Disjointed, Short, Pointless

This post, that is, not my thinking processes in general. (And for those of you smart-asses wondering how this deviates from a typical post here at Skullcrusher Mountain, let me reiterate: short.)

Work is exceptionally ugly and posting is of necessity light at least through this weekend. Here a few tidbits in the meantime:

---I have done absolutely nothing on my dental/jaw/TMJ/whatever issue because of the snow and because I've been so busy it is pointless to even try to schedule an appointment before mid-March.

---YB, who I psychoanalyzed here, seems to have benefited from his long break from work and will be visiting for a few days in mid-March. I was really worried we wouldn't get this set up and I'm glad we did.

---I had a dream last night that I was chewing glass. I tried to spit it out but it wouldn't come, and then I got nauseous and woke up. (Go ahead and look up the symbolism of that dream.) The chewing glass thing is new, but the nausea in dreams has been happening intermittently over the past months. It always leads to me waking up and my throat feeling weird for a few minutes. Probably related to the first bullet.

---Few things piss me off more than controlling bullies. I have an extreme physiological (yes, I mean physiological and not psychological) response to this kind of behavior (for reasons you might very well guess, and if you can't, just read the post I linked to two bullets above to get some idea), and it's even worse when the controlling and bullying is geared toward young children and their innocent poofy-cheeked goodness. This article in Salon (and links therein) had me close to grabbing the nearest blunt object and heading down to Tennessee to make the world a better place. This is some seriously disturbing shit. And I have a gut reaction just to the use of the word "training" in child-rearing, again for personal reasons. But think about it: what a perfect (almost engineered optimally perfect) way of producing damaged unwhole human beings who go on to perpetuate an endless cycle of victimization. Pity everyone on this page except (perhaps, maybe pity them as well, they were probably victimized too, though it's hard to justify growing up and then working to propagate this evil) the two on top.

---My wife and I are starting to seriously look into leaving D.C. for parts West within the relatively near future. We've had such a move in mind since before we even arrived in D.C., and the time to start making it happen appears nigh.

I feel calmer already

---I'm reading Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Don't get me wrong, it's decent. But as I read more and more, I'm feeling more and more that it was overhyped.

---Last but not least (or perhaps I should say last but MOST): I started writing my new project over the weekend. I had done some heavy lifting on the research the weekend before and felt pretty well ready to go. So on Sunday I managed to get about 850 words down on the page. I can't think of a project more different from my last one than this one. Tone is extremely important to the proper execution of this new project, so I asked my wife to look at what I've done (though it's obviously just a first draft of a tiny piece of the work). (By way of contrast, my wife didn't see a word of my last novel or even know what it was about until I was done and had spent months revising.)

But it's nice to be rolling again. I haven't sent a query in about a month and that's for a variety of reasons (see above about work being beastly for one of the main reasons) but with commencing on something new, it seems to matter less. I'll hopefully be able to start querying again in a couple of weeks, anyway.

Have a great rest of the week, everyone!

When Scientists Write, Redux Edition.

Two posts ago, I used Amy Bishop murdering three colleagues on the University of Alabama campus as fodder for generating different ideas for short stories. More information keeps coming to light (which, to be honest, makes the exercise less fun after awhile), as April pointed out in the comments. Pipebombs, new revelations about her shooting her brother, a revised timeline of her tenure denial, stories that students complained about her, etc.

But now, we find out the most disturbing news of all: it seems that Dr. Bishop was also an aspiring novelist (how do you like my Lovecraftian use of italics to reveal my unsettling punchline?). I haven't been able to figure out whether it was querying agents that finally drove her over the edge, but check out these stories about her novels.

I'm telling you people once again, scientists writing fiction is just bad news. They ought to pass a law or something prohibiting scientists from writing. Or at least check into the mental health of those who do.

I've said it before and I'll (probably) say it again: God protect us all from scientists who write.

My Dream

I am in a car with several senior people from my place of work. We are driving to a fancy restaurant that looks like some kind of country club - I guess for lunch. It's during the work day, and I am surprised to be invited, but kind of wishing I didn't have to go. One of them makes a crack that we were all going to be so sick of the food at this place, and the others laugh. I've never been there before.

We arrive, and somehow it becomes my job to remember a combination - like a safe combination - for something. Maybe something to do with the car?

But the waitstaff at the restaurant are not allowed to tell me the combination. They hand me a menu. It's like a menu for a pizza place - like Dominos or something. The combination is somehow encoded in the menu. I have to run my hand, or some instrument, over the menu, and parts of it light up. I have to remember which parts light up and in which order. The lights don't correspond to menu items - they don't correspond to anything. They are hexagonal red lights (sort of like the nose of the poor bastard in the Operation boardgame) seated within arbitrary divisions of the menu.

Get the water on the knee collect a thousand dollar fee

They don't give me a mock-up of the menu to make notes on. Indeed, I have nothing at all to write with or on. The lights on the menu don't seem to be always working.

We are sitting at a fancy round table and the others are talking, having a great old time. Minutes are passing, and I am growing more and more frustrated, more and more worried that I cannot figure this task out. No one notices.

Then my dad shows up. (Yeah, that never bodes well in dreams, does it?) He refers to me as [full name - think "James" or "Reginald"], a name I loathe in lieu of [nickname, which is what everyone calls me - think "Jim" or "Reggie"]. He starts talking to my coworkers, basically ignoring me. The pressure mounts because he is here, but I can't admit failure. Still, I have no fucking clue what to do. The waitstaff have disappeared. Time is passing.

Then one of my co-workers refers to me as [full name] and I blow up at him: "Call me [nickname], not [full name]!" My dad says something that I can't quite remember except that it's some divulgence of personal information about me, and though it's what he thinks, it's not correct. But everyone laughs.

I think to myself: why am I here? why is this combination thing my task? I am obviously totally unsuited to doing this. what difference does it make whether I do this? this seems like a terribly stupid waste of my time. shouldn't someone else be doing this instead? why is everyone ignoring me? why isn't anyone asking me if I need help? am i going to be called to the carpet if this fails? who are these people? why do I fit in so badly with them? and, for goodness sakes, why is my dad here???

I woke up and thought: oh my God. This dream perfectly encapsulates the way I feel about my job lately.

News As Fodder For Fiction

I had intended to write a short post with a couple of different links to interesting articles I'd seen lately, including this one from the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip to the Cruel Mistress blog, as I am far enough removed from the world of academia that I no longer look at the Chronicle with any regularity.)

I know some of my non-academic readers were a little baffled by my rant about the term "postdoctoral student," and if you read that article you'll begin to see, I hope, why it irks me so much. The article is focused on the humanities, but substitute "postdoc" for "adjunct" and it applies to the sciences as well - at least for those who are focused on an academic (vs. industry) career.

It reminded me of times when I was a postdoc that I would look on craigslist for odd jobs just to make ends meet for the month. I would go to the library and copy papers for a junior-level person at a local engineering firm. I would help some rich undergrad at my university move, and they would hand me a couple of $20s, and I would think "groceries for the week." When I could get away with it, I would take online surveys or participate in focus groups for $5, $15, $25.

"had a Ph.D., had an MBA, but now he's waiting tables cause there's rent to pay"

A science postdoc isn't a 40-hour-a-week job, so I was kind of cutting into work time (even on evenings and weekends) when I did this stuff. But I didn't feel bad because they weren't paying me a living wage.

Anyway, not entirely unrelated, there is a major news story about a biology professor in Alabama who shot and killed several members of her department's faculty upon learning that she would not receive tenure. This is only of moderate interest to me; people flip under all kinds of professional circumstances, and though the tenure decision is perhaps the most important milestone of most academics' lives, it is hard to read any larger significance into one case.

As I read the story, I thought that I would want to hear much more detail about the decision and her career timeline. All the news stories make it sound like she was pretty darned good at what she did. So why was she about to be denied tenure?

Then comes the additional detail that this professor killed her brother with a shotgun about 25 years ago. It appears debatable whether this was an accident or not. Now my interest as a writer is piqued.

(Let me digress for just a second to say that this is a tragedy, and I don't intend any coldness toward the victims or their loved ones. The cynical academic in me can't help but think: "Well, they'll be advertising some bio faculty jobs at Alabama soon" while again recognizing the callous nature of the sentiment. The writer in me is looking at story potential and has already sort of diverged from real life.)

So let us write a short story about this incident, using only what is in the news articles and relying on our imaginations to fill in the details. Here are a couple of alternative plotlines that appear consistent with what we know:

1) the woman is a stone-cold killer. her brother got in her way once, and paid the price. now her departmental colleagues think they're going to stand in her way. they will learn, too.

2) the woman was abused by her brother and or had other great reasons to shoot him, which she wisely made look like an accident (or the cops gave her a pass under the circumstancs). now the dynamic has been replicated with one of her colleagues who is bent on sabotaging her career and she feels helpless to retake control any other way.

3) the killing of the brother was truly accidental and traumatic. her whole career has been focused on solving biotechnology problems in order to help people to try to make up for what she did. now her faculty colleagues are going to put her out on the street and stop her from doing her good work, all for stupid personal reasons. losing all perspective, she pulls out a gun. oh, the irony.

4) it's all about some other character - say, a parent. she shot her brother either to get revenge on the parent for something or because she thought it would please the parent. now she has built up her career and, at a critical time, she sabotages it and her own life while bringing great disgrace on the parent. or, alternatively, she learns she is going to fail to get tenure and cannot face the shame.

I doubt I'm actually going to write this thing, but is anyone else intrigued by this? Anyone else want to brainstorm alternative plotlines? What possibilities have I missed? For those of you who are genre writers, could you squeeze this into your genre? How?

More generally, any of you guys mine the news for story ideas?

The Party's Over

My friends over at the Office of Personnel Management have finally put an end to the world's longest snow holiday. It's funny how quickly new routines develop. This evening at 6:30 pm I went over to the twitter homepage and typed #OPM into the search field. Refreshing the results every five minutes virtually guaranteed I knew when OPM announced the status for the next day as soon as it happened, probably even more quickly than trying to hit OPM's own beleagued page. I wasn't surprised they're sending us back tomorrow, though the commute will surely be a beast.

The Lt. sadly returns to the office.

What completely freaks me out are all the people who say they WANT to go back to the office (and yeah, I understand deadlines don't evaporate just because you get a snow day - trust me, I get it). Maybe I have a particularly tranquil home life, or maybe I'd rather hit the gym and read and write and cook than go to the office (crazy me!), or maybe working in my boxer shorts on my couch without having to commute seems more appealing than the alternative, or maybe I'm just off the charts on introversion, or maybe all of those and more. But seriously, people, you want to go back to work?? WTF is wrong with you?!?

This used to be the Lt., but he's now in recovery!

Well, just one day to get through and then a three day weekend! (Of course that's our last holiday until the end of May.) Mrs. Lt. Cccyxx (aka belimperia) is headed out of town for the weekend, so assuming she makes it I'll have the place to myself and would like to make some headway on my new writing project, plus take care of some other tasks in the nebulous realm between the professional and the personal.

So posting may be light until next week.

Dental Odyssey From Hell

Following from my last post:

So what is the problem? I'm still not exactly sure. I went to the dentist in October and it didn't help me one bit - it made me feel like a total dumbass for even going, like some kind of dental hypochondriac. But the problem didn't go away.

i can has teethz?

At the end of January I couldn't take it anymore and I went back. My dentist and I evidently do not communicate well. I told her it felt like there was something stuck between two of my teeth all the time and she started flossing back there to show me there wasn't anything there. I said, "I don't think there's actually something stuck in there, but that's what it feels like." She said, "Well, there's nothing in there." Argh!

She takes an x-ray. She bangs on my teeth (the ones on the other side of my mouth from the problem area hurt for two days afterwards). She says "bite down here," "bite down here" on a plate. She doesn't check the fillings, doesn't inspect the teeth for a crack, doesn't even check my occlusion. Besides the x-ray, she's not doing anything I couldn't do in front of my bathroom mirror.

And with the x-ray...well, maybe it's because I am a sciency smarty pants, but not once but twice I caught her pointing at the wrong teeth. She lost my confidence for good right there.

The one thing we did establish is that I am bruxing (grinding my teeth). No shit, ya think? She says, "We can either get you a bite guard and you can see if it goes away, or you can go to the endodontist to see if you have a crack in the tooth." I say, "What do you recommend?" and she responds, "Those are options!"

Well fuck, lady, you're the dentist. You tell me.

the curse of diphyodonty

So I went to the endodontist. Trim man of about 60 - cool accent: might be Indian or might be Italian, who knows - but he exuded competence. Not that it's either here or there, but I liked him a lot. He tells me he's a root canal specialist and it's obvious I don't need a root canal (this was news to me - I was worried). He says root canal means serious pain but according to Dr. Google (I know, I should avoid Dr. Google) you can need a root canal even if your tooth doesn't hurt at all. He puts some cold stuff on the end of a long q-tip thing and pokes around a bit, asks me if it hurts here or here. He takes two x-rays and looks at my teeth with a magnifying glass. He tells me my tooth's not cracked, which is what I really thought it was. It's not the filling - the pain is wrong for that kind of problem.

He says, "You've got a gum problem. You need to go to the periodontist." He shows me that my gums are irritated. "Your teeth are very clean, you obviously floss, but look at this." He gently pokes with the dental pick at the gum between two teeth. All of a sudden there's blood everywhere - I'm looking in the mirror and it's all over my tongue. "This shouldn't happen."

Then he says what is probably the punchline. "By the way, you grind. It's bad. Maybe the periodontist can help fix your occlusion."

So I wonder if the grinding isn't stressing and irritating the gum.

I wasn't sure if the grinding was the cause or the result of the other problem, but this leads me to believe it's the cause.

Next steps: get a referral to a periodontist, find a new dentist and get a bite guard, and - most importantly - try to fucking relax.

Kristin, You're Breaking My Heart

You're shaking my confidence daily!
Oh Kristin, I'm down on my knees,
I'm begging you please...

Kristin Nelson just published this post on her blog, about how her agency is lacking submissions from men, especially in commercial fiction. She ends: "I probably shouldn’t say this but if you are a guy and your query is solid, chances are really good we are asking for sample pages. We want you on our client list. Jamie Ford is lonely."

But Kristin, I queried you only four short months ago, at the beginning of my search. I told you my novel was commercial fiction, which seems to be what you're really looking for. And I'm a guy. [checks between legs] No, I really am. [asks wife, who's thrilled the Lt. posted some Simon & Garfunkel lyrics] No, I really am.

But alas, within two days you sent a "dear author" reply rejecting me, not even asking for sample pages. (Thank you, btw, for your rapid response. I am still waiting for any response at all from several other October queries.) Now, granted, I was using Query 1.0 and not Query 3.x. I was young, Kristin. Young and inexperienced. And your "it just takes one yes" has actually (yes, in all seriousness, actually) been one of the most inspiring things I've heard in a rejection to date.

But really, the book is the same, even if the query has changed, and the book is good, Kristin, it's GOOD.

I'm here. You're there (in Denver, lucky). I want representation. You're looking for guys who write commercial fiction. Why, Kristin, why didn't it work out for us? Is it because I somehow didn't rise to the top in the 38,000 queries you considered last year?

Or it is because I truly do suck? Your most recent post makes me think this might actually be it.

Oh, Kristin - you know that you and I were meant to be. Give me a call, send me an e-mail, and I'll query you again, with my augmented Travener-improved (TM) query, and you will love me, and offer to represent me, and we will sell millions of books together.

And here I was going to end the evening by posting a picture of a boilermaker and a Chumbawumba MP3 in honor of my (THIRD!!!) snow day tomorrow, but now melancholia has set in. Well, I'll post the picture anyway, and sigh regretfully (adverbs are OK on blogs, right? I know I need to minimize them in my novel, Kristin, I know, but it's commercial so we don't want to eliminate them completely, do we?) and think of what could have been for us.

we got the bottle, you got the cup, come on everybody let's get....

Sigh.

Lt. Cccyxx's Super Amazing Weight Loss Tips!

Step 1: Develop some weird-ass fucking tooth problem.

No, seriously: people have been remarking on how svelte the Lt. is looking lately. Former co-workers at a happy hour, my brother...then last week, the HR lady (of all people - this is the woman who arranges sexual harassment training) at my work ("have you lost weight? your clothes look really baggy!"). My wife went into our dry cleaners the other day and the very harried-looking but friendly guy who works there asked her to tell him my secret. Well, there it is above.

yup, that's totes the Lt. - waxed chest and all

On New Year's 2009 I weighed 206 pounds. I was hovering around 200-202 or so through most of the year - dropped about five pounds before the wedding but then gained it right back. Then, October, this tooth thing started and by November I was in the high 180s. I've been dropping slowly ever since - this morning I was 181...after breakfast. When this started I told myself that if I dipped below 180 I would go to the doctor (just for a general check-in to make sure I'm not dying) and I'm close to that threshold.

It's a mixed blessing. Everyone seems to think weight loss is always a good thing. But my problem throughout life has been being too scrawny. Being fat's never been an issue - not even when I was 205 or so. In fact, weighing 200 pounds was an accomplishment I was proud of. Now, the weight's mostly come off my legs, my belly, and my face. My clothes are kind of baggy (my co-worker is right), my middle looks good, and when I go to the gym to lift (which I do three times a week) I haven't lost much, if any, strength. Generally I feel good physically.

What freaks me out a bit, though, is that I was definitely not trying to lose weight. I was doing some high-intensity cardio sessions (which are supposed to raise your basal metabolism) but I wasn't doing those faithfully enough to have made much of a difference. I've changed some habits that aren't directly related to the tooth issue - substituting lots of iced coffee and iced tea for diet soda, for one - that may have lead to my dropping a few pounds. I've also pretty much stopped chewing gum. But those kinds of things can't be the bulk (no pun intended) of it either.

Also, I'm stressed. I try not to blog much about work - a good policy for many reasons - but I am pretty darned stressed and thinking that a change may be in order. Things do not seem in balance for me. I have been feeling pretty needy lately, and my poor wife has borne the brunt of it. I would have thought being stressed would lead me to gain weight, but evidently not.

Here's the deal, though: if you have to think carefully about whether everything you put in your mouth will bug you, if you have to take the time to consider how it will feel to chew on everything, if you are constantly thinking about your mouth, and if what you do eat you chew slowly and cautiously, your eating habits will change. And I don't just mean crunchy stuff (though that's the worst) - I mean too hot, too cold, too sweet, too sticky, too acidic, too spicy. You will never just idly snack or throw random stuff into your mouth for the hell of it. It gets really easy to pass up the donuts in the break room all of a sudden. My wife made a big batch of delicious Christmas cookies and - even though they were around for weeks and I love them - I had maybe four of them because they were both sweet and crunchy. I can't tell you how many times I've had nothing but a can of soup for dinner lately.

Maybe I'll write tomorrow a bit about my efforts to figure out the cause of the problem. For now, let me know if you want to sign up for the Lt.'s Fat Camp: the program begins with a nice punch in the mouth. Your teeth may not thank me, but your waistline sure will!

[crickets chirping]

Despite being buried under Snowlapalooza (please, click on the link - it's priceless), with offices closed for a second day today, and with 5-20 (!) more inches of snow predicted for this afternoon/evening, that's the sound I'm hearing loud and clear on the writing front.

what do you mean the metro's still closed?!

Hello, agents? You guys still rejec...I mean reading queries? I haven't heard back from a single agent this month. It might be time to send out another blitz of queries soon. What I have been doing with some of this (much, much appreciated and needed, by the way) down time is working through some of the necessary groundwork to start writing my next novel.

It occurs to me that it has been nearly a year since I finished the first draft of my novel. Now, the interim has been quite busy: revising and more revising, getting feedback from a couple of readers, yet more revising, writing a query letter and synopsis, learning about the publishing industry, researching agents, actually beginning to query. But, besides a few abortive attempts at short stories, there hasn't been a whole lot of fiction writing going on. I am more than ready to get back into it, and will probably feel much better once I do. It's just I know myself and my style well enough to understand that, without proper preparation, there is no point. I'm almost there.yeah, you know how we roll!

Meanwhile, a couple of other interesting writing-related tidbits:

1) As I mentioned, I entered the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Submissions were capped at 5,000 (for adult fiction, with another 5,000 for YA) and I was surprised to see that the submission period apparently stayed open for the entire two weeks. I would have guessed they would have been deluged at the beginning and closed quite quickly. Anyway, those that have moved on to the next round (1,000 in each category) will be announced on Feb. 25 (just a few weeks from now). I'll let you know whether I make it.

2) I'd also been following these e-bay auctions Irene Goodman was doing for partial critiques. She's going to do a few each month. I kept tabs on her February auctions. She did four of them, for different charities. The auctions got 15-26 bids. Two of the critiques went for just over $600 and the other two for more than $1,000! I have to be honest: this is out of my price range. I am hoping attention will die down and the prices deflate at least a bit as this continues over the next few months. But really, even though I have a bunch of disposable income right now, I probably just wouldn't feel right spending more than $450 or so at absolute maximum. On the other hand, these are for charity, so....

3) Did you see the awesome feature that the Dystel & Goderich agents will be running over at their blog? It's like a mini Query Shark, over a much shorter timeframe and with each of the agents critiquing a query. Query Shark is the absolute best, but she has admitted she is hopelessly backed up with queries to critique. Full disclosure: I queried D&G in early December and have not received a reply. I'm still thinking of submitting a query to their Slush Week feature, though. The worst that happens is they don't choose it. Anyway, you have until February 12 to e-mail your query for the feature.

4) I also found this opportunity to have the fee waived for attending the Backspace Writers Conference in NYC at the end of May. I'd heard of this conference before and it seems like a very cool event, but once again, it seemed prohibitively expensive in terms of time (I'd have to take three vacation days) and money. I could get up to NY cheaply enough, and I have ways of slumming it up there too. But registration for both the conference and the seminar is $650! Woops, no it's not - it's $770 since the early registration deadline has already passed.

I've been to conferences here in DC that cost that much, but: a) they are industry-heavy and policy-focused, so everyone's oozing money; b) non-profit, academic, and gov't types get SERIOUS discounts; c) if you know anyone you can get the whole thing waived; and d) your place of employment always pays anyway. So if these guys are going to waive the fee, it sounds worth giving a shot. You have to snail mail your entry to them, and you have until March 1 to get it postmarked.

I am always on the lookout for writers conference in the D.C. area, so if anyone knows of any, pass the information along.

That's it. Check back tonight when I will update you all on my amazing weight loss secrets.

Well, At Least It's Not A Korean Restaurant!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

SnOwMG

Snowpocalyse Part Deux!!!


Snowmageddon!!!1!

Please, Metro. Please, OPM. Please, please, please.

I don't need the day off. But please, please with cherries on top, please can I work from home tomorrow?

ADDENDUM AT 6 P.M.:

When Scientists Write....

Just this sort of devastation can be unleashed on the world.

God protect us all from scientists who write!

Hey OPM!

You! Suck!

That is all.

On The Right Hand Of Sleep by John Wray

I pretty much agree with the Amazon reviewers on the main features of this member of the em-dash-instead-of-quotation-mark brigade:

1) The subject matter is ambitious. Austria, right after the Anschluss (annexation by Nazi Germany). A World War I deserter, at long last, returns to his hometown. There he becomes reacquainted with an old Jewish friend and falls in love with a woman whose cousin (and father of her young child) is in the SS. Which leads us to...

2) The story is predictable. Things ain't gonna turn out good for this little love triangle, nor (I doubt it needs to be said) for the Jewish friend. You might not be able to predict precisely what will happen, but you can narrow it down to a slim range of options pretty early on in the book.

3) The language is wonderful. Very descriptive. And yet...

4) The characters remain strangely flat. Voxlauer, the protagonist, is both desperate and unpredictable enough to be somewhat interesting. I can't really say that for the other characters. There are a lot of extraneous details, and I term them "extraneous" because their connections to the main narrative remain obscure to me even having finished the book. The author takes great pains to show parallels in the stories of Voxlauer and Kurt (the SS cousin and - besides history itself - the main antagonist) but any larger point is not at all clear. Surely the reader isn't supposed to believe the two are, minus historical context, equivalent?

A quick read, I would recommend this book, but not strongly. Despite my keen interest in this period in history, the story didn't make much of an impression on me, and I think that I will probably soon forget all but its broadest outlines.

Anyone else read it? Have opinions?