Yup. I realized I was researching, in pretty serious detail, a list of about a dozen topics that started with:
I wonder, now that I write this, if the scope’s too huge for me to ever start on a book, and I should just write a draft and figure out the science later by having people in those fields read and laugh at it.
It’s a doozy, though. I’m totally jazzed.
Some of this is going to be US-centric.
Relative powerlessness to do anything about all other items on this list
Global warming (expandable!)
Iraq War
I’m a citizen of a country that tortures people and makes them disappear
We’re all “good Germans” (see above two, several from below)
Erosion of civil rights (see: war on drugs, war on terror)
Non-global warming environmental issues
We’re not going to get onto clean energy sources before we can’t use dirty ones/there aren’t dirty ones left so the last two humans face off with clubs over a preserved bottle of Penzoil in a couple decades.
Media consolidation and lack of discussion of topics on this list
Corruption
Politicization/Evangelism of military
Politicization of other government services (TSA)
Quality of educational system (particularly race/class discrimination)
Societal inability to find reasonable compromises (see: war on drugs, erosion of civil rights, also: health care/copyright laws)
Wealth concentration
… and so on
I don’t know, looking that over, none of it seems particularly unreasonable to be anxious about.
My story about (beeeeep) in (beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep), written at Clarion West, honed through the fine crit skills of my comrades, sold to Asimov’s. Details to follow, but this is my first sale to Asimov’s — my first sale to any of the esteemed digests. I’m super happy. Especially since I read and love Asimov’s.
I know the Wii’s success was a surprise to almost everyone in the development industry (especially those who allocate money to projects), but I thought by this point, we’d be seeing some quality games come out for it. And I read some comments this week about how it was a novelty – people bought it, played Wii Sports, and it started gathering dust immediately. I compared it to my much-traveled DS over the last six months on Game Rankings…
For the DS:
1 90+ game (Phantom Hourglass)
5 80-89 games (counts the two Pokemon versions)
8 70-79 games
For the Wii:
2 90+ games (Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime 3)
0 80-89 games
9 70-79 games
And then compare that to the Xbox 360 (which I don’t have)
2 90+ games
16 80-89 games
I don’t even know how many 70-79 games
And again, I know the development pipeline for the Xbox 360 has the advantage of that huge lead time and all. But when do we start getting some decent games for the Wii? I don’t think anyone knows how this will play out — but I’m really curious to see what happens when I run that query again in six months.
I made my first presidential campaign contribution of the cycle, and I never would have expected it when this thing started up. As any reader of HLWT knows, I’m greatly upset about the erosion of constitutional rights, and lately, particularly by the failure of Obama or Clinton, who are in the Senate, to do anything, or take a leadership position on any of that, or Iraq, or anything… so obviously, Dodd’s “restore the Constitution” platform’s appealing, but I didn’t care enough.
Anyway, I watched this latest bill with dismay, unable to understand why you’d want to give blanket immunity to people who violated (at least) the privacy of their customers, and almost certainly their civil rights. That no one did anything to stop it made me wonder why I even cared about this stuff.
And today, Dodd threw a big wrench into the process, and at the very least, he’s prepared to pay a price for his opposition to this horrible legislation… and I realized that I need to support that. So I did.
During Clarion, every week I turned in my story in a sweat, freaked out, anxious, exhausted from the week’s effort, wondering if I’d gone mad, if it was any good, if I’d made any progress at all. I would, seriously, turn in, sit down quietly somewhere for a couple minutes to calm down, and then take a shower, or go for a walk, or fall asleep.
I wrote harder, in an exertion sense, then I’d ever before. And here’s the thing that’s come to me: you don’t stop writing that hard. The things I learned don’t make it easy to crank out a story. They made it harder. In some cases, far harder — putting the visceral and the emotional in my stories is still a huge struggle, for instance, and it puts the fear into me again, and when I don’t pull it off I want to bang my head against a wall.
Looking back, I’m not sure why that’s a surprise. I didn’t expect that in week four, Kelly would say “and surprise, here’s the secret to turning out consistently great short stories — drink a cup of green tea quickly five minutes before you sit down! There it is, everyone! Don’t spread it around, because you’d only be helping your competition.”
And yet it’s hard to grasp: to write stories I liked as much as the ones I produced in those six weeks, I have to work just as hard as I worked then. The difficulty setting on the treadmill only goes up.
Unless you write some flash fiction, right Gary?