I woke up at noon with the baseline from Don't Fear the Reaper running through my head. It wasn't the first time I had woken up today but I hoped it would be the last. I tell you this only because I think when you have an opportunity to start a story that way, you should take it.
Unfortunately there's nowhere to go forward from there. I ate. In a little while I will have blogged. So let us go back in time.
I got some feedback on the current draft of Hengist and Undine, and it was not great. (Should I warn my beta readers that I will blog about their opinions? Should I refrain from doing so? Do they take it for granted?) By "not great" I specifically mean that the latest draft is, in some ways, inferior to its predecessor. So that is disappointing and, among other things, a lesson in why I shouldn't put off receiving feedback.
I was not in a great mood about that last night or this morning (after I woke up the first and second time) but there are pleasant complications. My beta reader (an artist in his own right, and further along his own path than I am) agreed with me that there is a certain relief in hearing a negative review that confirms your own instincts. And I had felt like something was missing from Hengist and Undine as I produced its last iteration. In a word, it might have been "exuberance." Based on what I heard it might also be called my "voice."
What do I make of that? For one thing it is a little confusing, at least, to hear that I write well, but not in my most conscientiously edited output. This blog, for example, was offered as a good example of my voice, while for my own part I have been perpetually worried that I do you, the reader, a disservice by writing these posts too quickly, by rambling, by not adding enough worthwhile thoughts or entertaining turns of phrase per post.
There's something frankly frightening in the thought that what I do best I do unconsciously, and that my conscious mind can kill it.
So that is confusing and frightening, but not new. It reminds me of my last few art courses in college, many (5) years ago. My professor was trying to get me to do... something. He wanted me to try a looser, more frenetic, rawer style, which was something I would attempt but as I tried to smooth out the errors I made in my initial marks my painting would get more controlled and, somehow, the end result would come out looking almost sloppy.
In my next course with that professor he stopped me one day early in a project and warned me not to make very many changes to the drawing I was working on. This, he told me, was what I had been trying to do with my unsuccessful painting the previous semester.
He was right, of course. My first strokes with chalk and charcoal had a character to them that would only get erased if I overlaid them with more considered marks. So it wasn't perfect but what I wanted was there, and it was as there as it was going to get.
I don't know exactly what the moral of this story is. But if the best qualities of my voice are something spontaneous then I need to find a way to harness that.
Finally, on this not, I am excited because I have a direction. For a long time I've known H&U needed work but not exactly what kind of work it needed. But if it's lost my voice, that's a problem I can attack. I can try--I don't know exactly how yet--to put my exuberance back in.
I woke up at noon today feeling a little manic. I wanted to write something. I have an dragon living in my novel--when next I pick up my writing sword I will have something to slay besides the manuscript. So while I would much rather have heard that my current draft was genius, and I should send it out today unchanged, in some ways the world is back the way it should be.
This post is getting a little long but there is more to say and this time I think I will say it.
My helpful beta reader asked incisively: "What do you love about fantasy? You need to answer this question." Apparently this was not evident in my novel and this cut me to the quick. Being drunk at the time I begged off answering right away. The answer was something I had lost. But now I can offer an answer, both what I love about fantasy and about my story in particular, and I hope that the answer will be a sort of North Star when I attack my novel again.
Here we go. I'm going to think as I write.
I prefer Fantasy to Reality as a source of raw material for fiction. When faced with an empty space, to fill it by invention is an act with intrinsic value. Imitation has its place, but perfect imitation is redundancy.
I love the romantic mode (by "romantic" I mean the mode of Thomas Mallory, not Danielle Steel) for the vividness it brings. When the constraints of everyday feasibility are broken, when the amp really does go up to 11, the colors are bolder, the stakes are clearer, the virtues are greater. Not that there is a lack of subtlety but the spectrum is wider. And if we are honest, there is more to real life than we can conceive. We are truer to it when we imagine without constraint than when we imitate what we can see of it.
I love the ability to distort, magnify, and recombine, to make the alien familiar and the familiar alien. I think fiction does us the service, if nothing else, of expanding our capacity to conceive, and as I said, the real world demands that expanded capacity of us.
As for the merit of making the familiar alien, I want to go back to visual art for an example. Most people have a very hard time drawing their own face. It is largely because we all have an idea in our head of what our face should look like, and that's what we try to draw. Even with a mirror right in front of us we ignore the evidence of our eyes in favor or our prejudices. It takes practice to see what you look at--to see things as if you had not seen them before, and didn't know what they "should" look like.
I like pseudohistorical settings because I like old ideas--not all of them, obviously. I miss mystery, and the sense that no one knows what exists far away. Even in the unexplored places, now, there's a pretty good sense of what kind of thing we can expect to find. I think our society may even overestimate the extent to which we've exhausted our mysteries. I would like to see more maps with "dragons?" scrawled in the middle of large empty spaces. Somewhere.
Not between here and the supermarket, of course, but at least in books.
As for my own story, I want to tell a story that does some of these things, first of all. But also, I want to tell a story where the epic scale exists in service of the human scale. Not the realistic human scale--I don't want to write The Great Gatsby--but I want to push heroic characters to heroic lengths. I want bolder virtues and bleaker evils, still essentially experienced by individual minds and souls.
I want to tell a story about people trying to do the right thing. I'd like even to create characters who are admirable. I want to tell a story about dealing with change and uncertainty, adulthood and the nature of integrity.
Is there more? I was tempted to getting into the virtues of particular plot points, and then coyly replacing them with "[spoiler redacted]" and maybe I will later, but right now I think I've spent long enough writing this thing. I've also got real writing to do, which I will discuss in the past tense when appropriate, in the near future.
On an unrelated note, I found out yesterday that girlfriends don't like stories that begin with "So I almost suffered a debilitating injury on Wednesday," even if they turn out to be slightly exaggerated. I'm still learning.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Dice as writing implements
The good news is that I'm writing other things, although some of them are technically games that I'm playing and not works of fiction. I wonder if there is any benefit to the writer in participating in this sort of thing, or if it takes up time that would otherwise be spent writing more seriously? I know that it's taking up time I could otherwise spend blogging.
Having suckered myself into getting involved in two games of online Diplomacy, I won't spend much time trying to justify it. But getting involved in a play-by-post Burning Wheel campaign actually raises the question of whether--or to what extent--my contribution to the game is practice in or a distraction from the writing craft. Most of the other players are of a literary persuasion, and I know two of them are spinning a different campaign off into a novel, so it's not necessarily a waste. And where Burning Wheel looks like it should shine is in creating characters with depth and wringing story out of them. I have to wonder.
A few years ago I DM'd a D&D campaign that was apparently well-liked by my players. I DM'd in college more or less continuously, but just found it harder and harder to create sessions. I wrapped up one long campaign to everyone's satisfaction, but everything since then has sort of sputtered and gone out.
To the extent that running a game is performance, I fear it. To the extent that it is writing, it is trying to write a story when you have no direct control over the main characters. (A million good GMs would tell me that I'm doing it wrong if that's how I'm looking at it, and they would probably be right.) And I think that the attentive GM will be the most aware, of anyone at the table, of everywhere the game drags or stalls, and every sword swing that stretches over 15 minutes because arewesurethisishowthatthingactuallyworksohshootIforgotaboutthis.
But for all that frustration it's worth mentioning that my most recent stalled D&D campaign has recently fermented into the concept of a novel. As I strip out the epic fantasy generica and trademarked materials something genuinely intriguing--to me anyway--is taking shape. Although I run into a new problem there, in that several of my characters were created by good friends of mine, who became invested in their avatars over the course of the game. In the vagaries of interpersonal emotional law it is hard to see how much right I have to take these characters and change them to suit my needs, as I do with my own. And can I play the capricious god with characters who wear my friends' faces? It was easy enough to do in the game, when the friends could fight back with dice and their own ideas, but is someone being denied a fair deal when I'm at both ends of the table?
Playing from the passenger seat has given me some perspective, not only on gaming as such but on writing. Getting to play characters instead of running things is a relatively new experience for me, then, and I often find myself preferring it. But I can see that I conceptualize characters differently than most of my friends, whether they're for games or stories.
When does a fictional character acquire a soul? By this I think I mean at what point does the character acquire an integrity that can be violated--when does changing the character become writing them wrong? I see my friends hit this point pretty early on, perhaps less than halfway through character creation in the case of an RPG. Whereas I come to a potential story wanting certain things to happen to certain sorts of people, and I pick and shape the characters to make that happen. I suppose when writing, a character is mutable until the final draft, but you only have one go at a game. That would perhaps argue for ensouling an RPG avatar relatively early, but I find that I don't know my character until I have a firm grasp of the world that they're inhabiting.
The World includes the Rules. Rules are worldview. The game developer codifies the answers to questions that we struggle with in real life: What defines a (human) being? What is important? What brings success, and what brings failure? In Dungeons and Dragons it pays to take risks, and be larger than life. In Call of Cthulhu it doesn't pay to get out of bed in the morning.
This is getting fairly long. I should save some thoughts for the future.
Having suckered myself into getting involved in two games of online Diplomacy, I won't spend much time trying to justify it. But getting involved in a play-by-post Burning Wheel campaign actually raises the question of whether--or to what extent--my contribution to the game is practice in or a distraction from the writing craft. Most of the other players are of a literary persuasion, and I know two of them are spinning a different campaign off into a novel, so it's not necessarily a waste. And where Burning Wheel looks like it should shine is in creating characters with depth and wringing story out of them. I have to wonder.
A few years ago I DM'd a D&D campaign that was apparently well-liked by my players. I DM'd in college more or less continuously, but just found it harder and harder to create sessions. I wrapped up one long campaign to everyone's satisfaction, but everything since then has sort of sputtered and gone out.
To the extent that running a game is performance, I fear it. To the extent that it is writing, it is trying to write a story when you have no direct control over the main characters. (A million good GMs would tell me that I'm doing it wrong if that's how I'm looking at it, and they would probably be right.) And I think that the attentive GM will be the most aware, of anyone at the table, of everywhere the game drags or stalls, and every sword swing that stretches over 15 minutes because arewesurethisishowthatthingactuallyworksohshootIforgotaboutthis.
But for all that frustration it's worth mentioning that my most recent stalled D&D campaign has recently fermented into the concept of a novel. As I strip out the epic fantasy generica and trademarked materials something genuinely intriguing--to me anyway--is taking shape. Although I run into a new problem there, in that several of my characters were created by good friends of mine, who became invested in their avatars over the course of the game. In the vagaries of interpersonal emotional law it is hard to see how much right I have to take these characters and change them to suit my needs, as I do with my own. And can I play the capricious god with characters who wear my friends' faces? It was easy enough to do in the game, when the friends could fight back with dice and their own ideas, but is someone being denied a fair deal when I'm at both ends of the table?
Playing from the passenger seat has given me some perspective, not only on gaming as such but on writing. Getting to play characters instead of running things is a relatively new experience for me, then, and I often find myself preferring it. But I can see that I conceptualize characters differently than most of my friends, whether they're for games or stories.
When does a fictional character acquire a soul? By this I think I mean at what point does the character acquire an integrity that can be violated--when does changing the character become writing them wrong? I see my friends hit this point pretty early on, perhaps less than halfway through character creation in the case of an RPG. Whereas I come to a potential story wanting certain things to happen to certain sorts of people, and I pick and shape the characters to make that happen. I suppose when writing, a character is mutable until the final draft, but you only have one go at a game. That would perhaps argue for ensouling an RPG avatar relatively early, but I find that I don't know my character until I have a firm grasp of the world that they're inhabiting.
The World includes the Rules. Rules are worldview. The game developer codifies the answers to questions that we struggle with in real life: What defines a (human) being? What is important? What brings success, and what brings failure? In Dungeons and Dragons it pays to take risks, and be larger than life. In Call of Cthulhu it doesn't pay to get out of bed in the morning.
This is getting fairly long. I should save some thoughts for the future.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Titles are not my friends
The detailed stats that Blogger gives about viewership are, perhaps not a double-edged sword, but possibly a triple- or quadruple-edged sword. The point is that one can easily cut oneself, in addition to other things. So it may be because I saw my readership drop off to almost nothing that I was not so quick about updating lately. But of course I have nobody else to blame--how much readership did I expect if I let my writership lapse?
I'm back from jujitsu (again) and sore. Lately I've been wishing I had more time--time to be tired and to go to work and to do things of consequence and of little consequence, and to write. It's a trap, I know, to imagine that I would write like a demon if only I had lots of free time. But sometimes I wish I could rearrange things, at least. When I'm at work I'm having ideas; when I get home my brain starts shutting down.
I want to talk at length about several books, but it's 11:00 already so I think I will talk about them briefly instead, and at length later.
First, I realized that I never wrote about Machine of Death after I finished it, two books ago now. I will call it the only fiction anthology which I have read in its entirety, without feeling like any story had wasted my time. Did some stories have less to say? Yes, but they said it that much faster. This is the first time I've been impressed with the sequence of stories in an anthology, too. There's an emotional arc, and an ebb and flow, which make the book a complete experience. I'm reminded of World War Z, another highly episodic look at a world gone mad. But MoD has the advantage of multiple authors; the variety of perspectives, voices, and tones is richer.
And now I find that a sequel is in the works. Part of me really wants to submit something--okay, all of me wants to submit something, but only part of me thinks I can do it. I need an idea, and I need nerve, and time, and I really need to not get distracted and finish Hengist and Undine.
Today I finished reading American Gods, and Neil Gaiman is still the cat's pajamas. That's a book that needs longer than I have tonight. I'm tempted to write an honest-to-goodness paper on it, which is another thing I shouldn't pretend I have time for. I want to talk about the book and Christianity, which is nominally absent but actually present everywhere in parallels and sharp contrasts (perpendiculars?).
Finally, today I started reading The Name of the Wind, which I mentioned in my last post has been presented to me as mandatory. Yet I'd been a little reluctant to start it. Part of this was hype aversion. Part of it was that what I had actually heard about it didn't sound so great--it sounded like an endless parade of Kvothe's superawesome awesome awesomeness. And I'm not very far in yet, but I'm beginning to understand. Everything may be true. But it is well-written, and that counts for a lot. It may count for everything.
With regard to the possible Mary-Sueism, I should remind myself that it's not wrong if it works.
I'm back from jujitsu (again) and sore. Lately I've been wishing I had more time--time to be tired and to go to work and to do things of consequence and of little consequence, and to write. It's a trap, I know, to imagine that I would write like a demon if only I had lots of free time. But sometimes I wish I could rearrange things, at least. When I'm at work I'm having ideas; when I get home my brain starts shutting down.
I want to talk at length about several books, but it's 11:00 already so I think I will talk about them briefly instead, and at length later.
First, I realized that I never wrote about Machine of Death after I finished it, two books ago now. I will call it the only fiction anthology which I have read in its entirety, without feeling like any story had wasted my time. Did some stories have less to say? Yes, but they said it that much faster. This is the first time I've been impressed with the sequence of stories in an anthology, too. There's an emotional arc, and an ebb and flow, which make the book a complete experience. I'm reminded of World War Z, another highly episodic look at a world gone mad. But MoD has the advantage of multiple authors; the variety of perspectives, voices, and tones is richer.
And now I find that a sequel is in the works. Part of me really wants to submit something--okay, all of me wants to submit something, but only part of me thinks I can do it. I need an idea, and I need nerve, and time, and I really need to not get distracted and finish Hengist and Undine.
Today I finished reading American Gods, and Neil Gaiman is still the cat's pajamas. That's a book that needs longer than I have tonight. I'm tempted to write an honest-to-goodness paper on it, which is another thing I shouldn't pretend I have time for. I want to talk about the book and Christianity, which is nominally absent but actually present everywhere in parallels and sharp contrasts (perpendiculars?).
Finally, today I started reading The Name of the Wind, which I mentioned in my last post has been presented to me as mandatory. Yet I'd been a little reluctant to start it. Part of this was hype aversion. Part of it was that what I had actually heard about it didn't sound so great--it sounded like an endless parade of Kvothe's superawesome awesome awesomeness. And I'm not very far in yet, but I'm beginning to understand. Everything may be true. But it is well-written, and that counts for a lot. It may count for everything.
With regard to the possible Mary-Sueism, I should remind myself that it's not wrong if it works.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
There are things that I should do
Feeling a bit down at the moment. Girlfriend is back east right now, for one thing, and while that's not the proximate cause, odds are good that if she were here I would be in a significantly better mood, perhaps even a good one.
I didn't come here to complain. There have been some logistical frustrations. I was feeling quite off my game at jujitsu practice tonight, for a number of reasons. The most interesting of those reasons, I think, goes back to the instructor mentioning a handful of times that a particular throw had killed people in living memory. That rattled me a bit, to be honest. I'm aware that jujitsu is a martial art, and so using it is definitionally an act of violence, but one aspect of it that has appealed to me is it's array of nonlethal techniques. Rightly or wrongly, I had filed its throws in that category, and I certainly have thrown a good number of people over my shoulder, and not given so much as a large bruise. So it's jarring, morbid, and ethically trenchant to be reminded of how differently things play out when the person being thrown doesn't know how to take the fall.
So the image of necks snapping put me off my game for the night. If anyone else there felt that they had abruptly been asked whether they were utilitarians or deontologists, or to make a call about the limits of the just use of force, they didn't show it.
Is prolonged exposure to pacifists turning me into one, or am I simply possessed of a healthy distaste for actual violence?
That wasn't actually what I came here to talk about. I guess another thing that made today suboptimal was that I did my taxes instead of writing--this post excepted. I am aware that this is the very, very last minute. I am aware.
So the real eponymous thing that I should do is, apparently, read The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. I have been advised in strong, almost coercive terms to do so. One trusted beta reader has implied that I could not honorably pursue fantasy writing without reading this book. Tycho Brahe has called me a villain--and he doesn't even know who I am. But the challenge has been issued, and it will be met. I just need to finish American Gods first. (Halfway through that, by the way, and liking it.)
To some degree a person could spend his entire life simply reading the books that he must needs read to understand--to sufficiently grok--his chosen genre. Very recently I got around to reading Ender's Game (short review: holy crap), which incidentally means that now I've read fiction by Orson Scott Card, and I'm not just acting on blind faith when I take his writing advice...
...I set this post aside and never finished it. I may have had more to say, but I don't remember offhand. I guess it can wait until the next post.
I didn't come here to complain. There have been some logistical frustrations. I was feeling quite off my game at jujitsu practice tonight, for a number of reasons. The most interesting of those reasons, I think, goes back to the instructor mentioning a handful of times that a particular throw had killed people in living memory. That rattled me a bit, to be honest. I'm aware that jujitsu is a martial art, and so using it is definitionally an act of violence, but one aspect of it that has appealed to me is it's array of nonlethal techniques. Rightly or wrongly, I had filed its throws in that category, and I certainly have thrown a good number of people over my shoulder, and not given so much as a large bruise. So it's jarring, morbid, and ethically trenchant to be reminded of how differently things play out when the person being thrown doesn't know how to take the fall.
So the image of necks snapping put me off my game for the night. If anyone else there felt that they had abruptly been asked whether they were utilitarians or deontologists, or to make a call about the limits of the just use of force, they didn't show it.
Is prolonged exposure to pacifists turning me into one, or am I simply possessed of a healthy distaste for actual violence?
That wasn't actually what I came here to talk about. I guess another thing that made today suboptimal was that I did my taxes instead of writing--this post excepted. I am aware that this is the very, very last minute. I am aware.
So the real eponymous thing that I should do is, apparently, read The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. I have been advised in strong, almost coercive terms to do so. One trusted beta reader has implied that I could not honorably pursue fantasy writing without reading this book. Tycho Brahe has called me a villain--and he doesn't even know who I am. But the challenge has been issued, and it will be met. I just need to finish American Gods first. (Halfway through that, by the way, and liking it.)
To some degree a person could spend his entire life simply reading the books that he must needs read to understand--to sufficiently grok--his chosen genre. Very recently I got around to reading Ender's Game (short review: holy crap), which incidentally means that now I've read fiction by Orson Scott Card, and I'm not just acting on blind faith when I take his writing advice...
...I set this post aside and never finished it. I may have had more to say, but I don't remember offhand. I guess it can wait until the next post.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
In which the blogger returns and makes excuses
Wow. If nothing else this past month may serve as a cautionary tale about letting yourself get out of habits. Not that I was cranking out posts like clockwork before, but it's very hard to start something like this up again when inertia has turned against you.
I could make my entire blog about the experience and pitfalls of procrastination. I'd have so much material.
But there are some reasons I got out of the habit in the first place. At least, there were some interruptions in my life which serve as excuses for breaking my pattern.
Maybe this all starts with the ER visit. Maybe not, though, because the ER visit really starts with the headache, and the accompanying numb feeling on the side of my face. I, who have a superpower when it comes to worrying about things, was plenty worried about that, as it came and went over the course of three days or so. The (presumably) unpowered nurse with whom I discussed these symptoms over the phone was also able to become very concerned. So it came to pass that I was advised to go to the ER.
And I did.
It's worth pointing out that when Girlfriend comes with me to the ER it is not a wholly unpleasant experience, as I learned through an OCD-related scare in 2009, just before we were dating. True, I would rather be at Oasis sipping bubble tea. (Oasis is the only place on the Ave to get bubble tea, by the way, if you can tell the difference.) But there is something wonderfully clarifying about realizing that in a bad situation, there's really only one person who you want to be with you, and hey she's right there.
Medical professionals looked at me, and they administered the various symmetrical aptitude tests they use to look for strokes several times. My blood pressure was high, but not abnormal for a neurotic trying to fight down the idea that he might be dying. Actually, consciously, I was pretty relaxed through the whole process. I knew better than my amygdala and wasn't afraid to tell it.
They did a CT scan of my head. When the pictures were developed (around 10pm that night, some six hours after I had come in) I was told my brain looked perfectly fine. Certainly no sign of a stroke or any other abnormality. The people with medical degrees stopped worrying about me. I got a piece of paper which containing the text, "Diagnosis: Headache." All was fine, except...
There was a dot. A brain dot. The doctor who ordered the CT scan told me he was fairly certain it was a dot and not a tumor, which was the other thing it might be. But you don't just let someone walk around with brain dot. So he told me to get an MRI because the cure for brain dot is to take more pictures with a device that is less likely to put dots on your brain.
So I got the MRI a week or so later. If I learned one thing, it's that MRI machines are loud. It's like dwarven smiths are beating the images of your brain into iron plates just behind you. Maybe that's what it was--they wouldn't let me move my head to look. Anything could have been happening back there. Maybe the magnetic resonance stuff is just to make everything sound scientific. Because how can you convince a patient that dwarven craft will get better results than irradiating your head? Irradiating your head just sounds like a good idea.
However it worked, it cured my brain dot. My brain has been shown to be dotless.
So that's where some of my time went. Another place my time has gone has been jujitsu.
I trained in jujitsu back in high school, and on-and-off through college, but fell out of it when I moved to Seattle. But I missed it. In fact I periodically had dreams about getting back to it. So it's really a bit silly that it took me this long to find a place and join up. But I did, finally, not without some urging from my doctor to do something with my body besides drape it on furniture, and use it to hold up my laptop.
So that's two nights a week gone. The sudden loss of that time creates the sensation of having no time at all, even if my other evenings are free. It takes some acclimatizing.
I am not proud to say that I have also been playing some Dwarf Fortress.
This week I have to file my taxes. I guess it's a good thing that there's nothing particularly interesting going on there.
Here's hoping for more regular updates now.
I could make my entire blog about the experience and pitfalls of procrastination. I'd have so much material.
But there are some reasons I got out of the habit in the first place. At least, there were some interruptions in my life which serve as excuses for breaking my pattern.
Maybe this all starts with the ER visit. Maybe not, though, because the ER visit really starts with the headache, and the accompanying numb feeling on the side of my face. I, who have a superpower when it comes to worrying about things, was plenty worried about that, as it came and went over the course of three days or so. The (presumably) unpowered nurse with whom I discussed these symptoms over the phone was also able to become very concerned. So it came to pass that I was advised to go to the ER.
And I did.
It's worth pointing out that when Girlfriend comes with me to the ER it is not a wholly unpleasant experience, as I learned through an OCD-related scare in 2009, just before we were dating. True, I would rather be at Oasis sipping bubble tea. (Oasis is the only place on the Ave to get bubble tea, by the way, if you can tell the difference.) But there is something wonderfully clarifying about realizing that in a bad situation, there's really only one person who you want to be with you, and hey she's right there.
Medical professionals looked at me, and they administered the various symmetrical aptitude tests they use to look for strokes several times. My blood pressure was high, but not abnormal for a neurotic trying to fight down the idea that he might be dying. Actually, consciously, I was pretty relaxed through the whole process. I knew better than my amygdala and wasn't afraid to tell it.
They did a CT scan of my head. When the pictures were developed (around 10pm that night, some six hours after I had come in) I was told my brain looked perfectly fine. Certainly no sign of a stroke or any other abnormality. The people with medical degrees stopped worrying about me. I got a piece of paper which containing the text, "Diagnosis: Headache." All was fine, except...
There was a dot. A brain dot. The doctor who ordered the CT scan told me he was fairly certain it was a dot and not a tumor, which was the other thing it might be. But you don't just let someone walk around with brain dot. So he told me to get an MRI because the cure for brain dot is to take more pictures with a device that is less likely to put dots on your brain.
So I got the MRI a week or so later. If I learned one thing, it's that MRI machines are loud. It's like dwarven smiths are beating the images of your brain into iron plates just behind you. Maybe that's what it was--they wouldn't let me move my head to look. Anything could have been happening back there. Maybe the magnetic resonance stuff is just to make everything sound scientific. Because how can you convince a patient that dwarven craft will get better results than irradiating your head? Irradiating your head just sounds like a good idea.
However it worked, it cured my brain dot. My brain has been shown to be dotless.
So that's where some of my time went. Another place my time has gone has been jujitsu.
I trained in jujitsu back in high school, and on-and-off through college, but fell out of it when I moved to Seattle. But I missed it. In fact I periodically had dreams about getting back to it. So it's really a bit silly that it took me this long to find a place and join up. But I did, finally, not without some urging from my doctor to do something with my body besides drape it on furniture, and use it to hold up my laptop.
So that's two nights a week gone. The sudden loss of that time creates the sensation of having no time at all, even if my other evenings are free. It takes some acclimatizing.
I am not proud to say that I have also been playing some Dwarf Fortress.
This week I have to file my taxes. I guess it's a good thing that there's nothing particularly interesting going on there.
Here's hoping for more regular updates now.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
A bit late for an opinion on the Oscars...
But that's what I've got, and that's what you're getting in the next paragraph or so.
I guess the closest thing to a surprise at the Oscars this year was Melissa Leo (who the folks at The World Wasn't Meant called "Hollywood's Dick Nixon") taking Best Supporting Actress. But I hardly had an opinion of that at the time.
I was pleased with the breakdown of awards between The King's Speech, Inception, and The Social Network. I can't say anything one way or another about True Grit.
What I really came here to talk about was this: The Weinstein Company's decision to re-edit The King's Speech to a PG-13 rating. If you've seen the movie, you know what scene they censored. If you haven't seen it, it's the one where Colin Firth drops fourteen f-bombs.
The advantages of a more accessible rating for the movie, in light of its new publicity, are obvious. What strikes me as ironic is that if the Weinstein Company had thought anyone was going to see a movie "about a man who--against all odds--talks for three minutes" (as my friend Bryan put it), they would have aimed for the lower rating first and I wouldn't be talking about this. The King's Speech, fourteen frictive fulminations lighter, would still have won Best Original Screenplay, and all the rest.
But context is all-important. Now the version of the film in theaters will not be the version that won scads of awards, even if it would have. If I went to see it again, I would not see the same movie I saw over Christmas. And I'm most concerned with the question of the DVD release. NATO president John Fithian (not that NATO, the National Association of Theater Owners) described "The Weinstein Company's commitment to ... to remove all prints of the earlier version." I've looked at a number of articles without being able to get a clearer picture of the company's intent. Will they simply remove the old reels from theaters, or are they going to bury the old version like Disney did Song of the South? I don't think I'm the only person who feels a visceral disapproval of that sort of suppression of a piece of art.
It's worth pointing out that,in spite of because of the scene in question, The King's Speech is about the only movie I can think of that depicts cursing as something classy people don't do. I would say anyone old enough to sit through the movie is old enough to watch it without harm to their moral person. The Boston Globe aptly points out, "It's hard to understand any criteria that yield the same rating for The King's Speech as for No Country for Old Men." And if Kate Winslet's breasts are innocuous enough for thirteen-year-olds, I think there's a good case to be made for the Duke of York's therapeutic tirade. I can tell you which of those would have had the more corruptive effect on thirteen-year-old me.
I do hope I will be able to buy the version of the movie that I saw in the first place on DVD. If the censored version is the only one that gets released, I think I'll pass.
P.S. Hyperlinking is one of the peculiar joys of web publishing.
I guess the closest thing to a surprise at the Oscars this year was Melissa Leo (who the folks at The World Wasn't Meant called "Hollywood's Dick Nixon") taking Best Supporting Actress. But I hardly had an opinion of that at the time.
I was pleased with the breakdown of awards between The King's Speech, Inception, and The Social Network. I can't say anything one way or another about True Grit.
What I really came here to talk about was this: The Weinstein Company's decision to re-edit The King's Speech to a PG-13 rating. If you've seen the movie, you know what scene they censored. If you haven't seen it, it's the one where Colin Firth drops fourteen f-bombs.
The advantages of a more accessible rating for the movie, in light of its new publicity, are obvious. What strikes me as ironic is that if the Weinstein Company had thought anyone was going to see a movie "about a man who--against all odds--talks for three minutes" (as my friend Bryan put it), they would have aimed for the lower rating first and I wouldn't be talking about this. The King's Speech, fourteen frictive fulminations lighter, would still have won Best Original Screenplay, and all the rest.
But context is all-important. Now the version of the film in theaters will not be the version that won scads of awards, even if it would have. If I went to see it again, I would not see the same movie I saw over Christmas. And I'm most concerned with the question of the DVD release. NATO president John Fithian (not that NATO, the National Association of Theater Owners) described "The Weinstein Company's commitment to ... to remove all prints of the earlier version." I've looked at a number of articles without being able to get a clearer picture of the company's intent. Will they simply remove the old reels from theaters, or are they going to bury the old version like Disney did Song of the South? I don't think I'm the only person who feels a visceral disapproval of that sort of suppression of a piece of art.
It's worth pointing out that,
I do hope I will be able to buy the version of the movie that I saw in the first place on DVD. If the censored version is the only one that gets released, I think I'll pass.
P.S. Hyperlinking is one of the peculiar joys of web publishing.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Hardly a post at all
I don't want it to get to be two weeks since my last post, but there has been a lot to preoccupy me lately, not least the process of trading two well-liked roommates for one untested one. I wish the process worked in reverse more often.
I'm most of the way through Blackout/All Clear. It's not as good as Doomsday Book or To Say Nothing of the Dog, but I could aspire to match Connie Willis on a bad day.
I am working on a short story. I hope to complete a draft and then tighten the screws on the Hengist manuscript, per the input from beta readers that I have been holding in abeyance. The story indulges my fascination with the stone age--something which probably merits a post in its own right.
But now it is time for bed.
I'm most of the way through Blackout/All Clear. It's not as good as Doomsday Book or To Say Nothing of the Dog, but I could aspire to match Connie Willis on a bad day.
I am working on a short story. I hope to complete a draft and then tighten the screws on the Hengist manuscript, per the input from beta readers that I have been holding in abeyance. The story indulges my fascination with the stone age--something which probably merits a post in its own right.
But now it is time for bed.
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