Filed under: George Orwell, Government, Politics, Privacy, Publishing, Society, Writing stuff
Or maybe you don’t. My own knowledge of George Orwell was limited to his most popular novels (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) until graduate school, when I also delved into some of his essays. Any would-be writer, and almost anyone interested in political rhetoric, should be familiar with “Politics and the English Language”. His piece on “Why I Write” had a powerful impact on me, and I still find that this passage at the end resonates strongly:
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
Well, anyway, if you’ve enjoyed Orwell’s writing, you may also enjoy his diaries. The Orwell Prize has just started running entries from Orwell’s diaries 70 years ago, posting them day-to-day as a blog starting with the first entry dated August 9, 1938/2008. As stated on the blog:
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.
What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.
I’m looking forward to it, to seeing how this man’s mind understood the changing events of the world around him at a critical juncture. Maybe you will, as well.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Daily Kos.)
Jon walked to the edge of the pool. He heard a noise behind him, turned slowly to look at it.
From beside a large bush a pile of boulders shifted. The air shimmied, light danced, and a crouching figure emerged, covered in a fabric drape that tried to keep up with the changing surroundings. One hand pulled the drape to the side. Another was holding a very large sidearm.
Excerpt from Chapter 18 (page 258 of the .pdf) of Communion of Dreams. That’s my description of a military ‘stealth suit’ being used by one of the characters. Why do I mention it? Because:
WASHINGTON – Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible.
Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects. Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects.
The findings, by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Xiang Zhang, are to be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science.
The new work moves scientists a step closer to hiding people and objects from visible light, which could have broad applications, including military ones.
Wow. Another prediction coming true in my lifetime.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, General Musings, Health, Hospice, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Sleep, University of Missouri, Writing stuff, YouTube
I took some books back to Special Collections yesterday afternoon. As I was unpacking items, one of the staff members asked how I was doing.
“Pretty well. Been busy.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “You look – rested.”
* * * * * * *
On Wednesday, in response to a friend who asked what I had going on, I sent this email reply:
Need to do some blogging this morning, then get settled into the next batch of books for a client. Print out some invoices. Also need to track down some camera software and get it loaded onto this machine, and finish tweaking things here so I can shift over the last of the data from the old system and send it on its way. Need to work on learning some video editing, and start uploading clips from our ballistics testing project to YouTube. Then I can get going on creating the rest of the content for *that* website. Play with the dog. Should touch base with my collaborator on the Alz book, see where he is on some transcriptions he is working on. And then prep dinner. In other words, mostly routine. Yeah, I lead an odd life.
An odd life, indeed.
But here’s a taste of some of the documentation about the ballistics project that I have been working on:
That’s me wearing the blue flannel overshirt. Man, I’m heavy. I hope video of me now would look better.
* * * * * * *
The chaos continues. Yeah, we’re still in the process of completely re-arranging the house, and of seeing to the distribution of Martha Sr’s things. Looks like there’ll be an estate auction in our future sometime next month. But that’s good – it means that things are moving forward, heading towards some kind of resolution.
As mentioned in passing in the email cited above, I’ve been shifting over to a new computer system I got last week. My old system was starting to lose components, and was becoming increasingly incapable of doing things I need to be able to do. Well, hell, it was 7 years old, and was at least one iteration behind the cutting edge at the time I bought it. Thanks to the help of my good lady wife, this has been a relatively painless transition – though one which has still taken a lot of work and time to see through.
And one more complication, just to keep things interesting: My wife is moving her business practice home. This had been the tentative plan all along, once Martha Sr was gone, and for a variety of reasons it made sense to take this step now. She’ll be able to devote more of her energy to seeing to her mom’s estate, hastening that process. And she’s going to take on the task of shopping my book around agencies and publishers. Now that there have been over 10,000 downloads (actually, over 11,000 and moving towards 12,000), it would seem to be a good time to make a devoted push to getting the thing conventionally published, in spite of the problems in the industry. We’re hoping that she’ll be better able to weather the multiple rejections that it will take, and I’ll have more time and energy for working on the next book (and blogging, and the ballistics project, and – oh, yeah – earning money for a change).
* * * * * * *
She looked at me for a long moment. “You look – rested.”
“Thanks!”
It says something that with all I’ve been doing (as described above has been fairly typical, recently), I look more rested now than I have in years.
Actually, it says a lot.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Climate Change, Cory Doctorow, Emergency, Flu, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, Heinlein, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Tor.com, Weather, Writing stuff
Via BoingBoing, an interesting discussion over on Tor.com: The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles. An excerpt:
It’s funny how it’s overpopulation and political unpleasantness that cause the problems, never ecological disaster. Maybe that wasn’t on the horizon at all in the fifties and early sixties? I suppose every age has its own disaster story. It’s nice how little they worry about nuclear war too, except in Space Cadet which is all nuclear threat, Venusians and pancakes. They don’t make them like that any more. Come to think it’s probably just as well.
* * *
No individual one of these would be particularly noticeable, especially as they’re just background, but sitting here adding them up doesn’t make a pretty picture. What’s with all these dystopias? How is it that we don’t see them that way? Is it really that the message is all about “Earth sucks, better get into space fast”? And if so, is that really a sensible message to be giving young people? Did Heinlein really mean it? And did we really buy into it?
Yeah, he meant it. And further, he was right.
No, I’m not really calling into question the premise of the piece – that Heinlein had something of a bias about population and governmental control. And I’m not saying that he was entirely correct in either his politics or his vision of the future.
But consider the biggest threat facing us: No, not Paris Hilton’s involvement in the presidential election, though a legitimate case can be made that this is indeed an indication of the end of the world. Rather, I mean global warming.
And why do we have global warming? Because of the environmental impact of human civilization. And why is this impact significant? Because of the size of the human population on this planet.
And what is the likely response to the coming changes? Increased governmental control.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
For Communion of Dreams I killed off a significant portion of the human race as part of the ‘back story’. Why? Well, it served my purposes for the story. But also because I think that one way or another, we need to understand and accept that the size of our population is a major factor in all the other problems we face. Whether it is limitations caused by peak oil or some other resource running out, or the impact of ‘carbon footprints’, or urban sprawl, or food shortages, all of these problems have one common element: population pressure. We have too many people consuming too many resources and generating too much pollution. In fact, when I once again turn my writing the prequel to Communion, I may very well make this connection more explicit, and have the motivation of the people responsible for the fireflu based on this understanding.
So yeah, Heinlein was right. He may not have spelled out the end result (ecological disaster) per se, but he understood the dynamic at work, and what it would lead to. Just because things haven’t gotten as bad as they can get doesn’t mean that we’re not headed that direction. Our technology can only compensate for so long – already we see things breaking down at the margins, and the long term problems are very real. You can call it ‘dystopic’, but I’ll just call it our future.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Genetic Testing, Health, io9, NPR, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Sleep, Writing stuff
Some years back a good friend sent me a postcard from Florida with the image of a tri-colored heron’s head (you can see the image from which the card came here). On the card, the heron is looking straight at you, top feathers standing straight up, and above it in bright blue ‘electric’ lettering are the words “Stress? What Stress?”
It’s been tacked to the wall next to my desk here since. And it has been something of a standing joke between my wife and I. When things have gotten bad from time to time, one of us will turn to the other and simply say in a squeaky, high pitched voice “Stress? What Stress?”
* * * * * * *
A month ago I wrote about slowly coming down from the prolonged adrenalin high which was being a full time care provider. Doctors have known for a while that such long term stress was hard on care providers. It’ll drive up blood pressure, screw with your sleep habits, and even compromise your immune system. Now they have started to figure out how that immune system mechanism works. Last night I caught a piece on NPR’s All Things Considered with UCLA professor Rita Effros about her research on this mechanism. What professor Effros said (no transcript yet, so this excerpt is my transcription):
So, in the short term cortisol does a lot of really good things. The problem is, if cortisol stays high in your bloodstream for long periods of time, all those things that got shut down short term stay shut down. For example, your immune system.
…
But let’s say you were taking care of an Alzheimer’s spouse, or a chronically ill child – those kinds of situations are known now to cause chronic, really long-term stress – let’s say years of stress.
…
(These care providers) were found to have a funny thing happening in their white blood cells. A certain part of the cell is called the telomere, which is a kind of a clock which keeps track of how hard the cell has been working. Their telomeres got shorter and shorter, and it has been known for many years that when cells have very short telomeres they don’t function the way they’re supposed to function.
What happens is this: cortisol inhibits the production of telomerase – a protein which helps to lengthen and buffer aging effects. Abstract on the mechanism is here, and it says it succinctly:
BACKGROUND:
Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies show that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing.FINDINGS:
UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells’ ability to activate their telomerase. This may explain why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres.IMPACT:
The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness. The findings also suggest a potential drug target for preventing damage to the immune systems of persons who are under long-term stress, such as caregivers to chronically ill family members, as well as astronauts, soldiers, air traffic controllers and people who drive long daily commutes.
* * * * * * *
io9 picked up on this story, and gave it a nice Science Fiction spin:
Stress runs down the body’s immune system, which is why people with high-stress jobs or events in their lives are vulnerable to illness. Now a researcher at UCLA has discovered the link between emotional stress and physical damage — and she’s going to develop a pill that will allow you to endure stress without the nasty side-effects. And there may also be one good side-effect: Extreme longevity.
It turns out that when you’re under stress, your body releases more of the hormone cortisol, which stimulates that hyper-alert “fight or flight” reflex. While cortisol is good in small doses, over time it erodes the small caps at the end of your chromosomes known as telomeres (the little yellow dots at the end of those blue chromosomes in the picture). Many researchers have long suspected that telomeres would provide a key to longevity because they are quite large in young people and gradually shrink over time as cells divide.
Rita Effros, the researcher who led the UCLA study, believes that she can synthesize a pill that combats stress by putting more telomerase — the substance that builds telomeres — into the body. This would keep those telomeres large, even in the face of large amounts of cortisol. It might also make your body live a lot longer too.
[Spoiler alert!]
Curiously, this clue about telomere length and aging is exactly the mechanism I use in Communion of Dreams to reveal that the character Chu Ling is a clone. Genetic testing reveals that the telomeres in her cells are much shorter than would be expected from a child her age, leading to the understanding that this is due to the fact that she has been cloned.
Ironic, eh? No, no one is going to think that I’m a clone. But I find it curious that the same mechanism which I chose for a major plot point pertaining to the health of the human race in my book is one which has been clearly operating on my own health.
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Daily Kos, General Musings, Health, movies, Preparedness, Publishing, Society, Writing stuff
I mentioned in passing last week that I was working on all my care-giving posts for a book. Here’s a bit more about that project, as it is tentatively shaping up.
Sometime last year, when I cross-posted one of those entries on Daily Kos, I discovered that there was someone else there who was in pretty much the exact same situation: caring for a beloved mother-in-law. For a variety of reasons, it is fairly unusual to find a man caring for a mother-in-law with dementia. We didn’t strike up what I would call a friendship, since both of us were preoccupied with the tasks at hand, but we did develop something of a kinship, commenting back and forth in one another’s diaries on that site. Our paths diverged – he and his wife eventually needed to get his mother-in-law into a care facility, whereas my wife and I were able to keep Martha Sr home until the end. But the parallels were made all the more striking by those slight differences. In the end, his “Mumsie” passed away about six weeks before Martha Sr died.
Recently this fellow and I picked up the thread of our occasional conversation once again. And discovered that both of us, independently, had been thinking of writing up a book about the experience of care giving. It didn’t take long before we realized that together we could produce a more comprehensive book, and a lot more easily, drawing on our individual experiences to show similarities and different choices. A few quick emails sorted out the pertinent details – basic structure of the book, that all proceeds from it will go to the Alzheimer’s Association (or them and other related organizations), some thoughts on publishing and promotion – and we were off and running.
For now, I’ll just identify him by his screen name: GreyHawk. By way of introduction, check out this excellent post of his at ePluribus Media, where he very neatly explains the *why* of our decision to write this book:
Special thanks to Jim Downey for the supplying the links to the video and to his blog, and just for being him; my wife and I took comfort from the fact that we were not alone in our situation, and that we knew at least one other couple who were going through a very similar experience to our own.
That’s it right there. Millions of Americans are facing this situation today, and millions more will in coming years as the baby-boomer generation ages. I’m not a scientist who can help find a cure to the diseases of age-related dementia. I’m not wealthy and able to make a significant difference in funding such research. But I can perhaps help others to understand the experience. GreyHawk and I are going to try, anyway. I know that my wife and I found comfort in knowing that we were not alone in this. So did he and his wife. If we can share that with others, and make their experience a little more understandable, a little easier, then that will be a worthy thing.
Wish us luck.
Jim Downey
(This post has been expanded and rewritten.)
Been a long week. I mentioned the other day that it had been a rough day for me personally. That was the 37th anniversary of my mom’s death in a car accident. It’s always an emotional day, but it hit me harder this year than it has for a long time, probably because of Martha Sr’s death early this year.
In addition to that, we’re in the midst of doing a massive re-arranging of the house, following the division of the household possessions. It’s more than a bit of a juggling act, because at the same time we’re having to deal with things still here that no one in the family wanted. The chaos of having my home environment thus disrupted is hard on me, but the whole thing is harder on my wife, who now has the unenviable task of going through all her mom’s remaining things and deciding what to do with it all. Because with each dress, each photograph, each trinket, there is emotion, made tangible. To shed these things feels a little bit like abandoning the memory of her mom.
* * * * * * *
Whew.
I just finished going through and editing all the posts related to caring for Martha Sr, up to her death. It’s something I’ve been working on the last couple of days, part of the preparation for getting that material in shape to be a book I am collaborating on with someone else (more on that later).
Almost a hundred posts. Something like 40,000 words.
And an untold number of tears.
Wow. She was a remarkable woman. It was a phenomenally rewarding experience. I hope that I am able to convey that. I hope that what I have to say will help others get through, perhaps even to cherish, the time they spend caring for a loved one this way.
But for now, I’ll have a drink, and cry.
* * * * * * *
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Daily Kos, Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Huh. It finally happened, a week after I turned 50. Over 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams.
I’ve posted a ‘thank you’ to both UTI and dKos, but I want to extend a personal thanks to all who follow the blog and have helped to spread the word of the novel. As I noted on dKos:
When I set up a website to allow people to download the novel early last year, I thought that I would just make it available until I got around to finding a publisher for the book. But then my life became completely preoccupied with the deteriorating condition of my mother-in-law (see my diaries here tagged “Alzheimer’s”, or go to my blog), and just didn’t have the time/energy for doing the legwork of finding an agent or publisher.
So the book remained available for download. And surprise, surprise, word of it spread. The most I ever did to promote it was to put a link in my .sig file here and a couple of other places where I post. The whole thing took on a bit of a life of its own, to be honest, and watching the numbers of downloads slowly climb helped to bolster my spirits during some very dark and depressing times.
OK, that’s not entirely true – I did start this blog with the goal of promoting the book and documenting the process of finding an agent and then landing a publishing deal. But the part about watching the numbers climb helping me through those difficult times of caring for Martha Sr are certainly true. The same for the feedback I have gotten through this blog. Thanks to one and all for your support, criticism, and friendship.
Huh. 10,000. That’s kinda cool.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Well, I just checked the stats, and according to my calculations we’re closing in on the elusive 10,000 downloads goal. About 110 to go, way I figure.
That’s really cool. I suppose I should go pick up a current edition of the Guide to Literary Agents or something. Rework my contact letter. Select a half-dozen or so agents and contact them, tell them what a great opportunity it would be for them to represent me and Communion of Dreams.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just rework the homepage for Communion a bit, freshen things up in celebration. Because contacting agents has been so effective in the past.
Gah.
Anyway, chill the champagne, order the cake, let’s get ready to party!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 