Little Known Author

I heard from Charlie Stuart and Cheyenne the other day about this: the Japanese government has announced that they’re going to take a crack at actually building a rooly-trooly space elevator .

Holy crap!

This is very cool news indeed. I knew there were some US companies interested in at least researching what might be needed to build one, but I was given to understand that the difficulty of building carbon nanotubes more than a few millimeters long was going to be a major stumbling block for the forseeable future. And, this article suggests that this difficulty hasn’t gone away. I’m guessing the Japanese figure that if they just blast the problem with the finest scientific and technological brainpower they’ve got a solution will turn up. And I hope they do crack it! What a gobsmacking thing to attempt!

Thanks, Charlie and Cheyenne, for letting me know about this. Amid all the apocalyptic financial news swirling about at the moment, it’s good to hear something like this.

In other news: work continues slowly on new book project. I’m still very much in research mode, trying to learn as much as possible about what it’s like to be a taxi driver here in Perth. To this end today I sent an email to the Taxi Council of WA , the industry’s peak body, with a list of questions I figured they might be able to help me with. Otherwise, I’m spending time scribbling about the background world my hero inhabits, working out the details. Even though the idea is that the story is set in more-or-less present-day Perth, there’s still a very great deal to sort out.

Last: this coming weekend is the Queen’s Birthday long weekend (not actually the Queen’s actual birthday; that’s in April, but a government a long time ago decided we didn’t have enough long weekends in the second half of the year, so arranged for us to have a long weekend at the end of September), and we’re heading off to Mandurah in our shiny new (to us) ca r . We’re staying here . The weather this weekend is forecast to be a bit on the rainy side. I expect we’ll spend a lot of time in very nice cafes, sipping good coffee, reading newspapers, playing games, and having a spiffy time in general.

There’s a lot to talk about today, so let’s get straight to it:

Item 1. Check this out:

Once written, it is the book that has the relationship with the reader, not the writer, and it is the minute that I see that actual book… the finished thing - I realize that if I’m holding it in my hands, that more copies of this book are being sent to real people right this minute (and some of them even pre-ordered, and how terrible is that going to be when it sucks) and that from this moment forward - for the rest of my life- this book has made it absolutely certain that some people are going to stand around in yarn shops talking about how I’m a complete moron, I don’t deserve to earn any money (even a fraction of a dollar per book), and that frankly they wish that I wasn’t so full of myself that I thought I was special enough to write books at all. When I hold this book in my hands, that’s what I know.. and since every person has a voice inside them, the voice of their supremely unsuccessful self (a 16 year old short- skinny-bad hair-braces low self-esteem self, in my case) saying that anyway, the fear catches, and coalesces into nausea and a certainty that this can’t end well.

It’s an extract from a phenomenal essay by "The Yarn Harlot", Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who writes books about her knitting experiences, her life and family, and everything. She’s funny, perceptive, truthful, always unfailingly honest, and someone whose blog Michelle and I have been reading now for years. We love her stuff. And I don’t knit. I’m honestly not that interested in knitting (though I’ve developed a fair understanding of it), but I love the way the Harlot writes about writing. She understands exactly what it’s like to be a writer, the good and the bad, the anxiety, the sheer terror, the bliss, the pain, everything. In this essay she’s writing about the publication of her latest book of essays, and it’s just exquisite, the way she opens herself up and tells the truth about this whole "published author" thing. Go and read the whole thing. Heck, read the whole blog.

Item 2:

American author David Foster Wallace , aged 46, died this week, apparently a suicide, possibly related to long-term depression. It was a stunning thing to hear about. I’ve loved his work for years, ever since reading his novel, INFINITE JEST , perhaps the most maddening, frustrating, elating, wonderful, overwritten novel I’ve ever encountered. At a whopping 1079 pages, plus 100+ pages of fine-print footnotes which are as fascinating as the main text, it was a tough thing to read, a marathon, sitting there day after day, letting this extraordinary story unspool itself through my head, following, one one hand, the intensely imagined lives of teenage tennis prodigies, and on the other hand, the equally intensely realised lives of drug addicts, and, for good measure, on the third hand, the bizarre French Canadian separatist terrorists who are searching for a videotape, a film, said to be so entertaining you die from the sheer pleasure of watching it. Rarely have I read a book that so cried out for serious cutting, but which also presented such a uniformly amazing/frustrating text that you couldn’t decide which parts to cut, even if you could bring yourself to do it.

In the wake of Wallace’s death, I’m now sorely tempted to go and re-read it. No amount of description or discussion about the book is ever going to do its extraordinary gonzo strangeness justice, but in the past couple of days plenty of other writers have been trying to do just that. It grieves me that there will be no further such volumes from this author. His work reminds me that fiction, and perhaps especially science fiction, can and perhaps even should be so much more than what it usually is. I know in my own work, I’m usually satisfied if I can manage an exciting sequence, a well-visualised image, conveying some degree of appropriate realism. Next to Wallace’s work (and certainly his work is something of an acquired taste), his towering ambition and evenly matched ability, I do feel like a damp squib.

Item 3:

Today work on my own new project, EVEN STARLIGHT BURNS, continues to accumulate. I’m at the point where I’m starting to get a sense of the other characters in my protagonist’s life (unlife?), and what they might mean to him. There’s quite a crowd of these people, too, and that’s not even counting the assorted ghosts and ghost fragments who show up, wanting rides around the city in the middle of the night. I was very concerned that the lot of a taxi driver, particularly one who drives full-time, was such that he wouldn’t have much time for being the protagonist of a story, so to speak; since then Charlie Stuart suggested that this problem could in fact be a plus: yes, the protagonist doesn’t have time for adventuring or chasing down story-related stuff. He has to earn his living or he doesn’t have a place to stay, etc–and yet, stuff is still happening. He is drawn towards finding out about his past, about who made him a vampire, and maybe finding out about the strange war brewing out in the Red Centre. So good on ya, Charlie! You really helped me out.

It rocks mightily! Just now I thought I would have a crack at upgrading my WP installation. In the course of reading about how to do this, I learned of the existence of a Wordpress Upgrade Plugin, which you can download, install in the Plugins directory of your WP installation, and you’re ready to go. Activate the plugin from the Dashboard of your installation, and start it up.

And, lo, job done! Phwoar! Movable Type, take note!

Go here and look up a podcast of me reading aloud the first chapter of TIME MACHINES REPAIRED, recorded in Calgary. Look in the right-hand column of that page, where you’ll find a list of podcast recordings.

Quite apart from that, I’m alternating each day between writing story notes for the new project with reading taxi blogs for research purposes. The more I read the more it seems like a hell of a tough way to make a living. One thing that does concern me, though: taxi drivers, if they want to make a full-time living, don’t get a lot of free time: between putting in anything up to ten or twelve hours four or five days a week, and then going home and sleeping, sorting out routine living-your-life stuff (paying bills, shopping, etc), and so forth, you could find you don’t have a lot of time in which to pursue mysterious story-related matters. You could easily reach the point where your hero is so busy just trying to make ends meet that he just doesn’t have time (let alone the energy) to be the protagonist of your story. Hmm.

Fascinating article on Wired Online by Clive Thompson, about a new scientific study looking at how gamers trying to figure out how to deal with problems in computer games are engaged (whether they know it or not) in the scientific method. I had this same thought many years ago, playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the old Sega Mega-Drive. You start out with a question: how the hell do I deal with this deadly problem in the game? You try stuff, which is to say, you advance hypotheses, which yields results (”Game Over”!). This yields further study, further hypotheses (what if I try x?), probably a lot more “Game Over”, but in the end, if you persist long enough, and are systematic enough, you get the result you want, and lo, you now know how to beat that particular end-of-level boss, or similar.

Here’s an extract…

A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage , the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a "siege princess," running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.

Often, the first model wouldn’t work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they’d collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. "They’d be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive," Steinkuehler recalls.

That’s when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.

I’ve been reading this blog , which includes colourful and fascinating stories of the author’s days as a taxi driver here in Perth, and found the following video–not at all related to taxi driving–in another part of his site. Some extremely clever work has gone into this thing (though you will get tired of seeing Death Star II turning up so often).

At the top of this page you’ll find a review of TIME MACHINES REPAIRED from the Denver Post .

Money quote: "Bedford is funny in a crazed, Rudy Rucker kind of way. While Rucker writes of gonzo theorists, Bedford writes of the gonzo mechanics who keep the machines running."

Nice to be compared with Rudy Rucker, I must say!

Rather than spend today’s scribble slot feverishly scribbling notes–or, more likely, staring at the screen with nothing but static in my head–I spent the time looking at blogs written by Perth taxi drivers (this one , mainly, but also this one ), and starting to get a handle on just what’s involved in being a taxi driver here in Perth. I’ve taken plenty of taxi rides here, and spent a fair amount of time chatting with the drivers (most interesting taxi driver I ever met was, in a former life, a nuclear physicist in Switzerland), but I don’t know much about the life of a working cabbie. From what I’m starting to learn, it’s bloody tough. Long, grinding hours. Constant worry that you’re going to get attacked (or worse). No income if you don’t work. Government hassles. Lack of sleep. Limited downtime for hanging out with family and loved ones.

The taxi driver in my story is a guy who has been attacked, and it was this attack that made him into a vampire. At this point the story could involve trying to track down the vampire who did this to him, or it might be something else again. So far I’m just working on building up the protagonist and his world. Plot will come out of that, I’m thinking.

Meanwhile, if you’re thinking you’d like to take up taxi driving here in Perth, the state government’s Department of Planning and Infrastructure has you covered. Start here .

Speaking of the state government: tomorrow Western Australians have to go and vote. The incumbent Labor government is convinced they’re doomed; the scrappy Liberal (note that in Australian politics, the "Liberal" tag = conservatives) opposition are poised to sweep into power. Bugger.

Today I worked some more on the new book idea. So far it’s behaving fairly typically for a book idea: bits of it turn up in their own sweet time, no matter how much you sit there at the keyboard, staring at the blinking insertion point on the screen, waiting, just endlessly waiting, for something usable to turn up. The other day, for example, I was working on the idea that my protagonist is a sort of vampire. Yes, but what sort of vampire? That was the question. I worked through various notions, all of which had a familiar ring to them, up to and including a data vampire, complete with fibre-optic leads plugged into his eyeballs, if necessary–only to ditch that idea because it reminded me too much of the Colin Laney character in William Gibson’s "Bridge" novels, the guy with the eyephones living in the back of a refrigerator box in a Tokyo subway station, watching the endless flow of the world’s data for "nodal points". So a data vampire turned out to be a bad idea.

Thing is, though, working through the idea of a data vampire led me to something much better, much more usable, and something I’ve not come across anywhere–and which I’m not about to reveal here, sorry to say. I’d love to fill you in on all the nifty stuff that goes through my head during these note-writing sessions, but I’m worried about writers far speedier than I am making off with the idea and using it themselves, leaving me looking like a "Johnny-come-lately" when the book eventually turns up.

Anyway, yeah. Strange sort of vampire. Drives a taxi. Picks up ghosts. (Ghosts don’t pay well.) Knows the world has ended, quite some time ago, and hardly anybody has noticed. That’s all part of what I’ve got. In today’s episode of the note-taking, I worked on how my protagonist guy came to be this odd type of vampire, what it’s meant for his relationships with important people in his life, and so forth. I’m at the point where I need other characters to flesh out the world a bit, and these are starting to show up in my head, but it’s like they’re bashful or something. Maybe if I offer them chocolate.

I’m just happy to have an idea to work on. It’s been a long dry spell since finishing work on TIME MACHINES at the end of last year. It was kind of embarrassing during the recent Great Big Trip when people would ask me what I was working on at the moment, and I’d have to say, "Sweet bugger all, sadly." But it was true. You’re tuned into the right station on the radio, the station where you get all your ideas beamed straight into your head, but for months and months it was nothing but static, like the staff of that radio station had packed it in and gone home. I did at times consider trying to deliberately create an idea, crashing bits of notions into one another, like a conceptual demolition derby, I suppose, to see which idea-bits stuck together. I’ve tried this method here and there over time, and while I do end up with workable ideas, they feel dead, lifeless, cold and, well, like the remains of a good idea, rather than a usable, living idea. A Frankenstein monster made of parts of ideas. It’s not a good way to go.

The author copies of my new book turned up yesterday–sealed inside a big box which itself was sealed inside an even bigger box wrapped in about two kilometers of packing tape. I’m still recovering from the massive effort to get into the damned box! But still, it is so shiny…