Landless

#FridayFlash: Just Because

2012-01-27T10:59:00.002-05:00

Just Because

by Tony Noland

She died because she refused chemo.

She refused chemo because she saw what it did to her mother.

She saw what it did to her mother because she took care of her mother in her final days.

She took care of her mother because there was no one else to do it.

There was no one else to do it because her father died when she was twelve.

Her father died because he got a raging blood infection.

He got a raging blood infection because a small wound went untreated.

The small wound went untreated because he didn't notice it.

He didn't notice it because he had severe numbness in the backs of his thighs.

His thighs were numb because he had diabetes.

He had diabetes because he was so enormously obese.

He was obese because he ate the wrong foods, and far too much of it.

He ate so much because he was clinically depressed.

He was depressed because he'd been beaten as a child.

He'd been beaten as a child because his mother didn't want him.

She didn't want him because she'd been raped at age 15 by a large man, a very troubled man, who gained entry to her house, claiming to be a school crossing guard who needed to borrow the telephone.

That was, of course, before any of us had cellphones.

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Wednesday #limerick: bubble, lumber, wreck

2012-01-25T10:52:00.002-05:00

Each Wednesday, I compose a limerick using the prompt over at Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are: bubble, lumber, wreck.

On the bubble, the boy was a wreck.

Would his grades keep him out of CalTech?

But Daddy's remission

Greased the skids of admission.

A fortune from lumber: stacked deck.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And don't forget, if you'd like to read more of my limericks inspired by Three Word Wednesday, you can buy my e.book, which is cleverly titled:

Poetry on the Fly: Limericks Inspired by Three Word Wednesday

Only $0.99 - what a bargain!

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The burden of self-doubt

2012-01-25T09:00:00.001-05:00

There are times when I look at my record of accomplishments, factor in
the rate at which I've acheived them, extrapolate outward, and
conclude that I will absolutely, certainly be a successful author.
True, I'll be 168 years old, but statistics don't lie.

What's most interesting about this calculation is that it's entirely
within my power to change. I can:

* write more stuff, faster

* write better stuff

* change my definition of "success"

In thinking about self-doubt, I find that it is nearly always
punctured by understanding that my success as a writer is not a
function of what other people do or think. It derives from my attitude
and my efforts.

Is self-doubt a burden? It is for me, but it's one I can handle. I'm
confident of that.

--
Sent from my mobile device

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Buy your copy today!

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12 Things Successful Assassins Do Differently

2012-01-24T07:39:00.000-05:00

I've always been intrigued by really successful assassins, the sort of killers who can rack up body counts that are ten, twenty, even a hundred times what most people can. In our everyday lives, most of us kill just a few people a month. Compare that to the top assassins, who on any given day will kill a whole minivan's worth of people before noon, and go on to fill a hot tub with bodies in the afternoon. How do those entrepreneurial leaders do it? How does success like that become, not just a habit, but a way of life?

Over the years, I've made a careful study of their methods. Through wiretaps, high-power light gathering binoculars, and bribed informants, it's become clear to me that the world's most successful killers weren't just born that way. Here are 12 things successful assassins do differently that let them reach their full potential and be truly happy in life.

1. They plan to succeed.

It's not enough to want to kill someone. You have to PLAN how you're going to do it. We all know people who wish they could push a button on someone, but never quite get organized enough to get the ball rolling. Successful killers know who they're going to kill and how they're going to do the hit. They do their homework, study the terrain and have an active timeline for every operation.

2. They get paid up front.

Successful assassins focus on their strengths: killing people. Bill collection is part of the job for any self-employed entrepreneur, but minimizing the extraneous is what lets the top killers excel. The assassins I've spoken with have said that the traditional "50/50" model of half up-front, half after the job is done, just doesn't work in today's connected world. Instead, they take the full payment up-front, in a modern, "100/0" model. The "100/0" model is based on a relationship of mutual trust with their clients: the client can trust that the work will be done to everyone's 100% satisfaction, the assassin can trust that he will end up with 0 fingers if it isn't.

3. They spend their time killing people, not killing time.

"A day without a kill is a day wasted." Top-notch assassins multitask, doing their documentation and preparation for one job while on a stakeout for another. It takes only three minutes out of an hour to wipe out a target and her security detail. Those other 57 minutes should be spent lining up and/or prepping for the next job.

4. They kill with their head, not their hands.

Informed, intelligent decision making lays the groundwork for any assassination to be a walk in the park. Beginning killers think that anger, rage or bloodlust will help to drive them to the point of ending someone's life. The leaders in the assassination field know that, in fact, the opposite is true. Once all the pieces are in place, the actual kill shot is just the next step in the process, no more emotionally fraught than bribing the bodyguards or draining most of the gas from the target's armor-plated Mercedes.

5. They know when to pull the trigger.

When the time comes, when the homework has paid off and the laser dot is on the target's forehead, successful killers pop the cap. They don't even see the target's children standing by his side or the president of the neighboring country whom he's shaking hands with - they just see the target. When it's time to act, they act.

6. They have a S.N.U.F.F. habit.

Successful assassins know that a single kill is a snuff, but a meaningful career of killing takes S.N.U.F.F. What is S.N.U.F.F.? It's a five step process of operational security: Secret, New, Undercover, Fire, Friends. S.N.U.F.F. ensures the ability of top assassins to keep ahead of the competition AND the law so they can keep on killing, for years and years. Let's look at S.N.U.F.F. in more detail:

Secret - An old maxim of the killing business is that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Successful killers don't blab beforehand and they don't brag afterwards.
New - For every job, use a new gun. You might think it expensive to dispose of the pistol, rifle or shotgun after just one kill, but successful assassins know the truth: fresh hardware is cheap, dealing with crime scene-matching ballistics in the F.B.I. database is expensive.
Undercover - "It's a wise man who can learn from the mistakes of others." Your partner, your gun dealer, your banker in the Cayman Islands, your wife, your girlfriend, your brother... anyone can be an undercover operative for the F.B.I. Even someone who has proved themselves time and again over the years could have been turned in the last two weeks. Trust no one.
Fire - If there is any reason to think that something has gone wrong with operational security, successful killers go to ground. The first step in going to ground is to burn down their own houses, offices, equipment storage sheds, and any other building they might be connected with. Nothing slows down a forensics investigation like a good five-alarm fire.
Friends - Every successful assassin is part of a team. You'll need accountants, weapons suppliers, informants, contacts. Remember: these people are your business associates, not your friends. Work with them, but do not trust them.

When you develop a S.N.U.F.F. habit, you are motivated to see the holes in any plan and fill them full of lead. You can achieve any kill, anywhere at any time, knowing that you will walk away completely clean. That peace of mind not only gives you the confidence to charge top dollar for your work, it is absolutely critical to maintaining work-life balance (see #12).

7. They see perfection as a process.

Every kill, no matter how smoothly it went, has lessons for the next kill. The most successful killers study their successes and their failures equally. What worked? What didn't? How can the process be improved? As one assassin told me, "I was killing flawlessly, every target taken out right on schedule. It turns out, the schedule was the problem!" Paradoxically, getting better meant allowing himself to get a little bit worse. He stopped trying for 100% perfection on every kill, and instead strove for a faster, more efficient 98% perfection level. He stepped up his game by stepping back. As a result, that killer was able to double his kill rate, and triple his fees. It's one of the most important lessons for any aspiring assassin.

8. They don't get fancy.

Ask any of the top killers-for-hire, they will tell you the same thing: guns work. Remote-controlled car bombs, silent crossbows, poison-tipped condoms, keystroke activated electrocution, ricin slipped into the morning coffee... all of these methods are exotic, flashy and uncertain. When it comes to putting the brakes on someone who needs to be dead, an ounce of lead sent through the skull at 600 fps may be conservative, but there's a reason the pros use "old reliable" when they have a long To Do list: it works. The consensus about "style" among the best of the best? If you must add a flourish, use a triple-tap to the forehead instead of a double-tap. Classy, yet simple.

9. They see their comfort zone as a jumping off point.

Many people make a decent living limiting themselves to political assassinations. Other fields of target specialization have their adherents: cheating spouses, business partners, nosy law enforcement officials. What the top assassins know is that greater flexibility in your targets means greater opportunities in your business. Granted, if you've made a career out of killing politicians in their homes, it will take some time to develop the skills to successfully target a hospital, a preschool or a weapons research laboratory. However, working outside your comfort zone will bring clients to your door in a way you never thought possible.

10. They notch their belts.

Clients want to know that they'll be getting the best for their money. Successful killers keep a mental accounting of every kill they've made, and can recount the details of each kill to help boost their fees and seal the deal. How do they do it? They use a mnemonic device first used by the ancient Greek philosopher Hippo. Using some article of personal import, they mark it and mentally tell themselves the story associated with that mark. This traditional method is most familiar as the notching of a belt. Some assassins get a tattoo to commemorate each kill, but there is only so much skin available! Remember: a notch on a belt is NOT actionable evidence, even after being admitted to a grand jury as "State's Evidence, Exhibit A", whereas notes, journals, and blog entries ARE actionable evidence. Notch your belt to help you track your progress and remember your kill stories, but DON'T write anything down. Ever.

11. They know that murder might be a young man's game, but assassination is for a lifetime.

This was one of the most surprising things I discovered: most of the top killers-for-hire are over 50, and have been killing people for more than 22 years. It turns out that the popular view of assassination is that it's like the movies: an emotion-driven action, interspersed with car chases, fistfights and exotic lovers taken two at a time.

One of my interviewees laughed at that idea. "All that sort of thing might sound like fun, but it's not generating any income. If you want to make killing your business, you have to treat it like a business. While the young hot shots are getting their murderous kicks with zooming around on speedboats and rappelling down the faces of huge dams, I've quietly interrupted my target's Starbucks run with a quick double-tap to the back of the head. Get in, get the shots off, get out. And then go on to the next job. That's the work ethic that got me to where I am today." That's a lesson for all of us, isn't it?

12. They maintain a balance of work and life.

There's no denying that rising to the top takes commitment and sacrifice. Killing people has to be the first priority, but is it the only priority? Consider these two people:

Jane killed 211 people in the last 12 months alone, and had a net income of more than $80M. That's a record to be admired, right? But after having to kill her twin sister for impersonating her and doing freelance assassinations, what Jane found was that she wasn't enjoying the work anymore. The jobs got done, but she came to regard her work as just that: work. She even began to think about retiring, even though she knows that assassins don't retire, they just become difficult-to-kill targets. She's a successful killer, but is she happy?

Bob only killed 11 people (on contract) in the last year. He drifts across the country, hitch-hiking and doing odd jobs for locals. Although he kills mostly for fun - prostitutes, teen runaways, stray dogs - his only contract work has been from small time crystal meth dealers targeting other small time crystal meth dealers. His fees are paid in some cash, but mostly in weed, meth, hookers and McDonald's gift certificates. The freedom of the open road appeals to him, and he is smiling most of the time, but he admits to being worried about where he'll sleep this winter. He's a happy killer, but is he successful?

These are just two examples of an imbalanced life. It's sometimes necessary in the short-term for us to focus all our energies on only one aspect of our lives, whether it's work, family, extradition, or something else. But the best life, the happiest and most productive life, comes when we remember to look at all of the different areas of our lives as priorities deserving of attention and cultivation. Having an effective work-life balance will defuse stress, improve mood, and enhance our overall health and well-being. "You can't pull the trigger if you've got the shakes," said one successful assassin, "no matter how much Zoloft you take."

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Review: Shadow of Israphel

2012-01-23T09:03:00.002-05:00

While I'm writing up a really funny, insightful (and very long) blog post, let me introduce you to a machinima adventure using Minecraft. This comes from The Yogscast, a YouTube channel featuring Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane. The videos and podcast cover lots of video games, but the ones about Minecraft have been quite entertaining. Given the very low-res nature of Minecraft, any machinima using it must necessarily forgo a reliance on animation special effects. That this series pulls it off anyway, and does it through a series of game upgrades that fundamentally altered gameplay, is truly impressive.

I offer this to you, not because Minecraft is a cool game (which it is), or because the maps and scenery are amazing (which they are) or because the two hosts are funny (which they certainly are). No, I'm posting this because this particular series, The Shadow of Israphel, has compelling writing, the kind that pulls you in, the kind that any dramatist could learn from.

Seriously.

Yes, there is a fair bit of keyhunting and ingredient shopping list activity, but the scripting and dialogue from the NPCs is quite well done. You laugh at some of them, come to fear and hate others, and mourn when some are killed. The action builds to a crescendo, and then the rug is yanked from under you, leaving you knocked off your pins.

Enjoy.

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You call that sentence structure?

2012-01-21T08:58:00.002-05:00

Today over at Write Anything, I bitch, complain and snark about another author's irritating use of em-dashes, asides and infodumps. It was written in a fit of pique.

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#FridayFlash: The Gift of Love, Eventually

2012-01-19T16:00:00.000-05:00

The Gift of Love, Eventually

by Tony Noland

I gave you my favorite book, the one that opened my eyes and helped me to see the passions behind the hard metallic surfaces people show the world.

You hated it. You called it trite, simplistic, throwaway fluff.

I gave you my favorite painting, the jewel of a glossy gallery showbook that presented and discussed the genius of his age, the one who used slantings of light and shadings of color to make empty streets full of promise, empty fields full of sunlight, empty rooms full of laughter.

You hated it. You called it cartoonish, vacant, kindergarten crap.

I gave you my favorite movie, the one that made me cry in the theater, the one I bought on VHS, on DVD and again on Blu-Ray, the one that starred me as I might have been, could have been, should have been.

You hated it. You called it plodding, morose, escapist fantasy.

I played you my favorite song, cooked you my favorite meal, took you to my favorite place.

All of these I gave you, and all of these were the same worthless shit in your eyes.

I know now that it's time for me to stop running from the truth.

What is the truth?

The truth is...

The truth has nothing to do with my book, my painting, my movie or anything else that I have taken up and called my own.

Nothing.

The truth is that you weren't reacting to them, seeing them, passing judgement on them.

You were reacting to me. Seeing me. And, as I must now accept, passing judgement on me.

So.

And so, I will stop making this about me and I will give you what you want.

This year, when I give you a three dollar card from the aspirin and magazine aisle at the supermarket and a five dollar "World's Greatest Dad" mug, will you know that I have surrendered? That you have, at last, won?

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Wednesday #limerick: ****, *, *****

2012-01-17T13:51:00.001-05:00

Each Wednesday, I write a limerick based on the words from Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are downhill, freak and sliver. Today's limerick is:

Read about SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" here.

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Too late to catch the morning edition

2012-01-17T11:34:00.001-05:00

As I'm writing this, it's almost lunchtime. All of the advice about blogging says that morning is the best time - the only time, really - to put new blog posts up, so as to catch the entire day's traffic. Instead of posting something mid-day, it should be saved and slotted for the morning window of another day.

But what if you didn't write a post for this morning, and the mid-day post is all you have?

Don't be silly. SERIOUS bloggers don't have to worry about that, because SERIOUS bloggers always have something written for every day. There will always be plenty of material in the can or written days or weeks ahead of time.

Evergreen pieces on writing, craft, inspiration or encouragement can go up anytime. They should be sprinkled liberally through your blog, like salt spread on an icy driveway, melting through the treacherous layers of slippery confusion to reveal the One True Path that lies beneath, making safe the way for your readers.

Of course, evergreen pieces can always be bumped for late-breaking, topical pieces, or recently secured interviews with industry leaders, or other top-level content.

This, then, is how SERIOUS bloggers make it all happen: organized, focused, following their plan with dedication and professionalism.

I, on the other hand, just spin gold out of straw as the castle is burning down around me, for I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May!

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I Accept Anonymous Comments

2012-01-16T16:50:00.001-05:00

To the person who sent comments on a recent blog post by private e.mail (and you know who you are):

I do actually accept anonymous comments. It's one of the options on the drop-down menu on the comments bar. You can make your comment and select "anonymous".

I'm saying this here because some of the comments that I got could have been made directly on the post itself, and would have contributed to the discussion.

In fact, there have been other people who only comment on my posts because they can do so anonymously. The spam and offers to buy Russian Rolexes from Nigerian widows get filtered out, but meaningful comments will stay and go into the mix.

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Are you too nice to be a hero?

2012-01-14T10:21:00.001-05:00

I just finished writing a short story, a western about a lawman looking for a criminal on the run. Formulaic, I suppose, but it was fun to write. From start to finish, it went tripping along from saloon to dusty street, from sheriff's office to whorehouse and back again. Good guys got shot up, bad guys got shot up worse.

6000 words, clicking out like I was just dancing across a stage.

The experience made me wonder why I could be so blithe about writing a western (a genre that I rarely dip into), and yet be so conflicted about writing a science fiction superhero novel, a genre which I know like the back of my titanium-alloy cyborg hand.

The difference, I think, is that my main character in my science fiction novel WIP is fundamentally a nice guy, while the main character in that western is fundamentally a heartless bastard. I wrote a 4K story for the Yang Book, one of my better pieces. The MC in that one was a rotten son of a bitch, too.

Nice guys do too much dithering.

You can't BE nice without dithering. When the shit has firmly hit the fan and decisions have to be made in an instant, heartless bastards just pull the trigger, knowing that they'll have the balls to deal with whatever consequences might come up. Nice guys take a moment to think, to discern the path forward that will minimize pain and suffering while maximizing preservation of individual personhood and socially valuable utility (or something squishy like that).

All that planning and introspection means a lot of time spent standing around and apparently doing nothing. Even while the bullets are flying, the nice guy is sitting making plans while the bastard is already halfway across the floor, guns blazing.

What was really interesting after I had this insight (unless it was a delusion, which can look a lot like an insight if you're not paying attention), I thought, "Well, why not rewrite my novel WIP to make the MC a bastard? He could be a charming, slick bastard or maybe more of a rotten, bitter bastard. Either one would be more interesting than the morally upright nice guy he is now."

"But... but...", I responded to myself, "I can't do that!"

"Why not?"

"Because! He doesn't deserve that kind of abuse."

"Why not?"

"Because he's a nice guy! He's a decent sort of fellow. There are plenty of bastards in the world, why add another one to the mix?"

"Why not?"

"I'd feel terrible if I rewrote him to make him a rotten, self-serving bastard."

"Why? He's a fictional character in your book. You can do anything you want to him. Would you feel better if he got cancer and died in an interesting, heartbreaking way?"

"That's different."

"Why?"

"Because he could die of cancer and still be a nice guy."

"What if a diagnosis of cancer turned him into a bitter bastard? That happens in real life all the time."

"That might be OK."

"Tony, you're a nut. Why would it be OK for cancer to turn him into a bastard, a cancer that you gave him, but it's not OK for you to just make him a bastard from the get-go?"

"Um..."

"If you need causation, then assume it's part of his backstory. You don't explain why he's a nice guy, you wouldn't need to explain why he's a rotten bastard."

...

I should note that this is usually how conversations with myself go. I present such reasoned arguments that I can never think of a good way to rebut myself. Unfortunately, the course of action I inevitably want me to take is much more challenging than the way I've been doing it up to now. I'm a bit of a rotten bastard that way.

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Stopping By The Office On A Snowy Evening

2012-01-13T13:27:00.002-05:00

Stopping By The Office On A Snowy Evening

by Tony Noland

Whose office this is I think you know
My workday ended long ago
She might not mind me stopping here
To do a couple of things and go

My little wife must think it queer
To stop without objective clear
After the gym and running late
The busiest weekend of the year

She gives my silenced phone a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound's the beep
Of one more e.mail I need to take

The office's paperwork is piled so deep
But I have a homelife I must keep
And hours to go before I sleep
And hours to go before I sleep

~~~

For Cecilia Dominic (@RandomOenophile). With deepest apologies to Robert Frost.

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#FridayFlash: All That Glistens Is Not Garbage

2012-01-12T17:11:00.002-05:00

All That Glistens Is Not Garbage

by Tony Noland

He was down to his last aluminum can. There was no point in checking to see if the garbage truck held any more; he'd long since catalogued everything, from the cans and bottles to the pizza boxes and banana peels. Now, after everything, he was going to be short by about a hundred grams.

No, it was impossible. He wouldn't accept it. There HAD to be a way!

With the suns at his back, he went out away from camp, stomping over the sand dunes until he came to the Alkali Sea. The foamy surface undulated, refracting both the blue-white light and the reddish light into a lavender iridescence. He stood well back from the coastline. There were no stones to skip across the "water", only hard plates of crystallized sodium hydroxide. He wished he could skip some stones.

Dammit!

Could he cannibalize the multivariate transceiver? Maybe make the brane oscillation coil thinner and use some of the copper to make up the difference? No, that wasn't it. He'd had to hand-wrap the coils with wire from the engine wiring harness of the garbage truck. The rest of the wire came from an old stereo, a floor lamp and three clock radios that had been in the load. A dozen different thicknesses and who knew how many different alloys... he'd had to build in molecular collapse margins of almost twenty percent. Anything less and it would just transsubstantiate into lead when - not if, but WHEN - he got a bounceback signal that he could calibrate with.

He needed another hundred grams of aluminum, but from where? Every aluminum can had already gone into the solar smelter, along with the brake lines of the truck, the support clips from the windshield wipers, the brackets on the headliner and every other bit of aluminum scrap he could find. Melted down, it would have come to less than half of what he needed for a warp core. Thank god for that old lawn chair!

Still, though, the warp core didn't do him any good without the nimbus rods to make it collapse in on itself. He kicked at the sand, wishing for the thousandth time that this dimension had allowed some kind of vegetation to grow nearby. Even though it was supremely unlikely that a metal-accumulating organism would evolve in an environment that wouldn't have just killed him outright, something, anything to break up the monotonous landscape would have been welcome.

The electrode plates in the battery? No, they were lead. The piston rings? No, they were carbon steel. The lifters? The grounding strap? The fuel injectors? The glowplugs?

He stomped back to camp and scowled at the truck, his arms crossed. It was still essentially intact, even though he'd been pulling it to pieces as he built his lifeboat. If he'd had heavy tools to work with, things would have been different. Unfortunately, when the terrorists set off their dimension-fracture bomb, he'd been hiding behind a garbage truck, not a fully equipped hyperspace tool shed.

Small pieces of steel plate littered the sand. With what was in the truck's tool box, he'd been able to make do, but any heavy cutting or welding was impossible, let alone any nanomolecular fabrication. Glass bottles ground into parabolic lenses gave him the solar smelter; that and the exercise bike-windmill was as much concentrated energy as he was going to get.

He looked at the teleportation rig. Was there anything there that would help? Any corner he hadn't already cut dangerously close? Hyperspace orientation mesh, gravity simulator, klein bottle reflector, waveguide radiator...

Hmmm....

The radiator fins were aluminum, but he couldn't risk sacrificing it. He needed the radiator to cool the plasma arc waveguides. If he'd had a welding torch, he could have cut the radiator in half, since it was oversized for the job. After all, it was designed to cool the garbage truck's massive engine. However, while he could use the wire cutters and the pliers to tear the radiator flow pipes apart, he had no way of sweating the joints back together. He had to leave it as is.

Still...

With a sudden inspiration, he bent over the radiator. Carefully, he fitted the needlenose pliers onto one of the cooling fins and rocked it back and forth. It took almost a minute, but the sliver of aluminum broke off and fell onto the sand. He picked it up. It was too light to even estimate its weight, but it was aluminum.

He smiled. One down, a thousand to go. He fitted the pliers to the radiator again and got to work, pulling every other fin.

Maybe it would be enough, or maybe he'd still be grams short and have to think of something else. One way or another, though, he was going home. And as soon as he got back to his lab, he was going find those terrorists, no matter where in the multiverse they were hiding. He would make sure they regretted the day they decided to assassinate the Emperor's chief science officer!

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The Oxford comma

2012-01-12T10:38:00.002-05:00

For my fiction, I tend to not use the Oxford comma (aka the serial comma). When I'm making a list, I usually leave it off.

For breakfast, I ate a bowl of cereal, a banana and toast.

Even when the sentence gets complicated, I leave it out.

For breakfast on the veranda this morning, I ate a bowl of that hideous cereal (the sawdust kind which promotes the health of one's bowels), an overripe banana and the still-beating heart of my rival for Miss Jennie-Mae's affections.

According to Wikipedia(1), the Oxford comma is commonly used in the U.S. for non-technical writing that conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style. However, for journalistic writing (conforming to the A.P.), it's left out.

Given that opinions vary on it, I defer to the publisher's preference. If they specify, I follow the formatting instructions. If they don't specify for the Oxford comma, but say "use A.P. style", I don't use it. If they say "use CMOS", I use it. When editing a long document where no clear instructions are given, I just want it to be consistent.

Use it or don't use it, but inconsistency of usage is like a bad haircut. It says nothing about your fundamental qualities, but it DOES say that you lack the ability to pay attention to details.

1. I know, I know. Wikipedia, the Internet, reliability, blah blah blah.

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Wednesday #limerick: brutal, sullen, trust (HAPPY!)

2012-01-11T08:41:00.000-05:00

Each Wednesday, I compose a limerick based on a prompt from Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are: brutal, sullen, trust. (I see that Rallentanda left a comment at 3WW which said "No one can make a happy poem out of these words!" Challenge accepted!)

The lawyer? A sullen old pill.
The waiting? 'twas brutal, but still,
Now I'm twenty-one
It's time for some fun!
My trust fund has ninety-eight mil!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And don't forget, if you'd like to read more of my limericks inspired by Three Word Wednesday, you can buy my e.book, which is cleverly titled::

Poetry on the Fly: Limericks Inspired by Three Word Wednesday

Only $0.99 - what a bargain!

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Who said that?

2012-01-09T09:54:00.003-05:00

In a comment over at my Write Anything post about why I started writing, one of the comments referred to something I'd said. Specifically, the commenter said:

"Oh please tell me what book this is from – I have to read it!"

Comments like that always strikes me as interesting when the quote in question is something I made up (as was the case here). True, I also get that when I am actually quoting other people, but to get it when my words are the ones being sought after? Obviously, it's an ego stroke, since my words were compelling enough to sound like they'd been arranged by someone who really knows how to arrange words.

"Nobody Ever Turned Down A Free Martini: the wisdom and insights of Tony Noland". Look for it at Amazon sometime later this year.

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Narrative flow, interrupted

2012-01-08T12:49:00.001-05:00

I'm writing a blog post for Write Anything about narrative flow, and how it is interrupted by poor sentence structure. It's going to be a good post, so when it goes up later this month, you'll certainly want to read it.

This, then is what you might call a teaser blog post. Or, if you are somewhat less charitable, you might call it a placeholder blog post. If I had the sort of readers who didn't mind harshing on my delusions solely for the sake of strict accuracy of terminology, they would call this an unnecessary blog post devoid of actual information.

Fortunately, I don't have any readers like that.

Here, have a funny video:

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#FridayFlash: Albert Einstein Gets A Cavity

2012-01-05T16:58:00.002-05:00

Albert Einstein Gets A Cavity

by Tony Noland

"Look at that, the seat is covered in leather."

"Great. Now we know that Einstein's ass smelled like ass AND sweaty leather."

"Jesus, Cathy, can you at least try to snap out of it? It's like you enjoy being depressed."

"Ha ha. I'm just cold and my socks are wet."

"I told you Uggs weren't waterproof, but no, you had to wear them in the snow. Here's a news flash, Cathy: it's January in New Jersey. Dress appropriately."

"Shut up, Kevin. All I wanted to do was stay home and watch 'Firefly'. My snuggie would have been appropriate dress for that. But no, you had to drag me all the way to Princeton to a fucking museum to see Albert Fucking Einstein's fucking bicycle. Big whoop-de-fuck. Can we go home now?"

"No. We're going see the whole damned exhibit. You're the big science fiction writer, you should be loving this. Besides, you've already seen every episode of 'Firefly' twenty times. What you really wanted was to lie on the couch and get drunk again. We are here to -"

"Having a couple of hot toddies while I watch TV is NOT getting drunk!"

"We are here to get you out of this funk you're in! Cathy, you haven't written a word since Thanksgiving. Oh no, don't even try to bullshit me. I read your blog, remember? Even that you're just phoning in. Links to YouTube videos, rants about nothing, limericks and maudlin haiku... that's not writing, it's fluff."

"Poetry is not fluff."

"Yours is, because you suck at poetry. You know you do. They're not even funny anymore. A limerick about trimming a hangnail? Jesus, Cathy, this is going beyond just procrastination, it's practically mental illness. You've got a deadline, hon, the publisher is going to want to see the draft of the sequel by, what is it, February 15?"

"First drafts suck. They shouldn't want to see a first draft at all. They should wait until I finish revisions on the third draft. Maybe even wait until I get comments back from my beta readers."

"They just want to know that you're writing, that you're making forward progress."

"It's not like turning on a switch, OK? OK? I'm stuck and it's kicking my ass, OK? Are you happy now?"

"Hon, c'mere. Shh, sweetie, it's OK. It's OK."

"I... I just don't know where to go with it. What am I going to do, Kevin? Oh God, I'm so fucked. I'm so fucked."

"Shhh, it's OK, I've got you. Shhh....."

"What am I going to do? They're going to want the advance back and I'll be ruined. What am I going to do?"

"Shhh.... shhh.... it's OK. You'll think of something, you always do. You just need to get out of your head for a while, get away from it."

"But I can't! I can't think of anything but this stupid fucking book, but it all sucks! It's all such trite, hackneyed crap! I can't write any of it down, it's just a waste of space on the page."

"That's not true, Cathy, come on. Look, see the bicycle? See it?"

"It's Albert Einstein's old bicycle. What about it?"

"Look, the sign says that Einstein got some of his best ideas while riding his bicycle. Not sitting at his desk or writing on a chalkboard or beating his head against the walls of his office. He was out riding his bike. The whole concept of the fixed speed of light came to him while he was out riding, when he thought about what his headlamp looked like to observers in oncoming traffic or standing by the side of the road. One of the most important insights in the history of science, while he was out for a ride. But to anybody looking at him, they would have thought he was just goofing off instead of working. You see my point?"

"What, that I should goof off more?"

"No, you dope, that you should get out of your familiar surroundings and get some exercise. Einstein said that it was the changing perspective he got while riding that made him think about things from different angles. He imagined what the world would look like if he were riding his bike near the speed of light, worked out the whole Doppler shift thing. He even used the same metaphor to talk about time dilation at extremely high velocities, as though he had a time-travelling bicycle."

"Well, it travelled forward in time all the way from 1951 just so we could be standing here looking at its worn leather seat. I just wish I could put a time machine into this stupid sequel. There's nothing like a worn out old trope to... to..."

"Cathy? Are you OK?"

"Hey. What if... no. No, that's crazy. Unless... hang on a second. I need to write something down. Shit. This pen's gone dry - do you have one?"

"Sure. Here, don't write it on your arm, use the back of the museum map. What? What is it?"

"What if the Kirellians aren't trying to build a superweapon to blow up the Core Stars homeword, but are instead trying to build a time machine? It's impossible to build a real one, of course, but if you rotate a tuned magnetic field around a collapsar, you can get sympathetic gravity waves. I saw it on PBS last month. What if they're trying to do some kind of last ditch doomsday thing? Like a, a, a resonance cavity in time? They're not trying to win the war by defeating the Core Worlds, they're trying to reset the clock by forcing the universe to re-roll the dice back in the past! And then leave a message to themselves to keep re-rolling until they win! Yes, oh my God, this is PERFECT!"

"Cathy, that sounds -"

"And my hero isn't trying to find and BLOW UP the superweapon, he's trying to infiltrate the opposition on the other side to overthrow the Kirellian government, because, holy shit, Kevin, they've already fought this war ten thousand times and the Kirellians ALWAYS lose and they ALWAYS build the time machine. He's with the spies for the other side, and they learn about the time machine, and he has to break the cycle of endless war! Hot damn, this would actually work! I can write this! Jesus, we've got to get home. February 15, February 15, that's, uh, 37 days from now, so that's about 2000 words a day for the first draft, YES! I can do this!"

"I'd say this calls for a celebration, doesn't it? Maybe some of those fancy candies you like?"

"No way, not until I get the first fifty thousand words written. I've got to get to work, I've got a lot of writing to do."

"Well, we can stop at the Victorian Sweets Shoppe and buy a box in anticipation. They'll be waiting for you when you hit 50K. Deal?"

"Deal! Oh, Kevin, I love you. And I'm sorry I was such a pain."

"No worries, love. No worries."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This story was prompted by Icy Sedgwick, who gave me the following to work with: "the January blues, a time travelling bicycle and a box of Victorian sweets". Any resemblance to writers or writers' spouses, living or deceased is entirely within your own imagination, and I'll thank you to keep your idle thoughts to yourself.

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Today at Write Anything: me

2012-01-05T08:36:00.000-05:00

Over at Write Anything, my post today ("Wherefore Art Thou Tony Noland?") is filled with lies, truths, sneaky half-truths and absurd partial lies. What's true gets shaded and what's not true gets burnished. Since it's all about me, what did you expect?

Where I come from, why I started writing, why I keep writing, what I hope to gain by writing... lies. It's all lies, except for the part that's true.

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Wednesday #limerick: naughty, tactic, zenith

2012-01-04T08:57:00.000-05:00

Each week, I compose a limerick based on the prompt from Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are: naughty, tactic, zenith

The tactic seemed good at the time

Watch naughty flicks on my Dad's dime

But on his old Zenith

That Pay-Per-View penith

Was the color and shape of a lime

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

2012-01-03T10:18:00.002-05:00

For National Novel Reading Month, I've chosen Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Why?

In an article I read last year ("The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels" by Mark O'Connell), I saw this book described as one of those long and difficult books that scares people off, the kind that lots of people have heard of or even have on the shelf but have never cracked open. I've heard the same about some other books I've read and enjoyed.

O'Connell says he avoided long and difficult books, because in the same time his friends would take to read one long novel, he could get through a string of shorter, easier works and still get the same "intellectual cache".

And then, three or four years ago, something changed. For some reason I can’t recall (probably a longish lapse in productivity on my thesis) I set myself the task of reading a Great Big Important Novel. For another reason I can’t recall (probably the fact that it had been sitting on a shelf for years, its pages turning the sullen yellow of neglected great books), I settled on Gravity’s Rainbow. I can’t say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through. I felt as though I had been through something major, as though I had not merely experienced something but done something, and that the doing and the experiencing were inseparable in the way that is peculiar to the act of reading. And I’ve had that same feeling, I realize, with almost every very long novel I’ve read before or since.

Coincidentally, a week or two after I read this article, I came across Gravity's Rainbow in a used bookstore, the paperback first printing with this same cover.I read the first page, then the second and third. It was beautiful prose, so I plunked down my $2 and added it to the TBR shelf.

I moved it to the front of the queue for NaNoReMo. Now, 60 pages into this 760 page book, I'm enjoying it. Digressive and recursive, humorous and shocking, it's a demonstration of mastery. I'll post bits and pieces on my reading of it during this month.

p.s. While I've read other people's accounts of what it's like to read Gravity's Rainbow, I've avoided book reports, since I didn't want to read any spoilers. For example, I didn't read the entire Wikipedia article linked above, nor have I read any of the in-depth "reader's guides" that Google presents when you search on this book. I want to preserve the experience of coming at it fresh.

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Standing desk ergonomics: height

2012-01-02T17:58:00.000-05:00

I was wondering about this, since I'm a ~~lardass~~ writer. Maybe you're a ~~lardass~~ writer, too, and have the same question I did. Just how tall should a standing desk be?

This graphic is from the TinkeringMonkey article, "Do Your Back A Favor, Get A Standing Desk".

Since I've heard it's better to ease into this, I think I'm going to try having my desktop and my laptop running simultaneously, with content mirrored on the network. I'll be able to switch back and forth between the desktop, which will, uh, be on the desktop, and the laptop, which will be set up higher.

Links about standing desks, cribbed SHAMELESSLY from the Wikipedia article about them.

Judson, Olivia (2010-02-23). "Stand Up While You Read This". Opinionator. New York Times.
Manjoo, Farhad (2010-04-21). "Can’t Stand to Sit Too Long? There’s a Desk for That". New York Times.
Gardner, Amanda (2010-07-27). "Study: The longer you sit, the shorter your life". Health Interactives. USA Today.
Smith, Sue (2010-10-18). "Standing Desks vs. Treadmill Desks". Comparative Studies. TrekDesk.
Vlahos, James (2011-04-14). "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?". Magazine. New York Times.
Carlton, Jim (2011-09-01). "Standing Desks Are on the Rise". Wall Street Journal.
Donaldson, Phillip (2010-09-15). "The Benefits Of Using A Standing Desk". Benefits. Beyond The Office Door.

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Writing a bio

2011-12-31T11:33:00.001-05:00

You wouldn't think it would be so hard to write a biography for a publisher. They asked for two versions, one of 150 words for the website and one of 300 words for the book itself. No problem, right? Anybody that follows me on Twitter knows I can natter on about myself for hundreds, even thousands of words.

So why did it take me so long to write?

I had to think about this for a while. The answer I came up with is that writing a biography isn't hard at all. Updating a biography is what's tedious. At this stage of my career, I want to use those 150 or 300 words to tell people who I am, what I've written and where they can find me and my writing. The issue gets tricky when I start to make decisions about what to highlight and what to leave out.

If I have 50 words, you get my name, my Twitter handle, a link to my website and a funny line about the kind of things I write.

If I have 100 words, you all that plus a few book titles and maybe a recitation of what other people have said about my writing.

If I have 300 words, you start to get all kinds of stuff. In addition to the above, you also get lots of titles of e.zines, websites and anthologies with my fiction. You get titles and links to the projects I've edited or co-edited, the reactions to my poems and where you can find them. You get all kinds of stuff.

But is that really useful info, or is it just clutter? Anne McCaffrey limited her bio to "My hair is silver, my eyes are green and I still freckle: the rest is subject to change without notice!". Her website, of course gave much more than that, but it makes me wonder if people read author bios looking for information about the author and his/her works, or just to get a quick sense of them.

By the way, my hair is brown (going gray) and my eyes used to be brown but have turned to green in recent decades.

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#FridayFlash: The Unexpected Guests

2011-12-30T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Unexpected Guests

by Tony Noland

"Dr. Ventor, what's the verdict? Give us the bottom line."

The conversation all through lunch had been of Washingon traffic vs. Boston traffic, the Redskins vs. the Patriots, the Senators (terrible, but cheap) vs. the Red Sox (no longer terrible and no longer cheap), and similar kabuki small talk.

Ventor glanced at General Sommerville's adjunct, an affable, intelligent and combat-decorated Marine who was, at the moment, in charge of pouring the coffee.

"Major Jackson is cleared for the entire packet of information on this, Doctor." The General waved a hand around the table, encompassing Dr. Simmons from CDC, Mr. Khovalin from the White House, Mr. Nakimura from NASA, Dr. Harrison from the Department of Agriculture and Mr. Jenkins, who had been introduced as being "associated with the project", and was therefore probably either NSA or CIA. "In fact," General Sommerville continued, "like the rest of us, Major Jackson has read the advance material you provided for us. Isn't that right, Jackson?"

"Yes sir," said Jackson. "However, I'll admit that much of it was rather technical, beyond my scope. I'm looking forward to your presentation this afternoon, Dr. Ventor."

"We all are," said Khovalin. "Still, it would aid our understanding if you give us the punchline first. Are they human?"

"For all intents and purposes? Yes. They're human."

"What does that mean? 'For all intents and purposes'... are they or aren't they?" Jenkins hadn't spoken much during lunch. His voice was reedy and sharp.

"It means, ladies and gentlemen, that from a genetic and biochemical standpoint, they are almost entirely identical to us."

Simmons ran her fingertips in small circles around her temples before tenting them in front of her. Harrison swore under his breath and dumped cream into his coffee, sloshing some onto the table. Everyone else at the table looked at the two scientists steadily before looking back at Ventor.

"However," Ventor said, "in addition to the genetic analysis we've done on them and on their clothing, we've had a team of evolutionary linguistic anthropologists working on them as well."

"Explain that, Doctor." General Sommerville's voice was flat and crisp, as though he were faced with a combat situation. "That was part of your advance material I didn't understand at all."

"As we all know, Harvard has very good molecular biologists. In addition to myself, two other Nobel laureates have set aside all other research to work on this. However, I thought it would be useful to have an alternative cladistic analysis made of the Arrivals, one that didn't rely on genetics."

"Cladistic?" Khovalin leaned forward. "What does that mean? Is that the genetic clock?"

"It's a way to measure how closely related different groups are. Genetics are the primary way, and, I think, the most reliable way to establish when species and geographic populations diverged." Ventor drew lines in the air in front of him. "From the sequence variations in certain key genes, we've got a very good cladistic tree, a map in time if you will, showing how the various subgroups of humans diverged as we spread across the globe. Clades, what we used to call race-groups."

Khovalin said, "And the Arrivals?"

"They don't match anything. The base sequences confirm that they are essentially human, that they evolved in the Afar Valley of east Africa, the same as we did. Best estimate is that we ran an identical evolutionary course up to about a hundred thousand years ago. Not 'similar'... 'identical'. After that, though, the DNA says that we split off, developmentally."

"Jesus Christ," said Nakimura, "there's living proof of the Many Worlds Theorem. If they -"

"Can we please focus?" Sommerville's voice cut off whatever Nakimura had been about to say. "Dr. Ventor, you said you had linguistic data of some kind?"

"Yes, I do, and it gives us some hope. For decades, linguists have been analyzing the thousands of languages across the globe, trying to figure out when and how they developed. They've worked up their own cladistic analysis of how people spread from place to place, within regions and across continents. It turns out that their maps more or less coincide with ours."

"So?"

"So, Mr. Jenkins, we set a team of linguists to work on the recordings we've made of the Arrivals. They were completely unintelligible, speaking no known language. It turns out, however, that the base phenomes used in many of their words bear a relationship to a primitive dialect of Urdu."

"India?" said Khovalin. "They're from India?"

Ventor shook his head. "There's also a strong influence of proto-Germanic structures, most similar to Icelandic."

The table was silent. Finally, Major Jackson said, "Excuse me, Doctor Ventor, but what exactly does that mean?"

"It means, Major, that not only is our DNA sequence development much more random than I or any of my molecular biologist colleagues ever would have dreamed, it also means that the linguists were right all along. Look, you brought me in to tell you if these people pose a threat, right? A biological hazard? Here it is, in a nutshell." He ticked his fingers as he spoke.

"One: genetic analysis of their clothing shows it to be cotton, wool and flax. Their belts are made from cow leather, the buttons are either wood or ivory and bone from familiar animals. Not exactly the same as our cows, pigs, and goats, but close enough. That means they've had agriculture, animal domestication and close association for a long time, long enough for cross-speciation of diseases similar to bird flu, swine flu, smallpox, etc. Similar, but with significant strain variation.

"Two: they have the same genes as we do, so diseases that infect them could infect us.

"Three: their language derives from similar roots as some of our languages, but it's scrambled and homogenized to a much, much greater degree than our languages are. That means these people got around. They were very mobile, much more than we were twenty thousand years ago. That's probably why the genetics are so hard to read.

"Four: if they got around that much, they must have transfected each other with waves of diseases, in the same way that Europeans were decimated by the Black Plague in the 1300's, native Americans were decimated by smallpox in the 1500's and Africans are being decimated by HIV today.

"Five: their base DNA incorporates some seqences from viruses that are completely new to us. They not only had the opportunity for exposure to pandemic diseases, they experienced them. And they were bad. Very bad."

Khovalin turned to Simmons. "Well? What do you think? What's the CDC say?"

Simmons shrugged. "A full set of brand-new pandemic viruses? Not just one, but several, perhaps dozens? All at once?" Simmons shook his head. "If we were exposed to them individually over the course of centuries, we'd have time to rebuild populations. But all at once? There's just no way to know how many millions, perhaps billions of people will die. We don't have the mortality models for that kind of event."

"We do."

Everyone at the table turned to look at Jenkins. He stirred his coffee before taking a sip. "This is not that different than some of the biowar scenarios. The ugly ones, where one side decides to preempt a conventional war and decides to roll the dice on a surprise first strike with biological weapons." He set his cup back into the saucer. "We have models for just this kind of thing, using human viruses -" he pointed at Simmons of the CDC "- or viruses that attack crops and livestock -" he shifted his bony finger to point at Harrison of the USDA "- or both at once. The fact is, after an infection event similar to what we're facing with the Arrivals, the human population drops below to extinction levels. I had the numbers run again yesterday, after I got Dr. Ventor's reports."

The silence returned.

"So... what do we do with them?" Khovalin asked. "Send them back through?"

"Not possible," Nakimura said, "at least not any time soon. The portal is still only one-way. We're working on it, but so far, we can't even shut it off."

"If we can't send them back, then we have to keep them isolated," Simmons said, "all five thousand of them. Keep them all in a BioSafety Level 4 containment facility, same as we'd use for ebola or smallpox. It's our only option."

General Sommerville cleared his throat.

"Well..." he said, "that's not our ONLY option."

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Wednesday #limerick: demolish, resolution, transform

2011-12-28T10:22:00.001-05:00

Every Wednesday, I compose a limerick based on the words from Three Word Wednesday. This week's words are: demolish, resolution, transform

The goal of my new Resolution:

To transform my soul's constitution.

The flaws I'll demolish

And facets I'll polish;

It starts with the pop of this bouchon.

These words were fun to work with. If you'd like to read more of my limericks inspired by Three Word Wednesday, you can buy my e.book (the one with the descriptive title):

Poetry on the Fly: Limericks Inspired by Three Word Wednesday

Only $0.99 - what a bargain!

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Landless

#FridayFlash: Just Because

Wednesday #limerick: bubble, lumber, wreck

The burden of self-doubt

12 Things Successful Assassins Do Differently

Review: Shadow of Israphel

You call that sentence structure?

#FridayFlash: The Gift of Love, Eventually

Wednesday #limerick: ******, *****, *******

Too late to catch the morning edition

I Accept Anonymous Comments

Are you too nice to be a hero?

Stopping By The Office On A Snowy Evening

#FridayFlash: All That Glistens Is Not Garbage

The Oxford comma

Wednesday #limerick: brutal, sullen, trust (HAPPY!)

Who said that?

Narrative flow, interrupted

#FridayFlash: Albert Einstein Gets A Cavity

Today at Write Anything: me

Wednesday #limerick: naughty, tactic, zenith

Standing desk ergonomics: height

Writing a bio

#FridayFlash: The Unexpected Guests

Wednesday #limerick: demolish, resolution, transform

Wednesday #limerick: ****, *, *****