concept of דבקות. It means . . . well, let's say it means connection, adhesion, a clinging of one thing to another.

The source text that this fellow used was Genesis 2:24, which, in the King James Version, goes as follows: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Given the speaker and the context in which he was speaking, I am utterly confident that the guy didn't intend anything other than to translate the word דבקות. But because his source translated דבק as "cleave", he gave a long and intricate speech about how important cleavage is in a marriage.

The end.

10:29pm: What I've been up to.
Short form:

I wrote another book.

Longer form:

Before the summer, there were two projects that I had gotten about 20,000 words written in; Enoch Heard, and Nameless. For various reasons, once I started writing again, I started on Enoch Heard, which took a while, though it accelerated a bit towards the end. Then I started on Nameless. After a few days, that thing really got going; I have never written anything as quickly as this--it was about 30,000 words in a week, and then another week to do the next two drafts.

It's an urban fantasy, about a wizard who fights evil fay in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York. There's a lot in there that's supposed to be funny, but it's not exactly humorous fantasy--it's told in the first person, and the hero is a funny guy, but the world doesn't make puns or such for him. As is usually the case with things I write, it's a bit too short by the standards of a modern novel--66,000 words or so. And it hasn't expanded as much in subsequent drafts as things I write usually do, so I may have to put in more plot, rather than just filling out the plot I have.

So, if anyone wants to take a look at this, it's available. I imagine that most people who might want to look at stuff I've written are currently looking at Enoch Heard or not looking at, as the case may be, so I'm not exactly expecting a flood of interest, but if there is anyone who would be interested, it would be a help.

(There are actually a lot of similarities between the two books, some of which were doubtless caused by their proximity, others of which are a somewhat embarrassing coincidence. Aside from these two things, I've never had a red-head as a female romantic lead, for instance. And I've finished five other novel length manuscripts, and a decent handful of short stories. But there they are.)

12:45pm: A thing that fascinated me.
I came across mention of an RPG publisher plagiarizing art. Following it up, the mess just seemed to get bigger and more hilarious, so I wrote it up.

The thing that gets me is just how many people this sort of thing damages.

When the guy in question grabs a picture from the internet and puts it on a cover, that's slime right there, but I don't see the theft as being damage, as such--the artist is losing money that they should have gotten, but it's not that much money, and it could be that if this guy wasn't plagiarizing, there wouldn't have been a cover in the first place.

However, the scan in question is likely to be a low resolution scan; while it might look fine as a thumbnail, the actual physical cover is probably going to look pretty bad. And that does damage the artist's reputation. In addition, for a lot of this art, the artist didn't have the legal right to sell it; if the right holder came across the page, they might well think that it was the artist double dipping. And then there's the way that the existence of "free" high quality cover art will erode the position of all artists who are trying to sell that sort of thing to small presses.

And then you get the harm that he's causing other micro publishers. In addition to making the whole enterprise look sleazy, their books, with fifty dollar cover art, are now competing for attention with books with thousand dollar cover art. True, it's not going to look great when you get the actual physical copy, but most of the sales that these people are making come from the web, where the cover images are small enough that they'll look fine. And he's training people to assume that the physical object that micro-presses put out isn't going to look as good as the image on the web.

My point being, even if it was just the art theft, the guy's doing all sorts of harm to all sorts of people.

10:52pm: Draft!
Over the last couple of months, I've been pushing pretty hard on something that had been called The Redborn Murders, and which is now called Enoch Heard. And now it's done. Well, that is to say, version 6.5 is done, which is the third complete draft. I'm going to let it sit for a month or two before I do a final revision pass, and start sending it out to agents.

And that's where (hopefully) (some of) you come in! If anyone wants to take a look at this for me, that'd be a big help. As I said, I'm probably going to try and do a final pass in a month or two, so comments will be most useful before March, but given the majestic pace with which the publishing industry works, I can probably use them through to the beginning of the summer.

Enoch Heard is an urban fantasy-ish book set in New York, in 1851. It contains wizards, ghouls, Hungarians, vampires, fist-fights, Irishmen, gangs, a sachem of Tammany Hall, a trip on the Erie Railroad, international intrigue, and various other characters, events, and situations of that sort. The current draft is a hair short of seventy thousand words, which is one of the problems that I hope to fix in the next draft. It is, I think, a fun book.

So, if you would like to take a look, let me know, and I'll send you a copy. (If you don't specify a format, I'm going to go with .rtf. If I don't have your email address, I'll need that.)

Thanks!

7:40pm: What the internet has to offer today.
Apparently, there are such things as gigantic orangutans that live on the ground and, to be frank, scare me.

I also discovered that among 19th century Irish immigrants, the conflict between Corkonians and Fardowners was sufficiently violent that the military had to be called in to suppress outbreaks from time to time.

And, finally, I've come up with a new theory: Sir John Franklin and company were killed by Frankenstein's monster. They both start with "Fra".

7:40pm: It's been a while since I've posted, it seems.
I have been rather scarce around these parts, mainly because I've been pushing hard on this 1850s wizard thing. It's now called Enoch Heard, and I'm about 10% done with a draft that will go out to people who are interested in reading that. It's the stage of a project where I'm getting kinda sick of it, but it needs at least a week or two before I can stop doing it.

Also, it's Hannuka. This year, Uriel has started lighting his own menorah, which is fun, because there is fire. He's also off from school, so I'm not going to have mornings to myself for another week or so. On the other hand, Naomi made donuts, so things have a way of coming out even.


And hey: It's been a couple of years since I posted this, so have a festivally themed ( macro )

1:31am: Links and Quotes.
First off, a map of NYC, from 1852. It's got all sorts of buildings labeled, and it's overlaid on the current google map of NYC in such a way that you can see all sorts of interesting things. If you like old timey things, and you like New York, this is absolutely the map for you.

SOME people are wonderin' why it is that the Brooklyn Democrats have been sidin' with David B. Hill and the upstate crowd. There's no cause for wonder. I have made a careful study of the Brooklynite, and I can tell you why. It's because a Brooklynite is a natural-born hay seed, and can never become a real New Yorker. He can't be trained into it. Consolidation didn't make him a New Yorker, and nothin' on earth can. A man born in Germany can settle down and become a good New Yorker. So can an Irishman; in fact, the first word an Irish boy learns in the old country is "New York," and when he grows up and comes here, he is at home right away. Even a Jap or a Chinaman can become a New Yorker, but a Brooklynite never can.

From Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.

It has been recorded, in the lost scrolls of Caractos the Scribe, of which only fragments now exist, that . . . from the ice world of Northumbria, there came a youth named Niall, son of Thorkon the Mighty, who was destined to roam the world as he knew it, and to whom was to be given the appellation, the far traveler. . .

Dragon Magazine 55, "The Coming of the Sword," Gardner F. Fox

I'd like to note that those ellipses aren't mine; they're in the original. For no reason that I can determine. Maybe they collected all the periods that they thougth that bit needed, and piled them up? Also, I'm not sure how many readers I have from the ice world of Northumbria, but if there are any, best regards to Thorkon the Mighty.

The other news is that we've gone several days without home appliances exploding, or hospital visits, so I've been writing; I think I'm going to call the 1850s vampire hunter thing Enoch Heard, and I'm within striking distance of the end of a very rough first draft.

And that's approximately it.

8:35pm: Swine flu, and other adventures.
So, we spent much of last week dealing with Uriel's illness, some of it in the hospital. As it turned out, it was swine flu, strep throat, and scarlet fever. I didn't know there was even such a thing as scarlet fever anymore, but that's one of the miracles of parenthood; you learn about diseases. Anyhow, he's more or less fine now, though he's on medication until the end of the week. Both Naomi and I were also a bit swine flued, but we're recovering. Still, if you were thinking of stopping by for a visit, next week might be better.

In news not related to illness, I've got another bit of old New York Times for you:

Henry Clay has written a letter in favor of Gen. Cass for President.I state this on unquestionable authority. It is also asserted that Mr. Fillmore will soon be out with a letter declining to be a candidate, but intimating in favor of Daniel Webster. Great commotion among the other Presidential candidates.--Herald

The special and exclusive information contained in the line that we have italicised, may as well be mentioned to that portion of our fellow-citizens who serve their country in the capacity of marines.

New York Times, January 12, 1852

Zing!

2:14am: Writing?
So, apparently, I've gotten back to writing, after a bit of a dry spell. I'm not doing nanowrimo because I've got too many things I'm in the middle of, but there were 4,000 or so words of fiction written today, mostly in the 1851 thing.

They included these:

Given the course I had chosen, it would certainly not be just for me to complain of this violation of the principles of unarmed combat. Furthermore, I will admit that I had not the wind to make that complaint, or any other, for indeed, the chair had knocked it all from me.

I'm not sure that'll survive to the final draft, as it is a bit much, but they amused me.

8:14pm: Celebrities! Right here on my LJ!
So, do you get comments from movie stars on your LJ?

I do.

Okay, maybe movie star is overstating the point. Movie Kuiper Belt Object, let's call him. But he was totally on my lj, sharing anecdotes about how The Asylum takes a script and direction optional approach to movie making.

Made my week, pretty much.

11:29am: My theory.
I believe that somewhere, there is an alien race that has found a way to convert stupidity into energy. So, they seek out the purest stupidity in the universe, devising strange ways of encouraging and refining stupidity.

Hence, Youtube comments.

10:21pm: Couple of questions.
First off, and this is a longshot: I've read that Irish immigrants to New York in the mid-nineteenth century tended to segregate themselves by county of origin. Anyone know where the people living in Corlear's Hook would have come from?

Next, a slightly shorter, but still a relatively long shot: How offensive is it to call Hawaiians "Kanakas"? It's what they were often called in the 19th century, but I don't see any reason to keep a throw-away line with that in it, if it's something that'll upset people.

11:35am: On the off chance that I'm not the only one who didn't know about this.
I'm not sure where or when I encountered it, but I've known about X Minus One for years now, as a radio show that consisted of dramatizations of SF stories, some classics, and others . . . less so. But I just today found out about the similarly named Dimension X, which was more or less the same thing, and which was a sort of precursor to X Minus One.

Point being, there are period dramatizations of stories like "A Logic Named Joe" and "Nightfall." Available for free, on the internet.

12:31pm: The New York Times, on England.
This is by the European correspondent, in the middle of a larger piece about Louis Napoleon seizing power. The paragraphing is mine, I'm afraid. Also, I don't think that there's an HTML tag for small caps, so I went with regular capital letters for people's names. (Apparently, I was wrong on that front. Now, glory in the small size of the caps reproduced below.)

( LJ cut, as it get a bit long. And slightly uncomplimentary. )

1:06am: So, here's a thing about fasting.
For various reasons (mostly a stomach upset before Yom Kippur), this fast was a tough one for me. And, now that it's over, I've realized something about what fasting does. It's not the only thing that fasting does, but it's part of it.

I was back at home, sitting in my big comfortable chair, because I wasn't feeling strong enough to stand, and I realized that I was dying. That is, I realized that if I continued fasting a bit longer, at most another day, I would be dead. I wasn't in any immediate danger--if I was in immediate danger I would have been obliged to break the fast--but my body was doing the things that a dying body does, because that's what was happening. The process of my death had started. I could stop it; I did stop it, about an hour later, but at that time, I knew what dying of thirst felt like, because that's what I was doing.

There are other things happening on Yom Kippur, but death is part of it; the robe that the men wear, the kittel, is the grave cerement for Jewish men, and one of the things that is decided, that people pray for, is to be written for the coming year in the book of life.

This wasn't a near death experience, exactly. Call it an "in the general neighborhood of death experience". But one of the things that it brought home to me was the fact that I'm going to die. The traditional Jewish response to the thought that someone will die isn't denial, exactly. It's "until a hundred and twenty"; that's the maximum that people are expected to live. Okay, granted. By May 11, 2096, I'll be dead. (May 3rd, actually, if it's 120 by the Jewish calender, but I digress.) Which is a long ways off, but still isn't terribly pleasant to think about.

But that's what fasting does; that's what this iteration of the fast did. There's an abstraction to the idea of death, if you're healthy and comfortable, that there isn't when you're sick and weak. I'm not going to talk about what followed that realization. That's private. But I can't help but feel that at least part of the reason for religious fasting is to get that feeling, and to get a perspective of that sort.

4:45pm: Offerings from the demi-plane of refreshment.
Someday soon, I'll get back to actual blogging rather than just sort of . . . keeping a log of things I see on the web. But, odd as it may seem, I do seem to have seen this on the web. To summarize: I wonder if truth in labeling laws will require them to say something along the lines of "contains less than 8% genuine Illithid brain juice".

And, for those who are wondering where I've been finding the Old Time Radio I've been listening to, the answer is Archive.org's Old Time Radio collection. Man, Gangbusters. Is there any better way to hear about gangs, and the busting thereof? I would posit that there isn't.

3:03pm: Internet Slang of the 1940s.

Frank Chandler: Well, if it's spelled R-O-X-O-R, as it sounds, it's spelled the same forward and backward. It's a very ancient trick of, of sorcery.
Dorothy Regent: Sorcery? You mean black magic?
Frank Chandler: Exactly.
Betty Regent: I don't see why we have to get all mixed up in black magic and everything all of a sudden. It scares me!

11:08am: Now that's, I say, now that's an opening paragraph.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all from time to time taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room--the hundred like it or worse--in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really in a manner that she mightn't add the shame of fear, of individual, of personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small salutary sense at least of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet--as including in particular the interview to which she had braced herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad so as not to be angry, but it made her angry that she couldn't be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a "lot" at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean stale feelings?

11:08am: The wit and wisdom of google.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 369,000 for "in the year 2525" "what the hell"."

10:28am: From the institute of "I did not know that."
http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html.

Long story short: Roman gladiators were pudgy vegetarians. Makes sense, but not what I'd have expected.

9:09am: Well, I'm back.
Actually, I've been back in Israel since the end of August, but there's been stuff to do, and catch up on, and suchlike, so I haven't been on livejournal much. But now I've caught up, and suchliked, so here I am.

The trip went well; it's possible that I'll assemble my fragmentary memories into the form of posts, but I'm not sanguine that there'll be much more than fragments. Still, here's one to start:

On the flight over to the US, I had a long layover in Schipol airport. Which is a very nice airport, as far as it goes, though it doesn't have very many free outlets. Anyhow, I was sitting near one of those outlets, and a pair of conservatively dressed young men took up the seats directly behind mine.

"Did you know, Jack," said one of them. "That there are those who don't know that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah?"
"Really? But surely, they are aware that in Isaiah, 7:14, the Hebrew prophet specifies that the Messiah will be born to a virgin?"
"That's right, Jack. And while some might argue that . . ."

And so on. It was hilarious. Honestly, the amount of missionizing that I've been subject to has fallen off considerably since I left the US, and even there, it had been much more common when I was a teenager than when I grew up. But all the same, this is the first time I can recall passive-aggressively missionaries. I let them go through their whole script, which was a clever one--there were a bunch of places where they made the sort of gross errors in translation that invited interruption, but, once it was clear that I wasn't taking the bait, they went sadly off, presumably to find some other obvious non-Christian to discuss the bible near.

2:31pm: Misc and various
So, I'm in New York, which was pretty much what a rational person would have expected. The hours in the airport were excruciating, but the flight itself wasn't bad -- they have that system where you get to pick from a selection of movies and TV shows, so I watched things I might actually have chosen to watch, rather than things that are more entertaining than that little screen showing how far you are from your destination.

And now I will talk about those movies, as that's somewhat more interesting than "I was in an airport. Then, I was in another airport. The food wasn't good.": No Country for Old Men: Confused and arbitrary plot, deliberately unsatisfying resolution. But there was an entertaining sort of voice to it, and it got the sort of worldbuilding stuff right. But I'll admit that I fast forwarded a bit in the middle, as I quite simply lost patience with people not leaving Texas. Yes, it's true that it would break the tone and atmosphere of the movie. But honestly. Just get on a Grayhound bus, and go to Indiana. That will make it hard for people to find you. Monsters vs. Aliens: It was actually okay. The blog thing wasn't actually funny; there was a sort of generic quality to its jokes, and attitude, and comedic voice. But the rest of the cast was okay, and the plot wasn't bad. The Da Vinci Code,: Look. I'm moderating a worldcon panel about bad movies in like a week; this is something that I need to study carefully. The pacing of the beginning is actually okay, but the long bit where wossname -- he had some ridiculous name like Chuzzwozzle Thickbottom -- let's call him Magneto. The scene where Magneto goes ahead and explains the ridiculous backstory was just stupid and unending. I don't see any way they could have fit that stupid theory in more elegantly, but the tricks they tried didn't work. Generally speaking, when you have to interrupt your movie for some academic power point, you're not winning. There was also an episode of CSI Miami (The one where the investigators burned down the crime scene because they are mindblowingly stupid.), some late season Simpsons, and the first bit of The Spiderwick Chronicles which seemed to be about half fun stuff, and half tired cliche.

Basically, I think the trend is that planes are becoming less unpleasant places to be, while airports, particularly US airports, are becoming more unpleasant. The fact that I'm short and not terribly fat probably is what makes me think that airplanes aren't that unpleasant, but there you are.

3:26am: Free wireless, woo, woo.
3:05 in the morning. Less woo. Considerably less woo.

Something you may not know about me: I get travel anxiety. Generally, it's not too bad, but sometimes, it does get pretty irritating. What I've discovered today is that when I don't have people around, it's . . . not helpful. You see, the way it works with me is that there's this sort of free-floating mass of worry. When it lights on a topic; "you're going to have an upset stomach, and they won't let you on your flight," it is very hard for me to stop thinking about that particular chain of thought -- the extent to which my stomach is upset, the ways in which the flight crew will notice this, and decide to keep me off the plane, the difficulties that would ensue from missing this particular flight, and so on. Which isn't fun!

When there are distractions around that mass of worry doesn't go away, but it doesn't adhere to anything in particular. So I'll be tense and snappish, but I will not be driving myself actively insane. Today, Uriel, Naomi, and Naomi's parents left relatively early in the morning. And yet, I did not have a relaxing day. Instead, I worried. And you know what's not a great idea when you've got that sort of worry? Talking to people with the exact same sort of problem. Because when I'm talking to mom, her reaction to a scenario like the above is less, "ha, ha, you're driving yourself nuts," and more, "that is a very serious concern which you should worry about, and which I am now going to worry about as well." Which is sympathetic, but not entirely helpful.

As a result of this, I took a taxi out to the airport at 1:00 AM, rather than a train the previous night at 9:00 PM. Because while I don't actually have any reason to fear the security check at the airport, I do fear it, and I decided that spending three or four hours actually facing the security check would leave me exactly the sort of twitching wreck that they'll give subject to an intensive search. And if I miss this plane, then I'd wind up flying on the ninth of Av, which is one of Judaism's more intense fast days. And I don't want to do that, as flying west makes a day longer.

But I digress, in a slightly insane going manner. Now, I'm through the security checkpoint, which reduces my anxiety by about 70%, and soon I should be on a plane, assuming all goes according to plan. Where I'll probably get a little sleep, as I've had about an hour and a half tonight. Then they'll wake me up to give me a horrible breakfast.

If Schiphol has free wireless, I might be online again in a bit. Otherwise, I'm not sure how often I'm going to be checking email for the next week or so. After that, Worldcon.

Assuming that they don't throw me off the plane, for some reason.

10:14am: Winding down the dig.
Official post is up; it's been a while since I've done one of those.

And, if you've been kinda vaguely interested in the excavation, but not sufficiently to actually read my . . . moderately tedious official posts, I'd recommend reading this one, and, hopefully, the next two. They'll pack all the tedium of an entire season into a few blog posts! Also, they should explain what we think we've found, and why those interpretations make more sense than the other things we've considered. Also, maybe there'll be pictures from parties and suchlike. And then it'll be done, gloriously, gloriously done.

Anyhow, here's a ( picture of Uriel )