Theophrast.us - Chris Howard's Writing Blog

Oceans within lemony oceans

And yes, I am still wondering if the whole universe isn't an ocean, and if in fact we're not all living on a galactic lemon shark.

Skott has informed me--using his stuffiest high Victorian--that, indeed, the turtles all the way down theory has been thoroughly debunked.

I am delighted!

This, of course, leaves wide open my theory that we are all living on the back of a lemon shark of galactic proportions--in a universe of lemon sharks--most definitely one of the cartilaginous fishes.  It could quite possibly be a Sawfish or one of the Rajiformes, a Deepwater Stingray.  We'll just have to go find out.  I propose two expeditions, one to explore the snout of the beast, which, should it turn out to be saw-like, then, well, Sawfish it is.  Another explores the tail regions for the long slender stinger of a ray. If both parties should return in failure then...our good citrus friend, the lemon shark, will be declared the victor!

.

Brainstorming with poetry

Let's set aside poetry the art form, rhythmical composition and elevating anyone's thoughts, and think of it in a purely structural way: poetry as action, description, mood, story, in a succinct form. 

Think of it as stylized sketching for writers.  Have you ever written poetry as a way to bring ideas together for a work of prose? 

There's a bunch of brainstorming (storystorming?) methods that I've tried successfully.  I have thumbed through the dictionary, pulling out appealing words, writing them down on a big piece of paper, stringing them together--just to see what is born out of them.  Sometimes nothing much, although--in my somewhat limited experience--exercises like this usually yield something, maybe not something special, but something worth paying attention to, something useful. 

I've used mindmapping software (mindjet.com, freemind) for word doodling, throwing down ideas, which amazingly--As Seen on TV!--grow into other ideas, and soon you have this spreading network of thought and action and characters and motives and "what if?" questions.  Really cool stuff.  I recommend at least goofing with these kinds of tools just see what you build.

But I've also found that writing poetry works for brainstorming story ideas, helps tie together a set of interesting words, a flow of ideas, and even more as a way to tell a story or backstory without burying me with too much to take in.  I also think writing poetry sends me in unexpected directions, helps open doors I wouldn't have even noticed with other methods.

The idea here is to get your story ideas down in a concise way, tell a story, fill in background, create a mood, write action, with a handful of descriptive lines.  It's also about taking some time to work with words, be creative, build impossibilities.

There's...um...only one problem with this post.

I wrote a poem a couple nights ago called The Wild Children that I kind of liked, and refined, played with it until I thought I should submit it somewhere rather than post it here.  So I did--we'll see if it goes anywhere.  Anyway, I wrote The Wild Children for one of my current book projects, a fantasy set in a post-virtual universe, where the world's human population has gone completely sim. 

What if there was an apocalypse and nobody came?

You can think of it as post-apocalyptic urban fantasy, only there wasn't an apocalypse, no judgment day, just the singularity, the hissing speed of progress pulling everyone into their nanobuilt V-pods housed in city-sized storage spheres of diamond with walls a meter thick.  Humanity vanishes off the face of the earth--or any planet we've colonized.

Humanity has gone total virtual, billions of us, living out our lives in pure simulative worlds--worlds without limit--without hunger, pain, limitless capacity for growth.  New generations of humans are born, grow and live forever without ever having a physical form--that they know of.  The virtual world is just that good.  But it doesn't really matter.  The story's not about them.

It's about the ones who were left behind. 

What about those who didn't make the go-virtual deadline, and now have to live out their physical lives in a depopulated world?  And is it really depopulated?  There's tech around, empty cities, nanoware that can provide benefits, but what about old world powers, things ignored by human progress, that lived at the borders of humanity, that lived in the forest, under the leaves, in the earth?  They were here before there were humans.  They just let us run our course--maybe even helped us along, and now they're free to roam the far ice reaches, the hundred-mile forests, the cracked pavement, empty office towers, the deep sea.

What about the humans who were left behind, generations of us, sharing our empty world with them?

There, that's my setting, and it all came out of some poetry brainstorming.

What do you do to help jump start your story ideas?  I've covered a few methods.  What have I missed?  Anyone else use poetry?

.

Balance

So much of the writing craft is about balance, how much to tell the reader.  There are many aspects of this balance: how many hints, how deep the info--too much and you give away the surprise, or you kill your suspense.   I have been struggling with this very issue in the sequel to Seaborn, but I'm thinking of another aspect of balance.

How much do you write for the present, an audience of today but not tomorrow?  How much history, cultural depth do you--or should you--fill your pages with?  It's a question for genre, historic, contemporary, all kinds of lit--even purely made up worlds.  Although there are differences with the last because a reader cannot know your world without you.  Unlike our world--this world--21st Century Earth--where I can have two characters talking about a tyrant's downfall and have one say, "He'll most likely end up like Hitler."--and leave it at that.  I don't need to explain.  There are facts a storyteller can assume a reader will know, but it is that assumption that is the balance we have to deal with: can you assume that all audiences will know?  Is the best bet to pick your audience and write to their level of understanding--their current level of understanding at this point in time?

3 o'clock this morning, Antisthenes by way of Aristotle got me thinking about this, because Ari assumed his audience would always know certain facts.  In the Politics [around 1284a] there's a great line that goes something like, "...it's like the response from the lions in the parable of Antisthenes when the hares came before the assembly demanding equality."  That's it.  Aristotle didn't think it necessary to include the lion's response--not when every freakin' kid in the agora knew.  But 2400 years later, not every freakin' kid is familiar with Antisthenes' work.   

I'm going to spend some thought on this because it's definitely worth keeping in mind when mentioning historic events, cultural references, popular works, Buffy, Harry, Scotty, Freddy, Elmo--will you're readers two millennia away understand you without footnotes?  Do they need to?  Do all writers write for a certain time, a century, an era, but no more--beyond which they need analysts and historians rooting through the news and Net garbage to find out what the hell you were talking about?

Oh yeah.  The lions asked the hares, "Where are your claws and teeth?"

.

Interstitial Arts

I was only vaguely aware of the interesting ideas and work being done over at the IAF--how unfortunate for me.  Thanks to an invite from Ellen Kushner (via Facebook) to check out the Interstitial Online Salon, I've set out to find more about "art made in the interstices between genres and categories," and I encourage you too.  I've been pulled in by everything I've read so far, essays by the amazing Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss, Holly Black, Jeff VanderMeer, Terri Windling, and some of the messages going at the second Interstitial Online Salon. 

Find out more, join, participate.

http://www.interstitialarts.org

http://p081.ezboard.com/finterstitialartsfrm2.showMessage?topicID=323.topic

Idiot

On the drive into work this morning--somewhere between Newburyport and Exit 50/Route 1, I drifted back to ancient Athens where the word, idiōtēs, referred to a person who acted privately without knowledge of what was going on around him.  An idiot was someone who was politically or socially unaware.  Idiōtikos is "of or for a private person," and sometimes, "not done by rules of art, unprofessional, amateurish."  This is the source of our modern use of "idiot" to refer to someone who is generally ignorant. 

No, I didn't get into an accident or even weave dangerously into other lanes--a common occurrence when one drives in Massachusetts.  I was just thinking of Socrates being an intellectual midwife in the Theaetetus and idiots. 

Maybe it's all the presidential candidate commercials.

LSJ: ιδιώτης, ιδιωτικος

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot
http://www.yourdictionary.com/wotd/wotd.pl?word=idiosyncrasy

.

Writing and Research

It's not just for genre writers, establishing new worlds, unearthly conflicts, alien flora and fauna--even hissing fauna (I'm an Of Montreal fan).  I have seen Jodi Picoult speak twice, once in Exeter for her launch of Nineteen Minutes, and once in New York at a writer's conference, and although she did a reading for the launch, her primary focus was on the research she had to do for her books.  (She's a great speaker).

I love the research part of writing, the creation of worlds, magic systems, political structures.  But what about the form these take?  Do you write notes, just stating the facts?  Have you tried other methods, like writing fictional accounts, diaries, newspaper articles?  As a writer, one obvious path to take is to write about the world from the viewpoint of an author in that world, an observer, and these fictional out-of-story helpers can become characters in themselves, characters that will help you write your story.  It just occurred to me that one interesting way to explore the world would be through the diary of someone young or very old, through their eyes.  Same world, different perspectives--always keeping in mind that the purpose of world building and all this research is not to dump it on the reader, but to make you the writer so comfortable in your world that it becomes second nature to tell stories about what goes on inside it.  (That's rule number 1 of world building, BTW.  It's for you, not the reader).

For Nanowhere--an old novel of mine I gave away under a CC license, I wrote several drafts of a scientific article establishing the theory that self-awareness in humans is the result of two separate conscious faculties in hierarchical order, one outward facing and one that was inward facing (conscious of, or managing the first conscious faculty).  I posted the papers and collateral material here if you're interested.  (I wrote them.  The authors listed on the papers are characters from the story).

I sort of stumbled into this post idea this morning when I was looking for Visio on my notebook and found an old family tree I did of Aristotle (The Philosopher) for a novel I will get back to when I'm done with my current WIP, The New Sirens. 

That's the other cool side of research, is that we writers do so much of it that it piles up after a while, and we forget about some of the crazy and cool things we did to dig into some particular world in the first place.

Here's my Aristotelian family tree with notes and even a dashed line back to Zeus, which was popular in those days (click the pic to see it larger).  If you're interested in the Visio format or SVG, let me know (email at bottom of right column).

Happy researching!

Links:
http://www.jodipicoult.com/nineteen-minutes.html
http://www.lykeionbooks.com/nanowhere/
http://creativecommons.org/

.

Aristotle on the value of biology and Heraclitus taking a dump

Here's Aristotle trying to convince his largely aristocratic students that studying the "less valuable animals," such as fish and rodents and hen's eggs (Not just cavalry horses and lions) is a valuable pastime in itself.  There are things to learn about their actions, the habitats in which they thrive, their eating, sleeping, mating behavior.  Aristotle--before there was a science of biology--had to go out of his way to make it clear that examining all animals and their ways is a worthy exercise.

Read this passage from Parts of Animals (De Partibus Animalium):

(PA I 5, 645a4)  For this reason we should not be childishly disgusted at the examination of the less valuable animals. For in all natural things there is something marvelous. Even as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to those strangers who wished to meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself at the oven—he bade them to enter without fear, ‘For there are gods here too’—so too one should approach research about each of the animals without disgust, since in every one there is something natural and good.

Here's what's really cool about this passage.  The phrase "warming himself at the oven" is thought to be slang referring to going to the bathroom, i.e., sitting on the pot, taking a dump.  "There are gods here too."  Heraclitus' use of "gods" doesn't refer to actual divinities, but to processes worth discovering, exploring--the idea that some value may be gained by studying what would be considered the lowest of functions of the body.

Of course, another quote--the very famous fragment--from Heraclitus has him saying, "Everything flows..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
http://www.non-contradiction.com/2007/09/on-the-parts-of.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/

.

Writers Love Books

I'm a huge fan of ebooks.  I want them to succeed.  I've been using a Sony Reader (PRS-500) regularly for about ten months, and I love it.  I think it works, it fits in my hand, it has the right weight, the eInk display is so page-like.  It's not backlit like a computer screen.  It's like a real book--so much so that book lights work well with it.  I don't buy ebooks nearly as often as I buy print books, but I do shop at Fictionwise and Amazon (for ebooks as well as print).

And then again...it's not quite a real book.

I also collect books.  Real books.  I specialize in a few areas, but my prizes are all works of Aristotle.  I have well over two-hundred books by, on, about Aristotle, Aristotle's philosophical works, his place in the universe, on Aristotelian commentators.  I have books printed in 2007.  I have books printed in the early 1500's.  The oldest was printed on the 25th of July, 1516 by the family of the famous Venetian printer Ottaviano Scoto.   (The printer's mark of Ottaviano Scoto is a circle with a double cross with the letters O.S.M, the initials of Octavianus Scotus Modoetiensis--Ottaviano Scoto of Monza).

It's the oldest in my collection, but it's not my favorite, which is a 1550 Madius edition of Aristotle's Poetics.  I pulled it out of the bookcase tonight, which I don't do often enough, and I just flipped through the pages, smelled 457 years of book.  It's a big book, folio sized, with stiff end boards.  It's in Greek and Latin.  It is astoundingly beautiful--so beautiful in fact, that I cannot imagine it ever being supplanted by anything as square and plastic and electronic as an eReader.  Perhaps used in combination with devices able to store, search and display thousands of books, but not displaced.  Never displaced.

I have a pretty wild imagination, but I can't imagine it happening.

In case you're wondering, the name of this blog, Theophrastus, comes from the name of a friend and student of Aristotle.

Domain Names

I'm trying to come up with some good available domain names for Seaborn.  I have time, but it's never too early to get things off the ground.  Of course, Searbon.com is taken, and I don't really want to spend a pile of money to bid for it.  Here's my list so far:

SALTWATERWITCH.COM 

NINECITIES.COM 

SEABORNBOOK.COM 

SEABORNONLINE.COM

What do you think of these?  Do they work?  What's your favorite?  Can you think of any others?

.

Edges and art and feathers

Here's me rambling like a fool on the art of writing. 

How many of those good wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night ideas do you actually use?  How many end up in your writing?  How often do you say to yourself, "what the hell is wrong with me?  I'm a total writing freak." 

The "wrong" isn't wrong, it's just you feeling the edge--and that's where the art is.  It's where you want to be.  I'd like to say the edge is something like writing boldly, but there isn't boldness in it.  It's not about conquering fear.  Not exactly.  On the other hand, it's not entirely craft, although it takes some time to develop.  It's kind of like an easiness with words, or the ability to jump across a river, and the rocks aren't always rocks.  Sometimes they're crocodiles, but if you jump and keep jumping they can't catch you.  And when you get to the other side, you can breathe deep because you've finished that sentence, and it's time to jump back to the other bank, and begin another.  Easy.

Back to the middle of the night ideas.

I get them all the time, although not all wake me up enough to open the journal and write.  Many do.  Sometimes this half-awake creative thinking is a lot more compelling, vivid--something--than what I end up putting down on paper, which a lot of the time is just crap, sort of like this post. 

But I can't stop.

It can be just one line, or a scene without any action.  Sometimes it just flows, not always right.  Everyone uses the word "groove" to mean that state of very free flowing storytelling.  That's part of what I wanted to say above, that it's not something you fit into, just the opposite, something you have to balance on.  I think it's more like a peak or an edge.  As I said, I don't think it takes courage to walk up to it, but going over hurts--or makes you look silly, but that's where I find the writing, right there at the edge.

Embrace the weird.  Your brain is an insanely powerful group of tools that you have assembled, adjusted to your liking, plugged in, modified, overclocked, scripted and turned on.  When you wake in the middle of the night with an idea, it's as if you locked the factory door, went home, and left everything running--and then in a panic, you drive like a maniac back to the office to find that your own machinery has changed the plans, the floor, the assembly line, and now the cars have wings and can do surprisingly complex low altitude aerobatics. 

Let it happen, and write it down when it does.  Actually, it doesn't just happen.  It's you setting the whole thing up and letting it run. 

Yeah, there's a lot of weirdness-flotsam, nonsense-rafts, drivel-scapes and characters from my stories riding escalators--all in color--hopping, floating and bumping into each other as they run through my brain.  Let it run.  Sometimes a couple of them click together and then there are party balloons, bakers making funny shapes with dough, waves crashing, doors creaking, screaming, flashing lights, and who the hell told you it was okay to bring guns when the invites clearly say, "knife fight?" 

The discouraging thing is that even when you see it, sometimes the words come out wrong; they're like the hot sun to Icarus--or really to the wax that held the feathers on his flying contraption.  The words are lumpy, unconvincing, formed badly, drippy; they don't tell the story you want to tell.

Sometimes the stuff just flows right, a sea of puzzle pieces that surface face-up, improbably roll with the tides, link perfectly together, and if I can get these damned wings to work and fly at a respectable altitude, I'll be able to see the picture, the big picture, and the tiny stories inside every one of the pieces. 

Walk to the edge.  Remember that the feathers don't make the wings work.  You do.

Set the words free.

.

It was the best of times...

No, that's it.  Best of times.  As far as technology and communication go, we live in a universe changing era.  A million examples of this, but let me give you one tiny detail that somehow makes all of this technology glow:  I got an email from Terry Martin, the managing editor of the new British quarterly magazine Murky Depths, thanking me for subscribing, telling me that issue 0 (promo) and issue 1 were in the mail and should be in my hands shortly.  And then to thank me for posting about MD here on the blog.   I paid for the one-year subscription with PayPal, which--of course--handled the conversion to British Pounds seamlessly.  I found out about Murky Depths from an article I read online at SFScope, to whose RSS feed I subscribe, and through my feed reader, Bloglines, I read articles when the reader tells me there's something new.

Trite tech commentary aside, the whole world really is right outside my door, on the other end of the Internet pipe, etc.  And with everything else going on here and around the world, I still wouldn't trade living in this time for any other.

So, go order that two pound Spanish Cheese Assortment from Amazon.com, have it delivered to your door, browse the art at the Met, and you better go pick up a sub to Murky Depths.

Lit snobbism

A great post by Elizabeth Moon on literary snobbism.

http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/29384.html

Put me squarely in Seth's camp

Tobias Buckell posts quotes from Seth Godin and Peter Watts.  Sure, there's a context difference, but there's also a clear here's-my-view-of-the-world in each of these, and it's interesting how wholeheartedly accepted and different the two are.

Where do I think I will be in five years?

I posted my "Where will you be as an author in five years?" question here and on MySpace, and the first two comments on my blog on MySpace made me step back and take a second look at my own goals. 

The first comment from Lorraine C. Ladish was more along the lines of my own response, a general view of the future with some details sprinkled in, but then WriterGal76 commented with twelve very specific goals, including, "submit a book-length collection to the Yale Series of Younger Poets" and "teach a college course in poetics or literary novels/analysis and any other aspect or form of creative writing."

So, I went back and rewrote my follow-up post to be somewhere between Lorraine's and WriterGal76's level of specificity.

I'll start by saying that the one thing I don't see me having more of in the next five years is time.  Always need more time.

I know I can complete at least one novel a year for I don't know how many years.  I have enough ideas, outlined novels, first three chapters of stories to last me a decade.  I come up with several story ideas worth pursuing every year, so I'm set for a long long while.  Again, it's that time thing that will always get in the way.   

I've created a few fiction writing lessons for my own kids called Saturday Morning Writing Club, but teaching or participating on the panel side of a writing workshop would be something new and fun.

I will continue to go to conventions, even more than I do now.  I can't see myself ever missing Boskone or Readercon unless something more urgent comes up, but I'd like to take in more cons, world and regionals.  I don't know how things might change.  I mean, right now, I'm like, OMG!--no way, there's Elizabeth Bear!  Okay, I don't say OMG, but it is really cool to see authors walking around, talking to fans, talking about their experiences.

I would love to win an award, say a Hugo.  Just one, thank you.

I will continue to draw and paint, and I'm going to work on a graphic novel or three over the next five years.  Has to happen.

Movies?  Yes, lots of them, my stories turned into screenplays and big screen productions, red carpets, tuxedos...Really, I'd be overjoyed to get an option or two in the next five.

I want to see my novels translated and published all over the world.

I've made one novel, Nanowhere--a YA thriller, available for free reading and downloading (CC licensed), and I can see myself doing it again.  I've already written a short story that I plan to post for free when my novel Seaborn is released sometime in 2008.  Also planning a short graphic version of the story.

There's my list. Where's yours?

www.lorrainecladish.com
http://www.myspace.com/writergal76
http://www.myspace.com/the0phrastus
http://www.elizabethbear.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award

Your writing future

Writers look into your futurescopes and tell me what you see? 

Where do you see yourself in five years?  Another two, three, four novels completed, a whole new series, short stories, anthologies, awards, movie options or whole movies made from your stories and premiered by then?  Do you see yourself entering new genres or focusing only on one?  Agent changes, publisher changes? Any unexpected turns in your writing career? 

Where will you be as an author in five years?

I have to think about this myself.  I'll follow up with a post on where I think I'm going.

breastsummer

This week's theme at Wordsmith.org A.Word.A.Day is red-herring words, and today's word is:

breastsummer

It's not a word with which I'm familiar, and my first impression was that it was going to be something sunnier, more uplifting, maybe even with a nice tan. 

breastsummer (BRES-sum-uhr, BREST-, BRES-e-muhr) noun; A horizontal beam supporting a wall over a large opening, such as a shop window.

A bit of a let down, really.

First three chapters, fast and what-the-hellish

Explain...Explain later.  You don't have time for explanations.  Don't stop to smell anything.  Do use the sense of smell, but don't dawdle.  You have to move.  Action and dialogue!  Now!

Okay, I'm describing standard writing strategy.  I have just gone back and edited the first three chapters of The New Sirens (working title for the sequel to Seaborn) readying them for critiquing by the really wonderful writing group to which I (thankfully still) belong even though I have been too busy to make the in-person meetings for months.

So, it's that show don't tell, don't info-dump, crisp dialogue stuff again...

I know, I know.  It's common sense, but I'm looking at paragraphs I've written that just shouldn't be in the first three chapters. There's narrative, telling too much, all the crappy stuff writers shouldn't be doing, but it ends up flowing off our fingers onto the keyboard anyway.

You have to make it short and mysterious, don't explain anything, use one line of dialogue instead of ten, just enough to make the reader think, this is just the surface of something a whole lot deeper.   

I think that after chapter one, you have to get the reader/editor/agent to think, "What the hell just happened?"  And after the first three chapters, think "I must have chapter 4!"

You also need a crit group to tell you, "You think this is fast? --yeah, if your walking" or "It wasn't so much what-the-hell as why-the-hell am I reading this?"

I'm into chapter 13 of The New Sirens, not quite halfway done, and it's been a good exercise for me to go back and strip the first three chapts down to the essentials, action, motion, dialogue that adds to the plot. 

And nothing more.

Something to think about...

...the next time you design your imaginary city from the ground up.  We all know Athens.  You know, Socrates, Plato, Perikles, democracy, parrhesia, but did you know the city name is plural?  How many plural city names can you think of?  In Greek, Athens, Athenai--is like saying "Athenses".  Only one Lakaidemon.  Only one Korinth.  Many Athenses.

Pen's mightier

Erica Orloff's written a great pen is mightier than the sword post on her blog.  A must read.

I'm closer to the introvert side of things and so I spend more time in my head, chewing words before speaking them. I write them down, rewrite them, bring them back into my head, then write them again. There's no doubt the pen is mightier.  Words have always meant more to me on paper than in the air. 

On the other hand, I know people for whom the whole world--including words--seems to be outside their heads, and words take on a potter with clay kind of reality.  The first things out of their mouths aren't always finished, and they get out a lot more than I do, but halfway through the conversation they have a clear stream of thoughtful words--amazing me most of the time.

That said, one of my favorite passages in the Iliad is when Athena--goddess-of-wisdom-and-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword deified, strides right up and beats the holy crap out of Ares.  No fancy weapons, just tells him what a loser he is, picks up a rock and proceeds to lay out the god of war.  I posted--and painted something--about this a while ago here. (Athena Rocks!)

http://www.ericaorloff.com/blog/index.htm

Words...

You have to have a love of words to be a writer.  Of course, that doesn't prevent me--or any of us--from abusing them, twisting them into forms for which they weren't meant, misusing them, misspelling them, and even playing games with them, like when you say, "when, when, when..." over and over and the word soon sounds funny and unrecognizable.  This last was much more fun when I was twelve, but I just tried it and it still works.  It's like an after image burned into your retinas, lingering, but with a form that's not really clear.  The word 'When' just sounds weird now.

I'm working on a series of posts meant to get my kids into fiction writing this summer, and to prepare, I've gone back to the Master of Those Who Know: Aristotle.  (Dante called him that.  Everyone else simply called him The Philosopher).  Aristotle's Poetics is one of my favorite books out of everything that he wrote and that has survived the ages.  I mean, he actually wrote a lot on esthetics, a couple books on the analysis of Homer's works, on Hesiod's, he wrote poems of his own, but none of these made it this far.  We've even managed to lose the second book of the Poetics, Ari's analysis of comedy--the basis for Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose.

Artist as engineer 

I was thinking about the word 'art' this morning on the way into work, and that it's interesting that I'm an artist and I'm also a techie, a software engineer, and the Greek word for art is techne--pronounced tek-nay, one word that encompasses the ideas of art and craft.  To take one more step, the Greek word, poiēsis means creation, making.  The work titled in English, The Poetics or On Poetry by Aristotle is, in Greek, Peri Poietikes.  A poet--as we use the word--is a maker of literature.  An artist is a maker of representations of reality.

Okay, let's get out there and make something, storywrights, playwrights, and all you other wrights...something with words.

My own worst [marketing] enemy

Leave it to me to come up with an obscure blog name and somehow make it almost unreadable.   I've been using the "the0phrastus" tag for a while.  I'm an Aristotelian (means I'm pretty much off the deep end when it comes to Aristotle) and the real Theophrastus was a fellow philosopher student of Ari's.  Why the zero instead of the "o" you ask?  Several reasons behind this, none of which may be true because I can't remember why I started spelling it that way.  Take your pick: some sort of hacker nom de guerre (of course, this is my favorite), by having a number (zero replacing the 'o') in the name I can use the same username on almost any system and be fairly confident that it hasn't been picked by someone else (Who in their right mind would pick such a username?), I don't know how to spell and sometimes mix up my letters and numbers, because it can be argued that zero may not even be a number I got confused.  It's probably one of these.

Anyway, I made some changes to the blog banner, put a slice through the zero, making it even more zero-ish, and I put a line at the bottom, explaining my insanity--ahem--spelling problem.

They're total freakin' brainiacs, the lot of 'em

Forget that "kids are like sponges" nonsense.  They're way more than that.  They're off-the-end-of-the-chart wackos, I tell you, total, freakin' brainiacs, bionic geniuses, practically cyborgs, the meter's pegged with kids.  They have powers beyond our (adult) comprehension.  Which demands an answer to what the hell happens to us when we grow up?  Something along the way grinds us down, tries to turn us all into slow-witted, envious dullards. 

OK, that's my intro.  Here we go.

The problem with reading so many blogs is that I forget where I read something, and it's particularly annoying when I know I wanted to post a comment, but things come up, meetings, work, etc.  The opportunity's gone. 

I wanted to put this comment somewhere, so here goes.  The day after Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince appeared in bookstores, there was a flood of reviews, analysis, what's-next? reports, who died this time? and who in hell is R.A.B.  Well, some daft wee brain at L.A. Times book review panned Harry Potter, wondering why anyone would waste their time reading it.  There were also a few digs at LOTR and Narnia, childish trash, that sort of thing.  His message was basically, "grow up."  I disagree.  There is a place for adventure in stories, and it should be rather spacious in my opinion.  Most of the comments on referencing blogs also disagreed with the reviewer, some amounting to "I consider it a success if I can get my kids to read anything over thirty pages." Others--adults--saying they've started to read them to find out what all the hype's about.  Most enjoyed the books. 

There was one thread that, condensed, went something like this:  I take exception to your "reading anything is better than reading nothing" argument.  Your average ten year old is going to have trouble with a 500-700 page book, there are three in that range and three shorter of the Potters.  Conclusion: these young kids are going to spend all their time (a year was the range thrown out in the comments) to complete the series, leaving them no time to read other books, presumably the boring, depressing, "naturalistic" ones the L.A. Times reviewer wants them to read instead.

Enter the wacko sharp as nails kids...

Here's the comment that I didn't post:  My daughter, who'll be eleven in October, read Half Blood Prince in a day and half, and with, as far as I can tell, complete comprehension.  I know she understands it as well as I do because we argued about plotting and character motives, and she has as much insight into the story as anyone else who's actually read it.  Back to the original point: she can read Harry Potter 1-6, end to end, in less than two weeks.

I think it's an adult tendency to underestimate what kids are capable of, and more--maybe this is what we've really lost--how much time they have on their hands--especially in the summer months.  I wonder if the commenter has children, the one who assumed ten-year-olds need a year to read all the HPs?  Probably not.  His opinion sounded a lot like Plato yapping about the ideals of common child rearing in the Republic.  Yeah, Plato, the lifelong bachelor, who knew nothing about raising children, who's total grasp of childhood behavior and requirements probably amounted to, scratching his chin, "They're shorter, right?" and "I may have noticed a few of them trotting around the agora after their mothers.  Not sure, though."

Grassroots

I just read an idea-inspiring post on Grassroots and Sci-Fi by J. Marcus Xavier at VerySmallDoses.com, building on a discussion started by Loren Javier at Confessions of a (thirtysomething) drama queen.  Now, just coming out of a four hour meeting, I think I'll let my thoughts ramble at the keyboard for a while.

I thought about the connection to purchasing power:  "Like it or not, hard core science fiction nerds are the "early adopters" and stage-setters for majority opinion...[and they] tend to be "early adopters" of electronic communication technology."  I wonder if there's consideration for the nerd demographic?  There must be, right?  Geeks, nerds, SF fans?  They tend to take technical jobs, which pay fairly well, right?  The rest of us work in video stores but spend all our hard-earned money on computers, PSPs, books and movie tickets.  A powerful piece of the population, if you ask me.  Of course, why on earth would you do that?  I know almost nothing about real marketing.  I don't even know a lot about fandom culture.  I'm an SF fan, I love Star Trek, I loved the original Battlestar Galactica, but I've never been to a convention, never wrote a letter to a TV studio with my demands, never dressed up as James T. Kirk, and rarely participate in anything remotely fan-ish.  (Hell, I even got a capital "I" for introvert on my Myers-Briggs eval, which puts me somewhere between downward-spiraling agoraphobia and get-away-from-me anti-social). 

So, with that out of the way, (and you're comfortable with my speaking with authority based on a total lack of knowledge) what is the real issue here?  Are we talking about influencing the Nielson Ratings?  Is this about idea creation, e.g., fan fiction?  Is this the general notion: hardcore fans influence softer ones, who tell their friends, who--by this time in the millions--demand the show must go on, the pilot be made into a series, screenwriters should move the plot in this direction, demands for the return of old shows?  Are we talking about becoming influential bloggers that sway industry insiders?  Is this an artistic medium issue?  I mean, books hang around forever, they sit on shelves at B&N, they end up at used bookstores, and can spring to life at any moment, sometimes years after they're published.  (Harry Potter wasn't a "phenomenon" until the fourth book).  Books are like seeds in this respect.  A television show seems different.  Perhaps not with TiVo, but they seem transient.  Is this changing?  TV does have the advantage of momentum, a series building week after week, and may run for years.  A movie hits the theater, hangs around a while, goes dormant, and then shows up at Target on DVD.  It's something like a book, then, a book that cost a few hundred million to make.

Stretch this notion a step further, and I ask you, when will SF fans begin making their own movies, video shorts, graphic novels based on their favorite TV series or movie?  Is this already happening?  Are there rights issues to be resolved?  Not enough fans with video editing gear?  I'm completely out of touch with this side of the art and the visual medium.  I'm a software engineer, but I'm also a writer.  I write more than I read, and I read more than I watch TV, and I watch TV more than I get to the theater.  I get around to watching things way too late.  I just picked up the DVDs for the Sci-Fi Channel's productions of Dune and Earthsea  (Yes, at Target for $7.50 each).  I haven't even unwrapped them, and they might sit on my desk for months.  Really a shame.  (Obvious killer app: time machine or some VR world where you can dial down the virtual time to real time ratio to 300:1 as in Morgan's Broken Angels).

Now it seems unlikely that an author will turn to fan-fiction for ideas, but it does make sense that the writers for a TV series might tap talent and ideas from fans.  An author can complete a novel every other year and keep his fan base.  Maybe there's an if-we-can't-beat'em-join'em tack, become a idea resource for a series.

I wonder if there's more acceptance by publishers and authors of written works for fandom.  There's an enormous Harry Potter following.

The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has allegedly made it clear that fan-fiction using The Lord of the Rings is off limits.  If you want to write fantasy better stay the hell out of Middle Earth.

Harry Potter is not off limits (within reason) as I understand it.  This from a copyright seminar I attended given by a copyright lawyer: J.K. Rowling thinks, for the most part, fan fiction is "good for the brand."  It does not dilute or damage J.K. Rowling's creation.  There is no harm to her world, to her characters, to her intellectual property if a fourteen-year-old from Boise writes a short story about Ron Weasley, Quidditch practice at The Burrow, dashing into Ottery St. Catchpole for some muggle shopping.  She's opened up the world she created, and as long as you don't have Hermione doing something...well, you know, distasteful, go ahead and write away.

With rights, the music and motion pic industries have been heavy-handed.  I wonder if a lot of these conflicts come down to who owns the rights, and that they're unwilling to share something with the fans?

There you go.  Some half-baked questions.  Too many of them.  Not many answers.  Time to go.  Ramble end.

Prank Potential

Keep in mind that long-term pranks are the most effective kind.  This one'll take "95-100 days to harvest."

Start with a neighbor who deserves it, and a good organized spread of Przemko Poppy seeds (Papaver somniferum).  These are low-morphine poppies, but they look like the real thing, by which I mean the first ingredient on the recipe for heroin.  Take a look at the Johnnyseed site for the pic.

200 seeds for a little over $2, and they're a Johnnyseed "exclusive."  What's interesting is that they limit you to one packet of seeds per order.  Hmmmm.  Rubbing my chin. Wonder why?

Nothing prankish so far, just a bit of surreptitious gardening.  The prank begins just before the poppies bloom and you tip off local law enforcement or the DEA, and they swarm on your unsuspecting neighbor at three in the morning, megaphones squawking, attack dogs snarling, black windbreakers with big white letters whipping in the wind, blackhawks thundering overhead.  Maybe they'll use one of those battering ram things and bust down your neighbor's front door, which would be fun to see.  Of course, you'd have to embellish the account of "weird bulbous flowers that look like the ones you'd make heroin out of" growing in their yard with "people coming and going at all hours" and a "strange smell coming from their garage."

What do you think?  Potential here?  Maybe they sell an ornamental cannabis that can be used as a substitute?

The0phrastus says "Many More Living People Than Dead..."

I posted my guess on Textiplication.  Skott's asking How many dead people are there?  I think I'm on the right track, and I didn't even have to ask that kid in the Sixth Sense.  Check out the other guesses and answers.  Here's a copy of my comment:

Let's see...Population's growing by (birth-rate - death-rate) while the death-rate is growing by number of deaths. The death rate decreases over time as medicine and other sciences develop. A big part of this is the infant mortality rate, which decreases over time. I don't think there's a father alive today saying to himself, "If I'm going to pass on the family name I'll need an heir and a couple spares." In today's world heirs aren't likely to die. (There are a couple exceptions like the plague that took out roughly 80-90% of the population "between India and Iceland").

OK, we can ignore the few exceptions and say there's always going to be more living than dead.

I'm going to guess 2-3 times as many living as dead.

(It's not a subject I'm really motivated to study, but you can always count on the Rand Corporation for digging deep into this kind of thing. http://www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB5044/)