Totally appropriate, as I'm spending all tonight working on DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME (plus some spot formatting on my coeditor Trisha's novel THE KELPIE) after which I will be returning to LIQUID FIRE. Aaaaa….
-the Centaur
Pictured: my Library.
Recently, I had a potentially bad interaction with a powerful person. I didn't lose my head in the encounter, and I didn't lose my head as the result of the encounter. What's even better, both of us were in the encounter because we wanted to be: neither of us were trapped by vassalage or nobility. Both of us were free to walk away at any time. So ultimately I did the right thing in that situation, and ultimately they made the right decision required by the situation and we both walked away winners.
That's the kind of thing that can happen when people are free.
So yesterday, while our cats were hiding under the bed because of the rumblings echoing through the valley, my wife and I paused our preparation of our holiday dinner and went outside to watch the fireworks sparking at the end of the street … beyond the end of the street … and in all directions around us that we could hear or see.
Fourth of July is an American celebration, and yes, technically it's a celebration of our independence from England, but the idea behind the celebration is far more important than that history. We're celebrating freedom: the right for each individual to do what they want with their lives as long as they're not directly harming anyone else.
And that's an idea which belongs to everyone in the world.
It may be a long time before freedom is implemented for everyone in practice, equitably, with sensitivity to each culture's unique sensibilities. It's tricky, because many people in this world think that they have the right to control others, or think that they're being actually harmed when someone else's choices simply make them feel uncomfortable. We have a lot of work to do.
But we knew all that. The Fourth isn't a time to mourn for victories not yet achieved; it's a time to celebrate, and cherish, the victories we have in hand. So hugged, and smiled, and watched the fireworks, and then went inside and called our neighbors to make sure they'd left their garage door open on purpose (they had; they were also watching the fireworks, just up the street). Then we had tabbouleh and vegan crab cakes and watched a Doctor Who story about haunted houses, time travel and love.
It was a good day to be free.
-the Centaur
The company I work at is a pretty great place, and it's attracted some pretty great people - so if your name isn't yet on the list of "the Greats" it can sometimes be a little intimidating. There's a running joke that half the people at the firm have Impostor Syndrome, a pernicious condition in which people become convinced they are frauds, despite objective evidence of their competence.
I definitely get that from time to time - not just at the Search Engine That Starts with a G, but previously in my career. In fact, just about as far back as people have been paying me money to do what I do, I've had a tape loop of negative thoughts running through my head, saying, "incompetent … you're incompetent" over and over again.
Until today, as I was walking down the hall, when I thought of Impostor Syndrome, when I thought of what my many very smart friends would say if I said that, when I thought of the response that they would immediately give: not "you're wrong," which they of course might say, but instead "well, what do you think you need to do to do a good job?"
Then, in a brain flash, I realized incompetence is just another excuse people use to justify their own inaction.
Now, I admit there are differences in competence in individuals: some people are better at doing things than others, either because of experience, aptitude, or innate talent (more on that bugbear later). But unless the job is actually overwhelming - unless simply performing the task at all taxes normal human competence, and only the best of the best can succeed - being "incompetent" is simply an excuse not to examine the job, to identify the things that need doing, and to make a plan to do them.
Most people, in my experience, just want to do the things that they want to do - and they want to do their jobs the way they want to do them. If your job is well tuned towards your aptitudes, this is great: you can design a nice, comfortable life.
But often the job you want to do requires more of you than doing things the way you want to do them. I'm a night owl, I enjoy working late, and I often tool in just before my first midmorning meeting - but tomorrow, for a launch review of a product, I'll be showing up at work a couple hours early to make sure that everything is working before the meeting begins. No late night coffee for you.
Doing what's necessary to show up early seems trivial, and obvious, to most people who aren't night owls, but it isn't trivial, or obvious, to most people that they don't do what's necessary in many other areas of their life. The true successes I know, in contrast, do whatever it takes: switching careers, changing their dress, learning new skills - even picking out the right shirts, if they have to meet with people, or spending hours shaving thirty seconds off their compile times, if they have to code software.
Forget individual differences. If you think you're "incompetent" at something, ask yourself: what would a "competent" person do? What does it really take to do that job? If it involves a mental or physical skill you don't have, like rapid mental arithmetic or a ninety-eight mile-per-hour fastball, then cut yourself some slack; but otherwise, figure out what would lead to success in the job, and make sure you do that.
You don't have to do those things, of course: you don't have to put on a business suit and do presentations. But that doesn't mean you're incompetent at giving presentations: it means you weren't willing to go to a business wear store to find the right suit or dress, and it means you weren't willing to go to Toastmasters until you learned to crack your fear of public speaking. With enough effort, you can do those things - if you want to. There's no shame in not wanting to. Just be honest about why.
That goes back to that other bugbear, talent.
When people find out I'm a writer, they often say "oh, it must take so much talent to do that." When I protest that it's really a learned skill, they usually say something a little more honest, "no, no, you're wrong: I don't have the talent to do that." What they really mean, though they may not know it, is that they don't want to put in the ten thousand hours worth of practice to become an expert.
Talent does affect performance. And from a very early age, I had a talent with words: I was reading soon after I started to walk. But, I assure you, if you read the stuff I wrote at an early age, you'd think I didn't have the talent to be a writer. What I did have was a desire to write, which translated into a heck of a lot of practice, which developed, slowly and painfully, into skill.
Talent does affect performance. Those of us who work at something for decades are always envious of those people who seem to take to something in a flash. I've seen it happen in writing, in computer programming, and in music: an experienced toiler is passed by a newbie with a shitload of talent. But even the talented can't go straight from raw talent to expert performance: it still takes hundreds or thousands of hours of practice to turn that talent into a marketable skill.
When people say they don't have talent, they really mean they don't have the desire to do the work. And that's OK. When people say they aren't competent to do a job, they really mean they don't want to think through what it takes to get the job done, or having done so, don't want to do those things. And that's OK too.
Not everyone has to sit in a coffeehouse for thousands of hours working on stories only to find that their best doesn't yet cut it. Not everyone needs to strum on that guitar for thousands of hours working on riffs only to find that their performance falls flat on the stage. Not everyone needs to put on that suit and polish that smile for thousands of hours working on sales only to find that they've lost yet another contract. No-one is making you do those things if you don't want to.
But if you are willing to put those hours in, you have a shot at the best selling story, the tight performance, the killer sale.
And a shot at it is all you get.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Lenora, my cat, in front of a stack of writing notebooks and writing materials, and a model of the Excelsior that I painted by hand. It's actually a pretty shitty paint job. Not because I don't have talent - but because I didn't want to put hundreds of hours in learning how to paint straight lines on a model. I had writing to do.
I'm a published urban fantasy author with two novels on the shelves, one of which, FROST MOON, won an award. I have two more novels in the can and I've just finished coediting an anthology with twenty stories based on an idea I proposed. I've read extensively on writing theory and even have written a few articles on the subject.
So what am I doing with a copy of WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES?
Doing whatever I can to get better at what I do, that's what.
Once a friend saw the huge stack of theory-of-fiction books in my Library, one of which is "Novel Writing for Complete Morons" or some title a lot like that, and he remarked "wow, it's probably been a long time since you had to look at that one." Well, that happened to be true, but not because I read the book, then wrote some novels, and then grew beyond it.
The truth is, I'd already written one novel - and chunks of six or seven others - when I got "Novel Writing for Complete Morons." Heck, I may have already written FROST MOON at that point. But I'm a book hound, and I look at everything. I came across the book, probably at a bargain bin. And I saw a chapter I can use. So I bought it.
I actually love reading overviews. I can dive deep into a technical book, but sometimes it's only stepping back and summarizing the text - either by reading a summary, or writing one yourself - that enables you to hang the details upon a coherent whole. Even when the overview isn't interesting, sometimes the book itself has details you simply can't find elsewhere.
In the case of WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, I saw it in a bargain bin, flipped through it - and found a section in a chapter on editing scenes, a task I'd just been struggling with on my third Dakota Frost novel, LIQUID FIRE. So I bought it, and tonight read a few chunks, some of which are good for structuring scenes, others of which were helpful in overall novel structure.
Some of that information is review; other parts are completely new. It doesn't matter. It helped me move forward.
Creative expression is driven by ego, but it's stifled by snobbery. Don't get embarrassed by what you need to do to improve. If you were trying to climb out of a pit, would you hold your hand back from a rung that was candy colored and clearly intended for children? No. As long as the rung is solid, you grab it and pull yourself up.
Anything else is just hurting yourself in an effort to look good.
-the Centaur
Pictured: WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, atop THE POETICS OF THE MIND'S EYE by Christopher Collins, a study of visual imagination in literature and cognitive science. See how hard it is to be honest with yourself and do what needs doing? Here I had to bring along a technical book I'm reading and use it to prop up the For Dummies book in an absurd attempt at credentialing.
No, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen: I may have happened to have picked up THE POETICS OF THE MIND'S EYE at about the same time as WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, and I may have had it in my reading pile because I was evaluating whether to recommend it to a friend who works in the field of visual imagination, but the one has little to do with the other.
I, a published author, picked up WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, and it had useful information for a problem I was trying to solve. Don't be embarrassed about things like that: do whatever you have to to help yourself get better. End of list.
But I am going to take a rest for a bit.
Above you see a shot of my cat Lenora resting in front of the "To Read Science Fiction" section of my Library, the enormous book collection I've been accumulating over the last quarter century. I have books older than that, of course, but they're stored in my mother's house in my hometown. It's only over the last 25 years or so have I been accumulating my own personal library.
But why am I, if not resting, at least thinking about it? I finished organizing the books in my Library.
I have an enormous amount of papers, bills, bric a brac and other memorabilia still to organize, file, trash or donate, but the Library itself is organized, at last. It's even possible to use it.
How organized? Well...
Religion, politics, economics, the environment, women's studies, Ayn Rand, read books, Lovecraft, centaur books, read urban fantasy, read science fiction, Atlanta, read comics, to-read comics, to-read science fiction magazines, comic reference books, drawing reference books, steampunk, urban fantasy, miscellaneous writing projects, Dakota Frost, books to donate, science fiction to-reads: Asimov, Clarke, Banks, Cherryh, miscellaneous, other fiction to-reads, non-fiction to-reads, general art books, genre art books, BDSM and fetish magazines and art books, fetish and sexuality theory and culture, military, war, law, space travel, astronomy, popular science, physics of time travel, Einstein, quantum mechanics, Feynman, more physics, mathematics, philosophy, martial arts, health, nutrition, home care, ancient computer manuals, more recent computer manuals, popular computer books, the practice of computer programming, programming language theory, ancient computer languages, Web languages, Perl, Java, C and C++, Lisp, APL, the Art of Computer Programming, popular cognitive science, Schankian cognitive science, animal cognition, animal biology, consciousness, dreaming, sleep, emotion, personality, cognitive science theory, brain theory, brain philosophy, evolution, human evolution, cognitive evolution, brain cognition, memory, "Readings in …" various AI and cogsci disciplines, oversized AI and science books, conference proceedings, technical reports, game AI, game development, robotics, imagery, vision, information retrieval, natural language processing, linguistics, popular AI, theory of AI, programming AI, AI textbooks, AI notes from recent projects, notes from college from undergraduate through my thesis, more Dakota Frost, GURPS, other roleplaying games, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, more Dakota Frost, recent projects, literary theory of Asimov and Clarke, literary theory of science fiction, science fiction shows and TV, writing science fiction, mythology, travel, writing science, writing reference, writers on writing, writing markets, poetry, improv, voice acting, film, writing film, history of literature, representative examples, oversized reference, history, anthropology, dictionaries, thesauri, topical dictionaries, language dictionaries, language learning, Japanese, culture of Japan, recent project papers, comic archives, older project papers, tubs containing things to file … and the single volume version of the Oxford English Dictionary, complete with magnifying glass.
I deliberately left out the details of many categories and outright omitted a few others not stored in the library proper, like my cookbooks, my display shelves of Arkham House editions, Harry Potter and other hardbacks, my "favorite" nonfiction books, some spot reading materials, a stash of transhumanist science fiction, all the technical books I keep in the shelf next to me at work … and, of course, my wife and I's enormous collection of audiobooks.
What's really interesting about all that to me is there are far more categories out there in the world not in my Library than there are in my Library. Try it sometime - go into a bookstore or library, or peruse the list of categories in the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal System Classifications. There's far more things to think about than even I, a borderline hoarder with a generous income and enormous knowledge of bookstores, have been able to accumulate in a quarter century.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
-the Centaur
Emily Dickinson, barely known as a poet in her lifetime, ranks impossibly large in our own. Yet when her complete works were first published, she was dismissed by the critics. Author Thomas Bailey Aldrich dispensed with her thus:
"It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson ... But the incoherence and formlessness of her — versicles are fatal ... an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar".
Yet now Aldrich is all but lost to literary history, while Dickinson looms larger and larger in our minds. Collector of folktales Andrew Lang said "if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme. The wisdom of the ages and the nature of man insist on so much" … yet history has proved him so wrong, and equally forgotten him.
The truth is, an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way town anywhere can, with impunity, defy the laws of gravitation and launch her poetry to the stars, and no-one unwilling to make the trip has the power to stop her.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Emily Dickinson bending space and time with the power of her mind. Emily's portrait taken from the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, against a backdrop of star streaks taken by John Fowler, both from Wikimedia Commons.
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Recently I've been reading a lot on sentence construction - in particular the "little books" Mark Doty's The Art of Description: Word into World, Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One), and Bruce Ross-Larson's Stunning Sentences, not to mention essays scattered across half a dozen books. I've enjoyed all this writing on writing, and I think all of it has been useful to me, but, as usual, there's one bit of advice I find myself encountering, find myself willing to take, yet find myself reacting against:
Find examples of great sentences to emulate.
On the one hand, I agree with this: finding great examples of sentences, then deconstructing them, imitating them and attempting to progress past them is a great exercise for writers, one I intend to follow up on (in my copious free time). On the other, focusing on exemplars of great sentences in the past, like it or not, encourages a mindset of focusing on the greatness of writers of the past, idolizing them, and then following in their footsteps.
I'm extremely allergic to the "idolizing the greats" syndrome. There have been greats in history, no doubt: great writers and thinkers, leaders and followers, heroes and villains. And there are people you will encounter that will impact you like no other: prophets whose principles will change your life, philosophers whose thought will change your mind, and authors whose writing will strike you like a physical blow. But they won't affect everyone the same way, and they won't solve your problems for you.
There are no secrets. It's all up to you.
Having said that, let me undermine it by recommending the following book of secrets: First Thought, Best Thought by Alan Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Diane Di Prima - an audiobook by four authors of the Beat Generation, talking about their experimental methods of poetry. I recommend the Beats because, like the Beats, I feel the need to counteract "conservative, formalistic literary ideals," but unlike the Beats, I don't reject those ideals: I just want more tools in my toolbox.
The Beats don't recommend emulating the past; they recommend finding ways of producing text that violate the norms. Ginsberg used breaths and rhythms. Burroughs cut words and sentences up and pasted them together until he had a whole page of, potentially, gibberish, which he then would mine for gems - perhaps finding a paragraph or even just a sentence out of an entire page of cut-up. Each author had their own method of breaking out of the mold. And a mold breaker … is a tool you can use.
So don't just find sentences to emulate. Write your own damn sentences. Cut up words on a page until they're confetti and rearrange them until they make sense. Build a program that writes random sentences. Throw down Rory's Story Cubes. Try magnetic poetry. Learn rap. Take improv. Stay up all night until you're loopy with sleep deprivation. No matter what crazy ideas you have, write them all down, then winnow through them all and pick the best ones - the ones that hit you like a physical blow.
THEN go back to the tools for sentence analysis from all those little books, and use them to make more of your own.
Seriously, what do you have to lose? Try the exercise. If you don't like what you produce, you may learn that your inspiration lies in understanding the past and building on it to create something new. If you do like it … you may add something to the world which, while its parts may come from the past, is in its whole ... wholly new.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a truly bizarre photographic composition that occurred by chance, and which I could not have planned if I tried.
At last! DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME is available for preorder on Amazon! The book's out August 13 … that makes it almost exactly two years from conception to publication. For your amusement, I thought I'd dredge up the original call for submissions that I sent to the Write to the End and Dragon Writers groups way back in September of 2011:
DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME
In our busy world of meetings and microwaves, car radios and cellphones, you always hear people wishing they could get an extra hour in the day.
But what if you could?
DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME is an anthology that explores ways to get extra time (be it an hour, a day, or a decade) and the impact it would have (whether upon a single life, a family or an entire world).
We’re looking for stories with a touch of the fantastic—whether mystical, magical, mechanical, or just plain mysterious—but they can be set in any time or any genre: contemporary or historical, science fiction or fantasy, horror or magic realism. We could even find a place for a nonfiction essay if it was truly exceptional.
In short, show us something showstopping, and we’ll make time for you.
Suggested Length: full stories from 3,000 to 7,000 words and flash fiction under 1,000 words. We will accept good stories up to 10,000 words but it’s a hard sell.
Due Date: January 31st, 2012
Editors: Anthony Francis and TBD
The theme's still the same, but due date January 31st, 2012? Really? HAHAHAHA no. As you all probably know, the estimable Trisha J. Wooldridge signed on as my coeditor and helped me make this a much stronger (and more diverse!) book. Thank you, Trisha, for helping make DOORWAYS possible!
So, please, everyone, preorder and enjoy!
-the Centaur
Once again, I will be giving a talk on The Science of Airships at Clockwork Alchemy this year, this time at 11AM on Monday. I had to suffer doing all the airship research for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, so you should too! Seriously, I hope the panel is fun and informative and it was received well at previous presentations. From the online description:
Steampunk isn't just brown, boots and buttons: our adventurers need glorious flying machines! This panel will unpack the science of lift, the innovations of Count Zeppelin, how airships went down in flames, and how we might still have cruise liners of the air if things had gone a bit differently. Anthony Francis is a science fiction author best known for his Dakota Frost urban fantasy series, beginning with the award winning FROST MOON. His forays into Steampunk include two stories and the forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.
Yes, yes, I know THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE is long in forthcoming, but at least it's closer now. I'll also be appearing on two panels, "Facts with Your Fiction" moderated by Sharon Cathcartat 5pm on Saturday and "Multi-cultural Influences in Steampunk" moderated by Madeline Holly at 5pm on Sunday. With that, BayCon and Fanime, looks to be a busy weekend.
-the Centaur
Everyone’s fooling people by taking their laptops to coffee shops, and here I am just editing anthologies
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So this is me, with my laptop, in a coffee shop, editing the science fiction anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME, listening to an author reading by John Scalzi, author of YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE WHEN YOU TAKE YOUR LAPTOP TO A COFFEE SHOP.
I read Scalzi's blog Whatever and was pleased to hear he was coming to my favorite bookstore / coffeeshop combination, Books Inc. in Mountain View and the attached Cafe Romanza. It's right up the street from my work, so I dropped in to the coffee house, got a copy of REDSHIRTS for signing (never having read his fiction, it seemed a good place to start since the book he's promoting is a sequel), got coffee, got permission from the staff to set my laptop up at a small table above the signing, and camped out.
I edited. Friends dropped by. We chatted. The room filled, and then Scalzi showed up...
...and he's even more entertaining in person than he is on his blog. He read from his latest novel THE HUMAN DIVISION, a little side tale about aliens and churros (I've never had any, but they're kind of like Spanish doughnuts, apparently), and from his blog the hilarious and insightful post "Who Gets to Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be."
When it got to Q&A, I didn't ask any questions: everyone asked all my questions for me. It turns out Tor approached him about serializing his books, and THE HUMAN DIVISION came out of that conversation. I'm jealous; I and my publisher are still negotiating how to serialize THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which I wrote with the design for it to be serialized.
After the talk, I waited for the line to die down before getting REDSHIRTS signed. Scalzi and I talked about the irony of me editing my anthology on my laptop in a coffeeshop while the author of YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE WHEN YOU TAKE YOUR LAPTOP TO A COFFEESHOP was reading, and he pointed out that there's two types of people who take their laptops to coffeeshops: those who go to write, and those who go to be seen.
He asked about the anthology, and I told him about DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME: an anthology that asks the question what would you do if you really could get an extra hour in the day. Oddly enough, Scalzi had the same answer about what he'd do with that hour as one of my barista friends in the coffeeshop: both said they'd use the extra hour to catch up on sleep.
I think John Scalzi and that barista must be two of the smartest people in the world.
-the Centaur
P.S. What's this, Google+? You can animate several pictures taken together, even when I didn't tell you to in advance? Really? We're not living on the moon, but we are living in the future. That's awesome. UPDATE: Apparently it only works by default on Google+, as I don't see it on my blog that way. Still, the downloaded image has all the frames, so I could fix it up in Photoshop real quickly if I wanted to. Still the future. UPDATE UPDATE: May be a Ecto upload issue. Will fix later. Regardless, future. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: I managed to manually upload it, but it took a little squeezing in Photoshop to make the image manageable.
… Barnes and Noble is adding Google Play to the Nook.
I remember when I looked at my first Nook Color, how excited I was to learn from the in-store sales representative that this great tablet supported Android, and how betrayed I felt when I learned that I'd have to root the device to actually install Android apps on it. Barnes and Noble, you (collectively) lied to me, and I've never gotten over it.
The rooting procedure always looked a little heinke to me, and I never did it - so my beloved Nook Color, which had the best form factor of any tablet I'd used, eventually ended up languishing as I couldn't use it for most of what I wanted it for. I ended up using my phone as my primary reader, and occasionally my Asus Transformer Prime, though it was a bit big.
Now Barnes and Noble is opening up the Nook to Android applications, legitimately. I could have told them that trying to lock down their devices wouldn't work. Steve Jobs tried it, with the iPhone and the iPad, but you know what? I didn't buy an iPad. I bought a Nook Color for the free OS, then got cruelly disappointed. Good job, salesman. Bad job, B&N.
Well, now they've changed course, a little. Should I find an excuse to spend my piling-up B&N gift cards upon a Nook HD? Perhaps. But I already have a Nexus 7, which fits right into the form factor that the Nook should have occupied. Why get yet another tablet … especially when Barnes and Noble is dialing back its investment in the Nook?
I hope Barnes and Noble survives. I hope we're not seeing another death spiral, a la Borders.
But it feels like too little, too late.
Still … I have all those gift cards.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A Nexus 7. Barnes and Noble, this could have been your device … but years ago, you betrayed my trust.
Readers of this blog know I'm a cat lover, and the favorite of our cats is Gabby, a loquacious gold cat that followed us home as a kitten and now is a fifteen pound fur monster.
One of his quirks is to follow you into the bathroom when you take a shower, and then to meow plaintively during the whole time you're running the water. If you peek out of the shower at him, Gabby has what can only be described as an expression of concern on his furry little face, meowing harder. When you get out of the shower, he stands up and reaches for you with his paws.
This behavior was mysterious until I had a brain flash the other day: we got Gabby when he followed us home … after two weeks of heavy rain. Clearly he'd been cared for, as he knew people very well --- but we could never find his original owners.
Then it all clicked: he lost his family in the rain … and doesn't like the sound of the shower because he's afraid he'll lose us too.
Don't worry, Gabby. We have no plans to leave you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby and me, standing in front of my wife's art.
Update: well, this isn't really an update, I'm just testing a Facebook integration feature. 
The completed manuscript to DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME is on its way to the copyeditors. This project, designed to explore extra time, is now on its way to take someone else's time, vampirelike, while I return to editing my novels. Please do not send me any more side projects right now, unless they are super good ones. That is all.
-the Centaur
Pictured: what's your doorway? A salsa of scenes near Monterey.
Our ground cover, in bloom. This is xeriscaping: landscaping which requires little to no water.
These pictures are from our front porch, shaded by landscaping planted by the previous owners. These plants, too, require little to no water: loquats and palm bushes and a few other plants I'm not familiar with. The overhanging branches create a sense of seclusion, which makes these shots pleasing; something I learned from my buddy Jim Davies's forthcoming book.
It's not a zero water system: we had to water the trees that we planted, and you can see a hose where we drip water occasionally on the sick olive tree out front. But the amount of water that we use for this succulent-covered yard is trivial compared to what, for example, my parents did in their large green grassy half acre - and when it's in bloom, it's far more beautiful.
The back isn't quite finished, but we've got low-water ivy, and even the cats approve…
-the Centaur
Pictured: a lot of landscaping, done primarily by my wife, Sandi Billingsley.
Gary Kim Hayes, a wonderful fixture of the writing track at Dragon*Con, passed away recently at the age of 61. I didn't know him well, but thanks to my friend Nancy Knight, I was on a few panels with him at Dragon*Con and of course got to see him in many more panels. Most notably, he moderated the fun and popular "How to Write a Story in an Hour" panels.
We talked a few times. I was just starting to get to know him. I was looking forward to seeing him at the next Dragon*Con.
And now he's gone.
He'll be missed.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gary Hayes, edited slightly from his bio picture to symbolize his passing.
We've had Gabby a lot longer than Loki, but you can see from the size of this little fur monster why we think he and Loki might be cousins or brothers.
In case you're wondering, Gabby is indeed enjoying this, and is not simply a large cat shaped rug that we've procured for the purpose of the photo. Note the movement of the tail.
Just distracting myself from LIQUID FIRE. Back to it. That is all.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby, Loki, and Gabby. And some guy.
Plugging away at LIQUID FIRE, chewing into Chapter 2. That is all.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Coupa Cafe, a frequent writing spot.
The first pass at the complete DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME manuscript is off to my coeditor. That is all.
-the Centaur
Recently I had a setback. Doesn't matter what on; setbacks happen. Sometimes they're on things outside your control: if a meteor smacks the Earth and the tidal wave is on its way to you, well, you're out of luck buddy.
But sometimes it only seems like a tidal wave about to wipe out all life. Suppose your party has lost the election. Your vote didn't stop it. You feel powerless - but you're not. You can vote. You can argue. You can volunteer. Even run for office yourself.
Even then, it might be a thirty year project to get yourself or people you like elected President - but most problems aren't trying to change the leader of the free world. The reality is, most of the things that do happen to us are things we can partially control.
So the setback happens. I got upset, thinking about this misfortune. I try to look closely at situations and to honestly blame myself for everything that went wrong. By honestly blame, I mean to look for my mistakes, but not exaggerate their impact.
In this case, at first, I thought I saw many things I did wrong, but the more I looked, the more I realized that most of what I did was right, and only a few of them were wrong, and they didn't account for all the bad things that had happened beyond my control.
Then I realized: what if I treated those bad things as actual problems?
A disaster is something bad that happens. A problem is a situation that can be fixed. A situation that has a solution. At work, and in writing, I'm constantly trying to come up with solutions to problems, solutions which sometimes must be very creative.
"Treat setbacks as problems," I thought. "Don't complain about them (ok, maybe do) but think about how you can fix them." Of course, sometimes the specific problems are unfixable: the code failed in production, the story was badly reviewed. Too late.
That's when the second idea comes in: what if you treated problems as opportunities to better your skills?
An opportunity is a situation you can build on. At work, and in writing, I try to develop better and better skills to solve problems, be it in prose, code, organization, or self-management. And once you know a problem can happen, you can build skills to fix it.
So I came up with a few mantras: "Take Problems as Opportunities" and "Accept Setbacks as Problems" were a couple of them that I wrote down (and don't have the others on me). But I was so inspired I put together a little inspirational poster.
I don't yet know how to turn this setback into a triumph. But I do know what kinds of problems caused it, and those are all opportunities for me to learn new skills to try to keep this setback from happening again. Time to get to it.
-Anthony
Pictured: me on a ridge of rock, under my very own motivational poster.
P.S. Now that I've posted this, I see I'm not the first to come up with this phrase. Great minds think alike!
He is risen. Let us rejoice and be glad in this. Take this time to find your families and renew your bonds of love.
-the Centaur
Pictured: me, Dad, and blurry at the edge of the picture, Mom … all a long time ago.