I love science. Probably because it's generally a challenge to me--my brain is very good at language and creative enterprise, but I've always had trouble with math and science--and I like to beat my head against things I don't understand once in a while. I like the things science can tell us about our history just as much as the things it can tell us about our future. 
But very rarely do I come across something new that doesn't make me think of that moment in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm looks at the scientists and the man behind the dinosaurs and asks if any of them thought about whether or not they should have created dinosaurs while they were so all-fired busy figuring out if they could. 
And I'm not talking about the likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider ending the universe, or new vaccines creating super-germs, or whoever happens to be building SkyNet this week. I'm talking about this.

You should totally go read the article, even if it gets a little science heavy in some places and a little strangely quasi-religious in others, it's interesting. The gist of it is there's a seventy-some year old scientist out there who's been obsessing over his need to stop aging for fifty-some years, and he thinks this spectacularly low number of people born with a incredibly rare genetic disorder might be his answer.

So, skating over literally half of what I just said there--like how his life's gone for the last fifty years while he's been freaking out about getting old, and how he's basically capitalizing on someone else's pain and in my reading anyway doesn't feel all that sorry about that (reminder, I am one of the least sentimental people in the universe most days so if I think you're being callous that's something to think about)... Dude wants to stop aging.

Like how does that even work? Do we get a magic pill at 27 and stay young and perfect (assuming you won the genetic lottery in the first place and you're young and perfect)? And even if we could choose to stop aging, does that mean immortality? Does that mean Facebook--or whatever comes after it--fills up with family pictures, comments hanging around at the bottom like 'Spent spring-break in Cabo with Gram, she always picks up better looking guys' or 'Me Mom and Grandma belly-dancing, I'm the one in the pink' where everybody's indistinguishable from each other? 

Okay, scratch that one, that sounds cool.

Anyway. I'm not a Luddite, I don't think modern technology is ruining us all and everything is scary. But when you start looking at big changes, not better cosmetics or disease control, when you're just in it to live forever maybe it's time to step back and think about whether or not you should. Sometimes that's more important than can.

That picture has absolutely no relevance to the thing I just wrote, but I like it. It's from here under this license. 


PS. Wrote that entire thing and then thought "Gee, that sounds a little like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the fifty pages I read anyway..." Yeah. That's still on the too-read list. More-so now.

“A book's a strange thing. It's ideas, feelings. It's fragile and complicated. You can't make them like refrigerators or cars.” 
                                                                                                   ― Étienne Davodeau, Les Ignorants

I got my first professional edit letter this weekend. And I was all set to tell you about how that was going for Well Written Wednesday. Not that I had the first clue what I was going to say yet. That was the plan.

And then Maya Angelou died Wednesday.

I spent most of Wednesday and a good portion of today trying to find something to say about that, and at this point I think I'm just accepting that brevity is the soul of wit. 

She's one of a very few select writers who get credit for getting me through my teens with a manageable, almost normal, amount of angst. Someone who made me understand the power of a universal story, and the visceral reality of the human condition.

My world was a better place for her being in it. That's probably the nicest thing you can say about anyone you don't actually know.

Photo from here under this license. 

I've been a history buff my entire life. Out of every book and movie and story I could give you as my favorite, ninty percent of them happened in the more or less distant past. I know an unusual amount about my family history--very little of it actually worth-while I grant--because I started asking when my great-grandparents were still alive. 
I learned a long time ago to leave my opinions and pre-conceptions at the door and appreciate the historical thing for what it was and what it said about where we were. There's a really great quote in Ken Burns The Prohibition where someone talks about how we tend to think a-historically (i.e. we invented sex or drug use or mass communication) and how not true that is. 
That's never been me. I grew up with an understanding of counter-culture that existed before 1967.
Still sometimes I find things that squick me, create this little curl of unease in my stomach, and make me start questioning things. 
Like when I catch myself happily singing this lovely tune down here...

And then I actually hear the words coming out of my mouth and thank my lucky stars I was born when I was.

I went on a writing jag this weekend, and at this point I'm so spaced out I can barely string a sentence together verbally. It's spring, and I always do this in the spring. I'm good until about 40000 words, and then I start to forget which way is up and I lose all ability to function in the real world.

But I refuse to miss another blog post.

Which would be admirable, if I felt like I had anything to say. (It was seriously tempting to leave all the mistakes in that sentence, because it was spectacular.)


I think this is one of those times where I need someone to sit through my giant fangasm about what I've written and then tell me to turn it into something real. You know who you are. 

Right. So this Monday is a little more Miscellaneous than normal, and a little more self-indulgent to boot. Whatevs. 

We do all this talking, about planning for the future of our planet. We talk about what to do when we run out of fossil fuels, and what to do when we run out of fresh water (the answer to that one is die or mutate, sorry to tell you). 

Nobody ever talks about what we'll do when we collide with our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. 

Arguably that's because we're not going to do it for around another 5 billion years, but still. Early planning is key with these things people. 

Don't ask me why there are mountains in this picture. Even when you can really see the 'Milky Way' from earth (I don't quite get how we're seeing it when we're in it, but that's a topic for another day) it's not that clear. 

My biggest beef with our lack of planning, for this possibly earth-shattering event? Who in the name of all things sciency and stellar decided our new combined galaxy should be named Milkomeda? Did they all sit around and go 'No, Andromeda Way actually sounds cool, so we can't use that one...'

When you sit down to write, one of the first things you're supposed to do is ask why your characters do what they do. What is their motivation? What do they want?


This is one of those fundamental rules of writing, the ones nobody questions, like 'write what you know' and I'm going to question it, because to me it's a ridiculous question. My characters don't know what they want, in the grand serious categories, any more than I would if you asked me. 

One of the hardest things I've found to learn as a writer is that things that happen in real life don't translate into fiction. In real life people's motives and thoughts are cagey and secret. Circumspect. And you can't get away with that in writing--supposedly--because everything has to be spelled out on the page. But there's a balance there, between telling your audience everything they need to know, and telling them everything they need to know.

The Star Wars holiday just passed, so I'll use an analogy from that. We need to know Luke's father was a Jedi, even an important one, from early on. The intention is for that to become a central part of his character, so we need it. But there's a...finesse, to giving us the information. Could Obi Wan have sat Luke down and hashed the whole thing out, beginning to end? Absolutely. And I bet, given it was Alec Guinness and space opera we'd even have listened. 

But we wouldn't have cared. All that dramatic tension comes from Luke's quest to be more like his father, to live up to that. 

There's no hard and fast rule for choosing what details to give and where to give them, no guideline that'll tell you where to but your grand realization (I'm a fan of as late as possible as long as it doesn't require twisting into gigantic Deus et Machina circles). 

I spend a lot of my writing life reminding myself I don't like it when complete strangers over-share their lives with me. Other readers probably don't like it either. 

Also, here's the bunny for the Marianas Trench contest, which ends on May 15th! Send me something, anything, and this little guy might be yours. Even if I'm not happy with his butt-to-ear ratio.

This week's Miscellaneous Monday is just a giant run of my pictures from The Discovery of King Tut. I know, it's all vaca pics, but they're cool, and the exhibit is going to Cali next and staying there until like April 2015 so... Enjoy.

These are supposed to be reproductions of the things found in King Tut's tomb, made with actual museum grade materials and all that.