Updates

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

April 7, 2012 -- 7:56 p.m.

The good news is that I found out what was making me sick. The bad news is that I didn't figure it out soon enough. I got so far behind on homework, I felt like I couldn't make it up and decided that I wasn't happy anyway so I dropped out of my program. I'm too emotionally stressed right now to deal with school.

So what was making me throw up and giving me horrible rashes? It turns out that the oil cap on my engine had come off and soaked everything in oil. Those fumes have been burning intto my car vents and my sinuses every semester. So every time I drove anywhere: to school, to the doctor's, to anywhere, I was making myself sicker without realizing it. It wasn't until I went from fine to throwing up after five minutes on the road that I put two and two together and realized I was only getting sick in my car.

So why didn't I smell the burning fumes? F*** if I know.

It took me longer than it should have to figure it out because I had the flu beforehand, and I managed to skip a period and so when the next one hit, I was swept away in a monthlong tidal wave of blood, stomach cramps, and bits of chunky flesh being puked out of my sensitive areas. So it's not as if I was particularly healthy even outside of the car.

At any rate, I seem to be fine now, and without school, I now have more time to devote on my writing. Which I've naturally frittered away on playing computer games, reading tons of books, and catching up on my podcasts. I saw Hunger Games and thought it was very well done, although they screwed up the bittersweetness of the ending. Woody Harrelson made an excellent Haymitch, and Jennifer Lawrence did with her face what it took Suzanne Collins pages of words to do. Hunger Games is going through the traditional internet joy curve where a bunch of people talk about how awesome it is and then wave two of critics say, "nah, it's not that awesome." But I think it was just about as good as can be expected of any translation from book to screen. And for the people complaining it's not violent enough, I wonder: what movie did you see? Blood spurting everywhere a la HBO's Game of Thrones is much less disturbing than the suggestiveness of the camerawork, which leaves the grisly details up to your imagination.

I would feel better at condemning the idiots who were annoyed at Rue's race if I didn't recognize my own weakness in that area. I didn't catch that Rue was black until the second read through. I'm not sure how much of that can be attributed to 1) the book's tendency to rip you through at thriller speed and not linger on any detail for very long, 2) My own internal tendency to think of every fictional character is like me (white and blonde) unless otherwise noted, 3) Collins' repeated mentions that Rue = Prim, and since Prim = blonde/white, Rue = blonde/white. But I thought the actress playing her was freaking adorable. I wanted to pull her out of the screen and play with her hair. (In a sisterly way! Not in the weird I-wanna-touch-black-people-without-permission way that NK Jeminisin reports some people seem to do at sci-fi conventions)

The other Hunger Games-related kerfuffle is the documentary "Bully" R-rating compared to Hunger Game's PG-13 (how they will be able to keep that rating for books two and three, I don't know). Apparently killing kids is okay, but swearing means "mature only."

Granted, movie ratings have always been on the arbitrary side, but you got to admire Bully's marketers. If they'd bleeped a couple of words and released the movie as it was, it probably would have gone the same way as most documentaries--largely unwatched. But by generating a controversy, they get articles on it everywhere, politicians speak up about it, and it probably ends up with an enlarged audience share. Free publicity is always good.

Am I cynical? Yes. Am I right? Probably.

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Hugo Nominees

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 11, 2012 -- 7:33 p.m.
I'm still feeling sick. But my scab thingy is gone, at least.

As a member of last year's worldcon, I got to nominate for this year's Hugos. I'm not going to go into all the entries, but if you're looking for a good set of stories to read, here are links to ones I nominated.

The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu. A short story about a Chinese mother and her Americanized son's relationship, illustrated with the help of magic origami. Made me bawl like a baby.

Younger Women, by Karen Joy Fowler. A short story that hilariously asks, "Why would a vampire fall for a teenage girl, anyway?" This one is really short so GO. READ. NOW.

The Man Who Ended History, by Ken Liu. Again. The man's a writing machine. He's already got a double-Nebula nomination in two categories, and I can't see how he doesn't get at least two nominations for the Hugo as well. How often does that happen? This novella is another WWII time-travel-ish story (there's that time-sucking nexus again...) but instead of visiting Hitler, this story is about Japanese atrocities, such as the "Asian Auschwitz". It's written in the style of a movie script, which I think is awesome.

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Blah.

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 2, 2012 -- 11:23 p.m.

I'm having a bad day. I failed a midterm. Not surprising really, since the computer deleted five hours of my work and I didn't find out it'd gone missing until a half-hour before the test was due. But still, so frustrating. You can spend thirty hours on a project and still fail...

I had three midterms in the past week and a half. My body is breaking down. My stomach is cramping all the time, and a mysterious, six-inch long scab developed on the underside of my arm. (See the lovely image to the left) Isn't it ucky? It hurts to move my arm. Hurts to type. Ironic, that if I quit school, I lose my medical insurance, but if I continue, I might get sicker if my ailments are due to stress. I don't know if they are. Probably. And the sicker I get, the further and further I get behind...

Happy thoughts. The semester is almost over, and then it's summer break and maybe I won't have to constantly be disappointed in myself. Happy thoughts.

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Mathematical Representation of a Good First Chapter

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

February 13, 2012 -- 2:28 p.m.

I ditched homework and went to LTUE this weekend. It might have been a mistake for my GPA (I completely failed to put together proper spider charts for my linear programming class) but it was still fun. Mostly, I listened to authors reading excerpts from their work because I thought the opportunity to network with other authors in a less-crowded format would be a better career investment than hearing more from panelists that may or may not be specific to me as an individual.

The highlight of the reading for me was, surprisingly, hearing Natalie Whipple's excerpt from her upcoming YA book, Transparent. Very good stuff. I liked the other excerpts I heard, but for some reason, this one just hit all my buttons. Maybe it was the mention of having chocolate-smelling breath as a super-powered mutation :)

I sat down afterward and tried to figure out why it engaged my interest. Usually, when I read the opening of a book I like, I've had it in front of me so I can point to specific paragraphs I like. But Transparent isn't due out until 2013, so I couldn't do that. But in a way, that makes things better, because certain things stuck out in my memory, making it VERY clear what hooked me.

Since I was also focused on my upcoming data analysis (statistics) midterm, I automatically created an interest equation that represents my own personal hook regression. In other words, this is the mathematical representation of whether the first chapter of a book hooks me or not. Pretend that I know how to make blogger do Greek letters coefficients:

B1symapthiccharacter+B2UpFrontConflict+B3CoolSettingDetails + u = Y

Where Y is a dependent variable (outcome) which equals my own personal hooked-ness. If you want, you can record it as a binary with a 1 of hooked and 0 of non-hooked, or you can just consider it a continuous number with the higher outcomes equaling greater hookedness.

OR, in less math-speak: having a high Y is good for a book. And the higher the factors inside the equation, the higher the Y.

Let's break down the independent variables one by one.

1) The sympathetic character variable. It's an index made up (roughly) of the following components. Everyone's personal sympathetic character index will assign different weights to each part of the index, but I think, in general, each person will have a significant number of the following factors involved in their unconscious enjoyment of a character:

a. Competence at something cool (in this case, robbing stuff while being invisible). Note: if the character is incompetent/unintelligent, this will end up being the only negative number in the index, since all other variables are strictly positive/zero. And what is one negative number multiplied by x positive numbers? A negative number! In non-math speak, it doesn't matter how awesome your character is in all other qualities, if she's stupid or incapable, I will have a low Y. In fact, I will end up hating the book MORE the higher the other numbers. An author will actually be worse off if an otherwise awesome character is incompetent than if a mediocre character is mediocre.

b. Character's "outsider" quotient. This includes the character's is emotional/unusual physical pain and their relationship to society and its authority figures. So, characters who don't fit in well will generate more sympathy.

c. Character's sex. While I first thought about this as a binary o=male, 1=female variable, I realized that, in reality, it's going to be an index of feminity/masculinity with characters that fall into the masculine stereotype being harder for me to sympathize with. This indicator may be reversed for male readers, esp. if they're into action novels. I strongly suspect that my own personal utility equation involves a positive interactive variable of female*competence, which means the effect of female competence is drastically higher than the components of either femaleness or competency on their own terms.

Other components of the index that weren't as present in Transparency's case (or at least not in as great quantities) but would definitely add to my enjoyment:

d. Character's sense of humor (This was minimally present in the reference of chocolate breath as a super-power).

f. Character's "sameness" w/ reader's self (i.e., how much is this character like me? Is she a bookworm? A gamer? A math geek? I guess there was a little of this going on, but it mostly is absorbed by the "outsider" variable.)

g. Some mystery about character or their history. (Again, I don't think there was much of that here, except that I wondered about the scientific rationale for turning invisible.)

So, those are the factors that go into the sympathetic character index. The variable UpfrontConflict is less complicated. In this case, the conflict was twofold:

1) The first chapter involved a robbery, which included conflict with the people being robbed.

2) The chapter hinted at future conflict w/ the character's father--a promise fulfilled later in the excerpt when the father uses his own superpower to manipulate the protagonist into doing something she didn't want to do.

Probably, the variables should be separated out into internal and external conflicts, but I don't necessarily think the coefficients would have any statistically significant difference from one other, and most of the time, a good author will layer both into the same situation. This would make it hard to detect whether one or the other would be sufficient on its own, because in books where you only have one or the other, you are also likely to have a confounder present (the dreaded variable BADWRITING). Hmm, could you strip that out with some sort of instrumental variable? I'll have to think about that.

The third and final factor going into the overall equation is Cool Setting Details. This is pretty self-explanatory. This is what draws me to genre work. Maybe other people read for the characters, but I'm all: "Give me more about the evolutionary history of that man-eating shrub you mentioned on page 41, BITCHES."

I also think this variable is what distinguishes the medium-level-novice from the expert-level-novice, both of whom are in the pre-published, larval state. People who are past the beginner-novice stage can usually create characters who tick off some of the traits on the character interest index in their first chapter, as well as produce some kind of conflict. But very frequently, they forget the setting details that make me hunger to read more. In other worlds, the intermediate novice will begin their book with a fight scene using an outsider character that has a sympathy-inducing DARK and TRAGIC past. But the focus of the scene will be on the sword-fight, which will be generic enough that it could appear in any book from Conan to Game of Thrones, with a little tweaking.

So, in other words, great sympathetic characters + conflict + good setting details=great hook.

...wow...

DO YOU SEE WHAT GRAD SCHOOL/DATA ANALYSIS HAS DONE TO MY BRAIN, PEOPLE?????

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Pass

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

I passed all my classes with a B+ average. Phew.

Now to do it all over again...

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Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

December 17, 2011

Ugh. What a semester. In the past two weeks, I have completed three twenty-page papers and one eleven page paper and done four finals, which included two take-home exams (one of which ended up being twenty pages long) and two in-class (one of which had eighty questions). I don't think I've ever worked so hard or learned so much in a scant few months. On the other hand, I've never tried so hard only to fail either. I failed my data analysis final. I wasn't the only one--two other people (about a quarter of the class) got Fs or D-s. Which tells you something about the class, when three grad students can't pass the test and no one gets an A. The highest anyone scored on the final was a B-. It's possible I won't fail, if the teacher has mercy and moves us all up twenty points.

I don't know how everyone else in my program held up through finals week. Maybe because they're younger, maybe they're more driven and willing to sacrifice to meet their goal while I'm jaded and cynical. But I want to cry. I gave up so much writing time and potential opportunity only to fail and probably have to take a course again. I think this is the first time in my life where I've actually tried so hard to learn something but apparently been incapable of learning it. I'm used to being smart but this stuff just seems to be over my head, I guess.

I may drop out instead of trying again. Or I may try a program that doesn't demand I spend 30 hours a week on homework.

Oh well, I'm taking my cousin to a book signing with Brandon Sanderson tomorrow. Hopefully that will cheer me up.

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Feed (pretty hefty spoilers follow)

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist


September 18, 2011 -- 2:08 p.m.
Been awhile since I've posted a book review. I haven't been able to find my camera with the Worldcon pictures in it. My mother must have put it somewhere strange when she unpacked the suitcase I borrowed.

Anyway, I've read several books lately that I think merit a mention. First off, there's Feed by Mira Grant. Up for a Hugo, but lost to Connie Willis. Full of zombies. This review is full of spoilers, so if those bother you, stop reading now.

One of the cool things about this book is that it isn't really about the zombie holocaust. Most zombie books take place during an outbreak, and don't really look at the aftermath because its anti-climactic. Don't get me wrong, I loved World War Z and its ilk, but it's nice to see a zombie book that focuses on human beings getting on with their lives after seeing their world get taken apart.

In the aftermath of a cancer/cold-curing retro-virus gone wrong, a brother-sister blogger team gets invited to follow a presidential campaign. The candidate is trying to take things back to normal with real campaigns stops and 'press the flesh' visits, despite the fact contact with the live virus can turn you into a zombie.

I liked the female protagonist especially, and enjoyed the banter. This is an excellent study for writers on how to write characters with great quirks and great voices. Also, on how to get background info dumps across without being boring.

Still, the heavy exposition makes the beginning go fairly slow. Unfortunately, there's a lot of repetition, some of it intentional by the author (you'll be as sick of the finger-prick tests as the characters before the end). I think you could easily have trimmed out 50 pages and not have missed anything. Did we really need the eye-rollingly mustache-twirling parents, for example?

But the flip side of so much exposition is that the worldbuilding is fabulous. The society the characters are operating in feels intensely, hauntingly real. Mira Grant's put a lot of thought into both the science and the social implications of her world.

I wish Grant had put the same time into the motives of her antagonists, who are evil just for the point of evilness. Oh sure, there's some gloss of rationality put on their villainy. For example, the aforementioned parents--who adopt the twin protagonists for a ratings boost--supposedly are unable to form any close bonds with the children they've been living with for more than ten years because they're busy grieving for the loss of their original biological child. I just don't buy it, or buy that the protagonists would be such well adjusted people if they're basically living in a paparazzi-centered fish tank. We all know how messed-up the British royal family are, and this sounds almost as bad.

The book's other antagonists don't even get token glosses of rationality. Even when he's doing his wind-up speech, the main villain doesn't point to anything specific when he's explaining why he felt the need to get his megalomania on. If we'd seen just one concrete example of what he was so pissed-off about, it might have made it all feel less comic-book monologue to me. Especially since his machinations never seemed necessary, since we never got a sense that the events swirling around him would justify his dastardly plan. A close presidential race doesn't feel very close to the reader if we never see the other side.

The vagueness of the antagonist's motives was possibly intentional, modelling modern politico's tendency to get take in by empty-yet-powerful rhetoric. But at the end of the day, I felt the villain character was an overly-generalized swipe at a certain segment of the population. Satire looses its sting if it's too easy.

Also, plotwise, all the characters seem to do a lot of holding the idiot ball.

"Sure! I'll totally take orders from a guy who doesn't let me see his face or tell me his name! I'll totally trust that he'll take America back to the state it needs to be, even though I have no clue who he is or how he's going to do it!"

"Yeah, there was an assassination attempt on the presidential candidate a few weeks ago, but after one member of his family dies, we're not going to check and see if this death might have something sinister behind it. Even when the evidence is out where a reporter can conveniently step on it and we've been inside, cleaning the facility anyway..."

"Ooh, I'm an evil henchman rigging a bomb to explode in a hero's trailer. And after I do that, I'm going to kill the occupant's pet and leave it right where he can see it. If he finds a dead animal corpse, he'll totally stick around while the trailer explodes around him, right? It's not like EVIL HENCHMAN 101 teaches us about leaving everything the way we found it if we want our victim to get properly caught up in an explosion..."

The other issue that annoyed me was the book's treatment of the blogger/traditional media divide. I feel like this book came out of an atmosphere that's five, ten years old. I don't think there's the antagonism there once was, especially since print/web journalists make the hop back and forth all the time. The idea that all the Presidential campaigns but one would not include bloggers seems bizarrely retro. The idea that there will still be newspapers in thirty years in itself seems bizarrely retro, especially since going outside in this world is a hazard. What would the insurance premium be for a paper boy?

Even if I do buy the idea that the zombie apocalypse causes all the old flare-ups between reporters and bloggers to surface, I couldn't possibly think it would cause future presidential candidates to ignore online media. There are some things--including publicity seeking--that won't change, even if the world is ending.

Ah well. These are small pet peeves, and almost got me to stop reading, but I'm glad I didn't. After a slow-fuse start, the book ends with an explosive bang. Feed has a lot of great action, great humor, and great fun. I got the rug completely yanked out from under me twice by fantastic plot twists that had me jumping around in my seat. I'd totally recommend this book to people, especially people who love zombies. I would never have written about so many of my negative comments with this book if it hadn't been nominated (and almost won) a Hugo. It just wasn't on that level for me.

The frustrating thing is that this book could so easily have moved from 'good' to fantastic with a more believable antagonist and a few more red herrings. I think, in another few years, this author's books are going to be at the top of my wishlist every year. But it's not in that category yet.

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Ten Minute Poem

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

Aug. 31, 2011 -- 6:31 p.m.

Well, grad school is more time-consuming than I expected. It's a little daunting to be surrounded by A-students who've been in the full-immersion class environment more recently than I. I'm used to competing with other slackers, not younger, more mathematically gifted versions of myself. I'm used to being at the top of the class, not the back. It doesn't help that everyone else attended BYU and so already seems to know everything about the campus while I'm stumbling around lost wondering what big hunk of brown brick I'm supposed to be going to. I wish there was a shuttle from one end of campus to the other. Getting from parking to my classes is pretty intense in the heat/humidity (yes, Utah does have a little of that.)

Anyway, first assignment due this weekend. We'll see if my writing/analysis ability is still any good. I've forgotten how to do simple things, like citations and mathematical proofs.

I'll try to post pics from Worldcon this weekend. It was awesome, but the kind of awesome that's hard to form into words. Mostly a sense of community. You can wander over to someone and strike up a conversation with people who share your loves, instead of looking at you with confusion and pity. And so many of my idols. E.G., I hung out at the Tor Party before the claustrophobia got to me and someone walked up and started talking to me and it was Lois Bujold. Lois Freaking Bujold just started talking to me like she's an ordinary person and not a goddess of awesome. In my own personal pantheon of Gods, anyone with a wheel-barrel full of literary awards is certainly able to pull a fiat lux out of nowhere and make it bright enough to blind my ass.

All the authors/editors had the same advice for breaking in. Write. Write some more. Write a lot more. Don't follow trends. I keep hoping if I collect enough chips of wisdom, I can cash in for a book deal, but it doesn't work like that. I understand, but I still can dream that someone somewhere will have the magic word that I need to hear.

The writing group with Louise Marley and N.K. Jemisin went well. Both of the pros had some hard things to say, but they were good hard things that I needed to hear. I'll take some of their advice and ignore the rest, but it was cool talking to them. Louise Marley grew up in one of the towns I used to cover with the newspaper I edited. Small world.

Anyway, until I post pics of me sitting in the Iron Throne, here's a poem I wrote in ten minutes, because that's all the time for writing I've had this week. I'll try to lock myself in a closet this weekend, where considerations of calculus don't tread on my creative synapses.

TEN MINUTE POEM

The pencil of Black Moods

is scribbling in my ear.

It makes thick, jagged lines

Whispering as it carves straight into

The pink lining of my cochlea.


From above, its scratches look like

Yarn after the cat’s been in the crochet drawer.

Or maybe letters formed by a two-year-old,

Who abandons things midway to go chasing after orange Jello.


Half-formed memories flow, twisted and taunting,

Belched out by the tip of the dark lead

Pressed against my eardrum--

The next-door neighbor to my brain.


The pencil of Black Moods

is scribbling in my ear.

Scribbling, scribbling…

Good thing I have an eraser.

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Playboy Feminism

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

August 6, 2011 -- 7:55 p.m.

I enjoyed reading Linda Holmes' takedown of producer's attempts to sell the new show 'The Playboy Club' as 'female empowerment'.

I hate the fact some people conflate 'low neckline' with 'female empowerment'. There is a distinction. Female empowerment is the right to be able to do what you want with your breasts. If you want to be celibate? Sure, if it makes your life happier and more fulfilling. Wanna be a stripper? Sure, if it makes your life happier and more fulfilling.

(And I have met some very smart, well-adjusted strippers. And some not-so-well adjusted ones.)

The point is, it's every woman's decision, and you have the right to make it for yourself, hopefully for the right reasons. I feel like a lot of teenage girls let themselves get pressured into doing dumb things because there's this assumption that you have to do something to satisfy a man's expectations. That if you flirt or let someone take you out to a really expensive restaurant, then he's entitled to kiss you, to f*** you. That's not the case. Your sexuality is your own, nobody else's, and you don't owe anybody anything.

But in and of itself, sexuality is not necessarily empowering. It's especially not empowering if it perpetuates the idea that a woman's value is determined solely on the basis of her bra size. Appearance is only one facet of a person's personality, male or female. It's a big, important part in terms of dating and your professional life, but you bring more to the far more to the table, even if you're only a 34B.

Of course, maybe the Playboy Club was counting on the publicity generated by their stupid marketing techniques to drum up bigger ratings. If so, I think it's a failure, since the people who pay attention to feminist blogs probably aren't going to watch it anyway.

(Read an excerpt from Gloria Steinum's expose on the Bunny Clubs here.)

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Sickness and Health

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

August 3, 2011 -- 12:33 p.m.

Ugh. It's amazing how the end of writing a book can leave you so frustrated, tired and depressed. It's like reaching the end of a marathon without the runner's high. There's the brief moment of joy and then...thud.

I can't bear to begin revising it at the moment. I'm bursting with creative energy though, even if I'm lethargic. Maybe I'll churn out another short story.

What I really want to do is start working on an epic fantasy about a city made entirely of mist but I probably ought to go back to the one I was working on during Brandon Sanderson's class, since it's already partially finished. New shiny ideas always seem to win out over dull old ones in terms of distraction.

It's also interesting how illness can strike two similar people in different ways. Monday, I woke up so dizzy I was barely able to stand up, so I spent the day napping and felt better after the sea-sickness passed. I wanted to nail the room down and say YOU! SIT! STAY!

But a family member of mine who works at a law firm felt fine...until he passed out in the middle of a deposition, banging his head a face times on the way down. The red scabs on his face looks like he got in a bloody beer brawl instead of a brawl with a table. He felt fine, afterward. Refused to let them take him to the hospital. I joked that he was the beginning of a House episode.

I figure we had the same illness and it just manifested in two different ways. Perhaps another symptom is me not particularly feeling like writing about the rest of my Hugo votes, though I did get them in on time. Oh well, maybe later.

In the meantime, in honor of all the Doctor Who nominees, here's the 1960s classic, 'I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek...'



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