I haven’t always been a huge fan of NaNoWriMo, and in fact I’m still a bit ambivalent about it. But, as in institution it’s clearly not going away and, to be fair, some pretty good books have come out of it. So rather than critiquing it, this year I’ve worked up a summary of the main points in my Writing Archetypes series, to help NaNo fans write on the fly.
This is geared primarily toward younger writers wanting to do fantasy or sci-fi, but it should help anyone. Enjoy!
I have been thinking a lot about the rhythms of television drama, and the trouble that showrunners go through when adapting written fiction to the small screen. Which, in the age of giant flat screens and wall-size projections, seems a bit quaint. However, with all of the IMAX films these days… but, I digress.
Television dramas have a rhythm that is very punchy. With written fiction, you can follow a single set of characters through an entire chapter. On television, a few characters have a moment that punches up a plot-line, then hard cut to another set of characters. Usually, you’ll come around to the original set of characters again, but sometimes you’ll only see each set once each episode. Because episodes. And sometimes, you’d only see certain characters once every few episodes, because the viewers will remember them.
It’s fascinating, if you’re a writer. Continue reading
Earlier this year, I posted an atypical political essay on how to clean up the Senate and free it from partisan gridlock. I usually try to confine myself to art and literature, with occasional dumb memes. But there’s a debate these days on the partisan gerrymandering of the districts that feed into the US House of Representatives, and a case before the Supreme Court. The same policy I proposed to reform the Senate would do even better applied to the House.
The elephant in the room (or the donkey, depending on your allegiances) is that the US Constitution does not require districts at all. It requires a two-year election cycle, a twenty-five year age limit, seven years of US citizenship, and living in the state represented. And, it sets the number of Representatives for each state by population. It does not requires election by district.
So, an obvious solution to the problem of gerrymandered districts is to just ditch the districts. I call this model Free Constituencies.
A lot of my music, like a lot of my writing in general, has a religious or spiritual theme. This song is no exception to the rule.
I write a lot of different styles of music, but I have yet to share any country & western. A couple of weeks back, one of my friends asked if I liked country music and whether I’d ever written a country song. I like country as much as anything else (which means, I like the best of it, and generally despise the worst of it) and I have written several country songs. But, those songs were all written years ago, and there was a funny country tune bouncing around in my head that I decided was more contemporary.
So, I recorded that one. And, here it is: You’re So Odd (I Just Can’t Even).
So, you know what they call a Quarter Pounder in France. Do you know what they call an octopus in Spain?
Two things have been bouncing off each other in my head for a while now. One is the bestselling The Soul of an Octopus by naturalist Sy Montgomery, which explores the psychology and individual personalities of that most intelligent of molluscs, the octopus. The other is the film The Arrival, in which a linguist is assigned to kick off communications with an alien species that strongly resembles the octopus. Having only seven arms, however, they’re called heptapods.
I was particularly troubled by a piece in Popular Science that draws on linguistics professor Jessica Coon, who was consulted on the film, which goes in a lot of screwy directions in its thinking about life, grammar, and communication. Bottom line upfront, Coon seems to think that language is somewhat arbitrarily constructed and therefore we can expect a tough slog trying to communicate with aliens.
I think that a comparative psychologist, who studies the relationships between human and non-human cognition in Earth-based life, might give you a more realistic view of how the universe constructs things (it’s far from arbitrary) and thus a far more optimistic view of our chances at communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence.
