Back of the Envelope

Kevin Lucia, blogging at Relief, has some recommendations on how to find time to write:

As a preface, I’d like to touch on two things, both of which relate to my previous entry and set up this one. First, I’d like to point out a recent blog entry by horror novelist Brian Keene, whom I referenced in my last entry. He recently re-posted an old blog entitled “Time, and How to Make It,” in regards to finding time to write. It’s relation to the tone of this series is uncanny (Warning: Contains ‘R’ rated language in spots, mostly in regards to how aspiring writers should just sit their BLEEPs down in front of the computer and BLEEPing write).

Second, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out rising Christian Suspense Novelist, Eric Wilson. Recently, Eric had the joyous occasion of announcing to family, friends, and colleagues that he was finally able to quit that dreaded “day job” and write full-time. How was he able to do it? Well…hopefully he won’t be offended by this, but please reference Brian Keene’s blog; Eric happens to write his BLEEPing BLEEP off. After plugging along through four novels that boasted rave critical reviews but only average sales, Eric persevered – trusted God as well – and hit the mother load: a whole slew of movie novelization and tie-in deals, as well his much anticipated new series: Jerusalem’s Undead.

It occurred to me as I sat down to write this blog that I might very well be the victim of my own hyperbole. As I thought about all the things an aspiring writer should consider giving up, I realized maybe these things aren’t that big of a secret and everyone already knows them. However, even if they aren’t elements of rocket science, sharing them is by no means a bad thing.

He goes through a number of things a writer should consider giving up or cutting back on, as well as things he should never do so. To no one's surprise, television is number one.

Considering that I just started a job specifically chosen because I believed it would give me more time to write, you'd think I'd have this down. Not so much, as it turns out. I've found time to write the last few days, but that was before the new job really picked up, and it remains to be seen whether I'll be able to figure out a routine that will let me spend as much time as I'd like with the writing.

Of course, I have my own distractions, the number one of which is not listed by Kevin Lucia, but should be: the internet. I'm going to have to cut back on it, I think, to make as much progress as I'd like.

So yesterday I quit my job to become a writer.

All right, that might need a little clarification. While Lincoln Laboratory's been good for me, it was time to move on from my current position. At first I was looking for other positions within the Laboratory, but I eventually decided to cast a wider net and look at jobs outside. I was offered one with Cardinal Intellectual Property, doing patent searches under contract from the US Patent Office. At first it struck me as a very interesting job that offered a lot of flexibility, even if it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. When I realized how I could benefit from the flexibility it gave me, I discovered that I was asking the wrong question. The real question was "How serious am I about my writing?"

I've always wanted to be a writer "someday," but lots of people say that. The difference is that while before I was planning on writing a book at some point, I have now written two books, and the question isn't "How do I write a book?", but rather "How do I publish one?" This will take time and effort, and a flexible job is a great benefit to accomplishing it. I am taking some risks to do so, but if ever there was a time in my life to take risks, this is it, and I think it's worthwhile.

Well, "The Office of Second Chances" is, according to an e-mail I received today, on the short list. My guess as to what this means is that they looked at it, saw that it was in English, had most words spelled correctly, and wasn't written in crayon, so they didn't peremptorily discard it with a contemptuous laugh.

In other news, I've been offered a book deal for The Eyes of the Shadow. It is not, however, a really good book deal. It's a co-publishing arrangement.

We use the term “co-publishing” to describe a hybrid between conventional royalty publishing and self-publishing (or subsidy publishing), utilizing the best of both worlds. ... We print the book for our own inventory, market it, distribute it, and pay the author a royalty on every copy we sell...

Our company has an outstanding team of editors, graphic designers and production personnel to produce books with the highest quality. Also, our company’s system of marketing would help to position the book to be widely distributed both in the Christian marketplace and general book trade. That system includes trade catalogs and fliers, sales presentations to independent retailers, chain stores, and distributors, representation at the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), press releases, Internet listings and advertising in Christian Retailing, our premier trade magazine.

So where's the catch, you ask? What does the author provide to make this a 'co' process?

[I]t is made possible by the author’s willingness to purchase--at a deep discount--at least [a very large number] copies of the book from the first press run. For authors who have a means of selling copies of their own books, co-publishing works very well.

To be honest, it sounds like I'd probably lose money on this, unless my book is a runaway success and/or I'm willing to put in a lot of effort doing my own publicity, selling off the copies I've purchased via book signings, talking to bookstores, selling over the Internet, and all sorts of unusual distribution schemes. Probably both. I'm not even sure where I would put that many books.

I'm at least going to figure out what the actual sum would be, and do some research on the process. I'd certainly appreciate input. Does anyone know anything about co-publishing? Any experience with it?

Back of the Envelope was down this weekend. I doubt that many people noticed, but it was rather infuriating to me. The reason for it can be found over at the Powerblogs development blog website:

Yesterday, our service provider sent out this message:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

Aside from other Powerblogs sites, such as Dean's World and The Volokh Conspiracy, some other prominent sites suffered from this service interruption, such as Blank Label Comics, which supports Schlock Mercenary and Shortpacked. The main effect of this on my blogging is that it's set me behind on getting the Storyblogging Carnival put together. Hopefully, I'll be able to get that done tonight.

In other news, I submitted "The Office of Second Chances" to Coach's Midnight Diner on Saturday. I'm glad to have it done, although I'm not completely confident of what I submitted. I didn't think "Aha, this is the perfect version of this story," so much as "It's due today, I better send in what I have." Not that the version that I sent in was a bad version. I'm just not sure that it was the best version. I wrote four separate versions of Second Chances. Not revisions, mind you, which is merely where I take a story and edit it, changing the details but keeping the same basic plot. Versions are different enough that they don't tell the same story, and this one has had four. The first two were boring, and I don't miss them. The third, I thought, was pretty good, but a friend of mine thought it read too much like a Young Adult story (I didn't entirely agree), so I changed it. I wasn't certain that this fourth version was better than the third version, but it is the version I sent in. What I really needed was time away from this story, so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and then judge it for myself. Unfortunately, the compressed timeline for writing this story, and the decision to discard the second verison and write a third with just a week to go, didn't give me any time to do that. If the story gets rejected, I'll come back to it after some time away and see if I can produce the perfect version of the story.

The deadline for story submissions to Coach's Midnight Diner have been extended to May 31. If you have a story that can reasonably be called Christian-themed genre fiction, you may want to submit it. They aren't looking for sword-and-sorcery fantasy or hardcore sci-fi, but they are looking for horror (including Cthulhu and monster stories), crime, adventure, twilight zone, conspiracy, aliens, and more. Now that the deadline's been extended, I may be able to get my Office of Second Chances story ready in time.

I've been meaning to write up a report on this for a little while, but I've just now gotten to it. As I said earlier, two weeks ago I went to a Christian writing conference. Aside from attending a number of talks by writers, editors, and publishers, I talked to several publishers and convinced two to take a look at my book proposal. I haven't heard anything back yet, but I'd be surprised if I had. I won't go into all the advice I heard about writing and publishing--some of it was good, some of it was okay, and much of it was contradictory. Writers are always telling you how to write, yet no two seem to write the same way. I met Dave Long of Faith*in*Fiction there (and convinced him to look at my proposal), and talked to an old high school friend.

It was fun, but what I think may be useful to you is to talk about some of the publishers who are looking for submissions. If you have a story or book you want to get published, then these aren't bad places to start:

• Creative Byline - This isn't a publisher so much as an intermediary between publishers and writers. For a modest fee ($19), you can submit manuscripts, get feedback from first readers, and submit it to editors who are interested in your type of work. Now, I don't know how well this works, and they are fairly new, but what caught my eye was that among the publishers who signed on are Tor and Forge, who publish science fiction and fantasy. As they aren't very expensive (about what it would cost to send a manuscript via snail mail), they may be worth taking a chance on.
• theotherjournal.com - a Christian online quarterly for the discussion of faith and culture.
• Coach's Midnight Journal - A yearly journal of Christina genre fiction, including horror, crime, mystery, and paranormal.
• Relief - A quarterly journal of Christian literary fiction. Coach's Midnight Journal grew out of it. Cause great genre fiction needs to go somewhere.

There are some others, but those are the ones for the fiction I write. I may put up something for some of the others later.

Update (5/4/2008) Messed up the link for Relief (actually put a copy of the previous entry where the link should have been). Fixed now.

I've decided to attend a writer's conference, specifically the "Festival of Faith and Writing" at Calvin College in April. If nothing else, it's a good chance to network, and as there will be publishers there looking for new authors, there is a chance I could find someone interested in one of my novels. To that end, I've been working on preparing both The Eyes of the Shadow and Fire and Water for this. I considered bringing paper manuscripts, but at 600 pages, it's probably a bit much to burden someone with. So I've been working on preparing a CD which both manuscripts and some introductory material on me. I don't know if anything will come of it, but it should be fun.

Andrew Ian Dodge, a regular contributor to the Storyblogging Carnival, has a new book out. Available on Amazon, The Gathering Dark and other tales: A Sage of Wales Collection, has more of Andrew's Sage of Wales stories, which he's frequently graced us with. Here's the blurb:

The Sage of Wales' adventures continue in this exciting new collection by Andrew Ian Dodge .

In a short novel, The Sage must help his friend, Reginald Wiggenbottom, discover strength out of legend in order to save his unborn son from a nasty conspiracy .

Followed by three additional short tales . First, the Sage must help a man come to grips with a dangerous family legacy.

In the second, he must stop an overly detailed writer from accidentally freeing the Elder God, Cthulhu, from his watery cave and so bringing about the end of mankind.

And finally, he must devise a way to keep an evil offshoot of Islam from raising a bloodthirsty pharaoh.

Congratulations to Andrew, and I encourage you to support him by buying his book.

So I got a new printer the other day. I wanted a relatively fast duplex laser printer so I could quickly and easily print my stories, both for myself and for publishers. Duplex was a must. Relatively long documents become manageable when you print on both sides, and while software will let you do manual duplex, that's annoying and easy to get wrong. Also high on my priority was network readiness: I wanted to be able to print from my laptop without having to turn on my desktop. Of course, that's such a standard feature in laser printers that I didn't expect I'd have a hard time finding it. I wasn't planning to get a color laser printer, but when I saw how much the price on those things had come down, I decided I could afford one for the $500 I was willing to spend. That netted me this:

It's a Lexmark C530dn, priced at $499. I was frankly surprised at what I could get for that:

• Color
• Duplex
• Better than 20 pages per minute
• Network ready
• 1200x1200 dpi resolution

Its one downside is that its paper capacity is only 250 pages on the input and output. For most of my print jobs that's no big deal, but if I'm printing my novel, I may have to reload the paper tray halfway through. It's also not small, approximately 1.5 feet in every direction, but that's less a negative than something you just have to make room for. Fortunately, I had just removed an old computer, so it was able to take over the desk. Toner cartridges aren't cheap, of course. In fact, buying a complete set costs as much as the printer itself does. Fortunately, they'll print 3,000 pages (for the color toner) or 4,000 pages (for the black toner), so the total toner cost per page comes to 2.6¢ black and white and 14.3¢ color. All in all, I'm happy with it.

I've been sitting on this story for a year and a half now. But... New Year's Eve of 2006, I said that my goal was to publish a short story. I even had a seven step plan. What I didn't say, when it happened in May of 2006, is that I succeeded. (In the meantime, I've had an e-zine anthology publication first.) It turns out that publishing a story takes a really long time, and the story that was accepted back in mid 2006 has finally come out, this month, in Aoife's Kiss. I even got my name on the cover. Heck, they actually paid me--though not enough to pay any bills.

I am now, ladies and gentlemen, a Published Author.

On January 1st, 2006, I said that my goal that year was to be published. One of the things you have to realize is that the pace of the publishing industry is slow... so I didn't have anything in print last year. However, I do have something in print now.

Lyn Perry has published a short story anthology on Lulu, with 24 speculative fiction stories with a spiritual theme. This, of course, is part of the Residential Aliens project, a speculative fiction e-zine which is humming along nicely. Lulu is, of course, a self publishing press, but as Dave Gudeman says:

It's in a self-published book, but I didn't publish it myself; Lyn Perry at Residential Aliens did. So technically, Lyn published me meaning that I've been published rather than I published myself. The difference is critical.

And yes, Dave has his own story in the book, the brilliant "Transcendence." Also included is Curtis Schweitzer's "Colossus." All three of these stories have appeared in the Storyblogging Carnival. So if you'd like to own an anthology with a lot of stories with spiritual significance, be sure to buy a copy. You can go straight to Lyn's Storefront.

Blogger and Storyblogging Carnival participant, Lyn Perry, has started a new e-zine for Christian speculative fiction, called Residential Aliens. I contributed one of my own stories, one which I've never published anywhere else, including this blog, so you may want to check it out there. It's called "The Hunter of Shades."

Mad Kane has posted the results for her limerick contest on her blog.

Madeleine Kane is having a limerick contest. If you have, or think you can write, a limerick about spring, and you're interested in cash prizes, why don't you have a look? The deadline's the first day of spring, so you don't have much time.

I bought a new desktop computer recently. My last desktop was six years old. I had updated its memory, processor, and graphics card, but it had reached the point where it just couldn't keep up anymore, so I decided to do away with it and by a new one, a Dell XPS. I had thought I could buy a new desktop for about $2000. I was right, I could, but once I started tweaking the options and deciding to add more memory, a faster processor, a high-end graphics card, and a new printer, I was a little (okay, a lot) above the $2000 level. It was more than I had wanted to spend, but I could afford it, and it really was time to replace my old computer with something close to top of the line. So I ordered the thing the last weekend of last month, and it arrived on Friday a week ago. Since I couldn't stay home all day to receive it, it was delivered to my apartment community's office. I arrived there to find three boxes, one of them quite huge, waiting for me. The big one was, according to the shipping information, between 70-80 pounds. It felt heavier as I tried to cram it into my compact car so I could drive it to my apartment.

My apartment is on one of the courtyards, so I had to carry it a couple of hundred feet to get it to my apartment. When I unpacked it, I found a full-sized tower, something you don't see much anymore, made not of plastic, but of thick silvery metal. No wonder it was so heavy. So I unpack it, and the monitor in the second box, and set it up. The monitor is a superwide, 1680x1050, and it seems quite awkward at first, but I place it on my computer desk, connect all the cables, and fire it up, only to watch the computer fail to start up. It can't find the harddrive. Grumbling to myself, I take it apart and check to make sure there actually is a harddrive. It took me a bit to find it, but it's there, and I check its cabling to find that the data cable has come loose, so I reset it, and when I start the machine back up, the computer boots up fine. I guess the cable came loose due to all the manhandling it took to get it in the apartment.

Alright, new computer up running: check. Microsoft Windows setup software making annoying demands: check. I get through the setup software (having to recheck my ethernet connection when I remember that my router has a bad port), and then it asks for a name for my new computer. Hmm. Most of my electronics is named after mythical creatures. My laptop is Gryphon, my cell phone is Phoenix, and my old computer is Dragon. I was considering just giving that name to this new one, but I still have a lot of stuff I need to move from my old computer to this one, and I may want them both on the network to do that, so giving them the same name could be a problem. I look at its bright silver casing, and the answer is obvious: I dub thee Silver Dragon.

So finally the machine is up and running. Now all I have to do is move all the software, files, and games from the old computer to the new one. But first, let's install Neverwinter Nights 2. It's the game I'm currently obsessed with, and the one game that wouldn't run on my old desktop, which convinced me of my need to buy a new one. I had been playing it on my laptop with all the graphics turned down, and I wanted to see how it would do at highest resolution, with all the special effects, on that expensive graphics card. In a word, beautiful.

So that's been fun, until Monday when my Norton Antivirus updated itself and the game quit running. I tried turning off the antivirus and the million and one features that ran with it off (spam blocker, firewall, phishing indicator, parental controls, spyware assassin, you name it), but no go. I finally had to completely uninstall the antivirus before my game would run. Heh. I'll eventually install a simple anti-virus, which actually turns off when you tell it to turn off and doesn't include all sorts of extras designed to keep you from running anything aside from Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer (with no plug-ins).

Meanwhile, I need to decide what to do with Dragon, the old desktop. My sisters have indicated that they'd love to have the computer in their home (my two sisters and their daughters live together). Which would be good, but that'd mean I'd have to ship it, which means figuring out how to pack a computer I don't have styrofoam designed to fit. And if a cable comes loose on the way, I'm not sure they'll be able to fix it. I also have friends with desparate computer needs, and with the ability to hand deliver and set it up myself (so I know it's not going to just gather dust), that'd be somewhat easier... but friends shouldn't come before family, should they?

Well, for the moment, I really need to move all my data and software from Dragon to Silver Dragon, and I can't give away my computer until I do that and clean up the hard drive. I'll get right on that, as soon as my character levels up in Neverwinter Nights 2.

I wrote a memo the other day. That in itself isn't something to blog about, but it was an interesting experience, as the purpose of writing the memo was to inform my employer that they had no claim on any of the fiction I've written. You'd think this would be obvious, but I wanted to be careful. Since my company is a Federally Funded Research Lab, they own everything I do with one exception:

IP which a) is outside the professional field for which the employee is hired, b) is outside any sponsored research carried out at [the company] in the broad scope of its technical research and development programs, and c) made no significant use of [company] administered facilities and/or funds in its creation, will be owned by the creating employee(s), with the concurrence of the Director’s Office and the TLO.

My favorite part is that it has to be outside the professional field for which I was hired and outside the scope of the research anyone at my company is doing. My understanding is that this is a federal requirement, since my company is federally funded. Fortunately, my fiction qualifies on all counts (with caveats), but according to the policy, I needed to run it by the Director's Office first, and they suggested I write the memo, which would assert that these stories were 1) written on my own time, 2) in the genre of fantasy and horror, which doesn't seem important but is, 3) without using company equipment or materials, and 4) outside my professional field.

Which is fine for the things I think may be published in the near future, but this does lead me to some questions. First, what if I'm on a business trip and decide to write a story using my company supplied laptop while on the plane or in my hotel room? Do they then own that story? What if I'm at home and I'm using a company pen to mark some changes on a draft I printed out from my own computer and printer? I suppose I really shouldn't be taking company pens home in the first place, but I don't empty my pockets of writing instruments before I go home. Besides, I'm just as likely to bring my pens into work as to take theirs home, so I figure it evens out. Now, I'm pretty sure using a company pen doesn't count as significant use of company resources, but looking through the administrative note on the policy, typing on the laptop might.

And what if I decide to write a science fiction story? I've written those in the past, though not recently. Is that considered in my professional field? What is my professional field? I do radar stuff now, but I was a superconducting quantum computation guy when they hired me. Even if I avoid talking about anything I've ever worked on personally, it's bound to include elements relating to what someone here is doing. Now I don't intend to be technical in my stories, or reveal any proprietary information, but I think I'd need a new memo.

Fortunately, I have a pretty good relationship with my company (at least until they see this blog entry), and I'm hoping they won't be unreasonable, but it's enough to make me a bit nervous.

Happy New Year's, folks! I hope you've had a fun New Year's Eve and are ready to face 2007. Do you have any New Year's Resolutions? I'll confess, I have a couple. I'm not sure I want to share them all, but I'll talk about a couple:

1. First, I really, really want to publish a book. I'm not sure I should resolve to actually publish it, as that depends a lot on publishers (my resolution last year was to publish a story, so I know how much of that is out of my control), but I do resolve to make inquiries, something I kept meaning to do last year, but I never got my books into good enough shape that I thought they were ready.


2. To maintain discipline with my exercise. I actually have a pretty good exercise routine, with running four times a week and weights three times. I feel like it's reasonable in its time commitment and physical strain. The problem is that occasionally something comes up that breaks the routine--such as Christmas vacation, or a business trip. While I think it's okay to miss a few days because of that, I sometimes let those breaks stretch out into a month or two before I'm back on the routine. You may know how it is... the longer you're off, the harder it is to get back. I intend to avoid letting those unavoidable breaks stretch out this year.


3. I'm making one other that will make my Mom happy, but I won't give her the satisfaction of reading it here.

Okay, that's it. You have any good ones?

You may be wondering where I've been recently. You'd be forgiven if you thought I went home for Thanksgiving and was visiting my family, but you'd still be wrong. I stayed in Boston for Thanksgiving, going to a friend's house for Thanksgiving, but staying home for the rest of the weekend. I wasn't bored, though. I was playing Neverwinter Nights 2. If you played the original Neverwinter Nights, you should know that the sequel is much, much better. I'll give a complete review once I'm finished, but right now I've got to make some magical weapons and then see about finishing Khelgar's monk quest.

I've been having trouble writing recently. The big thing on my plate is Eyes, but the problem is that it's been the big thing on my plate for the past year, and I'm tired of it. I want to get it done, but I'm stuck. There are problems with the version I currently have, but I really need the opinions of other people in order to see those problems clearly, and I'm having trouble getting feedback. Does anyone out there feel like they can give it a look and give me some advice? I'm not just looking for someone to read it and say whether it's good or bad, mind. I'm looking for detailed comments delivered on a timely basis (a couple of weeks). Anyone feel like giving it a shot?

I had jury duty yesterday. I didn't actually sit in a trial. Basically all that happened is I went to the courthouse (itself an adventure--it took fifty minutes to drive the 12 miles to get there, due to Boston traffic), turned in my questionnaire, and then waited in the jury pool room for an hour and a half. Then the judge came in to explain that none of the cases were going to trial today, and that we could go home. Apparently, most cases never go to trial. So I went into work for the rest of the day.

I won't call it rage, since it didn't quite reach that level, but it did get me rather annoyed. I was stopped at the exit to my community, which is essentially a T intersection with a light, so that the car leaving the intersection may turn either left or right on the (extremely short) green light. I needed to turn left, so I was as far over as I could get (which wasn't very far--it's not two lanes, although you can squeeze one car turning left and one turning right side by side, and I was far enough over that that could happen) with left turn signal on. Unfortunately, while I was waiting for the light to turn green, a school bus pulled up on the left branch of the road and stopped at the intersection to load kids. The light turns green, but obviously I can't go. If I had been making a right turn, maybe I could--I've checked and the laws seem vague--but I needed to make a left turn. If I were already in that lane, I'd have to stop, so it's clear that I can't cross the bus's path to get in that lane. Besides, we would all stop and wait for the bus back before the light was added. Nevertheless, because there's a light now, people start honking at me. That's annoying, and I want to roll down the window and shout at them that there's a bus there. However, I reason that most of them can't see the bus, but can see the light, so they have no idea why I'm just sitting there despite it (though they should: the bus gets there at the same time every morning). Eventually the light turns red for us, the people behind me give up on their honking, and the bus finishes loading kids and moves on. Now the people behind me can see the bus pass, and I assume most of them are smart enough to figure it out and feel a bit ashamed at their behavior. We get the green light again and I go. And here comes the really annoying part: the person immediately behind me, who should have been able to see the bus, tails me and honks at me until we reach the next intersection, where the light is red. Then he moves to the next lane and inches into the middle of the crosswalk, apparently to make sure he can be ahead of me when the light turns green. Uh... okay, I think. No one can be that much of an idiot. When I get to work, which is pretty close, I check my car to see if there were some other reason he was honking at me. Was my turn signal not working? My brake lights? Anything to explain why he was honking at me aside from complete ignorance of traffic laws? Nothing I can see.

I hate driving in Boston.

David Long of Faith*in*Fiction gives Richard Powers some love. I've never read Richard Powers, but I'll always remember him since he beat me to a story idea with his novel Galatea 2.2. Well, technically, that's not true. I wrote my short story, Galatea, a straightforward retelling of the myth in modern terms, using a neural network computer to create the perfect woman, in 1990, and submitted it to the county-wide Write Now! contest in Chesterfield county, Virginia. The story won the contest, and I've since rewritten it a couple of times, looking for an opportunity to publish it properly. Unfortunately, in 1995, Richard Powers published Galatea 2.2, which forever ruined the novelty of my story, making the odds of getting it published much longer. My mother remains convinced that Mr. Powers stole the concept from me, and although I suppose it's possible he might have read my story, I don't think the odds are all that high. Besides, merging neural networks with the myth of Galatea is just too obvious an idea for anyone to claim ownership of it, and I think that the stories which we derived from the idea were very different.

A woman finally responded to all the complaining guys e-mailing the Corner the other day, and said simply that the complaints go both ways:

Men are getting off the hook way to easy; lots of the flaws that have been pointed out in the character of single women are just as easily applied to the single men out there. The truth of the matter is men and women in my age group have grown up in a very confused time where men and women's roles and expectations are not clearly defined. From what I read in the Corner, we have the feminist movement to thank. In fact I can confidently say that 5 men I have dated steadily/seriously (6 mos or longer) have flat out told me they don't ever plan to get married. Oh, with the exception of the guy who said he wouldn't get married until he was 40 at least, then only to someone much younger because he of course wants children.

There's another article on National Review's website which goes a bit more into this aspect of it, explaining what the Marriage Conspiracy is all about:

Having been through a painful divorce myself, I agree with Armstrong that there’s something terribly wrong with our marriage culture. There is a conspiracy of sorts — but it’s not the one Armstrong suggests. She is certainly right that people don’t know what to expect when they marry. And society does encourage newly engaged women to focus on their wedding day and honeymoon rather than on marriage itself. Where Armstrong’s article falls short, however, is in how she defines the conspiracy.
[...]
The real conspiracy — though I don’t believe the neglect is sinister, and thus perhaps “conspiracy” isn’t the word — is the silence about how hard marriage is. Not only does being married involve sacrifice that is sometimes overwhelming; it is also not, as we are taught, about being in love. It’s much more about practicality and usefulness than we wish it were.

Armstrong is wise to point out that women spend far too much time planning elaborate weddings and honeymoons. But rather than offer women concrete advice for what they should really be focusing on, she simply warns them about not giving up too much of themselves. This isn’t enough — for many women, it’s not even relevant, since they may not be pleasers by nature, as Armstrong apparently is, or was. What women should be doing during their engagements, instead of planning big parties, is talking with their fiancés about money, children, religion, sex, work, and the expectations they have of one another with respect to the division of labor in the household. As for the mental preparation, the single most important thing to understand is that love is not enough.
[...]
Modern women understand that marriage involves making sacrifices; they just don’t want to make them. They have a keen awareness that, as wives, they’re supposed to take care of their own needs throughout the journey. And lest they forget, they have plenty of women’s magazines to remind them. What may indeed be revelatory for today’s women is that they’re not the only individuals who make sacrifices in marriage. Men do as well.

Trying to find the right balance between giving to others and giving to ourselves is a tough thing. Many men have dreams of their own that are either put on the back burner or completely forgotten because of their responsibility to provide for their families. Take my husband, for instance. He is a writer, just as I am. Yet he cannot pursue his passion, because it is not generally the type of work that supports a family. I do not have this same burden. As a wife and full-time mother of two, I am able to pursue a writing career precisely because of my husband’s sacrifices. It is his financial contribution from a job that is not his first choice that allows me to do what I want with my life. Why do sacrifices like his so often go unexamined?

We would do better as a society to discuss the sacrifices involved in marriage on the part of both men and women. I agree that women are more susceptible to losing themselves in marriage due to their inherently giving nature. To warn against this is fine. But to belabor this point does a disservice to young women. Men could complain if they wanted to, but they don’t. Perhaps there’s something we can learn from their silence.

There's more, and it's worth reading. Obviously, overly high expectations aren't the only problem.

There's a discussion going on about the Ally McBeal Syndrome at the Corner. It started with this post by John Derbyshire:

Just had a conversation with a friend whose office assistant (in NY City) is female, 34 years old, smart, straight, and quite strikingly good-looking. I asked him why she isn't married. He: "She says she can't find a man. There are no men, she says." Me: "In New York City? Come on." He: "That's what she says. 'There are no men.' My daughter's the same. [His daughter is 35.] No men, there are no men to marry."

[Derb] What's going on here? Isn't half the population men? No wonder our demography is cratering.

Now obviously this isn't literally true. There are men in New York, after all. I know some single guys there who are actively seeking--young, well-educated, and reasonably attractive (admittedly, I'm not really qualified to judge this aspect well). This makes me wonder if perhaps these women don't suffer from a lack of men so much as an excess of expectations. Most of the men who e-mailed the Corner seem to agree, some more impolitic than others. This one, though, happened to strike a chord with me:

I suspect that when the smart, attractive 34-year-old woman says 'I can't find a man' she means she can't find a man who is up to her standards. I also suspect those standards are pretty high. Just check out some of the profiles on yahoo.com to see what I'm talking about.

I started looking through those a few years ago after my wife died and I couldn't believe the exacting specifications most of these women had for a mate. I was excluded from at least 75 percent of them just by the height requirement. I'm [unimpressive height] and 5'9" seemed to be the minimum. I soon figured out that finding a woman willing to marry a [fifty-plus]-year-old man with an adopted [preteen]-year-old granddaughter was going to be an exercise in futility if I went the domestic route.

I'm not fifty-plus, and I don't have a granddaughter, adopted or not, but I am short--an unimpressive 5'4". I've also been losing my hair since I was twenty-five, and I'm slightly overweight. So physically, I'm no great shakes. I'm politically conservative too, which wouldn't necessarily be a disadvantage if I didn't live in Boston. But other than that, I think I'm a pretty good catch. I'm smart enough. I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, which sounds impressive until you realize that PhDs are a dime a dozen in Boston. I have a good job which pays well, and while it's intense in spurts, I'm not a workaholic. I'm also a writer who, while not yet published, is pretty confident he'll get there, so my intelligence is not pure mathematics. While fairly introverted, I've learned to be outgoing when I have to. I'm considerate and concerned about others, if a bit absentminded, and I'll go considerable distances for my friends. I'm a theologically sound Evangelical Christian, knowledgeable and articulate about what I believe and why, and serious about serving God and others. Which should, in theory, be a big plus in certain environments.

I have some good female friends, whom I get along with well, but as far as I can tell, none of them have looked at me twice. It's possible I'm missing some subtle signals, but as I'm pretty good at recognizing interest when it's directed at other guys, it would have to be pretty subtle. (Or, I suppose, I could just be blind when it's directed my way.)

Now, that said, I haven't tried that hard either... or more precisely, I haven't been prolific with my interest. Some guys will hit on any girl they meet, then when rejected move on to the next person before the night is out. Me, I have to get to know someone and then carefully consider whether we're compatible before I ask her out. I'm not saying I'm in love by this point or anything, just that I've decided it's worth a try. It's disappointing when the woman doesn't agree, but I can handle it and move on. I'm not asking a new woman out every week, however.

This leaves me to wonder whether the women are the only ones with expectations which are too high. If I take so long to decide that someone is a possible match, am I missing other opportunities along the way? Might I have set my sights too high? After all, if we both set such impossible standards, what are the chances that you'll meet the standards of the person who actually manages to meet yours?

I'm cautious about lowering my standards, though. Both my sisters are now divorced, and I'm determined not to do the same. But the things that lead to a happy marriage are not necessarily the same things we set up as standards for a mate. It's important to be able to tell the difference.

Dave at Faith*in*Fiction is worried over the double standard between sex and violence in fiction, and particularly when it comes to Christian fiction. As I am not at all shy about violence in my fiction (see, especially, Fire, but Eyes isn't exactly pacifistic either), this is something I've thought about. I have a theory about the reason for this double-standard, and it's probably not what you think.

As a society, we have a much greater consensus on what constitutes acceptable violence than acceptable sexuality. Americans are as divided as ever on extramarital sex, homosexuality, and a host of other sexual practices. Sex in fiction is almost bound to offend someone, and whether the writer makes it clear the act is right or wrong, or just presents it without judgement, someone's going to protest. Violence is another matter. We have clear ideas on when violence is just and when it is not. It is, in general, not right to harm people, except in self-defense or to stop those who use unjust violence. Thus, when we read about a violent act in fiction, we immediately categorize it as right or wrong, and rarely worry that it will send the wrong message to impressionable young people, as that categorization is clear in the fiction as well. Of course, good fiction can blur the lines, and edgy movies do it as a matter of course, but none of them really attempt to shift the general consensus. Thus the violence is "safe," even when it is very ugly.

A friend of mine challenged me to take a nerd test in order to make herself feel better. I'm not sure whether the fact I tied with her accomplishes that, but we're both rather nerdy:

Additionally, it said, "High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!" Been there, done that, got the diploma.

I'm not sure why she feels embarrassed about this. We both have PhDs from MIT. It'd frankly be embarassing if we scored below 75%.

I pretty much just stumbled across this building when I was lost on Saturday. Well, I wasn't exactly lost --as usual, I had gone to Google maps and gotten precise directions to the place I was looking for, Beech Street. It just turned out that the Beech Street I was supposed to be at is in Cambridge, while I was at Beech Street in Somerville. The two streets are about ten blocks apart, less than a mile, so it's an easy mistake to make. I eventually found my way to the right Beech Street, getting the map through my cell phone, but I'm glad I got a bit lost. If I hadn't, I wouldn't ever have spotted this:

Yes, it is a house, and yes, it's completely round. It turns out that it's something of a landmark in Somerville, although the private owners have let it lapse into disrepair. It was built by Enoch Robinson in 1856, supposedly modeled on a building in France. Blogger Stephanie Rogers has more information on it.

It's a very cool old house, and one of the few I've seen and immediately thought that I wanted. It's not like there's any real possibility of that, though. Despite its disrepair, it's still way out of my price range, even if the owner were selling.

It took an hour and a half to get home from Bible study last night. Now, as my Bible study is in Boston, and I have to drive to the subway and take two different subway lines to get there, it usually takes about an hour to get home, forty-five minutes if I'm lucky. Tonight, it took twice that.

This was mainly because there was a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, so the T, Boston's subway, was packed. I arrived at my Green line stop to find about a hundred people trying to get onto a train that could comfortably hold fifty but was already filled with twice that. After spending a couple of minutes betting with myself whether ten or twenty people would manage to get on, I decided that I wasn't going to make it onto a train anytime soon. I knew that it was a quick walk across the Harvard Bridge over the Charles River to MIT, and cutting through MIT would bring me to the Kendall T stop, on the Red line, which would take me back where I was parked. I figured the Red line would be less crowded. So I sacrificed the $1.25 I had already spent to get into the station and walked across the River.

I was right, as it turned out, and I found the Red line train virtually empty when I got there half an hour later. Of course, by the time I got where I had parked, some of the traffic had caught up, and I still had a hard time getting onto Route 2 and back home. So overall it took an hour and a half. But it was worth it.

As I was walking through MIT, I got an idea for my next Ryan and Emily story. It'll be a while, maybe a whole year, before I get around to writing it, but now I have a pretty good idea what it will be: an MIT ghost story. There's a lot of potential there, but I have to be careful how I tell it, as there's also the potential to needlessly upset people with this story. I won't go into any more details here, because I don't want to give too much away, but that should be enough that I'll remember something about the ideas I had when I come back to it.

As I'm sure I said elsewhere, I'm currently on vacation, visiting my family in Louisiana. It's been fun seeing them again. Of course, this has been something of a working vacation. One of the things I'm doing is writing. I'm almost done with the rewrite of Eyes, and it looks like I'll have little trouble passing the 80,000 word mark. It remains to be seen if I'm still at that point when I revise the rewrite and cut some of the extraneous parts (that section where Ryan's meeting Emily's parents seems like it needs some cutting). However, I've already been talking about the writing, so today I'm going to talk about the vacationing, complete with pictures. So, here it is, a tour of my parents' backyard. Yeah, that sounds even more boring when I write it than when I thought it. The thing is, my parents have been working on their yard for years, and their justifiably proud of the results, so I figure a few pictures won't hurt.



No yard is complete without a statue of a naked lady in it. I'm pretty sure I've shown a picture of this statue before, so I won't dwell on it, and instead focus on the pond in front of it.



The pond has two sections, with a waterfall in between, and some goldfish in the lower section.



I suppose you could put the fish in the upper section, but then they might go over the waterfall.

Beyond the pond is a bottle garden, where wine bottles are used as a fence.



And behind that is the pool. Beyond the pool lies the hot tub.



We also have a barn.



And horses.



These two horses are unimaginatively named Red and Blue. My family doesn't actually own the horses; we're just housing them.

So that's what my backyard looks like. Later, I'll post some pictures of my actual family.

My laptop died last night. Sort of. It's a really annoying sort of half-death that's driving me crazy. It began by flashing the blue screen of death in the middle of web browsing. I've tried numerous times to get it back up since. Often, the moment it starts up, the screen remains blank and the Num Lock key flashes, until it turns itself off. Sometimes it will boot up and reach the windows loading screen before dying, either seizing up or rebooting. Sometimes it will get to the windows log-in screen and freeze while I'm typing in my password. And on certain rare occasions, it will let me log in, and actually do some stuff before dying again.

Fortunately, when I bought my network drive earlier this year, I set up an automated back-up system, so I have back-ups on all my important files. Unfortunately, sometimes the computer gets confused and changes which network drive is assigned which drive letter, which in turn confuses the back-up software, which won't make back-ups. Everytime I reboot, which isn't that often since I usually just put the laptop in hibernation, there's a chance the drives will get switched again. As it turns out, the last time the back-up software actually did a back-up was Sunday, and I've done some significant work on Eyes since then. However, I was able to get the computer to boot up this morning, then log in and get the drives straightened out long enough to do a back-up. So all my data is safe.

For, oh, maybe twenty seconds last night, I thought about fixing my laptop. Then I reminded myself that at two years old it's outside the obsolescence cycle anyway, so instead I went online and ordered a new laptop. I should have it in a little over a week. Meanwhile, I'm going to have to use my desktop for everything. Ah well, it's time to upgrade some of the software on it anyway.