Words from the inside

Not much to say here. Just a picture, really.

Quick Nano update as promised: Success! I had to reward myself with chocolate (hot) after the first 1.000 words, but the reward made me churn out another 1.000, so I'm pretty pleased. The rest of the day is off.

This past week of Nanowrimo has taken its toll. Not only have I moved the characters to another continent (which is exciting, but also puts new demands on my imagination). My son has also had the flu, which has left me with too little sleep and too much work in the evenings. So... tired...

Tenacity is the only answer, I guess. And positive thinking. My son is well today. Yeah! I'm only 9800 words from nano completion. Yeah! In 6 days I can take a break from writing. Yessir! And I can have chocolate when I finish today's word quota. Oh happy day!

All right, where's that story? Let me at it!

(I'll edit this later to let you know if this actually worked :-) )

The Writers of the Future Contest announced the winners of the 3rd quarter:

1st Place - Brent Knowles of Alberta, Canada
2nd Place - Adam Colston of Devon, United Kingdom
3rd Place - Brad Torgersen of Utah

Congratulations to all of the winners!

And while I'm cheering: Happy birthday, Barbara!

Nano is still in full drive. I crossed the 30.000 word mark the day before yesterday (by 25 words), and I'm having a real blast with this story. Part one is just about finished, and soon I'll be moving most of the cast of characters to another continent. Now, that's an experiment that I'm looking very much forward to :-)

Nanowrimo continues, and The Third Transmutation is coming along very nicely. The write-in last Sunday was a lot of fun, and I think we all added a good chunk to our word count (for some reason we all ignored our word dukes at the meeting...)

The main reason for my progress is that I find procrastination a lot harder when there's a goal and a deadline, but there are several other types of fuel that make the writing roll along:

1) Lots of time. I run my own company, so I'm pretty much able to control my own time and projects. I do use work for procrastination once in a while, but generally I have a good deal of time on my hands. Even so, I'm surprised how much I get done when I take an hour at odd times between other tasks during the day.

2) Music: This novel seems to be written mostly to the tunes of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Marty Friedman, Queen, Dire Straits, and a good deal of new age music. A pretty weird combination, come to think of it.

3) A little too much chocolate for my own good. The ill effects are alleviated to a certain extent by:

4) Exercise. Running or taking the bike to work means I burn off some of the stress that would otherwise keep me unfocused and unproductive.

5) Meditation: I'm attending a course in Mindfulness Meditation, and it's Very Good for anchoring me in the real world. It takes a great deal of training and daily exercises to make it work, but in general it helps me separate work from family time, so I'm not lost in the novel 24 hours a day.

6) All right, put this up as number 0. I really want to tell this story. The characters are alive in my mind, they experience great and horrible stuff in an interesting world. Because of the speed I'm writing at and the lack of planning, some very unexpected things happen to them, and they seem to handle themselves quite well. (All right, in places the story hangs together only because I insist it does, but I wouldn't send this off without editing anyway :-) )

Anyone else out there with similar experiences?

Nanowrimo… Gotta love it. I'm now 23.000 words into 'The Third Transmutation'. Vargas and Vladeks and Anshaat, oh my!

I've only actually written 10.500 words these first 6 days, but things are shaping up much better than I expected. I know I've got a plot going; the world has a rich flavor, I think, but will probably require some tweaking later. Some interesting characters made their appearance. And really. 10.500 words? That's a much better start of the novel than I'd dared to hope for.

I'm also hosting my very first write-in on Sunday, which is very exciting. There will be writing. There will be good company. There Will Be Cake. And more writing.

Well, well, well. Nanowrimo is on, and I've put from shore with a nice 1850 words today. Not bad for a Sunday that's mostly been spent looking after the kids, vacuuming (carpets, not cat), and doing the necessary shopping for the coming week.

I explain this initial success in part from the motivation I found in the great kick-off meeting I attended with a group of four other nano-writers in Aarhus on Saturday. I guess we were all pretty awed by the prospect of having to write 175 pages in the next month, but we quickly found out that we were nowhere near as crazy as... say people who put ships in bottles :-) And it was really fun 'meeting the internet' that way. Now we all have names and faces to put on the forum handles we'll be cheering on in the coming weeks.

Is anyone here participating in the National Novel Writing Month? (As you know Bob, the idea is to write 50,000 new words of a novel in November... a daring concept.)

I'm really tempted to try it out, because I have a novel idea that needs kick-starting. 50,000 words seem like a long shot, but if I could write just half of that in November I'd still be a happy camper.

I'll probably be signing up, but I wanted to hear if anyone here has experience with it? Any stories to share? Any successes? Fellow daredevils?

Let me proudly present the two candidates:

In Central Africa you find Lake Kivu, bordering Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the bottom you'll find methane. 60 billion cubic meters of the stuff, and 300 billion cubic meters of CO2. If this gas erupts -- due to volcanic activity or disturbances in the eco-system -- it will displace the entire breathable atmosphere along the shore and kill about 2 million people. Such an eruption is expected to happen sometime in the next hundred years.

This is where modern engineering comes into it. Methane can also be an attractive and stable power source, so the governments are currently building platforms to siphon the gas from the lake and pipe it to newly-built power plants. Therefore the Rwandan government has called in the help of Cowi Consult, and the project they have in the works should not only keep the lake stable, but also supply Rwanda with power and some to spare for its neighbors. This should pay for filtering the CO2 from the water.

A second candidate for the MDL World Championship could be Lake Karachay in Russia, which was pumped full of nuclear waste during the cold war. I'll point you to this interesting article about What Not To Do With Your Local Ecosystem.

Now that it's finally official, I can finally say: "Yippee!" I have a story in the final of the Writers of the Future Contest.

I've been sitting on this news for a couple of days. In part because I was away when the news came by email, in part because I wanted it to be official, but mostly because I wanted to tell my first reader what he should take credit for. He was a great help, especially since he marked a good number of passages "this made the story slow down." (Or as I understood it, "Get on with it!").

So I cut fluff. This included a lot of background information that, while interesting and world-enriching, didn't move the story forward or even bogged it down. In general the fluff got much more in the way in scenes where conversation carried the plot, so that's a lesson learned for further writing.

Nothing deep to say here, please move on...

But if you're still reading, let me say that sometimes deadlines are Good. This week I had a story to send off to the Writers of the Future Contest and a surprisingly interesting copy assignment to finish. Both had to be sent off on the same day, following a week where my wife was out of town--without the kids.

I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't had those deadlines, I'd have been tempted to push one job in front of me and spend much more time on rewrites than was actually necessary. As it happened, I sent off a story I liked after an intensive but quick rewrite, and I doubt I could have done a much better job if I had fiddled with it for another two weeks. A lesson (re-)learned.

Also, if there's been a bit quiet on the blog lately, that's the reason.
 

... but at least my hair looks nice.

A study out of Haifa University, Israel, shows that the way a person writes with a pen can reveal lies as well as traditional lie-detector tests. With a digital tablet it's possible to measure for instance " the duration of time that the pen is on paper versus in the air, the length height and width of each writing stroke, the pressure implemented on the writing surface." Comparing this to normal writing patterns electronically will reveal whether the person writing is lying or not. (A similar method can be used to spot early signs of diseases such as Alzheimer's.)

If this is true, governments have yet another reason not to use torture (as if they needed any more). The pen, they ought to remember, is mightier than the sword.

Sources: Videnskab.dk & Wiley.com
 

I spent a happy weekend in Copenhagen at Fantasticon 2009, the Danish convention for the speculative genres. I enjoyed this more than I had ever imagined, as the con was filled with great people, great panels, interesting interviews and surprising science talks.

Charles Stross and Gwenyth Jones were guests of honor, and a lot of the Danish fandom-cum-writer community was there as well, most notably H.H. Løyche, who writes some very thought-provoking fiction (some of which are available in English). They participated in a lot of very informative (if sometimes rather improvised) panels, and blew my mind away with their analyses of near-future sf and British sf. I also had the opportunity to talk to Ralan Conley, who, in addition to helping the SF community by running Ralan.com, is also a very nice fellow. So, for anyone using Ralan.com, remember that September is fundraising month ;-)

The science talks included introductions to the current energy crisis and suggestions for solving it (Hint: working to generate much more wind-, geothermal-, and solar energy should feature high on the list of any responsible politician.)

Another great speech was given by Klaus Æ. Mogensen about the future of copyright laws and what happens when we all own a 3D printer. High points: 3D printers are already available as "open source", i.e. the building instructions are available on the net for free. The first printer that can copy itself has already been built. And printers should soon (if not now) be able to produce electronics, as in "print your own phone" -- or simply copy your neighbors phone if you find that easier. Copyright, it stands to reason, will change drastically in the next two decades, and the effects on society seem pretty mind-boggling. (Klaus is going to publish a report on this later -- I'll try to link to it when I can.)

... I'd be in belong in be permanently locked away in rehab.


No, I'm not really addicted. I just need more shelf space. And most of these belong to my wife anyway. Really, she reads way more than I do. Waaay more. They're not mine, uh-uh. Not addicted, no, no. So I'll just go buy another dozen novels. Gotta have something to fit on those shelves...

Just a short post to pimp a story I've out in Alienskin Magazine. Kind of sad, really... the self-advertising, I mean. The story's more in the funny department :-) 

Yesterday the family and I visited some of our good friends to celebrate the 5-year birthday of their son. Or so we thought... It started out as such event do in Denmark -- hot buns, cake, coffee, cookies, and a load of presents. Ok, make that a huge load. They'd managed to invite some 30 guests, so their house was pretty full, and their son had a lot of new toys.

The weather was awful, so the planned outside treasure hunt didn't seem such a good idea, but the hostess got us out into the rain and sent us on our way. A couple of short detours later, the trail ended at the local church... where they had flowers and a priest lined up, and kind of caught us all with our pants down. They had muttered something about having a wedding at some point. They just hadn't told us the date in advance :-)

Surprise-surprise. They were married in a nice ceremony, and afterwards the already good mood in the crowded house rose several degrees. A day to remember for everybody!

A new report puts Encyclopeadia Britannica in the top ten among leading superbrands in the UK. I'm rather thrilled that knowledge bases such as this have made their way into the common consciousness -- supposing this means that people actually use the knowledge they find there :-)

My earliest memories of EB comes from my freshman college year when we learned to check facts in actual books. Yes, the Encyclopedia did contain an amazing amount of facts; sadly those facts hadn't been updated since the sixties. A minor problem for a historian checking dates, but I'm glad the internet edition is updated more frequently.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is publishing an online survival guide for freelancers (and writers in particular, I suspect). I've read the parts on Discipline and Illness so far, and they're excellent, with tons of spot-on advice from a writer who's rumored to be both productive and successful. The whole thing is published as ongoing blogs posts. To find a table of contents, search for "Freelancer's Guide in Order" on this page.

A meme (grabbed fromdr_phil_physics andaliettedb): List 15 books that you'll always remember. The first you can think of in 15 minutes. In no particular order, these books really stuck with me. There are others, of course, but these were the first 15.

• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
• Gateway by Frederick Pole
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• Around the World in 80 days by Jules Verne
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks
• Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• Ved profetens skæg (By the Prophet's Beard) by Bjarne Reuter
• Balladen om den forsvundne mumie (The ballad of the missing mummy) by Dennis Jurgensen
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
• The Gunslinger by Stephen King
• Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Many of these books are parts of series that I read and enjoyed.