Toadless in Toledo

I like playing Scrabble. The intellectual challenge, while narrowly focused, is almost always enjoyable. Sure, there are times when you're staring itchy-eyed at a rack full of i's and u's, cursing the gods of distribution, and wondering what's new on Netflix. But mostly I look at such circumstances as an opportunity to be creative and clever. From such desperate times words like VUG and TUI are discovered.

I really like playing Scrabble with my friends George and Tom. The mental challenge remains strong, but the geeky fun of discussing words and etymologies, real and fanciful—especially fanciful!— can be as much fun as a drunken game of spoons.

And then there are the weird discoveries. According to The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD), Fifth Edition, there is a remarkably small number of objects or feelings you can be without. For example the word TOADLESS exists, meaning "Having no toads," but there is no entry for FROGLESS. Apparently one can never be without frogs. There is an entry for FISHLESS, but not FOWLESS. Nor can you be CATLESS, DOGLESS, COWLESS, PIGLESS, or CLAMLESS. Somehow each of us always possesses at least one of these animals, and myriad others.

You can also be LOVELESS, but not HATELESS. It seems we must retain at least a dab of hate at all times. That would explain a lot.

You can be SUCKLESS, although inexplicably that is defined as "Having no juice." Let your mind wander.

There are far too many other examples to count. (The OSPD usually doesn't have words longer than 8 letters, so we may never know if one can be GIRAFFELESS.

What's the point of all this? Not much except whiling away a few spare minutes. I do wonder about the circumstances that led to the need for creating the word TOADLESS. "Excuse me, but I'm lookin' for a load of toads? You got any?"

Maybe some things are meant to stay a mystery. I guess I'll turn my mind to other fascinations, like the word REBOZO. Yeah, that's real.

The Other Side of Space: 2nd Draft

I finished the second draft of my MG/YA science fiction novel a couple weeks ago. Alas, it was too late in the year to follow Dave Farland's example. He says that he'll go to a grade school or middle school and work with teachers who will ask their students if they want to read the book. Dave will pay each student to read and simply mark any words that he/she doesn't understand. Once all the participants have done this, he'll meet with them, and it usually leads to an active discussion about all aspects of the book. He says it works very well.

Unfortunately the school year is over. Still, my number one target audience (my son!) now has the book in his hands. I've never been more anxious about someone reading my work. I'm trying to keep myself from pestering him about what he thinks so far, but it's tough. I've been keeping busy with other projects, as well as getting back on the agent-research train.

Part of that research has included reading more MG/YA/SF (runnin' out of letters here!), with my most recent being Marissa Meyer's Cinder. I'm about two-thirds through the book, and it's been a terrific read. The story is a creative twist on Cinderella, with the heroine being a cyborg in a world where they are property. I won't give away plot points, but Ms. Meyer has so far very nicely succeeded in 1) making me care about Cinder and 2) cranking up the tension with multiple instances of jeopardy and emotional suffering for her. Good job!

God's War by Kameron Hurley

I owe Kameron Hurley an apology. She doesn't know me, doesn't know about this debt, and likely wouldn't recall if I told her. Still, I do.

I met her, briefly, at WorldCon in Chicago almost three years ago. She was a panelist on something—a promo for Nightshade Books if I recall—and at the end she had a copy of her debut novel God's War to give away. I turned out to be the lucky recipient, but before she handed it to me she asked, "Are you really going to read this?" To which I replied something quick and positive like, "Absolutely!"

I read the first page or two that evening in my hotel room, but then I put the book aside. It hadn't grabbed me by the throat immediately.

About three weeks ago I finally picked her novel up again. I gave it a second chance, and I'm happy to report that it was well worth it.

This isn't really a review, and I don't want to spoil anything for the odd person who might actually be reading this, so I won't give much detail. I will say that Kameron paints a truly fascinating world on a planet inhabited by the spiritual descendants of Muslims, who use bug-based biotech for much of their needs, and who are engaged in a very long war.

Having just written that, I realize that it would be easy to think the book was primarily a milieu-type novel.* This is when the special world of the story is dominant.

What I read, however, is an action-y book about characters and relationships, with some complexity and mystery to the plot. In fact, I would have to say a bit too complex, or at least too mysterious. A fault I find with the story is that some characters and events are shaded too much, with insufficient explanation. I found myself wondering on a few occasions, "Why did that just happen? Who the heck is she?"

I get what Kameron was doing. The technique of showing events as they happen, without explaining everything at the time, makes for a more realistic story. She used this very effectively with significant portions of the back story of the main character named Nyx, and at least one other. Yet she over did it in several other places. (Whether or not she meant to is another question.) This didn’t stop me from reading once I got momentum, but the road could have been just a bit smoother.

What more than makes up for the road bumps, however, is the depth of characterization of Nyx, and some of her team. She is a tough, driven, sometimes-bounty hunter, yet very far from a stereotype. She's drawn gradually and completely, with multiple blended aspects of her personality. Just like a real person. She's admirable and detestable. She's intimidating and pitiable. She's the best friend to have at your back, and the worst. She's strong, and vulnerable, and wise, and stupid.

There's one scene in which the ruthless killer Nyx is comforting her friend and teammate while he goes through a particularly humiliating full body search. That may not sound like much, but for his situation and culture, the process is agony, and Nyx knows it. She can't truly help him, but she stays by his side, softly doing what she can.

I read that scene three times when I hit it, and thought to myself, "Wow. I wish I had written that."

Then I finished the book. As I already said, it has some flaws that didn't need to be there. But it is powerful, and compelling, and it makes me wish that I had written the character of Nyx.

So, I apologize to you Kameron Hurley, for taking almost three years before reading the novel that you gave to me. And I thank you, sincerely, for providing an experience that I expect will stay with me for a very long time.


*See Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. quotient. http://triton.towson.edu/~schmitt/311/pages/tsld004.htm And if you're a writer, I highly recommend his books Characters and Viewpoint, and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Terry Pratchett walked the black sand

He made death less scary, and life much happier.

The Other Side of Space Completed!

Okay, so it's only the first draft, but it feels fantastic. The final fourteen to fifteen chapters (out of forty-one) went pretty quickly. More importantly, I enjoyed writing them more so than any other large chunk of text I ever produced. I'm not saying it's my best work, but I had such fun writing it, even the more challenging bits.

I'm feeling a strange mixture of pride, relief, and to a certain extent a little bit of loss. I'm reminded of what Churchill said about his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

"Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind." --  From Churchill's The Gathering Storm.

Not that I'm suggesting my little fiction story is worthy of even cleaning up Mr. Churchill's cigar ashes. It's simply the idea of a long piece of writing being a friendly comfort that resonates. Of course my friend and companion is still there, patiently waiting to have his face mashed and his limbs twisted as I begin the second draft, but it's not the same thing as fresh creation.

I hope to finish the re-write in short order, and then present it to my son Alex. I wrote this one for him.

Forbidden Island, Universe Sandbox, and Falling Pianos

George, Alex and I played a game of Forbidden Island last Saturday night. This is a very good game in which all the players must work together to a) retrieve four treasures from the island, and b) escape the island together. Meanwhile, the island is trying to kill you by flooding!

The cooperation aspect is unusual and a nice change of pace from most games. As in real life, however, even well-meaning teammates can occasionally grind each other's gears, especially under the pressure of imminent death. It can be remarkably intense -- but very fun! -- for a cooperative game that lasts maybe a half hour.

One thing we've learned in about ten different sessions: We always discover a new rule or detail of the game. I'll admit that the rules aren't super simple, but neither are they a complex web. Nevertheless, we've never failed to be surprised by some little feature. For example, we just realized that each treasure can be picked up at either of its two possible locations in any given game, even though there is only one treasure figurine of each type. We've dubbed this "quantum entanglement of treasures." We didn't exploit this feature, and Alex hates it, but it's there and we'd always missed it before. Maybe we're just dense.


A couple of years ago I bought the Universe Sandbox astrophysical simulator. I also purchased Newton's Aquarium, and another program whose name I can't recall at the moment. U-Sandbox is my favorite. I'm a physics geek so I'd have wanted them anyway, but I specifically went looking for easy software to help me work some problems in The Other Side of Space. I did so when I was first outlining the book, and it gave me a good jump start with the plot. Now that I'm closing in on completing the first draft of the novel, I've had to dive into the sandbox again. (Things change during writing.) I won't spoil anything of the book here, but I just crashed a 500 kiloton teapot onto the Moon, multiple times! If you have clear skies, you might see the impact craters next time you look.

One interesting observation I made is that your initial velocity doesn't have as much affect on your impact velocity as one might think. For example, suppose you start from the radius of the Moon's orbit and you drop a tungsten piano onto the Earth, maybe with the Coyote as your target. When it hits his head, it will be traveling about 11.1 kilometers per second. This is almost enough to kill him. (By the way, this is just slightly less than escape velocity for Earth.) On the other hand, suppose you throw the piano down really hard, at 5 kilometers per second? The Coyote is done for, right? It must hit him at 16.1 kilometers per second. Except it doesn't! It brains the poor slob only doing about 12.2 kilometers per second.

I leave it to the student to think about why this should be the case. Don't worry about details, unless you're really interested, just the general concept. I'll offer this hint: A constant acceleration (or an accelerating force) operates on an object to change its velocity. Near the Earth's surface this acceleration is 9.8 meters per second per second toward the Earth's center. What that means is (ignoring air resistance) that  for every second that an object falls near the Earth's surface, it goes 9.8 meters per second faster. You drop a hamster hammer and it starts falling. At the end of the first second it's falling at 9.8 meters per second. At the end of the second second it's falling at 19.6 meters per second, and so on. The same basic idea is true even if the acceleration isn't constant, such as starting far away from the Earth's surface and falling for a long time.

No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog entry. All coyotes and hamsters were simulated. Teapots and Tungsten pianos were real.

Happy Birthday to the United States Marine Corps!

Maybe it's time for me to re-read Chesty's biography, Marine!

"We’ve been looking for the enemy for several days now. We’ve finally found them. We are surrounded. That simplifies the problem of getting to these people and killing them.”
—Col Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, Chosin Reservoir, Korea 1950