Category: Other Stuff

Coronavirus Log: Day 19

Whew.

It’s exhausting staying home. With your family. During a global health crisis. While still trying to do your job remotely.

For all that, though, things have settled into a (nice?) routine, and less time driving places, running errands, and going to kids’ activities has continued to mean more time for personal projects: home improvements, writing, reading, gaming, playing with kids. Really fortunate that this thing hasn’t yet hit our family or loved ones in any more immediate way than Stay-At-Home.

Part of the routine has also been reading the day’s news at night before bed. Not a good idea, yet I keep doing it for some reason.

stuff that’s been done

  • I’ve gotten back to work on revisions to an old story draft that I’ve had kicking around, literally, for years.
  • Finished watching the first season of Star Trek: Picard. More on that another time, but I generally enjoyed it. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes only out of a stubborn loyalty to all things Star Trek.
  • Been playing The Outer Worlds, as mentioned previously. It certainly treads some familiar RPG paths, but for all that, it’s quite immersive, and familiar is exactly the kind of comfort-gaming experience I’m looking for right now. Also dabbled a little in Disco Elysium (which is not at all on the familiar RPG paths), which I’ll pick up again when I’m done with TOW. Started both of these up because they’re Nebula nominees.
  • LOTS OF NEBULA READING. I’ve finished everything at novella length and shorter, but unfortunately I’ve run out of time on the novels. I’ve done my best to at least look through the one’s I hadn’t already read, in an effort to make sure the one I want to vote for really is my favorite. (I think it is). In general, about half the categories presented me with a clear favorite, and the others gave me some really tough decisions. So much strong and varied writing throughout. All-in-all, this has been a really enjoyable month of reading.
  • I unfortunately did not get to any of the Andre Norton MG/YA nominees. I’ll leave that decision to those more knowledgeable in the field, but I definitely need to make more time to get to this category next year. And I still want to read all of these in the near future.

Stay well, friends!

Coronavirus Log: Days 4-8

I’ve missed a few days! It’s been an odd combination of first having nothing new to report, and then having too much to do.

My children attend the same school system in which I teach, and Thursday was the day the district officially implemented our remote learning activities. (The teacher’s union helpfully and rightfully negotiated Tuesday and Wednesday as prep days for teachers develop resources and materials for an unprecedented situation). For me as a teacher, putting together activities for my students is actually a nice outlet–I do rather enjoy designing curriculum in general, and the present situation is something of a unique and enjoyable challenge. Even better, it’s really nice to read what my students are writing about this unique event. Now more than ever, it’s our writing that will help create community when we’re apart from each other.

As a parent, it’s a welcome relief to see my own children get back into their own school work. Their teachers have posted an impressive set of resources, complete with daily schedule and plenty of student choice, and none of it unreasonable or overly demanding. Truth be told, I think my kiddos are happy to have something new and engaging to do, though I don’t think they’d admit it. My second-grader had a virtual “snack time meeting” with his teacher and class this morning on Zoom. Really lovely to see the continued sense of community there, too.

Stuff that’s gotten done

  • Reading for the Nebulas has continued, if at a somewhat slower pace. Still reading my way through the novelettes, with a detour into the game writing category, as well. Really interesting to see the diversity of games there! I’ll write more about that particular category in a future post.
  • In my last post I mentioned watching The Walking Dead, which is one of three current shows I’m watching these days. The others are Better Call Saul, which continues to be just phenomenal. Monday night’s episode was so good, but then again I think I say that every week with this show. Definitely a topic for a future post. The third show I’m watching, of course, is Star Trek: Picard. Full disclosure: I’m entirely unable to remain objective about this one. Let’s just say I’m thoroughly enjoying it, and I’ll save my gushing at least until the first season ends (next week!), and I’m able to think and articulate a little more critically what I’ve enjoyed about it.
  • My kids got me to download and try playing Brawl Stars with them, which if you haven’t heard, is all the rage right now (at least with 2nd and 3rd graders). I can see the appeal for them, but I was like… meh. It’s hard to get into when you’ve just started playing The Outer Worlds! (Which, by the way… phenomenally immersive. Kind of like a cross between Fallout and Mass Effect so far. Absolutely nothing wrong with that!) Anyway, I’d much rather play M:TG or a board game with my kids than Brawl Stars. (Disclaimer: My negative attitude may be a direct result of having my butt whooped within the first five minutes of playing… Just saying. ;P ).

Coronavirus Log: Day 3

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Well, watching The Walking Dead tonight was a slightly different viewing experience in the context of an actual global pandemic.

As more and more widespread closures are announced, and for longer durations than originally planned, the reality of a partial national lock-down is starting to set in. We treated this mostly like a normal weekend at home, minus the usual hubbub of youth sports and activities, but tonight we also talked as a family to lay out what the first full “school week” might look like without school. We’re all in this, figuring it out together. The kiddos have a great attitude so far.

Stuff that got done

  • Sorted and boxed books for the near-future move we’re planning. There are many, many books. Should society fall, we’re doing our part to preserve our collective human knowledge. Between my psychologist wife and I, we’ve pretty much got covered the areas of statistics, social psychology, education, modern sci-fi and fantasy, the nearly complete works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and a healthy portion of the traditional Western and American literary and canon, including some in the original Latin and Greek. My kids will primarily be preserving Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Big Nate, Harry Potter, and the works of Mo Willems for posterity.
  • I installed two drawer catches on two kitchen drawers that never stay closed. In typical fashion, I made a simple project more complicated than it probably needed to be, but I still finished the job before the frozen lasagna was ready for dinner, so I call it a success. And now the drawers stay closed, which I have to admit is nicer than expected.
  • Nebula reading: Continued making my way through the novelettes, and I have to say, they’re really enjoyable so far.

Keep well, keep distant!

Coronavirus Log: Day 2

Twitter has been full of coronavirus content. I’m officially burnt out on toilet paper jokes. But here’s my favorite tweet so far:

Tweet by Ben Rosen Jerry is annoyed his girlfriend only washes her hands the length of the Kit Kat jingle George accuses a co-worker with allergies of having "corona cough" Elaine wants to break up with her boyfriend but he's quarantined Kramer starts making his own hand sanitizer in his bathtub 12:53 AM 3/7/20

That’s gold, Jerry. Gold!

Stuff that Got Done today:

  • Finished reading this year’s Nebula-nominated short stories. Some good stuff there, but I’ve narrowed it down to my top two. Going to have to sit with them for a few days. Mostly I read in-between parenting duties and…
  • Working on some home-improvement projects. Namely, I finally put the finishing touches on the DIY kitchen remodel we did five years ago. You know how these things go.
  • Tonight I started working through the Nebula finalists from the novelette category. Figured out how to get them all onto my Kindle for easier reading at the longer length. If your interested, here’s the list:
    • “A Strange Uncertain Light”, G.V. Anderson (F&SF 7-8/19)
    • “For He Can Creep”, Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com 7/10/19)
    • “His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light”, Mimi Mondal (Tor.com 1/23/19)
    • “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny 7-8/19)
    • Carpe Glitter, Cat Rambo (Meerkat)
    • “The Archronology of Love”, Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed 4/19)

Happy reading (and social distancing)!

Coronavirus Log: Day 1

With over a hundred confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Massachusetts, a number of Boston area schools are shutting down for a minimum of two weeks starting today, mine included.

I try to be a glass-half-full, silver-lining kind of guy, so as long as my family and I are all fortunate enough to be healthy, I’m going to see this as an opportunity to Get Stuff Done. Of course this means taking advantage of the extra writing time, but I’ve got plenty of other things to try crossing off my list.

First up today: Nebula reading!

As a newly-minted SFWA member, this is the first time I’ll be voting on the Nebula Awards–pretty exciting! I’ve always tried to read at least some of the various nominated works and eventual winners, but I’ve never read all of them. As someone with a ballot now, though, I feel a little extra responsibility to make an effort to read as many of the works as possible before voting closes at the end of March.

Nothing like a little social distancing to help with that project!

My plan is to start with short stories and work my way up the word-count categories to novels. (I’m worried that if I start with the novels, I’ll linger and take too long to read them and run out of time; whereas, if I leave the novels to last, I’ll be motivated to read more quickly.)

If you’re interested in checking out the full slate of 2020 Nebula finalists, you can see it here. In the meantime, here’s the list of nominees from the Short Story category:

Great Mustaches of Literature

It’s Mustache March! While I don’t plan on subjecting my clean upper lip to this old U.S. Air Force tradition and its popular civilian following, I have to admit that mustaches have always tickled me. So in honor of the old manly art of the mustache, I present to you some of the great Mustaches of Literature.*

*Mustaches only! No beards!

Mustache 1: The Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe in cravat, vest, and mustache.
The Poe: Simple and understated; the ideal complement to mussed-chic hair and dead, haunted eyes.

Mustache 2: The H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells in suit and tie with a subtle, secretive smile.
The Wells: Lush without trying too hard, to coordinate with mustachey eyebrows.

Mustache 3: The Mark Twain

Mark Twain in white suit, with big white hair.
The Twain: The bigger the hair, the bigger the eyebrows, the bigger the ‘stache.

Mustache 4: The G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, bespectacled and seated at a writing desk with pen, paper, inkwell, and a cup of tea. And his mustache.
The Chesterton: The mustache that wants to debate you.

Mustache 5: The Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle looking confident in swoopy, overgrown mustache.
The Conan Doyle: An impressive shape that suggests not so much a “mustache” as “bountiful nasal hair.”

Further Mustache Reading

Writer + Parent

Is this the child or the parent?

Bering a parent is hard.

Being a writer is hard.

Being a writer while also being a parent? Well… if you’ve tried, you know it’s not for the faint of heart.

In case you missed it, I wrote a blog post for the SFWA Blog last month, called, “Writing While Parenting,” a 10-step ‘guide.’ Hopefully it gives my fellow writer-parents a good, commiserative laugh, some practical ideas, and maybe even a little inspiration.

If you’re looking for more advice, best-selling author John Scalzi also gives some practical writing-while-parenting tips here, and there’s some good stuff in the comments on his piece, too.

Finally, here’s a goldmine panel of parent-writers as well. Enjoy!

Willy on the Web (or, Internet Shakespeare)

‘Tis true: there’s magic in the web of it…”

Othello, III.iv

Quartos.

Folios.

Textual variants.

Conflicting versions.

Competing editions.

Authorship questions.

Given the maze that is the textual history of the works of William Shakespeare, I love the fact that the Internet has become home to a hyper-textual labyrinth of so many high-quality Shakespearean resources.

I’ve never been one to sweat a folio versus a quarto, or a Stratfordian versus Oxfordian versus Baconian author. Whatever. I just like the plays. I love the language. I also like to geek out when I find some new online version or digital tool about the Bard, going all the way back to the early days of the Internet with MIT’s Complete Works, or the original digitized Shakespeare Insult Kit. (Still a hit with the high school crowd, I’m happy to report).

More recently, I’ve been using the Folger Library’s excellent Folger Digital Texts, which are a lifesaver when you realize you forgot your own copy of the book in the middle of teaching Midsummer, or just when you want an easy, clean way of putting a passage from Hamlet on the screen for the class to look at together.

Then just last week, I thought, “There must be an easy way to search for every instance of a word in the complete works of Shakespeare.” Turns out there is, and it’s called Open Source Shakespeare, which has a nifty search engine that does exactly that. At the time, I was looking for title ideas for a new sci-fi story (the word “device” appears 53 times in Shakespeare, as it turns out), and just now, I used it to find the quote at the top of this post (“web” appears 12 times). Check it out, nerds. Sorry about making you stay up past your bedtime.

I’m sure there are more. Even in the process of searching for the image I used in this post, I discovered Internet Shakespeare Editions. There goes my night.

What are your favorite online Shakespeare resources? Share in the comments! I’d love to know.

Lead, Lead, Led, Read, Read, Red

A brief public service announcement from the Office of Grammatical Pedantry:

The past tense of the verb “to lead” is spelled “led,” not “lead.”

More and more lately, I’ve been seeing this error. I blame that quirky verb “to read” and the natural human desire for consistency.

But come on, this is the English language. What’s consistency?

Even cultural bastions like The New York Times and The Boston Globe aren’t immune. From The Boston Globe (3/31/19):

“The incident lead to an 11-day inpatient hospital stay…”

For what it’s worth, the spelling error isn’t the most disturbing thing in that article, which is about kids being hospitalized for Fortnite addictions, but still. Ugh.

You might be wondering, Well why shouldn’t “lead” and “read” work the same way? I don’t have a real answer, but I do have a theory, completely ungrounded in anything but my own guesswork:

  • Led (v.) is the past tense of Lead (v.), but
  • Red (adj.) is a color, so
  • Read (v.) is the past tense of Read (v.), while
  • Lead (n.) is a kind of metal, or what a pencil uses to write (but not really).

Here’s a handy mnemonic for you to use: If you don’t use “led,” I’ll see red.

And if you don’t believe me, here’s Merriam-Webster on the subject:

There is some persistent confusion about lead and led. Or, we should say, there is confusion about the leads and led. Lead is both a noun and a verb, as most people know. There are several unrelated nouns spelled lead: one most commonly refers to a metal (as in, “The paint was made with lead”), and the other most commonly refers to a position of advantage (as in, “Our team was in the lead”). The verb lead is pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to a position or advantage is also pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to the metal, however, is pronounced /LED/, with a short e. To this moderately convoluted situation, add the past tense and past participle of the verb lead, which is led and pronounced like the metal noun lead with a short e. The homophonic confusion leads to homographic confusion, and you will therefore occasionally see lead in constructions where led is called for (as in, “She lead the ducklings to safety” instead of “She led the ducklings to safety”). The correct past and past participle of lead is spelled led. If you aren’t sure whether to use led or lead as the verb in your sentence, try reading it aloud to yourself. If the verb is pronounced /LED/, use led.

So please, in your writing, lead by example so everyone who might read you can learn that lead is not like read, and if you’ve already led by example, then everyone who might have read you owes you a debt of gratitude for taking the lead on led so we can put this stupid mistake to bed.

Gene Wolfe, Requiescat in pace

Gene Wolfe passed away today. There are plenty of writers who knew him personally and will memorialize him beautifully. I’m just one reader who didn’t discover him until well into adulthood.

In a way, I consider myself lucky. I have almost his entire literary opus at my feet, stretching out to the horizon before me. I can count on one hand the stories of Gene Wolfe I’ve read so far: “Memorare,” The Fifth Head of Cerberus (twice), “The Friendship Light,” and The Knight. I’ve just started The Wizard. I’ve also read a few interviews and essays here and there.

I have yet to be anything but wildly impressed by it all. When I recently finished The Knight, it was in the grips of a physical exhilaration I have not felt from a book since first reading Tolkien as a boy. The Fifth Head of Cerberus needs no praise from me, but I already know I’ll be reading it yet again. “The Friendship Light” terrified me. “Memorare” I’ll be rereading tomorrow because it seems an appropriate way to honor his memory. Then back to The Wizard.

You know that feeling you have when you’ve finished the last page of a great book, or the last book of a great author, and you recall in a flush of nostalgia how it was when you first set out on that particular reading journey? There’s nothing quite like reading great books for the first time, discovering their wonder for yourself, knowing in the back of your mind what the moment is. That’s where I stand with Gene Wolfe as a reader right now. It’s not a bad place to be.

I never met Gene Wolfe, but I did get to meet his longtime editor once, the late David Hartwell. It was at Readercon a few years back, where I was lucky enough to score a seat at a kaffeeklatsch with Mr. Hartwell. I knew he was a big-time, venerable editor at Tor Books, but I did not realize at the time that he was Gene Wolfe’s editor–that he had been responsible for bringing Gene Wolfe’s great works to the world.

Well, in the course of the conversation, Mr. Hartwell mentioned that he knew one editor who didn’t believe anyone really enjoyed reading Gene Wolfe; people just liked to show off and act like they did. I had read one, maybe two Gene Wolfe stories at that point, and I had enjoyed them. So I asked David Hartwell, “Do you enjoy Gene Wolfe?”

He paused, nodded, and said matter-of-factly, “I do,” and moved on with his stories and sage advice.

You don’t know what you don’t know, and I didn’t know to be embarrassed by my question until I discovered sometime later that I had in fact asked Gene Wolfe’s editor if he enjoyed reading Gene Wolfe.

Whoops!

As for Gene Wolfe, he enjoyed Tolkien, so it seems fitting to end with some words from the latter:

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.
“It’s a gift!” he said.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle

Gene Wolfe was a gift. David Hartwell enjoyed Gene Wolfe. Lots of other people, it would seem, enjoy him too.

Here’s to the many words of Mr. Wolfe that I look forward to enjoying still.