Twitter may be a false god, but...

...but it's still cool to read as-it-happens tweets from legendary journalist Daniel Schorr.

RT @danielschorr Trying to get to the bottom of the memorandums authorizing torture of terror suspects during the Bush Administration.

I'm sure I'll be hearing the piece he writes very soon on NPR.

Geekspeak: "RT" means "re-tweet," or quoting someone else's tweet (that is to say, their post to Twitter), which I am doing here in this blog post; "@" means what comes next is someone's user name on Twitter, the name you can use to look them up.

Why my take on politics is just not very sophisticated

I really, really want Al Franken to take his rightful place in the Senate. Not because he'd be the crucial 60th Democrat (now that Arlen Specter has obligingly decided to be the 59th*, whereas if he'd waited until after Franken's opponent Norm Coleman had conceded the Minnesota race, Coleman would have been a lot more likely to concede, as Franken would then have been the 59th, and Coleman would not have felt like he was bearing the weight of the entire Republican party on his back). No. But because in 1995 he wrote and starred in what is certainly one of the most heartbreakingly underrated movies in the history of American cinema: Stuart Saves His Family.

I laughed from one end of this movie to the other; moreover, I absolutely loved the characters, the dramatic arc, and the ending. It's really hard to make characters extremely funny, extremely flawed, and extremely admirable. Stuart Smalley is one of my Great Fictional Heroes. (The video gnomes at YouTube won't let me embed the trailer, but you should go watch it.) And Al Franken is a good writer, who knows how to see, and make others see, the good in even the most flawed of characters. Isn't a hunger to see nobility in people a good thing for a politician? Makes a nice change, no?

So okay, I admit it, it's not a very sophisticated reason to want someone to win a Senate seat. But there are worse reasons.



*While, yes, okay, all hail Arlen Specter for reverting to his original Democratness, I for one can't quite forget the Anita Hill hearings, and the only night I ever drank enough (spurred on by a combination of rage and the need to keep a similarly enraged friend company) to actually throw up.

I really had my doubts.

On the morning of April 21, I only had 12 pages of script written. Today (the 29th), I have a hundred. It's a hundred pages of character sketches, random plot points, the reddest of red herrings, and some interesting experiments with language (interesting for me, anyway — one of my goals was to push the boundaries of how much poetry I was willing to inject into otherwise prosaic dialogue). But it's a hundred pages I have learned from; a hundred pages I may return to and do something with later in the year. And it's a hundred pages that have given me my second Script Frenzy win.

Writin' Rations™

If you're fighting a head cold (as I am), but you don't fancy chewing raw garlic cloves straight (I don't) and you don't have time to make a nice, garlicky chicken soup (not at the moment), one answer for the busy but infirm writer is a nice batch of garlic bread. But don't stop there! When you're mixing up the crushed garlic and the butter, add a vigorous grind of black pepper and a generous spoonful of rosemary. They're both supposed to be goooooood for you, and they taste quite nice combined with butter and garlic.

I am fortunate in that there is a nice little gourmet shop in Thirroul that carries a fabulous ciabatta; if you are not so fortunate, the pane di casa from Baker's Delight is nice for this sort of thing, and even a plain ol' baguette from the supermarket will do (sometimes they're even on special, which makes this a very economical way to introduce truly daunting amounts of fresh garlic into one's system).

While we're on the subject, have any of you ever had garlic ice cream? What was it like? Did you enjoy it? Or was it more interesting in concept than implementation? Inquiring minds want to know!

I just love this song.

The video is shockingly bad; like, shockingly. But the song is great. So get it playing, then put your screen saver on, or (in the old-fashioned way) close your eyes. Sing along as loud as you want. Harmonize. If you can't understand the lyrics (and I wouldn't blame you), they're here here (new link, after the first one turned up looking a bit dodgy in Satima's virus-protection software), among other places.

Potential

I love supermarkets and gourmet-food stores. I love fabric stores. I love bookstores. Hardware stores, scientific-instrument stores, the gates to the showground, the first half of a major writing project.

All are full of limitless possibilities, endless potential, the giddy spark of "Hey! I know!"

And then it's time to cook the food, piece the quilt, plow through the book, build, measure, observe, understand, write. The actual work. The possibilities narrow, the potential transforms into experience, the spark either bursts into flame (rare) or phfts out into "Well, this isn't going quite as I had envisaged." Either way — flame or phft — you have to keep going.

Guess which side of half-done I am on the current project!

Another "I should be writing so instead I'm doing a blog post" blog post

Okay, so, the less said about my current opus-in-progress the better.

Moving on:

First, a blog I just found (via boingboing): Lisa Gold: Research Maven. I love this blog. She's interested in all the things I'm interested in — research (of course), libraries, book stores, typefaces, newspaper style guides, good language, good ideas. What's more (and I'm glaring at you, Peter M. Ball), she argues very persuasively for the serial comma. Therefore she instantly becomes entirely credible in all things.

Next, Dr. Ronald Chevalier, my writing guru. He's the author of all ten of the Cyborg Harpie trilogies, you know. And he's very generous with advice for the attentive and appreciative writer. (By the way, you can follow him on Twitter.)

Another writing role model: Garth Merenghi and his tragically overlooked Darkplace television series. (Jason put me on to both of these role models. Clearly he has some sort of mystical connection directly into the pulsing, flashing heart of the Intertubez. Or a job that does not always capture 100 percent of his attention.)

And finally, an explanation of the sestina poetry form. It's wickedly complex, and I'm dying to try it out as soon as the April writing deadlines have come and gone. My friend Craig (who, incomprehensibly, does not seem to blog) put me onto the form, as he's been having some fun with it in his own writing. I studied a lot of English at one point, including a look at some poetry forms, but the sestina has eluded me until now. If I manage to crank out a good one, I'll post it over at my story blog, Dry As the Remainder Biscuit. (In case you missed it over on the Aussiecon blog, Dry As now contains the story that won their little flash-fiction competition a couple of weeks back.)

Sigh. Out of links to post. You know what that means.

O how I wish I'd thought of it

A fair few people whose job it is to think about these things reckon Shakespeare's birthday was probably April 23. So guess what the City of Chicago and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater have done for the occasion? Yes! Yes! Talk Like Shakespeare Day!!! This site tells you all you need to know (although I shake my head at the howler that the second-person plural is "thee" — what was someone thinking?). Oh, and don't miss the Patrick Stewart video.



And here's the CNN story.

And here, just to add another data point to the argument that some people really do get carried away, is an age-regression of what Shakespeare may have looked like at age 14. I don't see any zits, though. Wouldn't you think that an artistic adolescent of undeniable excitability (why, only a few years later he was standing at the altar watching his pregnant girlfriend walk down the aisle) might have a few zits?

I have no idea what was said, but I agree wholeheartedly.

This is one very observant kid.



Found via boingboing.

Writin' Rations™

I'm finding it's a really good idea to keep a little bit of extra cooked pasta in the fridge for times when you want a nice dinner but don't feel like taking a lot of time. It's also good to keep some pesto around -- I made my own the other day when I did have some time, but stuff in a jar is not morally inferior. And the other day I got some mushrooms at the supermarket. And I had just a tiny bit of cream left over from something I made three days ago. Et voilà!

Restaurant-quality pasta and mushrooms in creamy pesto
(takes about 10 minutes all up)

• Put a tablespoon or so of olive oil in a saucepan and start it heating.


• Meanwhile, wipe and chop the mushrooms.


• When the oil is hot, chuck the mushrooms in and give them a good ol' cooking.


• When they're the way you like them (and I like them more cooked than less in this sort of dish), put enough cooked pasta in the pot.


• Add a generous amount of pesto, and about two tablespoons of cream per serving. Extravagant, I know, but you're writing. You're working hard.


• Heat it through. Put it in a bowl and, if you have any pine nuts (maybe they're left over from when you made the pesto), sprinkle them on top.

Quick! Simple! Can be way fancy (homemade pesto — hell, maybe even homemade pasta) or less so (storebought everything). The pesto makes it slightly not-so-cheap-per-serving, but it's still about one-quarter the price (or less) of the same thing in a restaurant. And that makes it taste even better.

Brilliant.

If I lived in Sydney or another largeish city, I'd definitely have to think about furthering this movment: Choose What You Read aims to (1) promote reading and (2) reduce the amount of hideous paper waste generated by the tons of free newspapers given out every day to commuters. "Read a book instead," cry the CWYR Librarians, and I can only concur. But they don't just say it: they make it happen. They give second-hand books away, with the only requirement being that the recipient returns it on one of the monthly CWYR days, or at one of the CWYR drop boxes.

Don't get me wrong: I've read my share of free papers during my years of commuting. But I eventually realized that the only ones I ever enjoyed were the Onion and Washington DC's City Paper. (The ones I've seen in Sydney have been absolutely execrable.) So except for the few days every two or three years I'm back in DC, I tend not to take them. Wouldn't it be great if lots of people read books instead?

Here is the CWYR Facebook page, which actually has more information on it than their web site. They're in London, so if you're there on the first Monday of the month, look them up! And here's the site for a similar initiative in Paris (site is in French).

An essential world-building resource

If you build worlds (as so many people do), you'll be very glad you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. I know it's been around for a decade or more, but that in no way diminishes its usefulness. It's one of those books that grabs hold of your brain and wrenches it a bit, and suddenly you look at processes, systems, interactions, consquences, history — humanity itself — differently. You understand better.

In case you are a stranger to this book, it sets out to explain why some cultures ended up with all the good stuff, and others ended up chronically impoverished. Diamond has an ulterior motive, about which he is quite blatant: he wants to destroy forever the idea that white people ended up with all the good stuff because non-white people were not "fit" to develop it or have it. He's a passionate anti-racist. Which I think is a good thing. But it's not why the book is so good for world-building. That's because it very specifically and in great (often, it must be said, repetitious) detail sets out the factors and processes that cause a culture to advance — or not. And you and I need to know this sort of thing if we're going to design cultures of our own, and if those cultures are going to come into conflict. Superficial, fatuous "you have and I want" conflicts are unsatisfying, particularly when we can do a little homework and produce something better, deeper, with more resonance and meaning.

And, of course, the best thing of all is that the publishers have left the serial comma in the title intact.

An Easter meditation

If you are interested in reading some very, very cool theology, check out my friend Max's Easter meditation. Warning: quite overtly and passionately Christian, so if that sort of thing gets up your nose, I'm sure Max would not mind in the slightest if you read it anyway and had your nose gotten up — sometimes disagreeing with something clears the head remarkably. (It's no good for anyone to only read things one agrees with.)

Don't you just love this sort of thing?

High-speed photography, with lots more on the site itself. (Picture is posted with the link to its source, as per Creative Commons License requirements as I understand them in this case, although I confess the whole Creative Commons thing makes my brain limp and panicky.)

Off to a Script Frenzy write-in

I've done two NaNos, and this is my second Script Frenzy. For the first time, I'm thinking I probably won't win this one. Too many other deadlines, too much else that I'm coping with. I'll give it my best shot, though — today is a Script Frenzy write-in, for example, and I'm hoping that I can surf on the energy of my friends to crank out a significant number of pages. I'm a little irritable about the thought of not winning, but things don't always go the way you planned them. To say the least.

In other news, my friend Rod alerted me to this vitriolic screed against the hoary and much-vaunted Elements of Style by Strunk and White (the original 1918 edition, by Strunk alone, is in the public domain). It's given some important basics to millions of people, and I've never had much of a problem with it. But one Dr. Geoffrey Pullum sure has! (I wonder if he knows there's actually been a musical adaptation.)

Vigil

Anything I might try
(out of panic or leaden, longtime horror)
would be worse than disastrous.
So I wait,
wanting something gloriously absurd to happen.
Now that would be a sign.

And you,
what do you wait for?
Have a seat, take a candle, warm up.
We have a long night ahead of us.

My work is never done.

Spotted at a roadworks site along the Pacific Highway:

DO NOT ENTER
AUTHORISED VEHICLES ACCEPTED

It's nice that they're so accepting....*

*If you don't quite see why this caused my Cranky Editor Factor to spike, leave a comment and I will be specific.

Oh, by the way....

The Aussiecon* blog is running a flash-fiction contest. I have a story in the running. Voting is open for a few more days. Each story is no longer than 500 words, and there are four finalists to read and vote for. Despite a strong temptation, I am not going to tell you which of the four stories is mine. Please go, read, vote. Here's the link: http://community.livejournal.com/australia2010/11298.html

*Aussiecon is the World Science Fiction Convention for 2010, and it's in Melbourne. Find out more here.

Writing about belief

While I am a Christian and a writer, I'm not what most people would consider a "Christian writer." The themes of faith and redemption in my work are not particularly overt or obtrusive, and they're not framed in specifically Christian terms. But they're there.

A lot of speculative-fiction writers incorporate the problem of faith into their work, precisely because it is a problem: it's a constant tension, even antagonism, between what is seen and unseen, what is agreed to or virulently denied, what you want and what you got. Those are human tensions, and they exist in pretty much everyone, regardless of the specifics of the beliefs. Inventing a new religion is one technique for looking at the ideas of faith and despair, the power of the individual and the power of the community, and — yes — the possibility of a transcendent, ineffable, even personal power in the universe. Very useful for the thoughtful writer.

Which is why I was interested to find this article on writing about religion. It advocates, above all, that such writing is not about the religion itself, it's about the people who believe it (or, sometimes violently, don't). The writer asserts:

"When writing about religion, it is not the suspension of disbelief we should strive for, but rather the elevation of empathy over agreement."

Writers of courage and compassion will rise above the need to make someone (or themselves) feel right or wrong. Instead, they will show their readers the amazing beauty and tragedy and hope that comes with belief. And that's just as true when writing about the bizarre toe-worshipping cult of Outer Greeble IV as it is when looking a little closer to home.

Libraries...bookstores....

Found on Angela Slatter's blog:

Cool bookstores

Cool libraries

I'm not sure how I feel about turning the sanctuary (i.e., where the altar used to be) of a disused Catholic church into a cafe area. Actually, I am sure how I feel about it. But aside from that, these are way cool. (I've been to one of the libraries and one of the bookstores. Not, alas, the one pictured here.)

(Some People Have) Too Much Time

Okay, so it's Hogwarts, right, but it's huge and made of MATCHSTICKS!

Can you even imagine having that much time????

Found indirectly via boingboing.