Things I Know I Know

Yes, I have now become so incredibly boring I can think of nothing else to post all day long except today's writing quote (become some of you are saying...man, you were always boring). And, in fact, I am apparently reduced to holding imaginary conversations with myself.

All that notwithstanding, here's today's writing quote...

You arrive at your office an hour later than you'd planned to find that the door knob has fallen off your door again.

And in case no one has noticed, I am now writing my second story with a second person POV. Once upon a time I swore I would never write any.

Posted by debco at 11:24 PM | Permalink

Jenny Jenkman could climb mountains like nobody’s business.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's kind of short. I've been meeting my writing goal every day (yay me!) but my writing goals are pretty modest so if I'm not careful my quotes may outrun my writing.

Posted by debco at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am currently reading some or all of the following more or less at the same time:

Deception on His Mind by Elizabeth George
Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku
Slack by Tom DeMarco
The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph M. Marshall III
French Women Don't Get Fat by Mirelle Guiliano

Posted by debco at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I need to start putting up shorter quotes or write faster....

You wake up to the pathetic bleating of your dying alarm clock. Bre-e-whine... Bre-e-whine... Eventually it trails off in disgust as if it, too, has already tired of the day. For a long minute, you lie on your back and look at the ceiling. There's a water stain from last September's all day downpour; the day the roofer was supposed to come but didn't. He showed up three days late with no explanation and no apology and when you tried to tell him about the water stain, the stain you wouldn't have if he'd showed up on time he just shrugged and set his ladder on your foot.

Posted by debco at 10:28 PM | Permalink

There was a meme floating around a while back on Ten Things I've Done that Maybe You Haven't. At the time I thought--yeah, my life has been so boring that there's nothing that I've done that everyone and their brother hasn't also done.

But then today it occured to me in passing that I've never lived in suburbia, which, while not a thing I've done led me to think about what I have done that maybe not everyone has. Here are a few I can think of:

• Milked cows by hand
• Showed hogs at county fair
• Saw Niagara Falls with the water turned off
• Judged dairy cattle
• Lived in the Ten Commandmants
• Built a twelve-foot dog walk in one day
• Lived in a house with a crank telephone

And possibly more but, damn, aren't these exciting enough?

Posted by debco at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I had to go back a bit for this one, though I did get today's writing done too.

Everyone wants Superman.

Not to be Superman--at least they might, but that's not what I mean. They want to be rescued by Superman. Being rescued by Superman puts you on the front page of the paper. People walk up to you--'Rescued by Superman! Hey! All right! Dude, you are so lucky.'

Posted by debco at 08:21 PM | Permalink

John Henry had his second round of chemo today. So far he's doing great. I'm crossing my fingers that he doesn't have any greater reaction to this round than the last one.

He's on a rotating schedule of two different chemicals and, boy howdy, was today's expensive. I don't think anyone actually mentioned that before. Not that it would have made a difference, but it's nice to be prepared. They know me at the front desk now and ask about whichever dog I don't have with me. Imagine a world where you only have to visit the vet school, like, once or maybe twice. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're, like five minutes from my house. But I wish I didn't visit them so often.

Posted by debco at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I did, just barely, manage to get my writing in today. So now, here's today's quote (I know you've all been waiting):

"Remind me what we're doing here," Tic said to Jack for what must have been the seventeenth time. She ducked under low pipes, her nose wrinkling unconsciously from the intertwining smells of old rocket fuel and dry rot and human sweat.

"Yeah, that's helpful.

Posted by debco at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got the page proofs for 46 Directions, None of them North which will be in Asimov's some time soon.

I'm guessing this is one of the few times in my writing career where I get to write story that manages to contain a sentence with seven exclamation points at the end of it (there's a sentence with five exclamation points at the end of it too. It's an exciting story.)

Posted by debco at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The flying monkey story has no good quotes yet so instead you get talking John Henry:

"I am in favor of hiding," Jent says. It�s what he says every single time we sit down to discuss this. "There are very few of us and Posteria�s a big country. It might work."

"Bury the rodent," John Henry says happily from the back of the room. He rarely speaks up at these meetings so everyone turns and looks at him. He is sitting straight with his chest out, looking at the assembled company. "Bury the rodent," he says, then he pounces on a flickering ray of light and chases light and shadow across the room.

Posted by debco at 08:54 PM | Permalink

I have decided that this is part of the flying monkey story that doesn't have any flying monkeys in it. I've further decided that the flying monkey sans monkey story is about creeping credentialism, Edgar Allan Poe (okay, only peripherally), cosmology, and magic.

It may also incorporate a story that I started a good number of years ago and never got anywhere with called, "Telekinesis is Not Scientific." On the other hand, it might not.

Posted by debco at 08:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a show on HGTV called, 'What You Get for The Money," which ought to just be called, "We Have Way More Money Than You." I only see it in passing or in the commercials, but they're always looking at what you get for 1.2 million in Miami or what you get for 800,000 in New York City or even Kansas City.

Here's something I've more or less accepted about myself--I will never have 1.2 million dollars to spend on a house. And, despite the insane housing market in Callifornia, neither will most people (because a) most people don't live in California and b) they just don't).

It's like the entire travel channel where most of the shows are about people with more money than you or I (or you and I combined) will ever have doing things we will never do. Why would I ever care that some guy who lives for six months of the year in Colorado and six months of the year in New York has a fabulous vacation home? He's never inviting me there. If I ended up there by mistake he'd probably call the sheriff and ask them to quietly get me the hell out of there. But he still wants me to know he's just a regular guy living in his soaring stone and steel cabin in the woods.

I swear some days I think people with money don't just want to have it all, they want the rest of us to love them for it.

Posted by debco at 03:52 PM | Permalink

Apparently it's Quote Day at I Know I Know. From Michio Kaku's new book Parallel Worlds:

Vera Rubin was ignored, in part because she was a woman. With a certain amount of pain, she recalls that, when she applied to Swarthmore College as a science major and casually told the admissions officer that she liked to paint, the interviewer said, "Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?" She recalled, "That became a tag line in my family: for many years, whenever anything went wrong for anyone, we said, 'Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?'" When she told her high school physics teacher that she got accepted to Vassar, he replied, "You should do okay as long as you stay away from science." She would later recall, "It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished."

Posted by debco at 07:35 PM | Permalink

From McSweeney's Internet Tendency:

With a broad smile emerging from his salt-and-pepper beard, gas-station attendant Earl Talbot hailed the little man in the shiny red Porsche that had pulled up to pump No. 3 and demanded, "Fill 'er up!"

Without skipping a beat, Talbot unveiled the sawed-off shotgun he kept behind his back and blasted four bullets into the unidentified driver's skull. Then, with a tortured howl directed at the sky, Talbot placed the muzzle of the gun in his wide mouth and pulled the trigger.

For the Exit 41 Kwik Fill, the final exit had come.

Posted by debco at 07:15 PM | Permalink

Sarah leaned forward, her elbows on the table. "Look, was he shot or what? I mean, there was a lot of blood. It wasn't just a heart attack or something simple." In the other corner of the small break room, Phyllis Cole, Tom Pollard's secretary sat with a woman who Sarah assumed was another police detective. Phyllis wasn’t crying--or even talking as far as Sarah could tell--she was just looking at the table and shredding a tissue in her tightly clenched hands.

"Life must be a constant series of disappointments to you."

In the interests of full disclosure, I have not necessarily written the quote I put up on the day I put it up. But I have written today. No writing, no quote.

Posted by debco at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just started reading a collection of Alastair Cooke's Letter(s) from America and the very first essay in the book, produced in 1946 says:

If you feel baffled and alarmed at the prospect of differentiating one American type from another, you can take heart. You have more hope of success than Americans, who shuffle through every stereotype of every foreign culture as confidently as they handle the family's pack of cards. Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their heart of hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.

Posted by debco at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And today's quote is:

Chet says that it is no longer mandatory to stop at stop signs.

"I'm just saying," he tells her.

Posted by debco at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I gave my talk at work about ten things I've learned from training dogs someone said, you should have brought your dog (which I should have because it would have been fun--even though my boss thinks Billie hates him--but I couldn't really think of a reason that bringing her would be necessary). And, he added, then we could see what a perfect dog looks like.

But, and this should surprise no one, I don't have perfect dogs. There was probably a time when I wanted a perfect dog, probably when I first started training when I thought all well-trained dogs met some ideal perfect image. My first Rottweiler shattered that illusion.

My personal philosophy for working dogs (and I don't advocate this necessarily for all breeds or all dog owners) is chaos in a box. Certain things are absolute--they must come when called, they must not bite people, they must not destroy the house--those things are the box. But inside the box there are decisions they get to make themselves--jumping over the sofa, telling the other dogs off, telling me off (as long as they are also doing what I asked them to), doing two agility runs and no more, not meeting people, or not meeting dogs (btw, I find it vastly amusing when people say, 'can our dogs meet,' and then don't bother to listen to the answer.)

They have to make some decisions themselves because no dog with big teeth should ever be lacking in confidence. And they have to live in the box because no dog with big teeth should ever be asked to decide the rules for engagement. Chaos in a box can produce obedience champions and really great agility dogs and tracking titled dogs--in fact it's more apt to than not. It can also produce dogs that aren't the easiest to live with. These are the dogs (not mine, by the way, 'cuz I'm not training at this level at the moment) that are precision itself in the ring and then drag their owners out of the building afterward.

Posted by debco at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't mentioned this before, so now I am. A little over a month ago, Billie had a seizure while she was sleeping in her crate. It was a significant seizure (and devastating to me since I already have one dog with issues and my dogs are my family) but not a major one. Dogs have seizures. Some dogs have one seizure in their lifetime and never have another. Then, a week later, she had another one. My vet advised putting her on medication, not bad advice but I had a couple of objections, the most significant one being--what if they're not idiopathic, but there is, in fact, a reason that we ought to be dealing with Right Away? So, this week, Billie got to go to the vet school for a neurological workup.

So far, they have found nothing out of the ordinary. Next step if for me to decide: medication or CT scan. Apparently my generally preferred action--ignore it and hope it goes away--isn't going to work out for me. Come to think of it, it almost never does.

Coming up, I will be figuring out my questions and, depending on the answers, decide on my next course of action. Meanwhile, of course, she is acting good and fine and swell.

John Henry has his next round of chemo on Thursday.

Posted by debco at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's today's quote:

With a wave of her hand, she removes the wall of her apartment. It's a structural wall and the floor above starts to collapse down onto them until Pammy makes another gesture, half-panicked though she tries to disguise it from her mother, and puts the wall back as if it's never been gone.

"No," Pammy says, annoyed. "The stairs are a statement. Plus, I can fly. What do I need stairs for?" Her mother gives her that flat, even stare that means she has something to say, but she isn't going to say it. "You don't know anything about glitter," Pammy finally says when the silence has stretched into what seems to her like endlessness.

I should add that I've met my writing goal two days in a row now. For me that's, like, a habit.

Posted by debco at 05:27 PM | Permalink

Browsing Clarion blogs, I came across this:

Leslie pointed out that I often have these big, deep subjects, but sort of pussyfoot around them or draw away.

I have always referred to this as being willing to take my characters up to the edge of a cliff, but being unwilling to push them off. For years, it was one of my biggest problems, I think, in making the leap from almost published to published (well, that and not finishing stuff). This particular weakness has resulted in lots of stories that I've either never finished or that had endings that left readers feeling flat and probably sort of cheated.

The solution, for me, has been to love my characters less. And to love the story more. If it's all about the story and less about the characters--on the writing side, not necessarily in how the reader sees it--then I am suddenly much more willing to try stuff on my characters to see if it flies:

What if I take their family away from them?
What if I kill their dog?
What if he really doesn't love her?
What if it does kill half the human race?

They have to be interesting, my characters, but I can't love them. Because sooner or later they're going to have to go over the cliff.

Posted by debco at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I gave a talk this week at work called '10 Things About Leadership I Learned from Training Dogs.' The 10 things are:

1. Everyone is different. Different is not wrong


2. Motivation is not the same for everyone


3. Unrewarded behavior fades


4. Make sure they understand. Then repeat the instructions


5. Confidence is more important than you think


6. If you don't know what they're doing, stop telling them they're doing it wrong


7. You don't have to be mean to be the boss


8. Leadership isn't always from the front


9. Never get in a fight with a Rottweiler


10. Don't forget the party

Posted by debco at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have not been writing much lately, which you may say is perfectly understandable, but is a lot the reason I have no actual writing career to speak of (also because I write things like '...is a lot the reason...') I'm currently trying to get my writing back up to speed and am working on six short stories and a mystery novel (yeah, I know, it's embarrassing, and I wonder why I'm so much better at beginnings than endings).

I'm looking for ways to mark my progress and I'd also like to start posting here every day, so I'm going to experiment with posting a short bit of writing from something I'm working on every day. Today's bit:

The detective grinned at her, a sharp white smile that seemed to lighten his eyes and Sarah almost found herself smiling back at him. Then she remembered where she was and what this was and she scowled at him instead.

"You’re doing it very well."

Posted by debco at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've started a new story. If I can pull it off, which I'm not entirely certain of yet, it should be a lot of fun. Current title: 'Another Story About A Whiny, White, Middle-Aged Professor'

I've also sort of started two other stories (have I mentioned that I'm much better at beginning than finishing). One's called 'The Whale's Lover' and the other is called 'All the Rage this Year' which starts thusly:

"Glitter is key," Pammy tells her mother just before she ascends to the Moon. "You can�t be taken seriously without glitter."

"I've been full of glitter my whole life," Pammy's mother tells her, as she climbs through Pammy's second floor apartment window, Pammy having removed the stairs in a fit of pique three days earlier. "You're just not looking."

Posted by debco at 10:49 PM | Permalink

More specifically, what's the deal with hating the people who like Harry Potter? If you read any of these rants (and I don't feel like linking to them--they're easy enough to find), you'll usually find that the ranter hasn't read Harry Potter. But it's children's literature, they say. And adults are reading it. And enjoying it! That can't be right. The rant usually ends with--why can't they read stuff I like (or at least stuff I say I like).

First of all, if you're going to whine about it, read it.

Second, here are the two things I like about Harry Potter (and I've read them :-). So far, Harry Potter books have at least been among the very few books that I know when I buy them I'm going to be able to relax and honestly enjoy. I won't hate the characters, I won't fall asleep waiting for something to happen, I won't end up cross-eyed with boredom from pages and pages of too many words that don't do anything, and it won't be a story that ends up illustrating the uselessness of modern living and the despair of the comfortably well-off. I could tell you about all the big books with big words that I've read, but, you know, assume instead that I have a tiny brain because I like different things in my books than you do. Jeez!

The second thing I like about the Harry Potter books is that, taking the series as a whole (through book 5, since I haven't read book 6 and won't for awhile), I would describe them as subversive literature masquerading as phatic discourse, which I think is cool.

So, read Harry Potter books or don't read them. But if you don't read them, don't rant about how you know that they're ruining civilization and turning adults into extended adolescents who have no responsibility for anything and don't know the world is, like, all complex and stuff.

Hey, guess what, I watch cartoons, too.

Posted by debco at 08:02 AM | Permalink

From Talking Points Memo:

No presidential advisor should ever disclose the identity of a covert agent at the CIA. That doesn't require elaboration.

If it's done knowingly, it's a felony. Joe Wilson could be the biggest hack in the world. Plame could have cooked the whole trip idea up to damage the president -- as some GOP loopsters are now claiming -- and it wouldn't matter.

Rove (and, though we're not supposed to say it yet, several of his colleagues) did something obviously wrong and reckless. And they probably broke several laws by the time it was all done.

Everything else is noise.

Posted by debco at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is just silly:

According to an article in The Observer, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) in Belfast have been told to avoid using the word 'brainstorming' as it may be offensive to people with epilepsy. Instead they've been asked to use the term 'thought-showers'.

Posted by debco at 04:06 PM | Permalink

I get story ideas and write them down and I believe at the time that I'm being really, really careful and writing down enough of the idea so that I'll remember exactly what I meant to do with it. But when I come back to it later, it always looks something like this:

You can't see Saturn with the naked eye.

Then why did you say--

I'm sure I will use this sometime, but it can't really be said that it's a story idea....

Posted by debco at 04:15 PM | Permalink

John Henry had his first round of chemo on Thursday. He's doing great. Details follow for anyone who's interested.

It all went very well. They did blood work and checked out his heart before doing chemo to make sure everything is as it should be so he went in at 8 and I picked him up shortly after 4. The chemo (doxorubicin, this time) is delivered via IV and they sedated him for it because they have to be still the whole time and he's a big dog and it's sort of hard to explain it to him in advance. So, he was kind of loopy when I picked him up and slept pretty much the rest of Thursday.

He was a bit lethargic on Friday which worried me a little but I think it was still after effects (for him) of the sedation and of having a busy day on Thursday. Other than that, his appetite is good, he doesn't show any other adverse signs, and he seems basically pretty happy.

There are some things to watch for--like infection in the week following when his white blood cell count may be low. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed on all that. He has his next appointment in three weeks.

Posted by debco at 04:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finished this book a while ago, but as you can tell from the fact that I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks, I've got some catching up to do.

The Prodigal Troll is the story of a boy raised by trolls and his return to the human world. It's a world not our own and not a stereotypical fantasy world either though it uses many (most?) of the tropes of stereotypical fantasy and turns them slightly, playing with gender roles and culture and laws. It's a destiny story that takes nothing for granted, including that Destiny Boy will actually want the destiny that awaits him.

Several years ago I was in a bookstore and overheard an older man with an Irish accent talking to a store clerk about the fact that very very few science fiction novels deal with democracies. The Prodigal Troll does, though. The trolls are all about the voting:

"We took a vote and voted you should put the baby down."

Windy raised hers. "It's a tie. So I can do what I want."

The main flaw in the story, for me, is that some of the characters and their motivations are not at all clear to me and we end up being told (and somewhat late in the game) what these characters are like and what their motivations might be rather than seeing them act. But I think this feeling--that I don't always know who these characters are--is a limitation of the primary POV character. Maggot, coming as he does from the land of Troll, doesn't always understand what's going on and doesn't see some of these characters in circumstances where we, if not he, might get a better understanding of their motives and of who they are.

It's not a fatal flaw, though. The story is compelling. The prose is readable. And it's an interesting book which offers some new takes on old tropes while remaining accessible and readable. Plus, the trolls are cool.

Posted by debco at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his book, Secrets, Daniel Ellsberg talks about the seduction of top secret clearance. I can't quote him directly because I don't have the book, but basically he says that once you get top secret clearance you start to think that all the people who don't have top secret clearance can't possibly know as much as you do even though they're, maybe, experts in their field or smarter than you. So you begin to rely only on yourself and other people with top secret clearance which means that your decision making becomes badly limited and you make worse decisions than you would otherwise.

Michael Isikoff writes about Cooper's source for outing Valerie Plame:

It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.

The press whines about how no one understands that they've got, like, journalistic ethics and standards and, like, really important big hard, like, stuff to deal with and no one can know how difficult it is to go on television talking head shows and spout off about stuff they don't know anything about. But what they act like is a bunch of kids with decoder rings, just havin' fun with their super sekrit friends.

If it turns out that what they knew and kept secret decided an election, my disgust for them will know no earthly bounds.

Posted by debco at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)