Peeking into the rock

So the young doctor got a Pay Pal account. I sent him 3000 koruny as a test. (That's about $171 on today's rate of exchange -- $120 a year or so ago)

First of all, the money took a week to arrive. And then an other week to clear. What's up with that? It's electronic funds. Last I heard, electrons did not take a week to travel from the west coast of North America to the middle of Europe. Can you imagine what phone calls would be like if they did? Ansible, anyone?

It gets worse, but the worse part is because of the young doctor's own special circumstances.

Taking out less than 3000 koruny a shot costs a small extra fee. He can't take out more than CZK 2500 a month unless he gets verified. He can't get verified without using a credit or debit card. We set up the Pay Pal account because his debit card is in a finite -- but indefinitely defined -- hiatus land. Otherwise we'd be using that. His withdrawal limit there depends on prior authorization (I guess that's to defend against identity theft -- kind of like when my credit union called to verify that it was indeed me that was ordering up plane tickets to Prague all of a sudden), but that can be managed, once the debit card is alive again.

Anyway, Pay Pal would work if his rent was about a third of what it is. For now, we're back to paying forty dollars a crack to send him his expenses. I am so looking forward to him getting his own loans.

On another front, it's very wet out there. It's going to be wet for the foreseeable future. As usual, there's pruning and spraying I should have done before this which will be very late now. As to whether the nascent drought has been averted -- I don't know. Why can't I find a site that just keeps tabs of season totals for my area? I know that Soquel Creek station has had 10.55 inches. And I could find the accumulated total for Bonny Doon. But I don't know what that means, because I can't find the "season normal to date" number anywhere. It shouldn't be that hard! Once in a while, an article includes that information, but when I look for where that information must have come from, I can never find it.

A minor frustration continues in thatthere are no numbers available for downtown Santa Cruz at all. This is not crucial for planning, because our water supply comes from the San Lorenzo Valley (i.e., Felton, Ben Lomond, etc), but it's personally interesting.

And on still another front: I am measuring my progress on the new new version of The Conduit in tens of words. Does that mean there's something wrong with the new approach, or does it mean I can't actually manage to write a novel and work full-time? I've done it before. But not, so far, a saleable one.

I know I should already have Skype or something lined up, but it takes time to do stuff especially if you're me.

I made a date with Frank to call him on New Year's Day. I sat down at the computer to look up his number and his IM icon flashed.

[Unknown site tag]

(08:54:43) ftrollman@gmail.com:
Did you just call?
(08:55:57) Lucy Kemnitzer:
I just got up and I was waiting until about now to look up your number and try.
(08:56:25) ftrollman@gmail.com:
I was in the bathroom, and one of the phones rang.
(08:56:35) ftrollman@gmail.com:
And I wasn't sure if it was mine.
(08:56:48) Lucy Kemnitzer:
Okay, I've just looked up your number and I'll try calling now.
(08:57:09) Lucy Kemnitzer:
Give me a moment to organize myself.
(08:59:37) Lucy Kemnitzer:
okay, I just dialed 011 420 774 937 382 and nothing happened. Seriously. My phone is silent.
(09:00:06) ftrollman@gmail.com:
My phone is on.
(09:00:46) Lucy Kemnitzer:
Just now I'm getting "We're sorry, your party is not answering. Please try again later. Your call will now be disconnected. 53, 870"
(09:01:06) Lucy Kemnitzer:
I think "your party" must mean the 011 420 part.
(09:01:50) ftrollman@gmail.com:
00420774937382
(09:01:56) Lucy Kemnitzer:
I'm going to try again with another 1 at the beginning like it was regular long distance.
(09:02:11) ftrollman@gmail.com:
That is what it says on my phone card.
(09:02:31) ftrollman@gmail.com:
But I start with the 77 when dialling it in here.
(09:02:44) Lucy Kemnitzer:
it says on the interweb that dialing from US it's supposed to be 011 before the country code.
(09:03:13) ftrollman@gmail.com:
My phone indicates that maybe there is supposed to be an extra zero.
(09:03:24) Lucy Kemnitzer:
So this time I got the regular high pitched three notes and "I'm sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed."
(09:03:39) Lucy Kemnitzer:
Instead of the extra 1? I'll try.
(09:03:39) ftrollman@gmail.com:
So 01100420 774937382
(09:04:08) ftrollman@gmail.com:
17 digit number!
(09:04:20) Lucy Kemnitzer:
okay, I'm trying that.
(09:04:34) Lucy Kemnitzer:
Now I have a regular busy signal.
(09:06:50) ftrollman@gmail.com:
I am theoretically getting five bars.
(09:07:06) Lucy Kemnitzer:
It turns out calling operator assistance is complicated too. You have to know who your long distance carrier is.


The operator got through on the first try, and I had a nice long expensive conversation. He sounded really good, much more cheerful than in writing.

On another front, I saw "The Golden Compass" yesterday and it was really, really well done. I had few disagreements with the visualizations, and the CG was really naturalistic and beautiful. And Lyra's personality came through very well (Pullman describes her as a "vicious child" in the book). And I got a really exciting idea for my final confrontation. For the record, it's the scene on the ice bridge that did it. I'm thinking Pinnacles.

Oh, dog, I just had another idea: wishes, earthquakes, tumbling rocks. Usually this kind of thing is not in the interface's purview but seismic waves can be expressed as information and manipulated in that way, probably, and it is after all a universal conduit.

I need a day off with no family around, but not for a few days yet. I still get tired for no reason. Also, today I was reading the second Sharing Knife book in bed and the nice fellow said "Why is the page trembling like that?" and it was my hand. I've been feeling as if my hands were shaking sometimes but I can't see them shake. This objective manifestation is so disappointing I can't even express it. I can't tell you how depressing that is.

I just found out there's a California registry of big trees.

There's also a National registry of big trees.

I think the reason that the three states with the most "biggest" trees are Arizona, California, and Florida (in opposite order) is that these three states also have the most tree species that nobody else has. I'm not sure that's true, now, I just think it might be the case. I'm not sure how to check it, so don't take it as a fact, only as a question.

Why yes, I'm working. That Santa Barbara Moreton Bay Fig is in my book.

still coughing horribly and having to change clothes no matter what strategy I use. How undignified is that?

So one of the things I'm playing with is artificial personality development. Not how-to-make-an-artificial-personality, but how an artificial personality develops under the particular conditions that the interface is in. I don't remember whether I said that one of my writing group folks once worked in AI development and he says the thing they kept coming away with was that, no matter what kind of system they were looking at, the evolutionary sequence was: sensation, emotion, then analytical thought. This may be true. But it's not what people do in their individual development. Individually, you get all three from the get: but they differentiate more as they go along. If you watch a baby, you'll see that even newborns study. They're equipped with an instinct for learning and analysis. Before language, the analysis is pretty inchoate, but it's never not there. It's never just approach-the-pleasant and avoid-the-unpleasant.

What implications any of this has for the interface, I'm not sure. Because he's never a baby. He's a thing, at first, equipped with whatever his makers feel is more convenient for them. He only has to determine what their desires are, and really not much of that, since they keep tweaking him to simply know those things.

I guess he's a golem, but he's not made of mud: and he has a complete human body since his makers thought it was simpler to use an existing model and let it take care of itself in the biological way than to determine energy usage and design factors from scratch.

have to go to work again, and I really don't want to, and I wasted my weekend, more or less.

I tried to order a copy of How to Cook a Wolf by M F K Fisher for the young doctor, but they don't ship to Czech Republic.

And they say we live in a globalized world.

I finished chapter seven, which is actually a bit of eight, all of nine and a chunk of ten from the original. It is safely squirreled away online too.

So there are twenty-six chapters in the original version, and I'm collapsing the number of chapters and expanding bits and contracting bits. I think it will still be under 85K when it is done. I think I am about 40% through this rewrite.

There are things that seem weak to me. Like the way that the interface often knows things about his prusuers when he hasn't been asked, though he's not supposed to know anything without being asked at least once. Also I think the voice is not quite right. I think I need to shorten a lot of sentences in the earlier chapters to give the feeling of a simpler mind. My natural way of writing is with a lot of long sentences, using layers of clauses. Also using a lot of gerund forms. I think those need to be made less until later in the book.

But for now I'm continuing with this phase of the rewrite. Getting the whole thing into 3rd person, mainly.

The first picture is the nice fellow's dumbrella avatar. It used to be much higher quality. How can it degrade without being resaved and reformatted and stuff? It's been sitting there in that file for a long time. I guess he needs a new one.




The second is the small form of the graphic for "Bella and Chain."

I need to get back to that story. I know everything about it and that. Also I want to redo some small parts, mostly graphical ones.

Meanwhile, it looks like The Conduit is going to have fewer chapter breaks and be longer overall. Part of this is dealing with how certain tropes? event types? repeat: I'm trying to make it clearer that each time they repeat it's with greater immediate consequence to the interface. This means much less backflashing, I think. Also I have to cut out a certain kind of interior monologue and replace it with a certain other kind of internal monologue. Since it's no longer a first-person narration but tight-third with unavoidable tiny flashes of tight omni. By tight omni I mean that the narration knows more than the protagonist but doesn't leave his shoulder. So when somebody dies and the interface doesn't see it, but it's important to the story, the narration says so.

Since I'm trying to ratchet the danger up, I'm disturbed that the first encounter right now ends in death for the wisher. I think I want to go back and instead of having the guy die of aflatoxin poisoning, he should get messily ill from some other food poisoning. Just as the guy who remembers and therefore teaches the interface about memory doesn't die from the heart attack. This way the first deaths directly caused by the wishes come later in the book and I can preserve the guy in the welfare hotel as the first dead body the interface is in the company of.

It's a problem writing about a person whose intellectual and emotional development is not congruent to normal development. I could go different routes. I could say that because he had nothing like child nurturing he won't develop social characteristics and will be unable to care for others. But honestly, that personality is boring to me. I'm not out to prove anything about human nature. I know that sometimes people would write a story like this for that reason. I'm not. I always was interested in the perspective of the fox that gives wishes, the little man with the violin in another fairy story, the bronze head, the witch's familair, the sorcerer's Damned Boy, Faust's homunculus, the genie -- a sentient, self-aware granter of wishes who has no direct agency of its own. An actively passive character. That's it.

On another front, my boss and her husband were thanking me for being in no hurry to quit and I admitted I had no place to go and they said that another person was leaving and they'd just as soon fill that place and I said, fine, I'll stay, and we'll just have an understanding that in the long run, I would be leaving. Things are somewhat better now anyway, I don't know why. The morning staff is no longer ragging on me, anyway. They have other problems, I guess, and maybe they've finally figured out how much work they leave for me to do every day.

It's not like they can stop leaving that work for me. It's just the way it is. There's only so much labor and so much time and so much slack. And the babies cry more in the morning, and I don't know whether that's transition blues or the fact that neither of them will play and sing when things are rough. I have a special crying song -- it's "whimper and whine" from The Electric Company, originally meant to illustrate the silent E -- and the babies automatically stop crying, if only for a couple of minutes, when I sing it. I only sing it when somebody's really upset, and I sing it almost everytime there are two or more babies crying. I think that the babies take it as a signal that life isn't always going to be this tough, I don't know. But I am sure that telling a baby "you're fine" in a peremptory tone of voice is never very helpful, even when it's true.

Sometimes babies cry because of existential angst rather than a physical need, and sometimes when they do that they want to be held more than is reasonably possible or convenient for the grownups. But it's never that the feeling is not true and it's never that the need to be held is unreasonable in itself. The task for the grownups -- who have other things to do to make the place safe and healthy and pleasant for all the babies, and other babies to hold, change, feed, etc -- their task isn't to derogate the existential angst and touch-cravings of the crying babies, but to help them find other ways to acjieve comfort. And the human voice is one of our most proximate tools. Pleasant, reassuring patter, humor, chanting, singing, are all pretty effective most of the time (nothing is perfectly effective all the time). So a baby caregiver who is silent or talking just to the other adults is missing out on a really valuable toolbox, not just a tool.

And we don't have time to talk about this because we never have meetings away from the babies.

So now I know how financial aid for foreign medical schools works, and that's why we're taking out a loan on the house. Just for this year, so far, because we don't want to be paying on the rest of it for longer than we have to. Also because the interest rates on the Stafford loans are not much worse than we can get on the house.

I want to make a hypertext novel. Of course the best candidate for that is Bella and Chain, which is already hypertext, but I'm not returning to it until I have a first draft of A Suitable Lover and a final draft of The Conduit. (which might make a good hypertext novel too, and also might make a graphic novel if anybody wanted to draw a lot of hoboes and migrant workers, plus a Band of Scary Things from Beyond the Fields We Know)

I am so unfocussed.

Talked to the law student today. His anxiety levels are not going down. Nor is his intense feeling that he must beat out the competition or be doomed to perpetual failure (which is defined as making less than $100K a year. This boy grew up poor, by the way).

Yesterday was the Arboretum plant sale (and the Native Plants Society, in one spot). I bought:

salvia sinaloensis
salvia pink thing
another salvia
two ginormous salvias
leonotis
mimulus selection (deepish speckled orange)
australian thing kind of like a mimulus but different
piggyback plant (California streamside native. I must be crazy. I never water in August! but I'm going to put in a drip system, I swear)
2 iris douglasiana natural hybrids, essentially for the nice fellow

I have planted five of these in my front yard. The others go in the back over the next couple of days. Have to take advantage of the planting season (that is, the rainy season).

Yesterday was also the farmer's market, and I spent a whole heck of a lot of money getting everything I could imagine except chard, celery and turnips, which I think I will get anyway at the grocery store. ( food TMI, but nothing really gross )

Also, am I the last person in the world to discover Crystal Waters? Nice voice.

It's very late, so I'm not going to go into detail, but I had to take Gloria to the movies today. Summer is not my movie season. It's full of car chases, explosions, and dumb cartoons. We ended up watching "Cars.' This movie is really well done. For once the cg is luminous and colorful, not weirdly grey and muted. It's also visually and kinetically very complex and rich and layered.

But it's corrupt at the core. It's essentially a pandering movie. The teamwork and true love gloss is just a surface polish. What the movie is really about is celebrating all the ick of the 20th century -- the monstrous petroleum gluttony, the insane drive to pave everything (yes, I know, the movie champions the old Route 66 over and against Highway 40, but look what we're supposed to be nostalgic for! Pavement and neon and what amounts to vast swathes of desecration of the desert).

At this point someexasperation can be heard and somebody says "It's just a movie for dog's dake. You're over analyzing and politicizing something that's really only innocent cartooning."

There's no such thing as an innocent Disney movie, okay? There's something to this movie, with its establishing shots of the huge Southern Nascar race track, and the opening dialog heavily emphasizing the Southernness of it all (dang, I don't want to cvome out against the ideas of a "southern culture," but why do they keep piling dreck on the the feast? Do I have to accept this crud in return for The Oxford Magazine and good music? What if I don't want to accept it?). There's something to it, with innocent, cute automobiles guzzling their oil and gas. There's something to it, with the racial stereotypes -- racial stereotypes? on cars? Can't they give these cars personality without racial stereotypes?

So, corrupt at the core. And, after all that, it still has a lot of car crashes and car chases.

On another front, Frank tickled the printer settings so I can print from Word Perfect again, so the ms of The Conduit is printed out and ready to go to its new destination. I have a cover letter almost finished.

And last: I have what Frank assures me is a mosquito bite most likely begind my right ear. It's so painful I can't describe it. It's just a hard place right under the skin, at about where the skull and the neck join, and just an inch or so behind the right ear. Did I say it hurts a lot? And, finally, to bed.

However, I did finally get those five stories mailed today. And I used the treadmill at Gloria's house though it was terribly boring because I couldn't get my book to stay in a readable position. The book is Kim which I read four times forty years ago. I wanted to read Zola, but I keep having this problem -- I hate the books. Is it the translation? Or is Zola really hateful?

We saw "Akeelah and the Bee" today and it is very heartwarming and sentimental, but it is also interesting and cool. There's some stuff about redemption through what? the dictionary? competition? helping? reconciliation? jumping rope? I'm not sure. Maybe all of these things.

Gloria's on a new medicine for the dementia, its stats look good. In general, her cognitive deterioriation has been accelerating, and physically she's been getting frailer. But this last two days, while she's been really very befuddled, she's been engaged, and her eyes have the light of human intelligence in them. No thanks to her regular doctor, who did not prescribe the medicine, and who, when I took her in last week for pelvic pain (and a history of bladder infections and intestinal difficulties) prescribed 800 mg of ibuprofen twice a day. No, we didn't do it. The other doctor gave her the dementia medicine and treated her bladder infection.

Tedious bad radio luck and annoying music most of the last two days no matter what station I turn to but I hit "The Elvis Blues" on the way home.I started free-associating about songs in general.

On another front -- I finally know how Winston got his own apartment.  And it sucks that there's only one person in the whole wide world who's actually read The Conduit besides me and who therefore has a chance in hell of knowing or caring anything about it.  Since Forager Girl is the protagonist of the next thing I'm writing when I finish Afterwar  (real soon now, I've got five or no more than ten pages to go, and I'm able to do this again), I understand that Winston is a major supporting character.  And he also gets a true lover in this book, in the process of F.G. getting hers.  I'm pretty happy with the way it's shaping up and it just might be one of those fast ones like The Conduit.  

I'm about to get maudlin about writing all these terrific things and not getting them read, so I'm off to bed.

I finally got the courage of my convictions and sent a query for The Conduit to Golden Gryphon, just over a year after I sent it to the other place where I have no direct evidence that they ever get any of my email ever.

I'm terrible at queries, but I think I'd want to check out a book described like this:

I’ve written a contemporary fantasy novel, _The Conduit_, in which the protagonist is a magical construct made to grant wishes – that is, he’s the user interface for the Universal Conduit. Made in human shape for the convenience of its users, it acquires self-consciousness and eventually an independent personality when set adrift by rifts within research group that creates him. Hunted by the splinters of the group, and by another group it doesn’t understand, it wanders the highways and skid rows of coastal California, at first only heeding its last instruction from a member of the research group – to stay safe. It makes its living at first from its capacity to grant wishes, and seeks out hungry people on street corners, in hobo jungles, and on freeway verges, manipulating conversations so that the right wishes will be made. As its human biology and neurology have a chance to develop,_it_ becomes _he_ and he develops awareness. And he realizes that every wish brings his pursuers nearer and he undertakes to learn how to make a living without wishes, trying tomato picking, cement breaking, every kind of casual labor, and eventually being befriended by an ambitious young gardener and the family he meets through him, but not before he is captured and lost by the increasingly violent splinter factions of the research group. The help of his new friends, including a Oaxacan curandera and a wilful and perceptive little girl, enable him to resist a final confrontation with his creators and his would-be destroyers.

and that's enough for today.