Okay.  So the title is a lame attempt to play off the "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" thing.  I'm at a two week Science Fiction novel writing workshop at the University of Kansas in Lawrence Kansas.  It started on June 28 and I'll be heading home early in the morning on July 11.  So far I love it. 

The trip in wasn't too great, though it had its moments.  I came in by train carrying all of the electronic stuff and clothes I figured I would need for a two week stay.  That added up to A LOT of luggage. My wife took me to the train station in Naperville.  We waited together at the train station, but when the train got there the hustle and hastle of getting all of the luggage onboard meant that I left without really getting a chance to say a last goodbye to her.  It felt wrong to go away for that long without a proper goodbye.

By pre-arrangement, one of the workshoppers from closer to Chicago met me on the train.  After a few misadventures we ended up sitting together and chatting a good hunk of the 8 hour trainride.  He's a good guy, with the rare virtue of talking until the important stuff has been said and then stopping.  The trainride was mostly uneventful though the train did stop for twenty to thirty minutes due to a severe thunderstorm and high winds somewhere in Iowa.

The workshop itself has been useful.  I have a tendency toward mild Turtledove syndrome (umpteen POV characters with their own distantly related subplots that I have to pull together at the end),  My Work In Process Novel has four POV characters and I could not for the life of me figure out how to pull them all together at the end of the story.  I was also having trouble having enough subplot to justify the existence, or at least the major role, of two of the four POV characters.  That has left me stalled at around 73,000 words in a projected 100,000 word novel since early December of 2008. 

The reaction in the workshop was virtually unanimous.  At least one and hopefully both of the weak POV characters had to go.  At first I resisted that.  There is good stuff in those subplots and I hated to get rid of it.  The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that the two subplots both weaken the story in various ways.  Ulimately I'm going to have to get rid of them as POV characters and somehow incorporate what is necessary from their portions of the story into the remaining two POV characters.  I have ideas as to how to do that, and I have over a week where I can devote most of my time to making it work.  Hopefully, by the end of the workshop I'll have the novel's structure in shape to let me finish it up in a reasonable amount of time and start marketing it.  That's the plan, anyway.

I wasn't sure how good the quality of people would be at the workshop, but I've been impressed.  They seem to have been pretty selective.  Everyone (with the possible exception of me) in my section of the workshop has some serious writing talent to bring to the table.  A couple of people have a long ways to go in terms of plotting ability, but even there the writing ability shines through.  This is the first time I've spent a serious amount of time with a group of other science fiction writers and it feels great.  It feels like I can be myself to an extent I'm rarely able to in my normal life.  This could get addictive.  I may want to come back.

 

Humans have much higher cancer rates than chimpanzees.  This guy points to evidence that chimps have much better mechanisms for pre-programmed cell death than we do.  He speculates that our ancestors lost some of these mechanisms as part of the development of larger brains.  So: a trade-off of bigger brains for being more susceptible to cancer.  Sounds about right.  There is rarely a free lunch in nature.

I've studied climate and climate change off and on for a couple of decades as a serious amateur.  I've been toying with a couple of science fiction novel ideas that would require more detailed knowledge of past climates than has been available.  I go back to the concepts every four or five years and do a crash research job to see if the science has advanced enough to in good conscience do the novels.  Between times I pretty much ignore the subject.

A few months ago I did another research sweep.  This last research sweep turned up a rather ludicrous development: There are now Democratic and Republican versions of past climates, and theories of how the climate works.  To which I say: what on earth?   I'm of the 'pox on both of your houses' school of politics for the most part, so this development would normally leave me mildly annoyed.  However, most of the research sources I normally use have been cluttered by highly partisan bickering and highly spun attempts at science to the point of being unusable. 

People seem to pick a point of view on whether the current warming is man-made based on their political affiliation and then flail away at each other without bothering to dig deeper than a small playbook of sound bites on climate and a huge playbook of propaganda tricks.  I recently saw a poll that showed a little over 50% of Democrats believing in man-made climate change and around half as large a percentage of  Republicans.  Again, I say what on earth?  Climate as a political issue?  I don't know about you, but that boggles my mind.

Here is a brief, hopefully non-partisan, very big picture summary of what we know about the earth's climate since the end of the age of dinosaurs and the start of the age of mammals around 65 million years ago:

The earth was a much warmer place 65 million years ago, with dinosaurs and large early mammals reaching north into the arctic circle and down into Antarctica.  There are a variety of reasons for that.  Among the more important ones: ocean circulation was very different back then.  North and South America were separate and ocean currents flowed between them.  There was also open ocean between Europe, Asia and Africa. That allowed currents to circulate freely through the tropics.  At the same time, ocean circulation around Antarctica was cut off, because Antarctica was connected to both South America and Australia, forcing currents away from the South Pole.  The depths of oceans became warm, buffering the planet from any cold snaps.

About ten million years after the dinosaurs died out, climate abruptly got even warmer.  There are theories about what happened, but at this distance of years (55 million years) any conclusions are tentative.  One of the more likely theories is that temperatures crossed some kind threshold that released large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.  That gas warmed the earth still further, and temperatures got high enough that for a period of several tens or hundreds of thousands of years tropical rainforests and the early ancestors of monkeys reached close enough to the poles that they were able to cross the Bering Strait into North America.  Imagine Alaska having the climate of Brazil and you kind of get the idea.

The climate stabilized through mechanisms that are not well understood, then went back down to about where it was before the episode, though not without a large number of extinctions.  For most of the rest of the age of mammals, the earth stayed warm, with few or no glaciers outside of a few mountainous areas of Antarctica. 

Somewhere around 20-25 million years ago, the land bridge between South America and Antarctica broke up.  Australia had broken free and headed north toward Asia millions of years before.  Ocean currents were now free to circulate directly around Antarctica, no longer being forced to the tropics by South America.  Antarctica and the oceans both began to cool.  Glaciers grew until they eventually wiped out essentially all land dependent life on mountainous Eastern Antarctica.  Western Antarctica, which would be a series of islands wthout the glacier on top of it, grew and lost ice sheets multiple times. raising and lowering sea levels as massive amounts water was locked and unlocked from the ice.  The rest of the world got colder and harsher, but gradually.  There were still tropical forests filled with apes and monkeys in Europe as late as 5 or 10 million years ago, and a few apes and monkeys survived in tropical refuges in Spain and Italy until ice sheets advanced far enough to eliminate those refuges during the Ice Ages.

Climate really started deteriorating when the Bering Strait opened around 5 to 6 million years ago and the North and South America connected a few million years later.  That forced ocean circulation even more toward the poles.  Somewhere between one and two million years ago, the earth cooled enough that it entered a series of cyclical ice ages, punctuated by short interglacials.  During the ice ages, glaciers covered much of Europe and large parts of North America as far south as Illinois.  Those glaciers tied up enough water that the Bering Strait became dry land again multiple times.  During interglacials, climates are generally about like they are currently. We're in a fairly typical integlacial.   Some of the earlier interglacials seem to have been somewhat warmer than our current one.  There may be a trend toward more severe ice ages.

The beginnings and endings of ice ages are apparently mediated by slight cyclical differences in the earth's orbit and inclination.  Ice Ages and interglacials are not like flipping a switch.  During an Ice Age, glaciers will advance and retreat multiple times.  Interglacials may or may not be more stable.  Some ice cores from Greenland seemed to indicate that the last interglacial before ours was sometimes much less stable than ours has been so far, but time has erased enough of the clues that it's difficult to be sure .  Earlier interglacials are even less known. 

Our Interglacial has lasted well over ten thousand years.  At some point we'll go into another ice age.  When?  Probably not in the next couple of hundred years, and possibly not in the next several tens of thousands of years.  

So if we don't screw it up, the climate will be pretty much like it has been for the last couple of hundred years, right?  That's a key question and one that we don't have solid evidence on.  How much do temperatures and other climate variables vary naturally in an interglacial?  Well, we have a good idea how much it varied in the last 100 years based on actual records, and a reasonable idea how much it varied in the last 1000 years based on spotty records and climate proxies like tree rings. During that period, the main driver of really extreme climates was apparently large volcanoes.  The really big ones can cause extremely cold years, like the 'year without a summer' in the early 1800s, where it either snowed or frosted every month of the summer in New England.

Beyond the last 1000 years, for the first more than ten thousand years of this interglacial, we have spotty proxies that are gradually gettng better,  Even if we fill in the record for the first part of this interglacial, how much does that tell us about the future?  Does the climate ride get bumpier in later parts of a long interglacial?  Does it get hotter on average?  Does it get cooler?  Do temperatures become more or less variable?  Those are vital questions, but given how little we know about previous interglacial and given how different they've been, I can't see an easy way of answering them. 

I've been following events in Iran as best I can, which isn't particularly well given the censorship and the wild rumors. My take on it is that several factions in the regime are trying to take advantage of the situation to gain power, and as a result they are playing with fire. Based on what I've read, it looks like the guy who was reelected president (Ahmadinejad), the thugs in the Revolutionary Guard, and the 'Supreme Leader' (Khamenei) are going for a crackdown that will consolidate their power and marginalize or crush other key players in the hierarchy.  They may even have deliberately provoked the demonstrations and be stoking the violence to do that.  The election was so obviously and crudely fraudulent that whoever fabricated the results had to know that no one would believe them.  The timing and nature of the results seem calculated to send a message of "Yeah, we stole it.  So what are you going to do about it?"

This could go south in a very bad way, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians massacred and the nuttiest fringe of an already nutty regime in charge.  I could see Stalin-style purges of the Shia clergy, and mass terror--with whole classes of people shot or deported to wastelands to starve to death.  Troublesome ethnic minorities like the Kurds could get a taste of genocide.  If things go that way, the police state apparatus will then turn on and eat most of the people who unleashed it.  That's happened almost every time anyone has unleashed that particular tiger.

Hopefully it won't go that route.  Unfortunately, even the best scenarios for a resolution will probably turn out pretty bad.  If enough of the clergy with enough authority speak out at the right time, traditional police and army units might get tired of watching thugs like the Basij types hurting and killing innocent people and take a hand against them.  That would probably lead to something approaching a civil war, because the thugs have had a free hand long enough that they'll undoubtedly fight back, even against the police and regular army.  Of course they are supposedly made up of the religiously faithful so the ones who take the religion seriously might be deterred if enough religious leaders speak out against the violence.

There is also the possibility of a general strike, especially among oil workers. If the flow of oil money gets cut off, the economy goes south in a big way, and paid supporters of the regime feel the pinch in a few weeks to a month. 

Wild cards: Iran is very close to a majority-minority country,with Kurds and at least half a dozen other large minority groups collectively making up around 49% of the populations.  Some of the larger ones are: Kurds - 7%, Azeris - 24%, Arabs - 3%, and Baluchis- 2%. Several of those minorities (though apparently not the Azeris) have simmering small-scale armed insurrections going, of which the one among Iran's 4 million Kurds appears the most serious.  Unrest among some of these groups is probably going to get more serious if unrest continues.  In the case of the Kurds, that could potentially bring in the Turks, who probably wouldn't like the idea of an independent Kurdish state forming in Iran.  At that point things get really interesting.

One other wild card: During the Hussein years, Iraq hosted a well-armed, rather tough group of anti-clergy Iranians (People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI)).  They're secular leftist and apparently not much of a step up from the current regime.  The US disarmed, but protected them.  Last I heard, the Iraqi government was trying to push the last 3500 of them back to Iran.  If those guys go back to a country in chaos, they may make an unstable situation even more unstable, putting hardened revolutionaries onto the streets at a time when the country is in the balance.  On the other hand, if Iraq turns them over to the Iranian government at this stage they'll probably be killed to avoid any chance of them taking a hand in a potential revolution.

So how would this all affect us?  Civil war and oil worker strikes would probably mean at least some oil supply interruptions, and probably an oil price spike.  If Ahmadinejad and company consolidate power further and crush the current unrest, things could get seriously ugly, with increased and more open support for terrorism and even more hostility to the US and Britain.  The leaders of the opposition are by no means prize packages, and they're certainly not the leadership the US would prefer, but they are probably the best of the bad alternatives Iran faces.  Can they win?  Possibly.  Can they win without massive bloodshed?  I hope so, but I doubt it.

I went to my high school reunion this past Saturday.  It was a mixed bag.  On the one hand, there was very little overlap between the subset of people I hung out with in high school and the subset of people who came to the reunion.  I recognized 4 people (one them via his name tag).  Of the people I hung around with, only one showed up (and that by prearrangement--'I'll go if you go').

I don't remember a lot about high school--mainly just personal highs and lows.  However, I recognized one lady from my class because we were in a college writing class/writers group together.  After 20-plus years I couldn't remember her name but I could remember her story.  Weird, huh?  It was a pretty well done horror story except that the narrator/POV character died near the end but continued narrating.  She was a pretty good writer, but apparently hasn't written for year.   I chatted with her for several minutes.  She seemed like a very nice person.  Then I walked away and immediately forgot her name again.

This is disillusioning.  According to this report, large dinosaurs were probably only about half as big (in terms of mass) as had been previously calculated.  If that holds up it will make a lot of textbooks (and other books) obsolete.  It does make dinosaurs fit into the rest of the gamut of living things a bit better though.

I've been a bit preoccupied with revisions to my novel Exchange.  It's getting there, but the last 10% of getting the words exactly right and getting a few crucial plot elements exactly the way I want them is taking a while.

I took a break on Friday for my daughter's graduation party and on Saturday for Duckon (the science fiction convention).  I ran into a couple of old friends, Jim Rittenhouse and Robert Alley and some new ones.  Jim was stretched in all directions and we didn't get a chance to talk in any depth.  I always enjoy chatting with him.  His adopted daughter's sister (adopted by a different family--long and interesting story) was there and her father was one of the con's guests of honor.  He does biological research for one of the NASA research centers and is a fascinating speaker.

I asked one of the panels he was on a question: If you could go back in time to the early 1960s and give the architects of space policy some words of advice to accellerate the space program or get it closer to the vision that a lot of people had for it bakc then, what would they be? 

One of the other panelists got off on a political tangent irrellevent to the question and then the panel drifted away to other subjects, but I still think the question was a good one.  The panelist blamed Nixon for the space station cutbacks after the moon landings.  I think Nixon was among the worst presidents in modern history, but I don't see him as the villian in that particular area.  The space program lost political and congressional support shortly after the first moon landing, and congress wasn't going to fund anything massive in that time frame anyway. 

So how would I answer the question?  In retrospect, going with Lunar Orbit Rendesvous for the monshots rather than Earth Orbit Rendesvous might have been a mistake.  Earth Orbit Rendesvous would have probably taken longer, but left a more useful legacy of hardware.  Still, the biggest mistake NASA and other space supporters made was probably not recognizing that the moon landings would be greeted by a public attitude of 'We won.  The race is over.  Time to go on to something else.' 

I've been deep in editing mode for the last several days--just surfaced to update this blog.  I'm working on my novel Bear Country (probably to be retitled Exchange.  I'm into the most frustrating and time-consuming part of editing: tweaking the words and details to get them not just right, but as powerful as they can be.  Wish me luck.  I far prefer the initial writing, but if Exchange is ever going to hit the book shelves it needs this last bit of polishing.

Another ScienceDaily article: This one looks at the supposed connection between sociability and brain size in Carnivores.  The study itself is interesting, but the more interesting aspect of it is something that the article and the underlying study don't mention.  I'll get to that in a bit, but first let's look at the study itself.  The people involved looked at fossil and living Carnivores and found some interesting things: (1) Brain size is only correlated with how social an animal is among the dog family.  There doesn't seem to be any correlation in cats and their relatives, in hyaenas, or in meerkats and their relatives. (2) One group of carnivores (an extinct group called the Bear Dogs) actually had their brains get smaller over time.  (3) The ancestors of dogs/wolves/coyotes, etc, abruptly developed bigger brains around 10 million years ago. (4) In a lot of groups there wasn't a firm trend toward bigger brains.  Sizes went up.  Sizes went down.

That's all interesting, at least to me.   More interesting though is what doesn't get asked:  Why does one Carnivore have a brain size totally out of line with any of the others--actually comparable to a Great Apes brain?  I looked up the raw data for the study, and as usual one animal didn't fit with the rest:  Helarctos malayanus--the sun bear, a little hundred pound bear from southeast Asia.  It has a brain roughly 2.5 times as large as it 'should' for it's body size.  That figure is apparently not a misprint.  Figures similar to it have been floating around the literature for at least 30 years, usually with nobody commenting on it. 

I'm not sure why nobody comments or seems to notice that anomaly.  Large brains are expensive organs to maintain.  It takes several times the calories to maintain an ounce of brain tissue as it does to maintain an ounce of muscle.  If an animal has an anomalously large brain it must have some kind of anomalously high  need for memory or processing power.  It would be interesting to find out why, but for some reason sun bears and their brains seem to fall through the cracks.  They just don't fit, and science sometimes ignores things that don't fit.

ScienceDaily cites a meta-study on the frequency of fraud and other misconduct by scientists.  Basically they looked at several studies where scientists were asked (anonymously, I assume) whether or not they had committed various kinds of misconduct or knew someone who had.  Here's the money quote:

"On average, across the surveys, around 2% of scientists admitted they had "fabricated" (made up), "falsified" or "altered" data to "improve the outcome" at least once, and up to 34% admitted to other questionable research practices including "failing to present data that contradict one's own previous research" and "dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate."

In surveys that asked about the behaviour of colleagues, 14% knew someone who had fabricated, falsified or altered data, and up to 72% knew someone who had committed other questionable research practices."

The 2%/34% figures probably are too low.  Not everyone is going to be honest, even on a supposedly anonymous survey.  The 14%/72% figures hopefully over-estimate the frequency of misbehavior because several people may have the same acts of fabrication/misconduct in mind.  On the other hand, not every piece of fraud is known, even to a scientist's close colleagues, and in multi-scientist studies the actions of one person can taint the whole study.

The ScienceDaily article points out that the frequency of the misconduct is higher in medical/pharmaceutical areas.  Great, huh?  That's not surprising.  If a drug company has poured hundreds of millions into research and testing of a new drug they're going to have an incentive to subtly or not so subtly influence the studies that determine whether or not it comes to market.

It's logical that the more money is at stake, the higher the likelihood of fraud or other misconduct.  That has an ironic correlary: The more money you throw at a scientific field, the more likely you probably are to get fraud or junk science back for your money. 

There is more to it than that though.  There are scientific fields where a small group of prestigious scientists stake their reputations on a viewpoint and as they get older make it very dificult for opposing viewpoints to even be published.  A classic case of that happened in the early to mid 1900s, when a group of very bright anthropologists decided that humans arrived in the Americas only a few thousand years ago.  Anyone who claimed evidence of older human occupation was fiercely debunked.  That went on for decades before the evidence for the older Folsom and Clovis cultures became overwhelming.  Even then, acceptance of older cultures was slow, reluctant, and often due to the death or retirement of the scientists opposing it, rather than their acceptance of older dates.

So what do we about science fraud?  Peer review should catch a lot of it, but fake data has made it into the most prestigious of scientific journals.  Peer reviewed journals should:

(a) Insist that the raw data for all studies be made available in a useable form
(b) Insist that the source code for any custom programs used in massaging or analyzing the data be made available
(c) Insist that enough details of the methodology be made available for an outsider to replicate the study.

Those requirement all seem like a no-brainers.  If it's really science it has to be replicatable.  Unfortunately, it appears that journals tend to apply those kinds of requirements selectively if at all.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090528203745.htm
 

Remember the "Year Without a Summer I talked about a few weeks ago.  I got to thinking: How would a similar year have changed  history at various points.  Here are some possible dates for the climate altering super-volcano:

1.       The late summer of 1913.  The year without a summer would be 1914, with the most acute food shortages coming in early 1915.  And the potential combatants in World War I would  have a dilemma in the summer of 1914.  It looks like a major crop failure is about to happen.  Do you go to war, dragging peasants away from their fields and making matters worse?  Are you sure you’ll be able to win before food stocks get disastrously low?  Wouldn’t it be better to wait a year or two?  Paper things over and wait for the next crisis?

If the European Great Powers postpone World War I until the food shortages ease, possibly in 1915 or more probably 1916, what difference does it make?

Russia would probably be somewhat stronger because of its rapid industrialization.  The Czarist regime would be somewhat more moribund. 

Austria-Hungary would have changed somewhat.  I’m not sure if the changes would on balance be good or bad for the regime.  Among other changes, they were planning to establish universal male suffrage in Galicia, which was majority Polish but with a large Ukrainian minority, which was actually the bulk of the population in the eastern half of the province.  Poles had traditionally dominated the entire province politically and economically, but universal suffrage would have altered that to some extent.

Italy would have had a couple more years to rebuild weapons stocks after the Italian-Turkish war, which would have made its army somewhat more formidable.

I’m not sure how France or Britain would have changed.  Ireland was a problem for Britain in 1914.  It would have probably still been a problem in some form in 1916.

Airplanes would have had another couple of years to develop, and the technology was developing fast.  Cars and trucks would be more common and more reliable.  I’m guessing we would see more armored cars early in the war, and tanks would be developed at an earlier stage in the war, though probably chronological after they were developed historically.  Airplanes would probably develop as war-fighting weapons earlier in the war too, though chronologically later.

Radio would play a bigger role earlier in the war than it did historically.  The extra development time might change the course of postwar development, though I’m not sure how.

The war would probably go on for at least two to three years because the sides were evenly enough matched that a quick, clear victory is unlikely, especially given the geography of the western front.  There was too much firepower in a confined space for much maneuvering, and the defense had a major advantage in strategic mobility.

2.       Actually a summerless year during any of the World War I years or the immediate aftermath would have a major impact on history.  So would a similar year in 1930 or 1931, when the Great Depression was starting to bite.

3.       The summer of 1939 or 1940 or even 1941?  Any one of those could get interesting.  Let’s try 1940.  The blitz is rolling and all of a sudden we’re in the middle of winter in May, with the Luftwaffe a lot less effective due to cloud cover and the panzers a lot less mobile due to mud.  Then we get another snowstorm in early June, this one lasting 5 days.  Would it be enough to stop the Germans?  What impact would the associated crop failures have on the rest of the war—both in Germany and the Soviet Union? 

Move the summerless year forward to 1941.  Snow in June.  That would make the prospect of going into Russia a little less appealing, wouldn’t it?  What if the Germans were forced to postpone the invasion until the summer of 1942?  What would they do in the meantime?  What would the Soviets do?  How much stronger would the Soviets be?  Would the Soviets go forward with a rumored invasion of Iran?

How would the Germans do up against the number of KV1s and T34s the Soviets would have by the summer of 1942?  On the other hand, what would a year where the crops failed do to the Soviets with their chronic food shortages?  What would another famine do to the ability and willingness of Soviet peasants to fight for the Soviet regime?

Of course the Germans weren’t exactly flush with food at any point during the war, so the poor crops would cut both ways, though they would probably hurt the Soviets more.

4.       The immediate aftermath of World War II—say 1946.  That would hit the Soviets and the rest of the eastern block very hard.  Add famine on top of the devastation left over from World War II, and the resilience of the Soviet regime would be tested in a major way. I think the regime would survive because those were some very tough resourceful people.  The Soviet Union might have been more vulnerable in some ways later, maybe in 1968 or some time in the 1970s under Brezhnev.  The early 1980s would have been a very bad time for the Soviets to have been backed into a corner.

The last of my nine uncles died Friday morning of emphysema and heart problems.  He smoked most of his life, but stayed reasonably healthy into his late 70s.  The transition from strong, independent friend to a guy in a wheelchair in a nursing home seemed to happen shockingly fast.  I saw him a month or two ago and he was still at home, still walking, his mind still alert and sharp, though he needed oxygen 24 hours a day.  He was still the same guy, with the same sly sense of humor and strong opinions about what was going on in the world.  I saw him again a week or so ago and he was in a wheelchair, almost unrecognizable.  He recognized me, and tried to carry on a conversation, but his mind kept wandering.  The humor was gone.  Most of the personality was gone.  Now he is gone, along with last links to a generation of my family--the knowledge, the laughter, the stories, the secrets, all gone now.  I miss him.    

For the last several days I've been editing my NanoWriMo novel, All Timelines Lead to Rome.  It's going fairly well. 

Over the years I've developed a strategy for writing a novel: (1) Spend about ten days developing the characters and plot. (2) Write the rough draft at flat-out fast-as-I-can write speed with no edits at all, hopefully finishing the rough draft in around 6 weeks.  (3) Let it sit for several months while I catch up on the real-world things I've neglected while I was doing all of that writing and to give myself a chance to start wanting to deal with it again.  (4) Go through and ruthlessly cut out excess words.  I set a per chapter goal of cutting 20-25% from the word count.  I can usually cut that much and the result is always a stronger, smoother story. (5) Go back through and add polish: sharpen up the dialogue, add little touches to make the plot stronger, and help the reader get more into the characters.

So how well does this work?  I tend to get impatient and jump into the writing phase too soon. That comes back to haunt me at the end of the process, as I have to do more extensive rewrites than I would if I spent more time plotting.  The rough draft part usually goes well.  I write fast, and most of the scenes end up usable.  I have the editing for length part down pretty well.  By the time I'm done the writing is tight.  The polishing phase is still a work in process.  The more I learn about polishing, the more I realize I don't know.

For a history buff like me, the past nine months have been a wild ride.  I've read enough about the Great Depression to know how completely big, complex economies can spin out of control and how big of a mess that can cause.  I've also read enough about the 1918-1919 flu to know how vulnerable we are to something like that in an era with air travel and borders that apparently can't be closed for economic and political reasons.

At the same time, history never exactly repeats itself, partly because at least some people remember it and partly because societies and economies change.  A new Great Depression wouldn't play out exactly the way the original did.  Two wage-earner families provide somewhat of a buffer against the worst of what happened in the early 1930s, as does deposit insurance, a larger proportion of the economy employed by various levels of government, and at least for the US, the fact that a lot of the most volatile manufacturing jobs are in China.  On the other hand, far fewer people are farmers or have any idea how to support themselves through farming than did in the 1930s.  Even farmers are often so specialized it would be difficult for them to feed themselves if the economy collapsed enough for them to need it.

My guess: Runaway inflation or a collapse of the international economy due to loss of faith in the dollar is more likely than the kind of deflation that we saw in the 1930s, simply because we know where runaway deflation goes and are guarding against it.  Fighting the last war,

A 1918-1919-type flu that if untreated would kill 10% of those infected wouldn't play out the same way it did in 1918-1919 either.  In some ways i would be less severe, at least in the United States.  Antibiotics would help prevent secondary infections as long as the health care system didn't break down from the overload.  On the other hand the economy is more vulnerable than it was in the 1930s because of the more complex interconnections and because of just in time inventory methods.  There are some nasty little follow-on impacts if a 1918-1919-style mortality ever does hit us.  For example: how do health and life insurance companies cope with the huge bump in claims?  What happens to housing prices in hard hit areas?  How does the legal system cope with the slew of lawsuits over inheritance issues, not to mention liability issues from various aspects of the flu?  What impact would the reduced number of taxpayers have on tax revenue?  What would that many deaths do to the housing industry? 

Yeah, those questions seem trivial compared to a whole horde of people dying, and it seems almost heartless to bring them up, but life would go on for the survivors and the economy would need to too.

I spent a couple of hours a few days ago trying to plot out the rest of my Nanowrite novel, an alternate history story tentatively titled All Timelines Lead To Rome. To do that I had to reread most of it.

Two reactions: (1) What I've written so far (74,000+ words) is in many ways the best writing I've ever done by quite a margin. I thought it would cool and I would find a lot of flaws in it, but after several months it still looks good. (2) I hope my subconscious has the rest of this all figured out because it went a long ways from where I intended for it to go when I started and I really have no idea where to go to end it anymore. In particular some of the people I intended to be villains have developed into flawed but sympathetic characters.  That makes the grisly fate I had planned for them much less attractive.  The subconscious seemed to really know where it was going toward the end of November though. I would sit down at Write Or Die with no clue what I was going to write and end up with a scene that fit the rest of the story. Maybe I should just forget plotting and let the story go where it wants to go.

That's scary stuff though.  At heart I'm a plotter, not a pantser.  I want to know where I'm going to end up before I write word one.

This is kind of shooting fish in a barrel, but for what it is worth the advent of the  new Dan Brown book brings these comments on the DaVinci Code to mind: I haven't read the book, but the whole 'direct descendant of Jesus' thing ruined what would have otherwise been an okay movie for me. If you do a family tree stretching over a hundred plus generations it's either going to be one tangled up incestuous mess or the percentage of genes contributed by Jesus/Mary is going to be so tiny as to be irrelevant. And unless there is some kind of supernatural way of making sure the dad is really the dad there is no way you could even have a chance of tracking that tiny percentage.

Think of it this way: the percentage of genetics contributed by Jesus/Mary would be cut in half every generation that their descendant married someone unrelated. So in 10 of those 100 generations you're already down to one part J&M genes and 1023 parts unrelated genes. And you've still got 90 generations to go. Go another ten generations and you're up to 1 part Jesus and Mary genes versus 1,048,575 parts unrelated. Of course by that time there would probably be quite a few distant cousins marrying distant cousins, which would concentrate the Jesus and Mary genes to a very moderate extent. Given another 80 generations for the genes to dilute further and you can see why the idea of someone being some kind of special "direct descendant" of Jesus is nonsense.

Even if that  wasn't a problem, the purported father is not the actual father on average 4 percent of the time in most societies, so if the descent was through the father the possibility of the person being more related than Joe Smith off the street is minimal over that many generations.

I managed to sort of enjoy the film by telling myself that I can forgive one big logical flaw. That's hard to do when the logical flaw is the center of the story.

Some people don’t grasp the logical flaw.  If you don’t, maybe it would be easier to think of it this way: You have or had two parents. You had four grandparents (2 on each side). You had eight great grandparents(because each of your grandparents had two parents). That's 3 generations and already your genes are only one-eighth from any one of your great grandparents. Go back another generation and you have sixteen direct ancestors because each of your great grandparents had two parents. Every generation you go back you have double the number of ancestors in that generation. That means that each of those ancestors contributed half as much to your ancestry as the generation after them did.

So if Jesus had a child and they had a child and so on, by the time he was a great grandfather his great grandchildren would get one-eighth of their genes from him. Every generation when they didn't marry a distant cousin the percentage of genes that they got from him would be cut in half. From one-eighth to one-sixteenth to one-thirty-second and so on over around a hundred generations. It doesn't matter if the people in a generation have one kid or fifty. Each of those kids will have two parents, which means that they'll be half as genetically related to a given ancestor as the last generation was.

Bottom line:  The idea of someone being 'direct descendant' of someone else who lived 2000 years ago is simply nonsense.  In a genetic sense nobody can have particularly close ties to anybody else from that long ago.

 

This has been crazy day for me. I had the day off and I figured I would get a lot of writing done. But first I needed to put the finishing touches on my zine for the  Alternate History APA I edit. Should be done in an hour at most. Wrong. I just finished it half an hour ago, after working on it most of the day. Part of the problem was that it just wasn't where it needed to be in order for me to send it out, and it took a lot of bashing to get it there.

Another part of the problem was continuous interruptions. First it was the telemarketers. At one point I picked up the phone for one call and they dialed our daughter's distinctive ring number less than a second later, so I had them on call and on call waiting--the same automated telemarketer. Yes, I screen with caller ID, but they're getting sneakier. Yes, I need to get on the Do Not Call list. I know. I've been procrastinating. Today probably pushed me into doing it.

Then I start getting messages from one of my daughter's friends and his friends. It seems the kid is in jail for assault (I assume it was assault--he got into a fight and the other guy called the police). In any case, he needs a couple hundred to make bail. Not exactly my issue, but my wife has tried to help the guy a few times in the past, so helping him again was a possibility. Unfortunately, the guy has kind of used up his help quotient with most of his friends. My wife and I talked about it and she just shook her head. The guy has made his bed and may have to lie in it a while.

So I'm dealing with that issue. Then my daughter comes home with interesting news. The high school she goes to was on lock-down part of the day. It seems that somebody spotted someone hiding near the school with something they were pointing as if it was a gun. The police were called in and surrounded a bipolar 8-year-old with a black flashlight which he pointed at the police. Fortunately he didn't get shot and the situation ended with only a few frazzled nerves and scuppered lesson plans. So I spent about an hour listening to my daughter's account of that situation. Necessary part of parenting, and not begrudged at all, but not in the plans for me wonderful writing day.

So it's a little after 10 pm locally and I haven't even looked at any of the writing I intended to do today. And tomorrow is a long day with meetings, etc. And the weekend is tied up with obligatory social events Friday and Saturday.  And my wife's birthday party on Sunday.

Somewhere between now and then I've got to get her a birthday present. She claims that she hints every year, but I'm oblivious. The only thing I remember her mentioning that she needed was a vacuum cleaner for downstairs and a set of silverware. I think the lady Wombats would lynch me if I got her either of those things. 

Well at least I didn't add to glut of novels today.

This past weekend I went to the three and a half day  High Tension Writing Workshop by Donald Maass, a literary agent and author of Writing The Breakout Novel.  I'm still kind of processing the information.   I would highly recommend the workshop.  Donald Maass is a natural educator--good speaker, well organized and funny.  He also has thirty years of experience in the publishing industry and understands it thoroughly.

The basic message of the workshop is that the current marketplace is super competitive and full of short attention spans.  Writers have to adapt to a world where a large part of the population is ADHD. They have to adapt to a world where their book is competing for reader attention with TV, video games, the Internet, and a gazillion other books.

In that environment, reader attention is a precious commodity that you should never take for granted.   It isn't enough to have a good plot and interesting characters. You have to keep the reader wanting to read--compelled to read the next paragraph.  As a new writer you can't afford flabby paragraphs. You can't afford pages that contribute plot points but aren't interesting in and of themselves--something I'm often guilty of.  You have to earn the reader's continued attention every paragraph. This is a market where if the reader's attention wanders you may never get it back.  If a reader gets bored and puts your book down, then  wanders off to read their e-mail they may never pick it up again.

This is also a market where the only contact a reader may have with your book may very well be taking it off a bookstore shelf, glancing at the back cover, then opening it at some random page and reading a paragraph.  If that random paragraph of a random page doesn't hook the reader, your book goes back on the self and that reader may never look at another word you've written.  Unfair?  Not really.  Readers are under no obligation to try to read enough to understand your plot.  They're looking for something that will entertain them.  If the random paragraph doesn't say 'this is worth my time', they are under no obligation to read on.

In the current marketplace, every paragraph may have to act as a hook, and as much as possible it needs to be able to function that way.  That is not a simple job, especially when that paragraph also has to advance the plot.

So how on earth do you do that?

Oddly, most of the obvious ways to hold a reader's attention don't work well anymore. A fist fight? Been done a gazillion times. It's likely to be skimmable. Flabby. A gun fight? Same thing. Sex scene? Same thing.  It won't hold most readers' attention. The big emotions have been done so often that readers are numb to them too. Fear? Hatred? Often skimmable.  Won't necessarily hold a reader's attention.

As writers we stand on the shoulders of giants. And they've written most of the good lines, most of the good plots. They've used most of the good emotions and description. And they've been followed by a horde of imitators who have made most of the things a writer would be likely to write seem old and trite.

I went into the workshop thinking that I had a lot of the answers.  The novel I recently renamed from Char to Time Travel Can Be Murder has a plot I'm pretty sure is unique.  It's intricately plotted, with quirky characters.  We read a few passages from it at the workshop.  Verdict: Flat.  Flabby. 

One section in particular stands out in my mind.  Going into the workshop I thought it was one of my better scenes.  The POV character and his cousin are in a farmhouse, along with a cocky deputy sheriff.  Char, an accidentally displaced 'cave-woman'  comes down the stairs with a rifle.  A wild fight ensues.  During the fight Char knocks out the POV character's cousin and then knocks out the deputy, right after he says "I'll take it from here."  She almost has to jump to hit him in the jaw.  As he falls on his face, out cold, the POV character starts laughing.  Char stares at him and then starts laughing too.  During the scene Char reveals for the first time that she's already learned enough English to communicate in it, which should come as a shock to the reader. 

Quirky, oddball scene.  Verdict: Flat.  Someone coming into the scene without knowing the characters would see a fist fight followed by an inexplicable aftermath.  And it is realistic that potential readers may come into the scene cold.  We have to write so that distracted potential readers will be pulled away from the distractions and into the book.

So what does hold a modern reader's attention? That's not easy to summarize, and I don't want to steal too much of the workshop's thunder. It's not the same for every writer or every scene/every genre. The keys are finding something fresh--a different way of looking at events and finding ways of getting the reader to identify with the character, or with the scene.

I'm probably showing my age here, but I remember a scene from early in the first season of Twin Peaks.  Somebody had deer head in their office.  Somebody had taken it down and it was laying on the desk.  The deer head on the wall would have been just part of the scenery.  Put it on the desk and it dominated the scene--couldn't take your eyes off of it.  You probably want to be a little more subtle than that, but a lot of what keeps reader interest is a familiar object or emotion looked at in a different way.  Characters that readers care about, that they feel that they know are important too, but very difficult to pull off.

Most writers, including me, seem to visualize a reader far more interested in reading their book than a modern reader is likely to be, and definitely far more interested than an overworked agent or editor will ever be.

The ideal is to have some kind of tension in every paragraph, some kind of hook.  That is incredibly hard.  But that is what the market demands.  Writers need to write for the distracted reader, to pull them into the story, and keep them there through the book.  That leads to publication, to sales,  to repeat sales, to word of mouth advertising, to fans who will seek out the next book.

I've come across several books on Authonomy with Alternate History, Time Travel and related themes.  This is by no means a comprehensive list,  Not all of them are good, but a surprising number are.  I don't think you have to be a member of Authonomy to view these, though you do have to be a member to comment on or rate them.  Hey, free Alternate history.  I can't vouch for how good all of them are but several of them are quite readable, including The TIme Travel Journals.

 
From the Blood of Slaves - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=7208 - (US Civil War, southern victory with a twist)
The Time Travel Journals - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=7333 - College girl and physics prof go back to 1908 Ireland
Nick Of Time (Young Adult)</a> - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=4177 - Kid transports himself to the future
 Xenolith - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=6291- Guy is kidnapped into an alternate reality
The Man Who Could Stop TIme - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=7786 - Guy discovers he can stop time temporarily
 The Second Coming of Walter Clements -http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=4160 - Guy hides in an alternate 98  AD
A Place of Conflict - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=6197 - Alternate history Scotland
Tybalt and Theo - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=2765 - Two men swap plaes in time (Modern and 1600s?)
 
 Then of course there are my two novelsL

The Exchange - http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=6716 - Pieces of Earth swap places with an alternate dimension
Time Travel Can Be Murder -http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=7546 - How do you explain paintball to a wounded cavewoman?

In 1816, New England, much of Europe, and probably much of the rest of the world, experienced what became known as “The Year Without a Summer” or "Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death."  The "Year Without a Summer bit is not quite accurate.  There were warm stretches during the summer of 1816.  However, none of them were long enough for crops to mature.  There were killing frosts or ice storms spaced through the summer, including late May, June 6^th through the 11th (repeated snow, frosts and freezing temperatures in large parts of New England), to a lesser extent in early July (frost only in higher elevations), and three times in August.  This was accompanied by drought through much of the summer. 

Theories on what caused all of this vary.  A series of large closely spaced volcanoes in Asia may have had an impact or it could have just been bad luck.  Weather has extremes and New England and Europe may have just gotten nailed by a series of them.  Roll the dice enough and you will get a long series of ones and twos in a row.  Whatever the cause, that kind of weather can happen. Mother nature isn't always benign.  New England weathered (yes, I noticed the pun) this episode without mass starvation, but something like this would have been disastrous at time where the population was more stressed, and two years like this in a row, or even within a period of five years would have probably caused serious problems, possibly including starvation..   For more info check out:

http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/1816.htm