Look out! Octopus!

6:15pm: Awww.
Okay, one more.

An overheard conversation:

Uriel: Thank you.
Naomi: You're welcome. What in particular are you thanking me for?
Uriel: Thank you for I.
Naomi: You're welcome.

5:34pm: Never Change, Pennsylvania.

Mr. Buchanan cannot perceive that in this struggle for the Presidency, he is pursuing a delusion, and a very expensive one, a delusion that is distracting the Democratic Party most unprofitably, which is opening daily new springs of bitterness in Pennsylvania, and which, unless speedily abandoned, must place the Democracy of that State in a hopeless minority.

New York Times, October 4th, 1851

2:29pm: A Cute Uriel Story.
For various reasons, I haven't been posting many of these here. However, from time to time, an exception will be made.

I'm not sure if those of you who aren't culturally American get this song, but there's a children's song that I grew up with which goes "Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Eye and ears and mouth and nose, head shoulders knees and toes, knees and toes." It's repeated approximately eighty billion times, or until you go mad.

Anyhow, now, when we sing this to Uriel, after it ends, he goes, "and glasses." After a bit of a pause, "and Uriel." And, after another bit of a pause, "and a book."

And there you are.

3:52am: Better?
This is the fourthish draft of the cover letter. It's probably not going to be the final draft, but it's at a stage where I'm not really seeing the words anymore. So, for those ( interested )

The second paragraph probably needs to be tightened, but I'm not sure what to cut. The third paragraph isn't changed, and doesn't seem to add enough to justify its presence, were it not for the fact that just about every agent who says something about what they want to see in a query has something along the lines of "a short bio", and it adds a bit more than "we used to have a cat, but I'm allergic to cats, so it got pawned off on my in-laws when my wife was pregnant, and honestly, I'm pretty happy with that arrangement, because I don't really want to have a box full of poop in my house, whether or not I'm allergic to it. Maybe someday we'll get a dog."

9:19am: Cover Letter.
Okay.

Behind the cut is the current draft of the cover letter for Nexus Sicarra. I can't help but feel that it's awful, but it's less awful than previous attempts have been. What I'm trying to write is a letter that'll get an agent to read the rest, and which doesn't mis-represent the novel sufficiently to upset them if they do decide to read the rest. Also, I'm trying to convince them that I'm not an idiot. For those of you not interested, here's an ( lj cut )

I'm most worried about the first paragraph; specifically, I'm not sure that defining the book in the negative -- not like Tolkien -- is the best way to go. Also, the bit about second and third order effects might be a bit too much along the nerd talk axis. This is the default letter; for agents to whom I have something specific to say, that'll come in the first paragraph.

Thoughts?

6:07pm: All the Places.
The combination of reading old New York Times and trying to get Nexus Sicarra ready for publication has led me to this: "Fowlers & Wells, Phrenologists and Publishers, Clinton Hall, No 131 Nassau Street, near the park."

I want to send them my manuscript. They probably don't want a query letter and synopsis; a mold of my head would probably suffice.

6:08am: Nexus Sicarra, yet again.
I've just finished draft 6.0 of Nexus Sicarra. The version that'll go out to agents will probably be 6.1 or 6.2; there are a few more minor changes that I'm going to make, but I think that, structurally, the story is in its final form.

Hooray!

For those of you that have read it, a few questions:

1) Can you think of an author or authors who are writing similar stuff? Part of why I ask is to help with the agent hunt, so if you also know who is representing those authors, I'd like to know that as well.

2) Sub-genre? I can think of a few things that'll sort of fit, but they're all hideously wrong, to one degree or another.

3) Suggest a new last name for Would. I'm pretty sure I have to change it, but I can't think of what I'd change it to.

Thanks.

7:24pm: Buh?
Via Boing Boing, arguably the most popular blog in the world, so some of you might have seen this already.

But apparently, there have been anti-emo riots in Mexico City.

What the hell, Mexico?

4:52pm: Submitted without comment.
Today's "Writer's Block" prompt from livejournal:

"If one day you meet your favorite super star, what questions you would like to do to him/her?"

11:45pm: Well, I'm back.
Actually, I've been back since Thursday morning. Which brings up another point -- we were in the US for about three weeks. I had been thinking about getting together with people I haven't seen in a while, but as it turned out, that was impractical. Uriel is a great kid, but traveling with a twenty month old really takes the energy out of you. Since we visited family in New York, Palo Alto, San Fransisco, Petaluma, and Passaic over the course of the trip, there wasn't a lot of time to do much other than recover from travel, go to family events, and then recover from family events. Also, I took on something of a rush job, which I'm in the process of working on. It's reasonably interesting stuff, but the English is. . . well, it's not the best I've encountered.

That is all.

7:42pm: More Very Old New York Times
Because they are awesome and hilarious. Presumably, I'll eventually post something else, but that might have to wait until I'm caught up on the Times.

The Austrian Government claims the right to overhaul and inspect every document passing into her Venetian States. As American diplomatic dispatches are subjected, equally with private matters, to this inspection, it might be well to suspend relations with the Imperial Court until it comes into its courtesy. One might suppose their taste for inspecting letters would have been corrected by the HULSEMANN communication.

The New York Times, September 20, 1851

Man, that third sentence. Ouch. I was all, oh, they wouldn't go there, but then, BAM! They totally went there.

10:37pm: It's been downhill ever since.

The most interesting item of the past fortnight was the Sebastopol fête and the fate of Sebastopol proper could not have been more perfectly demonstrated. The French, English, and Sardinian population of our city, as an outlet to their enthusiasm on the reception of the news of the success of the Allies in the Crimea concluded to celebrate the event in the brownest manner. (. . .) [A] representation of the Malakoff Tower, constructed of confectionary and pound cake some ten feet in height, sugar canons frowning from its battlements, and a large supply of ammunition was distributed about, all of the same material. (. . .)

The first step in the finale was the shying of a tough old goose at the Malakoff. It was fired with good effect, and instantly the air was darkened by the shower of roasted pigs, ducks, loaves of bread, claret bottles, hats, bones, and fragmentary edibles en route for the devoted Malakoff. The scene that followed beggars description. (. . .)

At this stage of the game, a French lady, full of patriotism and claret, jumped on to the, table, and commenced singing the Marseillalse hymn, winding up with a pirouette on a platter, which being rather uncertain footing, she came down "kor-slump" on to a gravy dish; a drunken Frenchman sprang to the rescue, and set her up again like a ten-pin, but owing to the "befuddled" state he was in he set the lady on the wrong end, and entirely reversed the order of things. A rush was made to right matters, when the lady and her admirers went down together in a promiscuous heap, half buried under chunks of roast beef, fragments of ducks and plates. In the centre of the pavillion there was a general row, in which every nation took a part--pandemonium broke loose wasn't a circumstance. (. . .)

As I left to avoid this catastrophe, I took a farewell glance. A procession of a dozen Frenchmen were marching the length of tables amid the wreck of crockery, singing the partant pour la Syrie, and a lot of men-of-war's men were endeavoring to shove a "landsman" into the roast ox through a big hole they had made in its side, singing out "shove the lubber away in the hold" d-n his eyes, he hurrahed for Roosher. An hour later there was nothing left of the Sebastopol celebration but a few thousand yards of torn canvass, an acre or two of broken crockery, and a couple of hundred dead drunk Allies buried in the ruins.

New York Times, Dec. 31st, 1855

All paragraphing is my own invention, I'm afraid. I've got no idea if this link will work, or if there's some sort of active content witchery involved in that URL, but the fact that the New York Times archives from 1851 to 1922 are available free here means that you can look for this or any other Crimean war related food-fights at your leisure.

God bless you, internet.

4:54pm: A conversation that Hebrew readers will understand.
The dig at Ein Gedi is finishing up this week. I wasn't there this year, but it reminds me of a conversation I had last year, which might provide some passing amusement.

Me: Well, there are a lot of small stones.
Dig Director: Not "small stones," "small stones."
Me: "Small stones?" But not "small stones."
DD: No, not that far. Just "small stones."
Me: Okay.

(For those who don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, it has to do with grammar.)

5:48pm: The Mockery Project.
As I threatened last week, here's a link to the short that we're going to try and mock.

Even if you have no interest in this sort of thing, you really should take a look at what's behind that link; it's absolutely brilliant. Particularly if you like cheesy 70s SF; it features an architect who's given some dollar store magic whatsitses by chipmunk aliens, and who has to teach kids about safety around the home.

If you feel like joining in on this full time, the wiki is where to go. On the other hand, if you just have a line or two that you think should go in, you can send it to me by email, or post it here. Whatever we come up with is going to be released under some form of creative commons thing, so don't expect residuals from this to pay for your retirement.

11:23am: Just one of many reasons.
While I do hope to make money based off the protections that copyright offers, I may not have as much respect for the rights of copyright holders as one might hope.

There are any number of reasons why this is the case, but here's one:

As I understand US copyright law, public performance of works protected by copyright qualifies as infringement, as does public performance of works that would infringe on that copyright, such as derivative works. Public performance being defined as "to perform at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered". This being the case, I can't see how it would be legal for kids to play with Star Wars toys, or My Pretty Ponies, or whatever, in public parks, or, indeed, anywhere outside the privacy of their own homes. If they're re-enacting the official storyline, it's straight infringement, or, as is far more likely, if they're making up their own stories, they're performing infringing derivative works.

Similarly, it's almost certainly illegal to use tunes by musicians like Shlomo Carlebach in religious services. He may have written those tunes for the liturgy, and intended for people to use them in their services, but to the best of my knowledge, neither he nor his estate has actually granted a license for that sort of performance.

The second one is interesting for another reason -- if the majority of what's performed for a congregation on the High Holy Days is infringing, and said congregation sells tickets, it's not hard to term that a copyright violation conducted "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" which is a felony, and the government can prosecute that sort of thing whether or not the right holders want them to. It's not necessarily the case that the courts would rule that the musical performance is what's being paid for, but it's also not necessarily the case they wouldn't.

Now, just because the law gives right holders bizarrely comprehensive rights, and just because copyright law allows the government to prosecute people for little or no reason, that doesn't negate the more reasonable rights that copyright holders have. What it does negate are concepts along the lines of, "well, it's the law, so respect and obey it", or "it's perfectly reasonable to expect people to obey the law."

The halachic concept of "dina d'malchuta dina", that "the laws of the kingdom are Law", actually has a similar limitation to it -- that going a mile an hour over the speed limit isn't actually a violation of Jewish law, and neither is jaywalking, and so on. But to prove that would take a lot of effort on my part, and not necessarily interest anyone more than casually, so, if you feel a need to learn more, go bother a pulpit rabbi -- they get paid to do go through that sort of effort. Often by funds raised in part through copyright violation; feel free to bring that up if they disagree with what I just said.

(Edited to fix an appalling sentence, and to insert a "US" at a critical point)

3:52pm: Something I've been thinking about doing.
When we get together for Bad Movie Nights, one of the things that we usually do is watch a few public domain short features, generally from archive.org.

What I was thinking of doing was writing a script wherein we mock a feature, record it, edit it into the file, and let it loose on the internet.

If you're interested, miketheman has set up a wiki for talking about the project. There isn't actually any content there as of yet, but hopefully, once I send this, I'll go about adding some.

If you're not actually interested in wiki style discussion, I hope to put up a format for writing your attempts at scripts, and a link to the short we're going to start with here, in about a week or so.

1:10pm: A supplementary note.
In a brief walk around the block to get Uriel to go to sleep, I noticed six buildings obviously leaking water, and another three with people up on the roof fixing stuff. There were only three buildings that I circumnavigated that weren't obviously experiencing some sort of plumbing relating catastrophe. This may explain the relative lack of a person fixing our hot water; cold snaps like this one must be the water heater repairman equivalent of winning the lottery.

Oh, and Jerusalem area folks -- you might want to just take a quick look at your buildings' roofs.

10:24am: It's cold outside.
The weather listings are calling it unseasonably cold, though if the middle of the winter isn't the season for this sort of thing, I don't know when the season is. "Unusually cold" is probably more accurate. Unfortunately, our building isn't what you might call designed for cold. As is the fashion in Israel, there are solar water heaters up on the roof, which work pretty well. And which rely on exposed pipes and hoses and such to carry the water around.

You might imagine what dropping below freezing does for a setup like that.

First one went out, then another. Today, there was water sproodling from more than half the units on the roof. It could be a cascade problem, rather than a half dozen individual failures -- everything there is gerry-rigged and linked in questionable manners. Also, a lot of the valves are rusted over and can't be turned. Ours was the second one to go, and the person we randomly selected to fix it has proven heroically unreliable; it was supposed to be a half hour to put in a new pipe. On Sunday morning. He keeps saying that he'll be here in the morning, and getting very angry if we suggest that seven in the evening doesn't strictly count as the morning. And that he hasn't fixed a damn thing.

We'll see how this plays out. I'm hoping it doesn't involve a new roof.

10:24pm: Mongery.
In contemporary usage, there's a pretty limited set of things that people can mong. You get fishmongers and warmongers, but not, say, hot dog mongers. Or softwaremongers. Aside from fish and war, the following things are monged, from time to time: Cheese, hate, rumor, fear, and iron. There are some variations there as well -- you can monger scare, for instance, as well as fear. The ever helpful wikipedia informs me that the Hate-monger is a Marvel super villain, and, furthermore, there were a number of characters in the Marvel Universe called the Iron Monger, most of whom were super villains. Sadly, it seems as though the Fishmonger has yet to teach the world to fear his sinister, piscine themed devices.

As a bit of an aside, it's worth noting that the Hate Monger character is a wonderfully stupid creation. To quote wikipedia:

The Hate-Monger first appeared in the small fictional nation of San Gusto in South America, and came to the attention of authorities when he took over with the use of storm troopers. The Fantastic Four went to stop a hate rally, but were caught off guard by Hate-Monger's weapon - the Hate-Ray - which instilled hate for others.

The fictional authorities of San Gusto seem to be sufficiently competent to notice people who've taken over their government. Good for them! I'll skip a bit, but the pay-off isn't something skippable:

When Mr. Fantastic removed the Hate-Monger's mask, it was revealed that Hate-Monger was Adolf Hitler - who apparently survived World War II.

Apparently.

On the "extremely stupid super villain" scale, this rates maybe .2 Egg Fu[1]s, but it's still pretty dumb.

On another tangent, having spent a certain amount of time thinking about medieval villages, "super villain" is a phrase that looks very, very strange. He harbors his flock to the damage of the lord, I suppose. And is actually Adolph Hitler, who apparently was cast back in time to medieval England.

At this point, I'd try to get back to my main point, but I'm not entirely sure I had one. I guess that what I wanted to say is that it's a bit odd, the way mongering as a word has basically fallen out of the language, leaving a few vestigial phrases here and there.

[1] Egg Fu was a Wonder Woman villain. He was an insidious Chinese agent, who was also, for some reason, a giant egg. And he had a prehensile mustache. That's the great thing about comics: They address the concerns that need addressing. In this case, communist eggs.

4:55pm: Prized as a delicacy.
The phrase "prized as a delicacy" so seldom applies to things that people would normally consider tasty -- chocolate chip cookies aren't described as being "prized as a delicacy" in America, for instance. In general, things aren't prized as delicacies in America. Bizarre things that foreign people eat get that term. And, if you're like me, an aimless paddler in the sea of knowledge, you'll have heard about any number of those things.

To protect those who might find this sort of thing distasteful, a ( cut )

1:21pm: Things Fantasy Writers Get Wrong.
Part 1 of what might be a continuing series.

This isn't necessarily about fantasy, and it's not about all fantasy. What I want to talk about is the way authors trying to write in pre-modern settings get things wrong. I tend to encounter this in fantasy more than anywhere else because I read more fantasy than historical fiction. But don't worry -- I'm sure you historical fiction writers out there are getting this sort of thing wrong as well.

While it's easy to get technological details infuriatingly wrong, that's more of a nerd issue than any real problem with the text. The sort of problems that break the world for me are generally those about the way technology shaped peoples attitudes, and while those are a lot harder to get right, that sort of thing helps make books better in a real sense, rather than in a crazy person sense.

One that I was thinking about today was the nature of pre-modern villages, and what sort of impact that would have had on the people living there. They weren't, for the most part, entirely self-sufficient. There would always be goods going out of the villages toward the cities, and there'd always be goods coming back from the cities to the villages. But they were, by todays standards, more isolated than the moon. Travel was difficult, and dangerous, and just being a stranger would make you the natural target for all sorts of anti-social shenanigans.

There would be the occasional visitor, but most of those people would be familiar visitors -- pedlers and travelling craftsmen for whom the village was a regular stop, maybe a landlord who lived in town, that sort of thing. And maybe some of the people in the village would go to fairs, or out to the city to buy and sell. But there were plenty of people living in these villages who never went more than a mile or two beyond its limits. Ever. And even if the adults were going to fairs, the kids wouldn't, for the most part.

Now, the way that teenagers in pre-modern times were adults is another issue. But if you take the typical "young man forced into a Mysterious Quest" sort of character, chances are that he's never met anyone who could reasonably be called a stranger. Now put him in a city.

Obviously, the sheer number of people is going to be a shock. And the anonymity of the transactions is going to be a shock. Chances are good this is a person who never had to deal much with currency before -- now he has to have coins to get bread from someone who has no idea who he is if he wants to eat.

Now, this wasn't true for all villages, or for all times and places. But it's true for enough to make it worth considering, even if the character is going to be from a village on a popular pilgrimage route, or next to a well traveled river, or suchlike. "Never met a stranger" is a really neat idea, and it's what happened. It's hard to grasp now -- even people growing up in remote locations have radios and TV and suchlike. Books, if nothing else. In a pre-modern remote village, you'd get stories, but stories told by people who didn't have much contact with strangers themselves.

A lot of people who talk about things in fantasy that irritate them wind up being irritated that fantasy isn't science fiction. So they get upset with the way things like interspecies mating doesn't make sense, or how there are dragons but not evolutionary cousins of dragons, and so on. I think that that sort of criticism is fundamentally misplaced, and I suppose there's a bit of that in this. But pre-modern society is alien enough that it's a bit of a pity that people don't look closer at those oddities.

11:45am: Why has nobody told me about this?
Apparently, there's a show called QI. It's somewhere between a stand-up roundtable and a quiz show, it's hosted by Steven Fry, and it's brilliant. Brilliant, I say. The way the "impossibly difficult" questions tend to cluster in areas that I know pretty well makes it all the more brilliant, of course. Naomi finds it pretty good as well, and so, for your delectation, a conversation we had about it:

Me: That show has excellent writers.
Naomi: No, no, it's a gameshow. Gameshows don't have writers.
Me: Oh, you're talking about American union agreements; this is a British show. They have socialized screenwriters.
Naomi: Right.
Me: The National Humor Service. On average, it gets better results than the American system, but there are really long waits for non-emergency punchlines.

7:00pm: It ended yesterday, but...
Have a festivally themed ( macro )

1:39pm: A quick note.
Revisions on Nexus Sicarra are going to start up again on Jan 1st -- if anyone who has seen it has comments to make, they'd be most useful before then.

11:46pm: Running Type Things.
One of my fannish acquaintances locally has been talking about his experiences in taking up something called Parkour.

Never having heard of it, I naturally googled, and naturally found a flame war on wikipedia's talk pages. As I understand it, it's something like running, except that the goal is to maximize efficiency when facing obstacles. Not that I have much interest in actually pursuing this, but my understanding is that it systematizes techniques for maintaining speed while jumping over things, or on top of things, and so on. Basically, you treat your environment as an obstacle course. Or at least, that's what the founders of the activity intended.

But, well, people being people, there are some who thought that doing flips and similar gymnastic tricks was more fun than striving for efficiency of movement, and people being people, there are folks who are interested in making a dollar or two from the thing.

Now, it looks like a cool hobby, no two ways about it. It also looks like the sort of thing that'll send its fair share of stupid teenagers and imprudent adults to hospitals. One of the cool things about it is the way it makes the unseen visible; people doing this sort of thing are going to be looking at the details of things like railings and staircases and so on, and seeing things that are right out there, but entirely ignored by passerby.

But I'm sort of interested in the aesthetic argument there. My sympathies tend to be in the camp of those who prefer functional movement; there's an elegance to it that less functional, flashier stuff lacks. This is true in martial arts, where I've got a bit more experience than an evening of watching videos on youtube, and there's always the temptation to think of it as a functional preference -- that the more efficient movements are better than the jumps and flips and so on. But the thing is that there isn't actually any functionality to this sort of activity. The most efficient possible way to get through an obstacle course of this sort is to stay in bed. It's where you're going to wind up at night, and not leaving will get you there most efficiently.

And, honestly, the same is true of martial arts. For the vast majority of your life, knowing how to punch people isn't going to matter. And, if you happen to find yourself in a situation where it does matter, a slightly less efficient form would almost certainly have the same effect as a form closer to absolute efficiency. But martial arts study isn't really about self defense, and, I suppose, jumping down staircases and over trashcans isn't really about practicing running away from stuff. And when it comes to philosophy of that sort, aesthetics are going to vary.

With backflips or without, there seems to be a lot of it on youtube. And it's pretty cool, is what I'm saying.