I, Ian

This page no longer updated

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:42:00 +0000

Hey guys. I'm about to move over to my new site at iancracey.com, and as part of that, all traffic here is being redirected there. If you're following along with a feed reader, hopefully you won't notice--the feed from this site has been redirected to the new one. But if this post has shown up in your reader, then it seems the redirect didn't take for you for some reason. You'll need to head on over to the new site or add http://www.iancracey.com/feed to your reader, or else miss out on sporadic updates about my writing career, my kids, and the true story of what happened to the second book on my much-hyped (by me) two-book contract. It's been fun here on Blogger, but with a book about to come out (and scheduled to have come out a week ago--another true story you'll miss out on), it's time to move on to something more professional.

I

Two to the fifth

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:36:00 +0000

Now, I know what you're thinking. Ian, with your birthday falling on a Saturday this year, and with it being only two weeks until the end of the Premier League season, it must have been great to get to spend all morning and early afternoon watching the football.

Well, no. Saturday was my birthday, and there was indeed lots of Premier League football on, but I didn't watch any of it. You see, my sister and her husband will be moving into the area this summer, which means they need to go househunting. And since it's tough to househunt in Northern Virginia from their current location in ~~America's wang~~Florida, she decided to send me househunting on Saturday morning instead. I figured that's a small price to pay for unlimited free babysitting anytime I want.

Finding Claire a house around here has also kickstarted our own discussions about buying a house ourselves. Lisa has been saying for years that she wanted to buy a house, but I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that what she really wanted was to complain about how she wants to buy a house. But she insists that's not true--so we're about to start looking in earnest. I told her that if we do move, though, we need to replace our standard-def television with an HD model. Not for an improved Media Experience, but because I was looking at the twenty-pound HD TV in our bedroom, and thinking how much easier it would be to move that than it will be the eighty-pound standard-def in the living room. I don't ever want to have to move that thing again.

So anyway. We spent the morning househunting, then went home so I could receive my birthday presents. Girl got me a pair of Cookie Monster boxer shorts with COOKIE LOVER printed across my arse. Boy got me a Star Wars-themed edition of the board game Trouble that makes R2-D2 sound effects when you pop that bubble-thing that rolls the dice for you. And Lisa got me an HD TV.

Yup. A high-definition television.

And the best part was that it was free because she won it in a raffle. Last weekend, we'd had our conversation about how I want to replace the eighty-pound standard-def TV with an HD model. On Wednesday, Lisa spent all day playing in a golf tournament for work. At the tournament, she got raffle ticked 204, but lost it somewhere. Then one of her colleagues found ticket 200 on the ground, and gave it to her since she'd lost her proper ticket. And ticket 200 won the grand prize, the HD TV. All Lisa's friends told her she shouldn't tell me that she didn't pay for it, as that would make it less special or something, I guess? Whatever--they clearly don't know either of us at all. It being free makes it way more special than it could have been otherwise.

So then, since I'm a dad and since someone in the household--whether me or anyone else--had received a major piece of electronics as a gift, I spent the next hour hooking it up, before it was time to miss the last Premier League match of the day so that we could go to Boy's soccer match. Granted, four-a-side U-6 soccer isn't quite Premier League football, but I suppose you can't beat a match that has twelve goals in 32 minutes of play. (Literally can't beat it, as it finished a 6-6 draw.)

Then we headed to Best Buy, to pick up some HDMI cables and a Blu-Ray player. The HD TV has only one composite hookup, meaning, as I reasonably explained to Lisa, that we can't hook both the Wii and the DVD player up to it at the same time, so we've replaced the DVD player with a Blu-Ray player, which we can hook up to the new TV by one of its three HDMI ports.

I got back out to the car with all that stuff and found Lisa asleep in the driver's seat and Boy asleep behind her, so rather than wake them, I got Girl out of the car and walked with her up the road to the used bookshop. There I discovered that they've eliminated their Biography section in favour of an expansion of Romance, and I picked Lisa up a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey (happy birthday to her). Then we headed back to the car.

Where we discovered that Lisa had kept the air conditioning and the radio on the whole time she'd been asleep, so when she tried to start the car, the battery had died completely. Lisa therefore popped the hood and stood next to the car, and, since she's a woman, within two minutes someone had pulled up next to her asking if we needed a jump. Actually, a startlingly good looking 25-year-old man in a gleaming silver BMW had pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a jump.

So we got the car going again, but we needed to drive around for a while rather than going home. We therefore elected to drive down to Fredericksburg, 35 miles away; that way, we could go to either Sonic or Steak and Shake for dinner. Actually, it was my birthday, so we stopped at both Sonic and Steak and Shake. I also popped into the comic book shop next door to Sonic, as I always do, and looked at their selection of Doctor Who toys and t-shirts. They had some nice stuff, as they always do, and it was exorbitantly priced, as it always is. Particularly hard to resist was the Lego Cyberman playset, which Boy would have loved, but it was $80 for what was maybe a $30 Lego set (and that's even accounting for the fact that Lego sets generally cost about half again what they're worth to begin with).

And then we were home, and I was sticking HDMI cables into our new TV to connect it with the cable box and the Blu Ray player. All in all, not the best birthday I've ever had, but a lively and eventful one. And one that brought with a new HD television! Followed by the discovery that the new HD television was free! So in the end, I can't complain.

I

As publication nears

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:58:00 +0000

If you've been reading, or if you've been trapped in conversation with me over the past year, you know that the publication date is fast approaching for A Traitor's Loyalty, my first novel. (The date is, in fact, 1 May.) And you know that I've spent the last two months on the first draft of the second book on my contract, tentatively titled The Zero Hour. And you know how excited I am about both those things.

Now, I found out today that my publisher's going through some ... stuff. And there's some fallout from this stuff that's going to be affecting me. Mostly those effects have to do with the second book, not A Traitor's Loyalty, which is still due out on time.

However.

It's been conveyed to me that a push on preorders and word of mouth would be a really good thing right now. So I'm asking you guys to take a look at the book. Just to give it a moment of your time. Down at the bottom of this post, you can read the blurb that'll appear on the back cover. Maybe it's something that intrigues you. Maybe you know someone you think it'd appeal to. Maybe you've been planning on picking up a copy but haven't felt the need to place a preorder--if you placed one now, you'd be doing me a personal favour.

Of course, there's a number of you guys who have already ordered it, or have already been talking about it. You have my thanks for what you've already done, and, you know, feel free to go ahead and order a second copy.

Hey guys, it's an Ian Racey first edition. Few things are rarer than that (like an Ian Racey second edition).

Here's where you can order the book on Indiebound.

And on Barnes and Noble.

And on Amazon.

Twenty-five years have passed since the German victory in World War II. Hitler has just died, unleashing a conspiracy that threatens the future of the world ...

Simon Quinn walked away from a brilliant career with MI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, but now they have blackmailed him into returning to Berlin. His mission: located Richard Garner, a British spy who has disappeared and is suspected of defecting. He enlists the help of Ellie Voss, a Third Reich dissident who opposes Nazi rule but still considers herself a German patriot.

But when Quinn and Ellie discover the true reason Garner went into hiding, everything changes for them. Now, pursued by both the Gestapo and MI-6, Simon Quinn must choose, not between his country and treason, but between the brutal Nazi leaders battling for the succession: Reinhard Heydrich, the key architect of the Final Solution, and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and Gestapo. For this British spy, it is a choice that will test even ...

A Traitor's Loyalty.

Hitler said his Reich would last a thousand years.

I

Encyclopaedia

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:36:00 +0000

Encyclopaedia Britannica is ceasing publication of its print edition after a 244 year run. Britannica's been around longer than the Declaration of Independence, and longer than the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And now, in its original format, it won't be.

I'm not going to bemoan that change. It's a natural progression. You don't last 244 years without making accommodation for a changing world. Britannica began publication in 1768 in the country from which it takes its name, but now it's an American concern--more than that, it's a Chicago concern. Where was Chicago in 1768? The encyclopaedia itself is older than the city it calls home.

I hope Britannica lasts another 244 years, if it can maintain the same mission it's had for the last two and a half centuries, of making available to us a compilation and condensation of human knowledge, accessibly presented. And if it does, then within a generation, no one will care that it used to be on paper, and now it's not--anymore than Canadians walk into the Bay or Zellers and think to themselves, "Hmm, and to think, back in the seventeenth century, this is the company that was chartered by the King to administer English colonisation of northern Ontario and Quebec!"

I myself made the digital switch with Britannica about ten years ago, when Lisa bought me the complete Encyclopaedia in CD. It was one of the best gifts I've ever received--but it was one of the best gifts because of the love I've always had for the print edition.

When I was growing up in Connecticut, we had a wonderful public library--I never realised how wonderful until we moved to Florida and the ones that replaced it proved to be ... lacking. And one of the best things about this library was its complete set of both the Britannica micropaedia and the macropaedia.

Man, that macropaedia. So much of who I am, so much of the knowledge I love, I first found in that encyclopaedia. I vividly remember the Graeco-Roman civilisation article being over a hundred pages long. How many words are on a printed page of Britannica? A thousand? Two thousand? Three thousand? That article must have been as long as any novel I'd read at the time I worked my way through it.

So I don't mourn the death of the printed edition, and I don't complain that we're now moving into a world where Britannica can deliver all the knowledge it's always delivered, but paperlessly. But I do take this opportunity to express my gratitude that I had the paper edition in my childhood, and for all the paper edition gave me.

I

Words yesterday: 2459
Words so far: 98,636

Time spent writing: 12.30-3pm
Reason for stopping: End of naptime
Darling: He couldn't stop himself from crying out at every blow, but he was so spent now that each cry came only as a pathetic, mewling whimper.
Tyop: They went a hundred and eight degrees around the building.g
New words today: oily, paddock, jackboot
Words that boggled Word: heavybrowed, afterwards

Oh, just one more thing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:40:00 +0000

The-book-currently-under-the-working-title-The-Zero-Hour opens with a murder, and the protagonist is the investigator on the murder case. Now, let me state this right out, it's not a murder mystery--it's not about laying out clues so the reader has the opportunity to guess the identity of the killer before the protagonist does, and (SPOILER) after about midway through the book, the investigation into the killer's identity isn't even what the story is about anymore. (END SPOILER)

But there's still something going on that I've never really had to confront before, as an author. There are clues laid out as to what's going on, and those clues have to lead to two different logical conclusions: they have to add up to what is actually going on, but in the meantime, they have to add up to what the protagonist thinks is going.

Now, I know what's really going on, so there's a degree to which any difference between the reality and what the protagonist thinks is going on looks like foolishness on his part. But it's important that it not come off as foolishness to the reader--that the protagonist's conclusions seem like legitimate, reasonable conclusions based on what he (and the reader) know at the time. (This is less important the deeper into the book we get, as the protagonist's judgement becomes legitimately clouded by his growing involvement in events--but as more of what's actually going on becomes known to him, anyway, so there's less theorising involved.)

So I feel insecure about that element of the book, and it's compounded by the fact that ties into one of the things I think is a weakness in my writing anyway--that events or arguments that are intended to convince my characters of the need for a given course of action actually are convincing. This is something Lisa will identify for me when she reads my drafts: "Yeah, here, where you think you've talked him into it? You ... really haven't."

So I rely on her to let me know these things. She reads along with me as I write--I'm about four hundred pages into The Zero Hour manuscript, and she's read up to about page three hundred. And she's had to put up with me walking into the room while she does so, saying, "So, how's it going, huh, huh? Keeping your interest, huh, huh?", which is definitely not at all the way you should be treating your first reader.

Lisa's had about ten years of training as a first reader, and she's become really good at it. (I think she's even better at it because she doesn't have any aspirations to be a writer of fiction herself.) She can point to specific items on the page that don't work; or if she can't identify just what the problem is, she can point to a given passage and say, "Something doesn't work here"; or, she can make a determination like, "If you want this point in chapter twelve to work, that point back in chapter nine needs to be a more convincing precursor."

She has a couple of other elements in her reader's skillset that I really value. She actually points out all these things she notices; I don't end up coming to her later and saying, "So, this bit here worked for you?" and she responds, "No, not really." If it didn't work for her, she circled it and made a note.

She doesn't get offended if there's something she thinks should be changed, that ultimately I decide not to change. She knows that having pointed it out means that I've gone back and given it another look, and evaluated any alternatives.

And she doesn't give me prognoses, unless I ask for them--she points out the problems, but she doesn't decide how I should go about fixing them, unless I actually say to her, "Okay, so what would fix this?"

Hmm. I'd intended to write a post about how I hope this manuscript is making me grow as a writer, because it's forcing me to confront something I'm insecure about. It's turned into me extolling Lisa's virtues as a first reader.

I'm sure, when she reads this back over, she'll approve.

I

Words so far: 84,548

Though I've taken the weekend off from the manuscript, as it was time to finally sit down and thrash out an ending for the story before proceeding any further.

The toasted pasta sandwich

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:17:00 +0000

So in pursuit of

I am posting

and

As an Englishman, I've got absolutely no problem with the idea that, if you've already got one carbohydrate, the only thing with which you need to combine it for a complete meal is an additional carbohydrate. (Beans on toast, anyone?) The fatal flaw with last night's pasta sandwich was simply that it didn't contain nearly enough pasta--or, alternately, that it contained far too much meatball. At any rate, it amounted to a meatball sub.

I used toast, pasta, marinara, meatball and mozzarella. It'd have been easier if I used ziti, which, in addition to their regularly making them easier to arrange on the toast, are also more substantial than farfalle. But I'd finished the open box of ziti the day before, when I made chili-covered pasta for lunch, so farfalle were what were open.

Next time, then, I'll either have a much thicker layer of pasta, or else I'll slice the meatballs far more thinly than into halves. Probably both.

I

Words yesterday: 3046
Words total: 65,456

Time spent writing: 12.30-3pm; 9pm-11pm
Reason for stopping: end of naptime; felt snoozy
Darling: "All the trees have gone because the population chopped them down for firewood, but the statues remain. Because the Berliners cannot burn them."
Tyop: ... but the status remain.
Words that boggled Word: submachine
New words today: inarticulate, downhill, searing

The .epub criterion

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:39:00 +0000

Six months have now passed since I was able to justify purchasing a Nook with the upcoming publication of my first novel. Or maybe it's been longer than that--time flies, after all. Because the truth is, I love my Nook.

I read an essay sometime back by a guy who was moving across the country, and who, now that he's switched over to an ereader, was torn between the inconvenience of shipping all his physical books with him or simply donating them. I can't remember where I read it, or, obviously, I'd link to it. My first instinct is Galleycat, except that it's far too introspective a premise for them. Maybe Galleycat linked to it.

And but so. The main takeaway I got from this essay was that, as he asked his book-loving friends for their advice, he found they fell into two general categories. There were book people, whose main interest was in the physical book, rather than its contents. These people were horrified at the idea of ridding oneself of the physical artefacts; the argument the author quoted them as making was, "But ... but ... but ... they're books."

The second group were the readers, for whom the content was the thing that made books special; once that content was safely transferred onto an ereader, they were rather blasé about the fate of the hardcopy item.

I expect most people who know me would tend to assume I'd fall into the first group, whatever membership I'd also have in the second. I'm very proud of the books I own. I've got about a thousand books displayed in the room I'm sitting in as I write this (the living room), filling seven bookcases, and I probably have as many again packed up in our storage shed.

And yet, I've found that's not the case. I don't know how I'll deal with the need to transport physical books when we move, but most of the books I own aren't available as ebooks and aren't likely to so come available anytime soon. But as far as the books I read? I've pretty much completely transitioned to ebooks.

All the usual reasons. I love the lightness and compactness of the Nook--it's far easier to read in bed. I love that when I braved earthquakes and tornadoes for an unscheduled trip to England, all I had to do for reading material was slip what's essentially a second cell phone into my laptop bag.

If I buy a new book, it's an ebook. If it's the next instalment in a series I began while still on physical books, I'll usually buy the physical book as well--but it's the e-dition that I'll read. And the physical books that I already own, that I finally get around to reading? I buy the e-ditions and read those instead.

It has got to the point that if a book isn't available in e-dition, I don't buy it. When I'm writing a thriller, I keep myself in the mood by reading thrillers, particularly ones written or set in the time period I'm writing about. Before the Nook, I'd been rotating between the works of Eric Ambler, John le Carré, Alan Furst and Ian Fleming, though I'd run out of Ambler books that were still in print. But when I switched to the Nook, I had to drop Fleming, because those aren't yet available as ebooks.

(Neither was le Carré, though that changed over Christmas, presumably because of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.)

But I did find far more Ambler books once I'd made the switch, because a whole bunch of his books have been republished electronically that aren't easily available in print. I also tried to add Patricia Highsmith to my rotation, because of a dear friend who's been pestering me for some time to read her books, but I've unfortunately been unable to--she has only two books in e-ditions right now (neither of which, unfortunately, are Strangers on a Train or The Talented Mr. Ripley.)

The only exceptions I've so far made to the no ebook, no purchase rule have been the ones I didn't really have a choice with--research for the current book. There were three books I find for most of my research, and none of them were available electronically. I ordered the print editions, and I slogged through them, probably over a million words in all. But I was damn glad when I got to go back to the Nook.

Which is what, for me, has been the great irony of this thing, though it's probably of little interest to everyone else--that it is nonfiction, in particular, that I value reading on the Nook. When I first considered buying an ereader, I'd thought it would become my preferred method of reading fiction, but that I'd always prefer print nonfiction. Yet now I so much wish that I had my three research books in electronic format (particularly the six-hundred-page After the Reich by Giles McDonogh, which is packed dense with useful information), because it would make it so much easier to search out the specific passages I want to reread.

I

Words yesterday: 2573
Words total: 62,410

Time spent writing: 1pm-3pm, 10pm-11.30
Reason for stopping: end of naptime; bedtime
Darling: She swore at him, violently, in Russian--he felt certain that she had directed him to perform an act on himself either sexual or profoundly unhygienic.
Tyop: in Soviet custardy
Words that boggled Word: flatcap, unslung, other's
New words today: horseback, carbine, vapor

Farthing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:26:00 +0000

If you only read one alternative history novel this year that takes place in a world where Britain and Nazi Germany made peace with each other, you should of course read A Traitor's Loyalty. (Or at Barnes and Noble. Or on Goodreads.) But if you read two such books? Well, I've recently read one that I'd like to submit for consideration.

Farthing is a 2006 novel by Jo Walton set in a world in which Rudolf Hess made a much more successful flight to Britain in 1941, leading to a peace settlement before either the Soviet Union or USA entered the war.

Conventionally in an alternate history novel, the action focuses on the part of the world that is most drastically different from our own. Harry Turtledove's The Two Georges is about a world where the Americans lost the American Revolutionary War, so it takes place in North America (a British dominion), rather than in Britain or France or Senegal. If you're writing a Nazi-victory alternate history and you want to set it in one of the Allied countries, you have the Nazis conquer that country--like in SS-GB (set in Nazi-occupied Britain), It Happened Here (Nazi-occupied Britain), The Man in the High Castle (German- and Japanese-occupied America) or "The Last Article" (Nazi-occupied India). If you've created a world where Germany has instead made peace with the Allies, who have remained democratic societies, you're going to set it in Germany or German-occupied Europe, like in Fatherland, "Ready for the Fatherland" or my own A Traitor's Loyalty.

But Farthing is a book where Britain made peace with the Germans, escaped defeat, preserved democracy. In the book's world, Nazi Germany is ruling Continental Europe, implementing the Holocaust, and fighting an endless war with Soviet Russia--but the book takes place in England. It's presented as a Christie-esque English country manor murder mystery, set in 1949.

And that means that the changes it presents are far more subtle and gradual than you'll see in a standard alternate history novel--a society that, confronted with a victorious right-wing dictatorship twenty miles away across the Channel, is quite understandably drifting toward the far right itself. Moves to turn the British class system into a legally-enshrined caste system. The reversal of the progress made by socialism, and a regression to where socialism is once again being seen as borderline treasonous. (In real history, 1945-1950 was the period of Britain's first true socialist government.)

And most jarring--and most effective--to the modern reader is the anti-Semitism. It's a rise in cultural sentiment against Jews, a greater willingness to express anti-Semitic views openly, an amplification of the idea that it didn't matter if they'd been born and raised in London, Jews were still foreigners. It's so terribly English, because (at least until the attempts of the book) it's been accomplished without violence. And it's the cultural movement that has cleared the way for political leaders to begin attempting anti-Semitic political programmes.

The book, as with any book, isn't perfect. For a story that spends eighty per cent of its time dealing with members of the aristocracy, it's a shame that several of the arcane complexities of the aristocratic system get fumbled. (The author, for instance, has baronets as members of the House of Lords.) But it's a very different spin on Nazi victory than I've found before.

There are two sequels, Ha'penny and Half a Crown, which I'll be moving onto. I'm looking forward to them.

I

The Zero Hour
Words yesterday: 2594
Words total: 42,888

Time spent writing: 1pm-3.30; 9pm-10pm
Reason for stopping: Picking Boy up from the school bus; Lisa got home
Darling: A string of Russian obscenities unraveled off her tongue.
Words that boggled Word: stationmaster's, submachine, snuck, railyard
New words used today: captor, inscrutable, pothole

Everything but the tacos

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:32:00 +0000

Every once in a while we have what we call Taco Night for dinner. Usually it comes when Boy starts asking for it, because he really loves it. I'm not entirely sure why he loves it so much, since the only thing he ever wants to put in his fajitas is cheese, but whatever.

In fact, come to think of it, I don't know why it's called Taco Night, since it doesn't involve tacos. The kids roll their cheese in fajita tortillas, while Lisa and I make ourselves burritos.

What Taco Night basically boils down to is that we cook up a collection of ingredients--we cook them together, as a family--then people get to fill their own tortillas: Mexican cheese, black beans, Spanish rice, beef browned in taco powder, queso, Tostitos and sour cream. This is all rather pedestrian, of course, and not at all out for the ordinary, but it's turned into a family ritual, both because we make it together, and because of what comes next.

That's the next night, when we take the leftovers and cook what we call cheesy taco pasta. We boil the pasta with some of the queso, then toss that with the beef, black beans and a sauce that's one part queso and three parts cheddar sauce. Then we crumble up Tostitos as a topping.

And my God.

I mean, there aren't many dishes I make. I'm a pretty straightforward cook. But the cheesy taco pasta is a frigging masterpiece.

I

The Zero Hour
Words yesterday: 4015
Words total: 36,078

Time spent writing: 10a.m.-11a.m.; 1p.m.-4p.m.; 9p.m.-10p.m.
Reason for stopping: Football match; family time; felt like I'd put in a full day of work
Darling: From the train platform they could see the city center, across the tracks: a blasted ruin, a forest of rubble coated in a thin sheen of frost.
Tyop: I did find it pretty funny when I typed families as failies
Words that boggled Word: matter-of-factly, tsar, tsaritsa
New words used today: stationmaster, blanched, valise

Hopefully she won't end up murdering my father-in-law, then being possessed by his ghost

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:11:00 +0000

After posting

to Twitter last week, it suddenly occurred to me--hey, it would be awesome to dress Girl as St Alia of the Knife for Dragon*Con this year.

Not sure how we'd do the Fremen eyes. The rest of it should be pretty straightforward, and she loves dressing up

I

The Zero Hour
Words yesterday: 4792
Words total: 19,250

Time spent writing: 2pm-4pm; 6pm-8.30
Reason for stopping: tapped out
Darling: She gave him a smile--a sad one--to acknowledge that he had at least attempted subtlety in asking about her husband.
Words that boggled Word: catalogue, doorframe
New words today: spats, dwelling, fingerless

It's so quiet in here

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:55:00 +0000

I'm alone at home this weekend. L took the kids last night and headed out to take them to a weekend in Myrtle Beach with some of the many dozens of Carolinians related to her.

So when I make beefy rice for lunch and dinner today, I'll be mixing in both corn and peas, because there won't be anyone around here with a weird hangup about how corn and peas should never be mixed (and I don't mean either of the kids).

And I can be naked whenever I want for the next three days, which is never, because while it's unseasonably warm for the first week of February, "unseasonably warm" is about fifty Fahrenheit, which is still too cold for short sleeves, let alone boxer shorts. But it is warm enough to go and sit out on the balcony while I work, and I'll get to do that undisturbed all day long.

And I can move all the chairs away from the dining room table, roll my Thomas-Jefferson-invented swivel chair up to it and take over the whole table as my desk. Man, it's glorious.

And most of all, of course, it means I get to spend three days pretending I'm a fulltime writer without any other responsibilities. It's come just at the right time, too, just when the new manuscript is picking up steam.

I'll be over in the corner, typing.

I

The book whose current working title is The Zero Hour
Words yesterday: 1265
Words total: 11,155

Time spent writing: 1pm-3pm, 11.30-12.30
Reason for stopping: Girl's nap ended; tired
Darling: He thought he saw a curl of contempt briefly twist her lips, but he might have imagined it.
Tyop: hotels, departments stores and corporate officers
Words that boggled Word: doughboys, Russkies, Führer
New words today: hatband, roundel, septic

Hmm. Forget I said that.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:30:00 +0000

Last night a friend of Lisa's came over for the evening, which led, in the course of events, to a conversation about how it's a fairly unusual thing nowadays for me to get to interact with another adult besides my wife. "It's almost like I never have any grownup contact whatsoever," I quipped, eliciting giggles from the ladies. "It's almost like I only became an author so I could pretend the grownups I write about are my friends."

And then I stopped, because suddenly, that felt a bit too honest.

"You know," Lisa said, "if your characters are meant to be friends ... you write a disturbing number of books about Nazis."

I

The book whose current working title is The Zero Hour
Words yesterday: 2656
Words total: 5945

Time spent writing: 11a.m.-2p.m.; 4.30-5.30
Reason for stopping: family woke up/family got home
Darling: He tried to stammer out a defense--he'd been caught redhanded at something he didn't know was a crime.
Tyop: She took one of his hands in both of his
Words that boggled Word: redhanded, fräulein, de facto, Zippo
New words today beginning with C: coroner, crevice, commissar

Of course, were I ever to need tyres, these are the tyres I'd buy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:46:00 +0000

At least the first one briefly flirts with highlighting some desirable quality of Kumho tyres in comparison to their competition.

These are, so far as I'm aware, the only adverts Kumho has ever run in the United States. They're on fairly constantly on Fox Soccer Channel, and the second one--the one that's currently in rotation--was on the main Fox network this weekend when they broadcast the Arsenal/Man United match.

I just find it fascinating how absolutely different they are. One is in a European urban centre; the other is on an isolated, apparently North American beach. One is about sophistication and refinement; the other is about youthful exuberance. One tells a story; the other is a snapshot. One looks like it was shot on low-budget videotape; the other looks like it was shot on film, slick and professional. One demands deliberately stylised artifice from its actors; the other goes for (and achieved) that candid, sort of found-footage effect that we'd often associate with a music video.

And yet they both have exactly the same emotional arc:

sexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexBUY OUR TYRES!

I

Nothing new under the sun

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:06:00 +0000

The first time it happened was this summer, when I happened to catch a showing of the (great) 1940 British spy thriller Night Train to Munich on TMC. Night Train to Munich is set in the days leading up to the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany in September 1939. The Nazis kidnap a Czechoslovak scientist and his daughter, and to rescue them, a British secret agent (played by a strikingly young Rex Harrison) travels to Berlin, dons a Gestapo uniform and bluffs his way into Gestapo headquarters.

Of course, there's no way I could watch that scene and not instantly draw the connection to a similar episode in A Traitor's Loyalty, in which the protagonist, a British spy, travels to Berlin to hunt a British defector and, in order to get information, disguises himself as a Gestapo officer and enters Gestapo headquarters.

Then over the holidays, I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, as is my wont, got home from the film and immediately looked it up on Wikipedia. And therein I discovered that, in the book on which the movie's based, the codename that MI-6 gives to their star Soviet mole is Merlin. In A Traitor's Loyalty, by the by, the hero used to be MI-6's star Nazi mole, and his codename back when he worked for MI-6 was Merlin. (In A Traitor's Loyalty, which takes place in a world where the Nazis defeated the Soviets, the cold war is fought between NATO and Nazi Germany rather than NATO and Soviet Russia.)

(SPOILERS FOR HAYWIRE AND A TRAITOR'S LOYALTY AHEAD)

And then yesterday I saw Haywire. At one point, in one small moment, after the heroine has had her employers turn against her, she searches her trusty rucksack and discovers, sewn into its lining, a small black device with an antenna on one end and a blinking red light on the other. In A Traitor's Loyalty, when the hero realises his masters have been manipulating behind his back, he searches the car they gave him and discovers, sewn into the upholstery of the boot, a "small radio transistor with a red light blinking slowly at one end".

(END SPOILERS)

Your first reaction when you come across stuff like this--or my first reaction, at any rate--is to wince, to think that you're a horribly derivative writer incapable of thinking up an idea someone else hasn't thought of, and that you're about to be exposed as such before the world.

After a little while, though, you start getting a little bit of perspective. You realise, first of all, that it isn't about having every element of your story be something no one's ever thought of before--it's about what you do with your story elements, combining them and presenting them in a way that people still find fresh and interesting. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code are both famously made up of a multiplicity of sources from elsewhere, but even those readers who could spot and tease out the inspirations for the stories' different elements still often found reading them very enjoyable.

Downtown Abbey could be summed up without much inaccuracy as a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Upstairs Downstairs. That was obvious to me within its first five minutes, but not only did it not do anything to dampen my appreciation of the show, it actually added another dimension to it for me. I got to see how Downton took the premise of a country landowner who has fathered only daughters but whose estate is entailed upon the male line and how it treated that premise--doing some things that were similar to what Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice and some things that were very different.

And then the second thing you have to realise is that a lot you see, you only see because you're you--you're the author of the work in question. The example from Haywire is a perfect incidence of that--I'd be stunned if anyone who were to see Haywire and read A Traitor's Loyalty noticed such a tiny coincidence. It gets about five seconds of screen time in both works, and "secret homing device" and "a spy discovers his (or her) masters have been spying on him" are hardly such unique, distinctive tropes that your first thought when you encounter them is, "That's just like ...!"

Ditto the codename "Merlin"--it's such a minor point in both books (so minor in Tinker Tailor that it didn't even make it into the movie) and the contexts surrounding it are so very different that I think anyone who picked up on it would simply give me the undeserved credit of thinking I'd done it deliberately, as a respectful homage to the work of John le Carré.

(That's if they had the chance--I confess, I did email my editor and ask him to change the codename to Lancelot. But A Traitor's Loyalty does still have a genuine homage to le Carré--there's a very minor character who's named after two characters in my favourite le Carré book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)

Your book is, of course, your baby, and as such, you've got a natural inclination to be highly sensitised to anything concerning it. As authors we're taught early on about having to let go of one part of that--about detaching ourselves when we receive feedback and critique. This is another part, I think. It's a very human thing to draw connections and see patterns, and we're so close to our own books that it's inevitable for those to be what we draw the connections to.

I have a hypothesis that the reason I've started seeing elements of my story everywhere now is because the book is, essentially, now out of my hands--I no longer have the ability to make any significant changes to it. In that sense, I've already let it go--I've had to. And now I also have to let it go emotionally.

I

Cinema Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:35:00 +0000

This morning I went to see the new Steven Soderbergh movie, Haywire. The plan was actually that I'd be seeing Contraband--according to Lisa's plan, I'd see the 10.30 showing of Contraband, and she and the kids would see the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie at 10.50. Contraband is twenty minutes longer than Alvin and the Chipmunks, so it would work out perfectly.

Well, except that when we got to the ticket machine, we discovered Contraband didn't start till 11.40. And that the Chipmunks started at 10.15. (It was 10.13 when we discovered this.) So I decided to see the 10.40 Haywire instead, while Lisa and the kids headed into Alvin and the Chipmunks. As it turned out, they didn't miss anything, because instead of the Chipmunks, the cinema put The Iron Lady onscreen instead. (They fixed that, of course, and then gave everyone in the auditorium a free future admission.) This was in contrast to the theatre where I was sitting waiting for Haywire, where rather than start the wrong movie, they didn't start any movie at all--after that series of commercials-dressed-up-as-entertainment that cinemas show nowadays, we got five minutes of a screensaver on the screen, then ten minutes of sitting in the dark. Presumably because whoever was in charge of getting the movie started was at the other end of the cinema, desperately trying to stop an auditorium full of six-year-olds having to watch Margaret Thatcher order the sinking of the General Belgrano.

It was a weird trip to the movies, is what I'm saying. Weird enough that the discovery that there's actually a church that's located in one of our cinema's auditoria on Sundays becomes just a sidenote.

(The review that's about to follow is, I think, basically spoiler free.)

But so how, Haywire. Good movie. Utterly disposable, with a ridiculous plot--not a film I'll ever see again. But an enjoyable, watchable, well-done thriller. But what made the biggest impression on me by far was the directorial style.

Style seems an odd word to use here, because what that style amounts to is a heightening of the realism of certain aspects of the film (certain aspects only--other parts of the film remain as preposterous as they generally are in this sort of thriller); but style is exactly what it was.

The fight scenes. There are four or five hand-to-hand combat scenes in the film, distinctively choreographed--since Haywire has been put out as a vehicle for its star, female retired mixed martial artist Gina Carano, this isn't much of a surprise. The fights aren't filmed in any sort of spectacular way; they're presented matter-of-factly. But impacts are emphasised in a way that highlights how painful they must be.

I don't mean that they're gory; as far as I recall, there isn't a single drop of blood spilled during them, though they'd certainly produced blood in real life. But whenever someone gets their face slammed into a mirror, or a wall, or the zinc counter in a diner, there's a quick closeup of it that can't help but you make wince.

The movie's one car chase is probably the most realistic car chase I've ever seen--by which I mean, it's the slowest car chase I've ever seen. It starts off making you think it's going to be a traditional high-speed chase: our heroine Carano is driving briskly down a long, straight US Highway in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on either side by a forest of bare, snow-covered trees, when she comes upon a police roadblock. She slams on the brake and turns the wheel, and we get the traditional shot of the car spinning a hundred eight degrees as it stops, so that now she can slam on the accelerator and speed away. Of course, the cops pursue her.

But a moment later, Carano turns off the highway onto a dirt path, and all pretence of a conventional, spectacle-laden car chase is abandoned. She doesn't slam on the break as she turns, so that the car slides along the road into its turn. Instead, she does exactly what all of us do when we play Grand Theft Auto or the like (which is, I think, about as close as any of us ever get to being in an actual high-speed chase)--she slows down when she's making the critical turn into a narrow space, to ensure that she takes it smoothly.

And once she's made the turn, the chase is now taking place on a snowy dirt road, only the width of a single vehicle, that twists its way through the trees--so the cars involved move damn slowly.

And last, there are two scenes in which the tension is drawn out far longer than we'd ordinarily expect. In the first, Carano emerges from a building, spots a man across the street who may or may not be tailing her, then turns and walks down the busy city street. The man starts walking parallel to her, and she and we know that he is following her.

What would normally happen, of course, is that she'd therefore take some action to lose him--dash down a side street or get into a car--and a chase would ensue. But not here--because there's nowhere for us to go. We stick with Carano as she walks, deliberately unhurried, the entire length of the city block, before finally turning the first time she comes to a corner. Which is, of course, exactly how it would happen in real life, and it takes probably a full minute to play out onscreen.

There's another moment like this, late in the movie. A bad guy is lounging on his patio, with a much younger, bikini-clad companion canoodling with him on a cabana. There's a knock at the door, and the bikini bunny gets up and walks inside to go answer it. She doesn't come back.

Of course, we know what's going on, and what danger the knock at the door and the woman's failure to return signals for the bad guy. But Soderbergh draws it out beautifully--and all through a single shot. It has the bad guy's face in the foreground on the right half of the screen, while on the left half of the screen we can see over his shoulder. First we see the bikini buttocks departing, across the patio, then through the door into the kitchen, then disappearing through the kitchen doorway toward the front of the house. And then we're left with just the empty kitchen, while the bad guy contentedly lights a cigar, then has something occur to him and shouts an instruction to the woman in the house, then frown slightly and look over his shoulder as he realises it's taking longer than he thought, then go back to puffing on his cigar, then finally realise that it's taking way too long and get up to go investigate. Again, it takes as long as it would take in real life.

I don't want to give the impression that Haywire is some sort of cinema verité found-footage docudrama--the spy thriller genre's answer to The Conversation. It's very much in the same boat with other identically-plotted movies like Hannah, The Bourne Identity and the first Mission Impossible film. But even while playing in that fantasy world, it tips its hat toward reality, and I really liked that.

I

SOPA, PIPA and sopapillas

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:14:00 +0000

ETA: Within about two minutes of posting this, I watched an excellent summary of the current state of SOPA and PIPA pop up in my e-reader from Making Light. A wonderful highlight of some of the bills' most egregious freedom of speech implications.

Yesterday, 18 January, was SOPA Blackout Day, when websites all across the Internet ideally went dark (like Wikipedia), or else put up educational messages (like Google), to raise awareness about the real threat to freedom of expression, and freedom in general, posed by SOPA and PIPA.

And it seems it worked. On the tide of a groundswell of phone calls and emails, U.S. senators and members of Congress backed off SOPA and PIPA in large numbers. Many, including even several of the bills' co-sponsors, explicitly turned against it, for which they're to be commended. Others refused to formally renounce it, instead choosing to state that they have reservations about the bills in their current form, and are going to want to work on them some more to improve them; they probably aren't to be trusted on this issue and should have an eye kept on them until the matter comes to a vote.

What really caught my eye about the congressional renunciation of SOPA and PIPA, though, and what troubles me about it, was that it was a wholly Republican-led phenomenon. It was predominantly Republicans who condemned the bills, Republican co-sponsors who loudly took their names off them; it was predominantly Democrats who tried to sound like they were distancing themselves from them while retaining the freedom of action to vote for them once public scrutiny has faded.

Call me socialist. Call me progressive. Call me liberal. I embrace all three labels. I'm a socialist because I believe that it is through society that we can best foster the flowering of the individual. I'm a progressive because I believe in progress, in a future that's better than our present. I'm a liberal because I believe in freedom and opportunity for everyone, and not just for the privileged.

What I've found is that very often--perhaps even always, though I shy away from absolute statements--those three different things boil down to one core issue: when the powerful wage war upon the weak, I side with the weak.

This is why I overwhelmingly find myself aligned more closely with Democrats than Republicans in American politics. It's not that Democrats can be relied upon to side with the weak when the strong come after them, because they can't. There's always a sizable faction of Dems aligning with the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party on the side of the strong. But what voices there are consistently rising in support of the weak are Democratic voices.

We've seen it time and again over the past ten years. The movement to roll back our civil liberties and stifle our freedom of action through things like the USA PATRIOT Act. Efforts to decide whether marriage to the person you love is a right enjoyed by all Americans, or a privilege restricted only to the heterosexual portion of the population. The debate over how the burden of adequately funding (or inadequately funding) our government should be distributed over the economic spectrum of our society. Efforts to strip workers of the protections that trade unions provide them. The fight to ensure that no one in America should have to choose between bankruptcy and illness. Consistently, in all those national conversations, I've watched the Republican Party and a sizable faction of the Democratic Party on the side of the strong, while on the side of the weak are the other faction of the Democrats, either alone or buttressed by a small, fringe minority of Republicans calling themselves libertarians.

SOPA and PIPA are unambiguously attacks on the weak by the strong. Everything in them stacks the deck against those without resources and in favour of those with them, from the way they punish someone simply for having an accusation made against them, to the provisions designed to ensure that, when the accusers actually are found to have deployed the laws unjustly and abusively, they're immune from suffering any penalty--like the penalty they will already have visited upon their target.

And today, it's the Republicans who stand with the weak, and the Democrats standing with the strong.

I'm a copyright holder. I'm in exactly the demographic PIPA and SOPA claim to be protecting. Copyright and copyright protection are important to me, both in terms of my own copyright and livelihood, and in terms of copyright as an intellectual principle. And online piracy is a grave threat to copyright and needs to be combatted. But PIPA and SOPA are not acceptable ways of doing that. They would, in fact, greatly limit my ability to exploit my copyright, by restricting and penalising the free flow of discussion and ideas.

FiveThirtyEight presented an obvious reason why the congressional parties should align the way they seem to have here: ninety per cent of political contributions from Hollywood go to the Democratic Party. Which raises another salient point about yesterday's win over SOPA and PIPA:

It's only temporary.

Truckloads of money will continue to trundle across the country from California to the District of Columbia. And every provision in those bills will be back. It might be under the same name; it might not. Certainly, there'll be more circumspection about how it's reintroduced. But if we're not prepared to act, again, against it, then it will come to pass.

I

MarsCon

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:15:00 +0000

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

This weekend we headed down to Williamsburg for MarsCon. I can't do a pictorial overview like I did for DragonCon, because there's much less spectacle and therefore fewer pictures. But everyone had a great time. Lisa, I think, liked it especially because it's such a smaller scale than DragonCon--there were about twelve hundred guests--and therefore she didn't have to deal with crowds, of which she's no fan.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

We went to a few things we wouldn't have gone to at DragonCon, like the bellydancing show and the charity auction (both at Boy's instigation), and really enjoyed ourselves. Girl especially enjoyed herself at the auction--she figured out the game and started raising her hand every time a new bid was called for. And the kids' programming we went to--a kids' science activity session and a how-to-draw Star Wars characters session--were small enough that the kids actually got to interact with the presenters.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

I was gratified at the profile Doctor Who had around the con. The most common costumes were zombies, because that was this year's theme, and steampunk, because that's the trendy fashion nowadays. But once we get into the specific franchise costumes, there were about four or five Star Wars costumes, four or five Star Trek costumes, and at least two dozen Doctor Who costumes. Who was also the only TV/movie franchise to get its own dedicated panel, albeit one that was rather dampened by the one attendee who shouted down anyone who mentioned the programme's current production era without expressing hatred for Moffatt's approach to Doctor Who.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

So we'll be heading back again next year--and hopefully we'll have the sense to book a hotel room when we pre-register for the con, in which case the hotel won't be sold out by the time we go looking for a room. As it was we stayed two miles up the road from the Holiday Inn where MarsCon was held, and yet somehow there two more Holiday Inns between us and them. Seriously, three Holiday Inns in a two-mile stretch on one road.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

I

Aura of mystery

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:13:00 +0000

With all this research about Germany right after the end of the Second World War, one of the most striking and inescapable things about the period is the uncertainty that pervades it. Everyone in Central Europe--both the native populations and the personnel of the four large Allied armies that were governing them--were profoundly aware of how little they knew about so much of what was going on in the world. It filled their discourse and it was a huge factor in their actions.

It's an atmosphere that I think is important to capture in the book--it created an underlying sense of doubt around literally any decision people made when trying to reconstruct lives for themselves. But there's a problem with that--all those great questions are questions to which we very publicly now know the answers.

A (very) abridged list of things we now know about 1 January 1946 that we did not know on 1 January 1946:

That Hitler was dead.
That Martin Bormann was (probably) dead.
That Adolf Eichmann was still alive, and on the way to fleeing to South America.
That Josef Mengele was still alive, and on the way to fleeing to South America.
That the Soviet Union would have the atomic bomb by the end of the 1940s.
That the bomb would come to be defined as a new class of weapon, and that it would not be used again, so that, for instance, North Korea was not subjected to an atomic bombing when she went to war with the Allies upon invading South Korea in 1950.
That by 1949, the three Western Powers would have merged their Zones of Occupation in Germany into a single joint zone (called Trizonia), then granted Trizonia independence as a new West German state.
That the Soviets would respond by creating a competing East German state out of their own Zone of Occupation.
That the inhabitants of the two heavily militarised German states would spend the forty years of their uneasy coexistence living under the cloud of knowing they'd be the first battlefield in the war between the Soviet Union and NATO that seemed the almost inescapable conclusion of the Cold War.
That within fifteen years, the two Germanies would be separated by a physical wall, and that siblings, spouses, and parents and children who lived on opposite sides of the wall would largely be left without the ability to see or communicate with each other for thirty years.
The whereabouts of billions of dollars worth of art, artefacts and currency that had been hidden or lost during the war. (More billions of dollars worth of it is still missing.) Much had been hidden by the Nazis--every year or so, we continue to get news stories of some of it being recovered--but other parts of it had been shrouded behind the Iron Curtain, such as Priam's Treasure.

Trying to summon up that atmosphere is a tricky business. Certainly the first step is highlighting the much more personal questions that people didn't know the answer to--like whether missing loved ones were alive or dead; and if they would ever return from the liberated concentration camps, or from the detention camps in which the Allies held a huge number of Germans after the war, or from servitude in Siberia, or from the massive and bloody population shifts that both sides subjected millions of people to during and after the war.

But those local questions need to be compounded by the uncertainty that pervades the whole world in general, and doing so involves some fairly tricky manoeuvring. "Is Hitler alive or dead?" or "Will all Europe be speaking Russian ten years from now?" are questions that could legitimately provoke suspense and unease in 1946, but to a reader in 2012 who already knows the answers, they're much less so.

I toyed with the idea of having certain things turn out to be different in the book than is actually true (having it turn out in the book that Hitler is alive and in hiding, for instance), so that the reader then couldn't be sure what they knew and what they didn't, but ultimately I rejected that idea--I thought I'd be breaking too many readers' suspension of disbelief if I did.

I got particularly resentful over Priam's Treasure. I want to include a lost Second World War loot, and Priam's Treasure would have been perfect for my purposes--a priceless, high-concept hoard, that can easily be broken down into smaller, discrete units to use as currency. Then I found out that it had been recovered in 1990, and that it wasn't the Nazis who looted it. I haven't been able to find a replacement that works nearly as well.

(If anyone does have a favourite piece of Nazi loot that's vanished without a trace, let me know.)

Of course, it's true when writing of any historical period that you're writing of a time about which we now know things that people didn't know at the time. But what sets post-war Central Europe apart, I think, is that it was a time when people were very much aware of how little they knew, and of how important the missing pieces of information were.

I

Fashionista

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:08:00 +0000

As Lisa tells the story, she was wandering through the men's department at Target, wondering what the kids could get me for Christmas, when Girl suddenly started shouting, "Elmo! Dad, Elmo! Elmo, Dad!"

She'd spotted a set of Elmo pyjamas (she's obsessed with Elmo despite never having seen an episode of Sesame Street) and had been able to tell that they were sized for me, and not for, say, Lisa. So that became my Christmas present from Girl.

I often wear sweatpants at home, so I figured the pants could just be another pair of sweatpants to add to my rotation. The shirt is essentially just a t-shirt, so I decided it would be the Elmo t-shirt that I, as a funky, ironic guy and a cool dad, happen to own and occasionally wear.

Boxing Day night, after Boy and I had got home from seeing Tintin, I went into the bedroom and changed into the Elmo pants, then headed out into the living room to see if Girl noticed. She did--her face split into a huge grin. And then it started.

"Elmo! Dad, Elmo shirt! Elmo t-shirt, peas! Elmo shirt!"

"Do I ... have to wear the shirt as well?" I was kind of surprised she even remembered that there was a shirt to go with them.

"Yes peas! Elmo t-shirt, Dad!"

So I went into the bedroom and got the t-shirt and put it on over the t-shirt I was already wearing. Half an hour or so later, I happened to be in the bedroom again, and I took the Elmo shirt off. I headed back out to the living room and sat down at my computer. Girl gave no reaction, and I figured she hadn't noticed.

A few moments later, though, she was at my side, and I assumed she wanted to sit in my lap. Without really looking away from the computer screen, I reached out to pick her up. But instead, she pressed a bundle of fabric into my hands.

The Elmo shirt. Which she'd gone into the master bedroom to retrieve.

"Here go! You're problem!" (That's her mishmash of you're welcome and no problem.)

So I wore the shirt until she went to bed that night, because really, that was clearly the most painless option for everyone.

So glad I have a member of today's youth monitoring my look. Now I'm dreading when she's thirteen and decides to give her mother and me makeovers.

I

The elephant on the front page

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:45:00 +0000

First Palin. Then Trump. Then Bachmann. Gingrich. Cain. Perry. Pinochet. Gingrich again. Pinochet again. Now it's even Ron Paul.

Every time this happens, it's the same story, and I genuinely don't understand why it's treated as a unique event. I don't understand why we're not getting exactly the same lede to start off the story every time: The economic and religious movements that drive the Republican Party have further confirmed their deep ambivalence between nominating an individual who will recapture the Presidency in 2012, and their desire that their nominee pass a checklist of discredited reactionary, oligarchic, plutocratic, anti-democratic, xenophobic, fascistic and borderline sociopathic positions on social and fiscal policy that would instantly disqualify any such nominee from receiving the vote of any rational, reflective voter considering the respective merits of the candidate.

Barack Obama should be profoundly vulnerable in the 2012 election. He's consistently brushed off the political left, who were his most enthusiastic supporters during the 2008 campaign. He's consistently failed the political centre by confusing "collaboration, consensus-building and intelligent conversation" with "complete abdication of leadership and authority". And the political right will hate him as a matter of principle.

And yet he has to be a heavy favourite for re-election, because instead of genuine conservative candidates for the Presidency, the Republican public have proven themselves only interested a parade of religious zealots, anti-liberty fascists and economic fringists who keep shouting that the best way to end a global recession brought about by a decade of Randian plutocratic policy from Republican congresses is more Randian plutocratic policy. They're so desperate to find someone like that to be their nominee that they glomp onto every new one that comes along, until they realise that, hey, this one's just as detestable to the American general electorate as the others have been.

Mainstream media don't preserve their neutrality by failing to point this out--they in fact abandon it. When you deliberately ignore such a basic and important element of the story as the ridiculousness of the Republican primary field, and the desperate attempts of Republican primary voters to cling to economic and religious extremism, you slant the story in favour of ridiculousness and economic and religious extremism.

Of course, the Republicans have another candidate. He's consistently the number two candidate whenever the latest fringe extremist jumps to the head of the pack, and he's consistently the number one candidate whenever the media and the Republican voters haven't yet found a new fringe extremist to get excited about. Just as Barack Obama will in all likelihood be re-elected by default because the only candidates the Republican Party can find capable of winning the vote of a conservative primary voter all make moderate general election voters either collapse with laughter or shudder at the terror of them winning the Presidency, so too will Mitt Romney in all likelihood win the Republican nomination by default because the Republican Party can't find any candidates acceptable to conservative voters who aren't also laughter-inducing or terrifying to sane, moderate general election voters.

They don't like him because he doesn't pass their religion test, and they attack him for not being a fringe extremist, but in the end, Republican primary voters will hold their noses and vote for Mitt Romney. Then they'll hold him up before the general election voters with an unmistakable attitude of, "We couldn't find anyone we actually like, so ... this is the best we could do. Mitt 2012! Yeah!" With predictable results.

All in all, a whole lot of huff and puff and enough candidate debates that the cable news networks really should have started a weekly Republican Debate Tuesday show by now, and all done just to surrender a general election.

I

Titling and Titleation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Work proceeds apace on the outline, though admittedly it was slowed somewhat by a family visit last week. It's also been slowed by the need to work out some kinks in the plotline, but exposing such kinks is, of course, the very point of doing such an in-depth outline.

Periodically, my mind turns to thinking about a title. There are several I've thought about so far, some of which are rather more realistic possibilities than others:

A Fistful of Sterling
Berlin 1946
The Russian Sector
The Russian Officer
The Dead Russian
Zero Hour
The Zero Hour
Stunde Null

Certainly none of these have yet leapt out at me as the title; in fact, I have one of them as the title on the first page of my outline, while there's a different one in the header that appears on every page. But they're a start.

I

It's always been solved before, but THIS WILL BE THE EXCEPTION

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:17:00 +0000

When I start working on the book, I know very little of the book. A main character, a hook, an inciting incident, maybe a couple of supporting characters, maybe a scenario I'd like to come up somewhere in the middle of the book. Isolated spots in a sea of blanks.

Filling in all those blanks, so that they first become isolated puddles in a sea of, er, filled-in stuff, and then disappear completely, isn't a steady progression. For me, there'll be something that triggers an idea, and then that idea will lead to a whole sequence of things falling into place. Three or four instances of stuff like this--the last one or two of which might not happen until I'm several thousand words into the first draft.

The funny thing about this, to me, is that until each of these revelations, I always have such an ominous certainty that there will be no more revelations coming, and that I will never figure out the ending of this book.

Like with the new book. I came up with the idea a couple of months ago for it, and it started out with a pretty standard collection of new-idea attributes: a time period and setting, a protagonist, an inciting incident, a twist and a pair of love interests (one of them a heroine, the other a femme fatale. Love triangle! Woot!) I worked on it a bit and fleshed it out, adding a few more elements. Then it sort of gelled the way it was, and for a month or so, that was all I knew about the book. Just like always.

And yet, as a week or two or three passed without significant additions to the outline in my head, I began to think, Man, I've made a huge mistake with this. It's a decent first twenty thousand words of a book, but there is clearly nowhere for the last eighty per cent of the book to go.

And then, two or three weeks ago, I sat down one weekend with an idea for another element of the book, and I found what felt like the whole story opening out before me. It came in such a rush that I sat down and wrote down all the different ideas I had for the book, trying as much as possible to order them, and it came to three pages, or about two thousand words.

I then wrote a short outline incorporating them all, and that came to about three thousand words over five pages. It got most of the way through the book--really, all that's left is the final climactic sequence, covering about the final quarter to the final third of the book, where everything gets resolved.

I'm now in the process of writing as in-depth of an outline as I can; it's so far thirteen thousand words long, and has reached up to the second page of my five-page outline. My hope is that this in-depth outline will make the first draft proper pretty much just stream out of my fingers when I go to start it.

And along the way, I've even had an idea for something in that last sequence. (There's no source for ideas as good as actually being writing.) Yet. I still have this feeling of I will never find a decent ending to this book. I'm going to write seventy thousand words, and they will all be wasted. Might as well just end it by fading to black.

I'd come up with a good, solid closing paragraph for this post, except I can't really think of one right now, and strongly suspect I never will. Never mind that I've written nine hundred blog posts prior to this. This is clearly the one I will never finish.

I

A fresh pair of eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:04:00 +0000

My mother and sisters are staying with us this week, which is making it somewhat more difficult to make progress on the current work-in-progress--shutting myself in the master bedroom for three hours isn't exactly the action of a good host.

But there's one way in which their arrival has been really conducive to getting work done, and that's on A Traitor's Loyalty. I got the second-pass pages on Friday. Having probably read the manuscript seven or eight times when it was first written and when my agent took me on, I reread it for the first time in a number of years when the contract got signed in the summer. I then reread it again last month, when I got the first-pass pages. Rereading it again now on the second pass is my job, and I'm doing it--but I confess, there are times when my eyes start sliding right over the text a little.

So enter Claire, whom I have ~~conned into working for free~~offered the wonderful opportunity of getting to participate in the publication of a novel by going over the second-pass pages with me. So far we've found two typographical errors in the first half of the book, and by "we've", I mean "she've". Wait.

Too bad it's too late to rewrite the acknowledgements. But I've promised her an acknowledgement in the next book. Of course, I also promised my other sister an acknowledgement in the next book for giving me her Yorkshire pudding at dinner tonight.

I

The moral thing to do

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:18:00 +0000

It's going to be LSU and Alabama. I mean, obviously it is. And I don't think we can really call that an injustice. I've been perfectly open that I think a rematch between the two schools is a waste of a national championship game for a number of reasons--because it does a complete disservice to LSU's regular-season win at Alabama, because Alabama haven't earnt it, and because it will be, fundamentally, a far less interesting or enticing national championship game than a matchup between LSU and the best non-SEC school would be.

(To be fair, "the best non-SEC school" would still mean "the fourth-best school in the country".)

But I can't claim that anyone's being treated unfairly here; I can't make an irate argument that someone else is getting dicked over to give Alabama a do-over for the national title and it's an outrage, dammit! Because the simple fact is that the reason Alabama are in the title game is because every time there's another contender to take that number two spot, they keep losing and knocking themselves out of contention--Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Stanford, Oregon, Boise State, Wisconsin.

But I do think there are two scenarios for which we can make a better moral argument than we can for an LSU/Bama title game. The first is to have Oklahoma State play LSU. Let me be clear: I don't think Oklahoma State are a better football team than Alabama. I don't think they're as good a football team as Alabama. I think if Alabama played Oklahoma State, Alabama would be likely to win. (Though if the game were at OK State, I'd probably bet on the Cowboys.)

ETA: When I posted this, I totally forgot to point out that Oklahoma State has beaten two top-ten opponents this year, while Alabama has beaten none top-ten opponents. It was finding out that fact this morning that first turned me from, "Well, I guess it has to be Alabama," to, "Wait, no--it should be Oklahoma State."

But I don't know which of the two is better, because they haven't played. I do know that LSU is better than Alabama, because LSU beat Alabama. An LSU/Oklahoma State title game would then demonstrate either that Oklahoma State is better than both LSU and Alabama, or that LSU is better than both Alabama and Oklahoma State. In such a scenario, whether or not Alabama is also better than Oklahoma State would be immaterial.

If we really can't get any team other than Bama into the game, then I think the other scenario should be just not to hold a national championship game at all. If Alabama were to beat LSU in the title game, then as far as I'm concerned, LSU would still be national champions. They'd have beaten Alabama at Alabama, and they'd have endured an extra test Alabama didn't have to face, winning an additional game in the SEC Championship Game. The additional points Alabama gains by beating LSU on a neutral field shouldn't be enough to transfer the national championship from Baton Rouge to Tuscaloosa.

One thing I do feel is that all the champions of the BCS, all the guys who scream every season about what a bad idea a playoff would be, should be the ones most decrying the notion of an LSU/Alabama title game. Their whole argument is, explicitly, "But with the BCS, our regular season is our playoff!" And rematching LSU and Bama in the title game gives the lie to that. Alabama lost their "playoff". And they lost it at home. They shouldn't be getting a do-over.

Or, you know, we could just have a playoff.

I

It's what I do

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:46:00 +0000

You might recall that shortly after I signed my book deal, I was getting crippling stage fright over calling myself a professional author. Last week at Lisa's birthday party, I found my way around that.

I apparently am pretty fine with responding to "So what do you do?" with, "I'm a writer." (Though that wasn't necessarily the case a few months ago.) And what I discovered at the party was that when you give that answer, the very next question is, "What sort of writer?" And that's when you nonchalantly slip in, "I'm a novelist."

A bit longer is the conversational chain that ensues when someone asks what we do with our kids during the day.

"I work at home."

"So they're home with you! That's great! What do you do?"

"Oh, I'm a writer."

Refrain.

Really, the hardest part is not bopping up and down whenever I say it, because the inner squeeing? Still hasn't stopped.

I