Just a quick update to this post – last night I finished editing Chapter 5, and I’ve now trimmed out 8,436 words from Communion of Dreams. Since I wanted to get 10,000 a month, this puts me on track or even a little ahead.
It’s kind of fun, re-reading the book. And the editing hasn’t been too painful yet – mostly I have been just tightening dialogue and cutting out some of the explanatory material. I think I’ll add the revised text to the CoD homepage as an option, in case anyone wants to download it to see what changes I’ve made. If it is indeed accepted for publication, I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep that available online for free.
Oh, and I just checked – have had another 750 downloads of the book in less than a month. So that’s approaching 18,000. Cool.
Back to work . . .
Jim Downey
As noted, I have been spending a fair amount of time working on the care-giving book, about the years that my wife and I cared for her mother here at home. And mostly this has consisted of going through all my old posts here which touched on that experience – there are at present 125 posts tagged with ‘Alzheimers’. Add in email excerpts, and the similar amount of material from my co-author, and you can get a sense of just how much editing and organizing work is involved.
But there’s also something else. It’s a odd sense of vertigo I get from re-reading this stuff. Because I am now far enough from being in the middle of it to have some perspective, but still close enough that a lot of the emotional content is immediately accessible and somewhat overwhelming. And then there’s articles like this one in the NYT by Natalie Angier, which really resonate:
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop
If after a few months’ exposure to our David Lynch economy, in which housing markets spontaneously combust, coworkers mysteriously disappear and the stifled moans of dying 401(k) plans can be heard through the floorboards, you have the awful sensation that your body’s stress response has taken on a self-replicating and ultimately self-defeating life of its own, congratulations. You are very perceptive. It has.
As though it weren’t bad enough that chronic stress has been shown to raise blood pressure, stiffen arteries, suppress the immune system, heighten the risk of diabetes, depression and Alzheimer’s disease and make one a very undesirable dinner companion, now researchers have discovered that the sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.
Ayup. Independent research confirming a lot of the stuff I talked about in all those Alzheimer’s posts. Another excerpt from the article:
Unfortunately, the dynamism of our stress response makes it vulnerable to disruption, especially when the system is treated too roughly and not according to instructions. In most animals, a serious threat provokes a serious activation of the stimulatory, sympathetic, “fight or flight” side of the stress response. But when the danger has passed, the calming parasympathetic circuitry tamps everything back down to baseline flickering.
In humans, though, the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.
“Think too much.” Gee, I don’t know anyone who does that.
Well, I mean, those 125 posts about being a care provider can’t possibly be evidence of that, can they?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Comics, Publishing, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff
Sent a note to a friend, who had asked whether it is painful editing CoD:
Nah, I can be pretty ruthless when I need to be.
And it’s true. Unfortunately, when I get into the necessary detached and critical headspace for this kind of work, it tends to slop over into a lot of how I see everything. So, let’s just say my cynicism level is high, and rising.
But it is working. I’m through Chapter One and about 1/3 the way into Chapter Two, and have already cut out about 1,400 words. And after doing the preliminary read-through of the rest of Chapter Two, I can say that a lot more is going to come out of that. Stuff I like, but doesn’t really do much other than back-fill history – too much “explaining of the events and the technology”, as the readers from the publisher put it. So it’ll get the chop.
Like I said, ruthless.
But this is somewhat interesting: moon town. And hey, they have my Paint the Moon idea (which prompted my wife to send me the strip), so it can’t be all bad.
Back to work.
Jim Downey
What’s that? 10,000 *what* a month? Hits to the website? Downloads of the novel? What?
What it is is the number of words that I am going to try and whittle out of Communion of Dreams over the next two months.
Why should I mess with the absolute perfection of the finished text this way? Why should I slaughter a single word that has been carefully chosen and adopted through countless revisions?
Well, because there’s a publisher who likes the book. And in the comments I received from said publisher, who had four people read it in order to sort out what work needed to be done to get the book into shape for publication, they said this:
It is very well written, and the author is clearly capable of telling a great story. I am a firm believer that a book should be as long as needed, however, this manuscript is too long for the story. I have several notes in the beginning that there is too much explaining of the events and technology. The original hook in the book after an hour’s worth of reading is that a secret meeting has been called. Again, the last several chapters were great at building the pace – it is just that it takes too long to get there.
They said other things, too, but this is what the whole thing comes down to.
I sent the comments to several friends last week, and asked for their reaction. The consensus was that I should be able to tighten up the text to make the earlier part of the book move more quickly, without sacrificing too much information that the reader needs to have in order to understand the world I have created.
And I agree.
So, I have told the publisher that I will make some significant revisions, and shoot for trimming down the book by about 20,000 words (it is currently 132,500), primarily from the first part of the book. And that I think I should be able to accomplish this in the next couple of months, given my other obligations. Actually, I think I can probably do this a lot faster than that, but I do have a lot else on my plate right now so I want to leave myself plenty of room.
The question comes up: why haven’t I trimmed down the book before in this way, if I am ready to agree to the changes now?
Well, because some people like the extra material – they want the more complete information, they like the more literary pacing of the start of the book. Not everyone, of course – one of the more common comments I have gotten about the book is that the pacing is slow at first. Curiously, it seems that this divide breaks along age lines – younger readers just like a faster pace, seem happy to dive in and let the technological details sort themselves out with less explanation. Before I was willing to make these changes, I wanted to have a good reason to do so. And while the publisher won’t be able to make a final commitment until I provide a revised manuscript, this is a good enough reason.
So, I’m going to do it. And we’ll see what happens. But this is undoubtedly the most ‘movement’ I’ve had with the book in the two and a half years since I posted it online and started this blog.
It may mean less posting here from me – which I hope is a worthwhile trade-off, if it results in a published version of the novel.
Wish me luck.
Jim Downey
Wow – I *really* wish I had written this:
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
There’s a lot more, but I have already excerpted more than I usually consider “fair use.” So go read the whole thing. Seriously, do so and you will understand people like me a whole lot better.
Because I am a “maker”. Whether it is the time I am writing – working on a book, or trying to come up with what I consider a worthwhile blog post, or creating content for this or that ‘project’ – or whether it is the time I am doing conservation work, I need at least a block of a half day in order to really accomplish anything. It takes a while to get sorted, situated, and settled enough so that my mind (and my hands, actually) has the necessary calm to be creative in the appropriate way.
Most people just do not understand this. They are used to living by “manager” time, even if they are not actual managers themselves. That’s because managers usually set the rules by which other people work. And naturally they set rules that they understand and are comfortable using themselves. So even if someone is not a manager themself, they have acclimated to living on manager time.
No wonder I hate meetings and interruptions so much. I cringe when someone calls and wants to “drop by” and talk with me about this or that. Yeah, it is necessary – even in my business, I need to function as a manager sometimes – but good lord, does it disrupt me, and ruin an otherwise productive block of time.
Huh. I wish I had written that. Because in writing something, I usually have to really think it through sufficiently to bring my thoughts to crystal clarity. And this would have helped me understand some vague notions I have had much more completely.
Jim Downey
(Via Freakonomics, where the discussion is also pretty damned good.)
And a worse sort that doesn’t even work that way.
OK, briefly: on Monday I did one of those things you’re supposed to do when you reach a certain age. No, I didn’t join AARP. I read a Dave Barry column. Actually, I lived a Dave Barry column. Well, minus the ABBA.
I didn’t write about it because it wasn’t very interesting, all in all. Or at least I didn’t think so until a couple of days later. Following the procedure, after I got home and was feeling more or less human again, I sent a note out to a couple of friends and family members letting them know that everything went fine and I didn’t have anything to worry about. In that email I mentioned that it actually went so well that the doctor didn’t even see the need to chat with me afterward, nor did they bother to show me images from the procedure. I mentioned this in passing to a couple of other people when discussing the procedure.
But that’s not how it actually happened.
My wife, who was there in the recovery room with me following the procedure, told me that the head nurse did indeed go through the images taken during the procedure with me, explaining how each just showed a happy pink colon and other bits.
Say what?
What seems to have happened is that I came out from under the anaesthesia, and part of my brain engaged well before other parts did. I was seemingly fully awake, lucid, conversational, even joking. But the little DVR in my head hadn’t rebooted yet. I had absolutely no memory of having seen the images. Some scattered fragments have since come back to me, showing that the images were stored somewhere in my head but probably the indexing function that the brain usually uses was inoperative.
This is not the first time something like this has happened to me. I have a history of waking and holding conversations, seemingly fully conscious when I am actually still partially asleep. My wife has learned to discern when this is happening. I think that it is related to my tendency for lucid dreaming – that some part of my brain is capable of still functioning in normal waking condition when other parts are in sleep mode.
Which makes me wonder – is this part of the reason why I am so creative? Is part of my brain tapping into a dream state more readily than is typical? It would be interesting to see whether other writers and artists have a similar slight scrambling of their neural abilities, a related ability to smear the seemingly discrete stages of consciousness into a blur.
And hence the quote used in the header. Because if anyone was capable of tapping into dream imagery, it was Lewis Carroll.
Jim Downey
*From Through the Looking Glass.
Filed under: Climate Change, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Society, Space, Survival, Writing stuff
OK, this was kicking around in the back of my head when I wrote the post the other day, because I have had a page from the June 6th Economist sitting on my bench for the last several weeks, waiting for me to get around to writing about it.
About what? Us clever monkeys. Well, more accurately, our genes, but for purposes of discussion here I will say the two are functionally the same over the time span I wish to address. (Which, when you think about it, is a rather profound notion. No, this is not my idea.)
The idea discussed in the article is this: that the development of modern human culture was dependent not on intelligence, but on something more basic – survival. Specifically, on population density:
In their model, Dr Thomas and his colleagues divided a simulated world into regions with different densities of human groups. Individuals in these groups had certain “skills”, each with an associated degree of complexity. Such skills could be passed on, more or less faithfully, thus yielding an average level of skills that could vary over time. The groups could also exchange skills.
The model suggested that once more than about 50 groups were in contact with one another, the complexity of skills that could be maintained did not increase as the number of groups increased. Rather, it was population density that turned out to be the key to cultural sophistication. The more people there were, the more exchange there was between groups and the richer the culture of each group became.
Dr Thomas therefore suggests that the reason there is so little sign of culture until 90,000 years ago is that there were not enough people to support it. It is at this point that a couple of places in Africa—one in the southernmost tip of the continent and one in eastern Congo—yield signs of jewellery, art and modern weapons. But then they go away again. That, Dr Thomas suggests, corresponds with a period when human numbers shrank. Climate data provides evidence this shrinkage did happen.
Now, this is a fairly old trope in Science Fiction: that some cataclysm can result in the complete collapse of society, to the extent that most if not all knowledge and technology is lost. Just look at The Time Machine to see how far back this idea goes – and it has been used countless times since. I play off this trope for Communion of Dreams in a couple of ways, of course, using it as both back story for the novel and for the eventual revelation at the end of the book.
It is interesting to see this intuitive idea borne out by some science (though it sounds to me like there’s still a fair amount of work to be done to establish that the theory is correct). And not just because it addresses some curious discontinuities in the archeological record. Rather, it says that intelligence has considerable staying power, at least in our species. Sure, it may not be a sufficient factor in supporting true civilization, but knowing that at least in our case it can last some 100,000 years gives one hope for it lasting for a while elsewhere, even if those civilizations do not.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Travel, Writing stuff, YouTube
I’d sent around a YouTube link to some of my friends, showing what happen when a freight train encounters a tornado – it’s worth watching (stick with it to the end of the 2 minute clip!). But in the discussion about it on MeFi, someone posted the following item with Richard Feynman explaining just how a train stays on its tracks:
As I told a friend this morning: “I did not know that.”
And, thinking about it as I have gone through my morning routine, I keep coming back to just how clever us monkeys can be. The basics of modern railroad technology are over 200 years old. The solutions to the problems that Feynman explains in that clip are classic applications of mechanics & geometry – but they are still really quite clever, being simple & self-correcting (once properly constructed in the first place).
And yet, I did not know this. I’m reasonably smart, well educated, curious about the world around me, and with a high level of mechanical aptitude. Still, I did not know this.
Now, I don’t mean to over-think this. There is no end to the things that I don’t know. There is even a lot about the underpinnings of our current technology that I don’t have a clue about. Coming across something I don’t know about railroads should be no real surprise.
And yet . . .
This is something I explored a bit in Communion of Dreams, in the discussions about *how* intelligence or technological sophistication could manifest itself very differently in an alien race. I used one of the characters, who has studied the matter in different human cultures, as a foil for examining different strategies to achieve a given level of technology. Why? Well, for my own enjoyment, mostly. But also to prompt a reader to consider the matter from perhaps a different perspective. In fact, that is a lot of what the whole books is about. So I spent over 132,000 words trying to do it.
And Richard Feynman accomplished much the same thing with an anecdote a bit more than two minutes long.
Ah, humility.
Jim Downey
This is a little weird – evidently, a Japanese site did some kind of mention/review of Communion of Dreams, and in the last couple of days I’ve had thousands of hits and about 200 downloads of the book because of it.
I say “evidently” because the site is in Japanese, and even The Mighty Google fails to give any real translation. Here’s the site:
And here’s the page from whence the traffic has come. Odd thing is, while the “MP3” is clearly in the title, only about a quarter of the downloads have been the audio files, and the rest the .pdf of the book.
Anyway, if anyone can read Japanese and would like to let me know what the site says, I’d appreciate it. Who knows, maybe I can wheedle a trip to Japan as a “famous American author” or something out of this.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 