I’m about 2/3 of the way through the September issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction and my feelings are mixed. I’ve been forcing myself to read every story, front to back, which is not at all how I would read the magazine if I had picked it up at the newsstand. Isn’t that interesting? Because F&SF sent me the copy free, I feel obligated to read it more thoroughly than if I’d spent my own hard-earned money on it!
The first story, Alexaner Jablakov’s “Wrong Number”, has an intriguing premise, but ultimately fell flat for me. The idea is, there’s an auto mechanic who fixes not just cars but people’s lives — a power he developed out of his own grief and frustration over a brush with the super-natural. The “bad guy” in “Wrong Number” is a creepy guy who collects women using some sort of mind control — the deepest wish of everyone who’s lost a lover to someone else, made flesh and blood in the story. The protagonist of the tale is a woman who, after her own run-in with the creepy fellow, gave him a false number to throw him off her track; the story starts when she wakes years later up with that wrong number playing endlessly through her head, a curse laid upon her by the jilted would-be lover.
I’m trying to be clear here, because the story isn’t — the nature and workings of the mechanic’s powers are fuzzy and poorly explained, and the plot gets wrapped up in its own cleverness too often for comfort. I found myself spending more time trying to figure out what was happening and, more importantly, why than I did caring about the characters. The wrap-up is all too convenient, the story itself is held together by a string of coincidences (the mechanic is supposed to be able to control coincidence somehow, which makes the fact that I never overcame my disbelief all the more troubling), and the love story is, well… a bit boring.
My interest was held much more strongly by “Envoy Extraordinary”, by Albert E. Cowdrey. “Envoy…” describes the arrival of Vincent Khartoum, a fat and self-satisfied diplomatic officer from the slums of Peoria, IL, on the backwater planet Malakatha. Khartoum’s mission is to negotiate the dismantling of the planet’s space fleet, ostensibly to prevent its threatening a wormhole gate near the planet’s system. His partner in negotiation is a singularly repulsive figure, an interplanetary Idi Amin without the style or charisma, who lives in magnificent splendor while his planet’s citizens starve, and who takes pleasure in the debasement of others and his own aggrandizement. As he prepares his negotiations, Khartoum realizes that there is really no threat, given new military technologies in place, and begins to have misgivings about the nature of his trip.
“Envoy…” has all the makings of an insightful, suspenseful story, but drops it at the end. I don’t want to give away too much, so you’ll have to take me at my word when I say that it seems like Cowdrey’s story began to get away from him, spinning into a much larger project than he was comfortable with, so he literally blew it up. An interesting idea, and a character that I was beginning to care about, despite his many flaws and general dislikability, thrown over to tell a tale of petty spite.
Oh well.
More later…
Let me let you in on a little secret: college textbooks in the US are grossly overpriced. It’s been shown time and again that the same books can cost much less in Canada and the UK, and can often be ordered for less even after adding the cost of international shipping! Because they’re constantly revised (at least in part — most publishers won’t put out a new edition if it’s more than 30% changed from the last ones, because they have to lay out the whole thing over again!) it’s hard to get rid of textbooks, so you end up stuck with Introductory Chemistry when all you really care about is 17th century poetry.
A coule years ago, I found a flyer in my campus mailbox, from one academic publisher or another telling me how to respond to students’ complaints about textbook prices. The thing is, publishers want you to buy textbooks new, at full price; if they could, they’d outlaw the trade in used textbooks altogether. Even the Text and Academic Authors Association, of which I am a member, takes a strong stance against the sale of used textbooks which, after all, mean less royalties for authors.
But that’s not fair. Our audience as academic authors — and the clientele of academic publishers — are college students, many of them struggling to keep their heads above water. I teach some of my classes at a community college, where tuition is low — it is the cost of textbooks that causes many of my students to drop or to fail (because they try to go without books). If you’re writing for or publishing for college students, you have to respond at least a little to their needs — not act the role of the self-righteous victim because students naturally try to find the best deal they can, and not push unnecessary books into circulation when the ones published last year, or even 10 years ago, are still perfectly fine. How much does Introductory Physics change in the 2 years between editions anyway?!
I make sure my textbooks are available in the bookstore, but I also try to find links to discounted or used copies online, and encourage students to find the cheapest textbook prices they possibly can. And I feel fine about that — my job is to teach social science, not to market the bookstore. At the end of the day, fairness counts.
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Another interesting week at lifehack.org! This week’s posts were:
Design Better with CRAP, an introduction to basic design principles for writers, business people, and anyone else who needs to present information in the most effective way possible.
A Basic Guide to Thrift Store Shopping, a guide to making the most out of thrifting.
Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Research, tips for students who need to develop solid research skills.
Two of the articles, the design article and the research article, were big hits on digg this week, which baffles me. The design article was somewhat controversial (I suppose that’s the word for it) as I had drawn the core ideas there from a book by Robin Williams (not the comedian!) called The Non-Designer’s Design Book . In my rush to get the piece up, I hadn’t even stopped to think that the ideas I relayed were associated with a particular author, so I didn’t mention her — leading to some scattered charges of plagiarism and a visit from Williams herself, who was incredibly gracious. The nice part is that I struck up a nice email conversation with Williams, who suggested a couple of things to talk about in future posts.
The other “dugg” article is more baffling — at the moment, there’s some 900+ diggs on the research article. Since I’m pretty sure there isn’t a huge contingent of reference fanboys and fangirls out there, the best guess I can come up with to explain its digg-ness is that I mention Wikipedia in a positive light (though I recommend students not cite it in their written work). There seems to be some deep craving among students to have their favorite research source validated in some way. Other than that guess, I have no idea what caused so many readers to digg on the research piece.
Which suggests that, although as I’ve written earlier I think I might have a talent for writing stuff that people digg, I really don’t know what that talent consists of. I would not have guessed any of my pieces this week would attract excessive attention from the digg community.
I should add, it’s not that I’m obsessed with digg or anything like that — even though I’m a member from way back, I’ve never actually dugg anything, and I rarely visit the site (I do listen to DiggNation, though). Digg stats are one metric among several available to us as writers, and an intriguing one because digg does drive a lot of (a certain kind of) traffic. Digg offers a way of identifying trends among a subset of our audience, a slightly finer-toothed tool than the other stats available to us (Technorati rankings, Alexa ratings, Google PageRank, etc.). It also offers an interesting, of baffling, insight into my own writing — how well (or, in this case, poorly) I envision my own audience and realize that vision in my work. Not that I’m complaining — there’s worse things than inadvertently appealing to the digg audience!
This week, I’m starting a lengthy series, digging deep into a book I’ve just finished, and we’ll see how much attention the digg audience musters for that. I’m looking forward to it — it’s the first time I’ve tried anything like this, but it’s a fabulous book and I think I have a lot more to learn from it than just reading it can unlock. To find out which book, you’re going to have to wait an either a) read it on lifehack.org, or b) see next week’s lifehack.org post.
‘Cause I’m evil that way.
When I was in graduate school, I tutored low-income high school students through the Princeton Review’s non-profit branch, to prepare them for taking the SAT. While I had the satisfaction of knowing I was helping some really smart kids get into college, SAT prepping isn’t really education. Most of it consists of teaching kids how to game the system — the SAT is a really unsophisticated test, and all it takes is a few simple tricks to boost your score 100 or even more points.
The fight-the-system anti-authoritarian in me was perfectly comfortable with that, in that context, but the teacher in me wasn’t. What I really wanted was to be able to actually teach these kids, to help expand their horizons a little — especially as the New York City schools had failed them so badly. I would have liked to have been able to teach them actual English, Math, and Science skills, teach them to use their minds to take apart and reassemble the world around them.
In short, I wanted to be an actual tutor, a teacher, to teach them the way I’m now lucky enough to be able to teach my classes full of college students every semester. I love teaching at the university and at the community college, although sometimes I feel like we get them too late at the university, that most of what we teach — at least in the social sciences — should have been part of the typical high school education. Whether I’m teaching anthropology or women’s studies, what I’m usually teaching is how to look at the society around us with a critical eye, to see the rifts and contradictions that we’ve been taught to ignore, and the connections and relationships that we’ve also been taught to ignore. That we release our high school graduates into the wild without such skills is, quite frankly, to our enduring shame as a society.
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The folks at Fantasy & Science Fiction put word out that they’d send a free copy of their September issue to bloggers who agreed to write about what they’d read. I’ve been reading Fantasy & Science Fiction off and on for probably two decades now, but hadn’t picked up a copy in a while, so I was definitely willing to see what they’re up to these days — especially on their nickel! This will be the first of a handful of posts about the September issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction — what I like, what I don’t like, what I think overall. I’ve decided to read it more or less straight through, as time permits, and post on each story or article as I read them.
Of course, I broke that rule with my first reading. Kevin Haw’s “Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge” has an intriguing title and is short, so it caught my eye when I was first flipping through the magazine. “Requirements…” presents a kind of “archaeology of the future”, a single document detached from any explaining context or framework to help situate it, leaving the reader to imagine — as best s/he can — what sort of events led up to the creation of this:
1. Explain to your Merit Badge counselor what Mythology is and how it differs from folklore. Describe Participatory Mythology and why we study it. Discuss how the events of 23 September 2006 forever changed mankind’s relationship with the gods and explain why no one made note of it at the time.
What happened on September 23 last year?! “Requirements…” is good fun, and only a few pages long, with each requirement getting a little more foreign to our, merely mortal, worldviews. (I like, too, that in the post-whatever world, the Boy Scouts are still sexists who insist on believing in something called “mankind”. Never change, Scouts!)
After reading that piece, I started over at the beginning of the magazine, which I’ll post about later. I hope to finish the September issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction while it’s still on news stands, but life being what it is (which is complex and busy) I can’t make any guarantees.
In my ongoing experimentation with online advertising and paid writing services, I signed up for payperpost to see how it works. As with other sponsored posts here, any post written at payperpost‘s request will be clearly marked as such — in fact, it’s a payperpost requirement!
I’ve seen a lot of other blogs, especially those of other writers, that use payperpost and seem to like it, so I thought I’d give it a try and see what I think. It’s not that I’m especially looking to make this blog into a money-making concern — I’ve been blogging since 2000 without worrying overmuch about whether it paid the bills, or even paid for itself — but it seems like an interesting challenge. Since I’m looking to expand my writing business into copywriting, writing for the effectively random sponsors payperpost hooks bloggers up with should be good practice.
That doesn’t mean I don’t see payperpost becoming a solid source of revenue in its own right. I teach and I write at lifehack.org and I do some writing and designing for clients here in Vegas, so it’s not going to become my main income source, but a few extra dollars here and there never hurts, right? I’ll see what opportunities payperpost lists over the next few weeks and build a schedule — one/day, 3/week, whatever seems sustainable.
Here’s what’s new from me at lifehack.org:
Becoming a Great Step-Dad
Don’t Be Eeyore
Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Writing
Nothing spectacular like last weeks 1600+ diggs piece, but some nice work anyway. The first piece, on becoming a great step-dad, my partner asked me to write, so that one’s dedicated to her; a few people left some really nice comments on it, so I guess it touched at least a handful of readers. The last one is part of an irregular series I’ll be posting on writing and researching — next week, I’ll follow up with a post on research skills.
And that’s all.
Last night, my girlfriend and I are sitting in the garage (we’ve got a nice little sitting/smoking area out there) and relaxing when she sees a dog run by. Thinking it’s our neighbors chihuahua, she goes tearing off after it, barefoot, while I head to the neighbors to let them know their dog is out. We’ve got a billion dogs in our development, most of them either huge or pit bulls or both, so you know a chihuahua isn’t going to last long out there!
Well, the dog wasn’t our neighbors’, and I checked the other neighbors to see if they were missing a dog, and none were. Meanwhile, my partner — now accompanied by her 10-year-old, animal-loving daughter — had managed to corner the tiny dog, who was snapping at anyone who came too close. When I caught up with them, they were wondering what to do — you don’t go around volunteering to be bitten by strange dogs after all, however cute. Fortunately (you would think — but wait and see!) I could see a phone number on the dog’s tag, and the 10-year-old’s eyes were up to the task of reading it.
So, we call the owner. “You found Bella!” she shrieks.
“Yeah,” we said. “We’ve got her cornered in a stranger’s yard, so if you could come get her, that would be good.”
“Oh, we’re not home. Can you just hold on to her for now?”
“Well,” says my girlfriend, “the thing is, she keeps snapping and trying to bite my daughter, and so no, we can’t really get her. She’s scared and upset.”
“Oh, well, we won’t be home until Thursday — can you just stake her down and leave her?”
!!!!!
Might I mention at this point that we live in Las Vegas, where the average temperature this time of year is around 110°, with almost no humidity?
Back to the conversation: “Uh, no, we really can’t do that. How long has he been out already?”
“Oh, only a day. It’s weird that she’s biting, that’s really not like her.”
“How old is she?”
“4 months.”
Us: !!!
“Anyway,” they continue, “we’re in Henderson and don’t have a way home until Thursday, so if you could figure something out, that’d be great. Call us if you have any problems.” *click*
Henderson? Henderson’s not even out of town; it’s a half-hour drive from here!
So to summarize, their 4-month old puppy — just barely weaned, right? — went missing and they decided, “screw it, let’s go” and left for 5 days. After a day with no food and no water in the blazing heat, they were surprised that their puppy might be a little scared and nervous about people. And though they could come get her in less than an hour that’s too much work, so just stake the dog in the heat with no food or water for 4 more days.
Ri-i-i-i-ght.
Well, we called my step-son to bring treats from home (we have 3 dogs, so a ready supply of treats is always at hand) and between the treats and my step-daughter’s Dr. Doolittle-ish ways, we managed to calm the pup down and get her back to our house. Fortunately we have an old kennel one of our dogs outgrew, so we set her up in the garage (we’re trying to keep her away from the other dogs, none of which are that big, but still).
We’ve fed her a little, but she hasn’t held any solid food down; she’s thrown up several times. I imagine she’s badly dehydrated, though she’s clearly hungry too — she wolfs down anything we put in front of her. She’s cute as hell, though; a neighbor thinks she might be a miniature pinscher, which is as good a guess as any (I don’t know dog breeds at all, except for my own dogs’). And she’s super-sweet — as I write this, she’s curled up on the chair behind me, snoozing away. She didn’t even flinch when the neighborhood kids, alerted by the smell of new cute, came to gawk at her last night.
The owners have never called back. You’d think they might want to know what we did with their puppy, but apparently not. I hate the idea of turning her back over to them come Thursday. I mean, they left her to die in the desert heat, and even when the poor dog’s luck turned and someone who gives a damn found her, they couldn’t be bothered. We know some people who work in the police department, so we’re going to try to find out what sort of rights we (and the pup) have.
We can’t keep her, though — and right now, most of our energies are spent keeping the kids from getting too attached to her. Three dogs is already too much, maybe three dogs too much! But I’d rather take her to a no-kill shelter (she’s so cute, she’d be snapped right up anyway) than to her owners. I’ve literally been raging for the last 16 hours since we found her, the whole thing makes me furious.
If she doesn’t stop throwing up, we’ll have to take her to the vet. We’ll have to anyway if we manage to save her from her owners — we don’t know what shots she’s had or hasn’t had, though I guess we can be pretty sure she’s had her initial shots and is about due for follow-ups. At the same time you have to wonder if her owners, who can’t manage a half-hour trip across time, have bothered with shots.
A few rules, potential dog-owners:
- A dog is, like, you know, responsibility and stuff. Don’t do to a dog what you wouldn’t do to a kid.
- Heat kills. Pretty self-explanatory, but given the number of people that lock their kids in their cars in the summer heat out here, it bears repeating.
- Which actually leads me to revise the first rule above: treat your dogs betterthan you’d treat a kid. Kids at least have thumbs and critical thinking abilities; dogs are at our mercy and need us to do their thinking for them.
This weekend marks the end of my second week at lifehack.org, and what a week! Here’s what I posted this week:
Although I don’t normally pay much attention to article ratings on digg, being new on lifehack.org I wanted some way to assess my performance and diggs are a fair enough measure. So I’ve been watching my diggs, and I’ve been pleased to see my posts getting 60 or so diggs apiece (the average post on lifehack.org seems to get much fewer diggs). I know that counting diggs is a measure of a fairly selective segment of our audience, but it’s nice to see this little bit of recognition.
But then, my post on writing research papers — hardly the most interesting topic, I’d’ve thought — got over 1500 diggs! At some point, it was even on the front page! Not bad for a post that — given the comments on lifehack.org and on digg — was hated by quite a lot of people. Who knew research papers were such a hot topic?
So that was an interesting experience. I had to tell myself quite a bit that, however harsh some of the comments were, at least 1500 people liked the post well enough to digg it. What I’m realizing since I’ve been writing at lifehack,org is that I seem to have a talent for writing the kind of post that digg readers like to read — and I seem to do it without thinking about it all too much. It’s not the only kind of writing talent (and I’d like to think not the only talent I myself have!) but given the power digg wields over web traffic, it’s a nice talent to have.
I’ve just submitted my first Search Engine Result Page (SERP) at Mahalo, Jason Calacanis’ new “hand-written” search engine. The topic is “David Weinberger”, whose work I’ve been following for years. (You have to have one reviewed before you can take on a wider range of topics at the same time.)
The idea of a useful web search engine composed entirely of hand-written result pages is a little silly and grandiose — which is fine by me. I’m not sure how many SERPs I can write, though — the pay isn’t all that good and as it turns out, writing a page is a lot of work. But we’ll see — if I can get the work down to 20 minutes or so, it might be just barely worth it.
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