Ketchup

Ripped from the headlines!  Today’s paper has a small piece on a university study about the beneficial effects of moderate alcohol use.  There’s an accompanying photo of a glass of beer, below which is the caption, and I quote:

Consuming one to fewer than three drinks a day can extend your life, a new study says.

I assumed that was surely a fuzzy-headed summary banged out by an overworked editor until I skimmed the article itself, which includes this line:

Moderate drinkers were defined as those who have one to fewer than three drinks daily.

Okay, yes, I’ve heard of fractions, but good captions make use of both  brevity and accuracy.  How about a show of hands for anyone who can tell us which number comes after one and before three?

Two milestones to start this week, one belated, one as fresh as this morning’s donuts.

First:  Excited about the upcoming release of Valka S Pandemii (better known to you and I as Plague War) in the Czech Republic, I realized I’m over 150,000 books in print worldwide.  With the rise of e-books, this is becoming a less relevant statistic every day, and, yes, I know plenty of writers with, like, eighty million books in print, but it’s still a happy number.

How will publishers of the future gauge their own expectations and pre-release demand?  Beats me.  At the moment, e-books remain less than 10% of total sales, but some experts predict they’ll skyrocket to 50% in five years.  Others are less sure.  I’ve heard estimates ranging from 20% in ten years to TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION WITH THE MAYAN APOCALYPSE IN 2012!!!  That last prediction is from the hardcore e-reader proponents, of course.  The one thing for certain is that e-books are here to stay and will grow in market share.

Second, Adad Warda’s book trailer for the Plague Year novels hit 30,000 views on YouTube this weekend.  Combined with views from other sites and players, this short film has received more than 40,000 hits, which is amazing and especially gratifying since we put it together for $300 out of pocket.

You can relive the magic right here:

In other news, apropos of nothing, I’ve finally gotten around to posting two segments of my appearance on “Good Day Sacramento” in December for the release of Plague Zone. The hosts of this popular morning show, Cody Stark and Lori White, were great about indulging my sinister plots at Christmastime, especially in the second clip, which can only be called “Fun With Nuclear Waste.” Enjoy!

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of South Park.  Yes, on the surface it’s nothing but sacrilegious toilet humor.  Truth to told, though, this show is very, very clever and well-informed.   

Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that I work at home.  For three weeks  now I’ve watched an episode or two  (sometimes for the eighth time) at lunch, you know, sprawled on the couch in my sweats with three days’ beard growth and a bowl of Cheerios.  Ah, the glorious writing life!

South Park is definitely funnier if you’ve watched from the beginning.  The character dynamics are full of well-laid history and inside jokes, but ya can’t go wrong with a Christmas Special.  My favorite part is this segment with a Jesus/Santa duo singing Duran Duran.

I’m watching on DVD because I’m a Neanderthal, but you can find today’s fare for free at http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/257092

This week we’ve got another slew of hot news.

First, super fan Jeff “The Other Jeff” Dutton has created a Jeff Carlson fan club on Facebook.  Get in there and make some noise.  Do you love Cam more than Ruth?  Can’t believe the turn of events in Plague Zone?  Let the e-debates begin!!!

2)  My short story “Planet of the Sealies,” a far future adventure loaded with clones and battle armor, has been slated for the February issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine .

3)  As mentioned previously, I have another new short story sale that I can finally talk about.  “Damned When You Do” is a modern day fable-with-a-twist which will appear this fall in an anthology from O/R Books edited by Gordon Van Gelder.  The anthology’s title is Welcome To The Greenhouse: Tales of Climate Change.  I’m excited about “Damned” not only for the story itself but because O/R Books is one of them newfangled publishers who emphasize e-books in addition to their print run of real live actual books.  They’re best known for their New York Times chart crusher Going Rouge, the Sarah Palin exposé, so this feels like an interesting experiment in demographics and marketing.  Cutting edge, that’s me.

4)   Meanwhile I’m still playing coy with the new novel because I’m evil.  Just to be especially cruel, here are four questions I found myself researching yesterday:

a)  Whose fingerprints are recorded in civil, state, and federal databases?

b)  What is the religious history of the evolution of the spring equinox into Easter and the winter solstice into Christmas?

c)  How long is the average flight time of a commercial airliner from Japan to the West Coast?

d)  What is the air speed of a swallow carrying a coconut?

So… come on, people!  If you can’t figure out what the book is about with this much information served on a platter, I’m completely disgusted with y’all.

This weekend, Diana and I ran off for a rare, childless, errands-and-sushi-and-a-movie date.  We hadn’t read any reviews because we’re always pressed for time and because reviews are so often wrong.

My favorite example is when we went to National Treasure 2, which was the only thing playing we wanted to see that weekend. We’d liked the first National Treasure, which was a good fun adventure full of twists and turns… but when we got online to check the schedules, the movie theater site had posted major thumbs-down reviews from the L.A. Times and other big names.  That’s great marketing, right?  “Don’t come see this movie,” said the movie theater.  We went to NT2 anyway and it was worth the price of admission.  It wasn’t meant to be profound cinema.  It was Indiana Jones.  The critics had savaged it, but we were happy, so the lesson learned was don’t bother too much with the literarti.

Inception has mostly received positive reviews, I think, but we were ready to see either Salt or Inception depending on how our chores and lunch worked out.  My wife is awesome.  If we’re going to the big screen, she wants to see things blowing up.  Chick flicks we can watch on DVD.

Salt looked like a straightforward Bourne/Bond spy chase.  Inception seemed more high concept, so we went with it, especially because we thought the 6pm Saturday showing would be lightly attended.  You know, everyone else would be going to dinner.  It was the 5:15 and 6:45 showings we’d expected to be crowded.

We smuggled a purse full of chocolate and water bottles into the theater at 5:40.  That’s right.  Diana and I are like the Han Solos of movie-going.  We’re freedom fighters against overpricing.  $3.50 for a bottle of water?  $4.25 for a box of Junior Mints!?!  That is horse puckey, man.

The main thing is we walked in before the previews started and the room was PACKED.  We were lucky to find two seats together dead-center eighth row, which is almost the ideal spot.

“Who are all these people?” I whispered.  “Doesn’t anybody need to eat dinner?”

The guy next to me had his meal with him — a  $10.50 mega-bucket of popcorn.  Like me, he was there with his wife.  They were mid-fifties and seemed nice, chatting amiably about other movies they’d seen.

I won’t write any spoilers here, but, well, Inception has a layered storyline that begins with a flashback, then moves on to multiple scenes within scenes with a lot of potent, spooky, slow-building dialogue.  I loved it.  I’m a paranoid freak and twenty minutes into the film I murmured three predictions to Diana (I expected one more big reveal at the end, but was proved wrong) while the poor bastard next to me said, to his wife, “Something better start happening soon.”

He didn’t get it.  What he saw was a disjointed series of obscure actions and places.

Thirty minutes in, he was shifting restlessly… and by the fifty minute mark, he was asleep!  He felt no connection to the characters or story whatsoever.

The irony of course is that Inception is about a crew of Matrix Jedi thieves who invade people’s dreams.  Due to various complications, they pass ever farther into the subconscious.  The more levels down they go, the more quickly time passes in their subjective time frame even as they remain simultaneously in each level.  The film keeps returning to one action sequence at a mid-level of subconsciousness while other sequences play out at deeper levels.

After snoring through an hour of gunfights and freak-out creep-outs, the guy next to me finally woke up with about 10 minutes left.  He must have been confused as hell, because the action sequence on the mid-level was still happening even as our characters were in myriad of other guises, places, and times.

Before the climax, one character turns to another as they’re preparing to make yet another jump and says, almost desperately, something like: “But then where will we be?”  A good part of the audience laughed, inappropriately, because by then everyone was straining to keep up with the plot.

The guy who’d been sitting next to me bitched the whole way out of the theater, too.  “That was just dumb,” he said while the rest of the crowd was excitedly comparing notes.

“What did you think?” they said.

“How about that one part where—?” they said.

You can’t reach all of the people all of the time.  More importantly, as a writer, it’s exciting for me to see a film like this at the #1 slot for multiple weeks.

I like to think people like to be challenged.  The audience enjoyed having puzzles and complications to talk about.  Inception had a few minor holes and weaknesses, but it was definitely great entertainment, and twisty, involving, high concept scripts are exactly the kind of movie I’d like to be writing myself.

Fun news this week from many directions:

First, at home, I feel like I’m writing the best book I’ve ever dreamed up in all aspects from plot to character to concept, scope, and pacing.   That’s a good feeling.  I hope to begin sharing some meaty tidbits about my Secret New Big Thriller soon and I apologize for the ever-lasting secrecy.  The wheels in publishing turn at glaaaaaaacial speeds.

More soon.

Second, a few weeks ago I was contacted by Paul Cole at WRFR radio in Rockland, Maine.  Paul hosts a sci-fi review program called Beam Me Up, and he asked if he could run a reading of my story “Long Eyes.”

Part I of the story ran last weekend; Part II is this Saturday.  If you weren’t or won’t be in New England, you can also find Paul’s rendition on the Beam Me Up podcast here.  Love the spooky piano.  It’s also a well-considered delivery of the story itself.

Third, I have a new short story sale to a high-profile anthology but I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the editor for the next few weeks, I think because he (or is it she?) fears a deluge of slush submissions if there’s the slightest peep of what she (or he?) is up to.  Ha.

You see?  Writers are like secret agents, man!     ;>

It should be no surprise to friends and fans that I have a taste for the undead.  Well, maybe “taste” isn’t the word we’re looking for.  An “appreciation.”  Ha!

I grew up on the original Romero movies and excellent knock-offs like The Return of the Living Dead and Army of Darkness.  What were my parents thinking?  Heck if I know.  Why would you let a ten-year-old boy read books like The Stand and Lucifer’s Hammer or take him to see Alien?  To keep him off the streets?

In the end, good apocalyptic films and books are what made me the writer that I am today, so I guess we should all thank mom and dad, those crazy, literate, let-the-boy-read proponents of make believe.

Here’s the thing.  Zombie stories are especially hard to pull off in novel form.  Movies, well, all you need are some automatic weapons fire and eight buckets of ketchup.  An explosion or three is nice.  Maybe some cleavage.  A chainsaw.  You know the drill.  But in a novel, all of that flashy stuff is absent.  It’s too easy to start thinking, “Jeez, this is dumb.”

David Wellington’s Monster trilogy come to mind as a series that hits exactly the right tone and brings a lot of fresh and fun details to zombie lore.

Day By Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne is another.  If you haven’t read the first installment, grab a copy.  Bourne is the nom de plume of an active duty naval aviator who knows his stuff, and he delivers DBDA in the no-nonsense bare bones style of the hurried journal of a professional survivor.  It almost reads like a screenplay, which is perfect.  DBDA filled my head with gritty imagery and tension, and now the highly anticipated sequel will be released July 13^th.  Amazon is even promoting it 33% off cover price.

Grab your ammo.  Barricade the doors.  People with nasty teeth are coming!

There’s a delusional leech who’s been causing stress in my family for nearly two years.  With permission from the most offended party, I may write about it here more in the future.  The saga of this self-destructive idiot is definitely great material for a tragicomedy, but, for now, it’s not yet my story to write.  Nevertheless, when I came across this New York Times article (stop me if you’ve read it already) I immediately thought of this selfish hemorrhoid of a man.

The article is by Errol Morris.  No doubt we all know a jackass or two like those described by Morris and his interviewee, Professor David Dunning. I’ve excerpted what I found to be the most incisive parts below.  The full article is here.

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac.  In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year.

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork.  So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — “although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.”   He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image.  It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo.  Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid.  He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or

(c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany.  If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence.  Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research.  Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.  But just how prevalent is this effect?  In search of more details, I called David Dunning at his offices at Cornell:

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making.  How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life?  And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true.  And I became fascinated with that.  Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them.  Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute.  The decision I just made does not make much sense.  I had better go and get some independent advice.”   But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.  In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

ERROL MORRIS: Many other areas?

DAVID DUNNING: If you look at our 1999 article, we measured skills where we had the right answers.  Grammar, logic.  And our test-subjects were all college students doing college student-type things.  Presumably, they also should know whether or not they’re getting the right answers.  And yet, we had these students who were doing badly in grammar, who didn’t know they were doing badly in grammar.  We believed that they should know they were doing badly, and when they didn’t, that really surprised us.

ERROL MORRIS: The students that were unaware they were doing badly — in what sense?  Were they truly oblivious? Were they self-deceived?  Were they in denial?  How would you describe it?

DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth.  We literally see the world the way we want to see it.  But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that.  Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it.  Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.   We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know?  Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right.  It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.”  He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.”  I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no.  Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce.  And then, that’s it.  You don’t need a lot of smarts.  You don’t have to do tensor calculus.  You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.”  One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”

ERROL MORRIS: Something I have wondered about: Is there a socio-biological account of what forces in evolution selected for stupidity and why?

DAVID DUNNING: Well, there’s no way we could be evolutionarily prepared for doing physics and doing our taxes at the end of the year.  These are rather new in our evolutionary history.  But solving social problems, getting along with other people, is something intrinsic to our survival as a species.  You’d think we would know where our inabilities lie. But if we believe our data, we’re not necessarily very good at knowing what we’re lousy at with other people.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.  Maybe it’s an effective strategy for dealing with life.  Not dealing with it.

Isn’t that awesome?  As someone fascinated with character and motivation, I thought this was really interesting.

The complete article is actually the first of a series of five.

This week Starship Sofa, currently on the shortlist for this year’s Hugo Award For Best Fanzine, has two stories that I highly recommend.

One is “Cats In Fiction” by the prolific David Barr Kirtley.

The other, bwah ha ha, is an old favorite and among the most successful of my short stories.   “Pressure” has been translated into several languages and now finds new life with this awesome audio magazine.

You can find their podcast here.

In the meantime, I’ve also posted my introduction to “Pressure” on YouTube in case you need to see me waving my hands around.  This is probably the most hilarious of all of my where-do-you-get-your-crazy-ideas introductions for Starshipsofa.  Bring your Kevlar!     

Here it is:

Second of all, I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since I’ve been here.

But first of all, would you rather have me blogging or writing?  I hope the answer is “writing” because that’s what I’ve been doing.  The new book continues to move nicely.   Still, it’s hard to believe I’ve neglected this blog for so long…  I can’t even ketchup with myself!    

Third, I really, really want to share what the Secret New Big Thriller is called and what it’s about, but, as always, the wheels in publishing turn at glacial speeds.  It may be yet another week or three before I’m free to make an announcement.  Soon!  Soon!

Fourth, an awesome anthology recently arrived in the mail.  It’s my first time sharing a table-of-contents with the awesome Charles Stross.  That I had to go to far-away Estonia to do so is even more sci-fiish.  Is that a word?  “Fie-ish”?

This is the full cover spread of The Sidereal Time #7, which includes both of my “Julie Beauchain” stories from Asimov’s.

Perhaps better, the publisher surprised me by including original illustrations with both  stories (whose titles I won’t even try to pronounce, ha ha, since the only word left in English is “Sugarloaf”).

Reproduced here with permission of the artist, Margus Lokk, copyright 2010, first we have this image from “Gunfight” of Julie cringing in the brush with her remote as Shorty blasts the snot out of Bongo.

Sweet, right?   

This is the quintessential “Beauchain” story in a single image — assault weapons, robot deer, and a plucky heroine.  Love it.

Second, below, is the illustration which accompanied “Christmas Fire.”

This one’s a little more arty, I think, and nicely captured.  This scene occurs in full darkness.  Julie’s toting a thermal imaging gun.

What Mr. Lokk so tastefully avoids shoving in your face here is that the guy passing out of the foreground is naked and  Julie, in pursuit, is wearing nothing but her leather jacket.  Why?  Ya gotta read the story, man.  But here’s another quintessential Beauchain moment in one  image — exotic weaponry, nudity, and loads of action. Aha ha ha ha!

The good news is I have a third Julie story I want to write.  The bad news is it’s gotta wait until the new book is complete.

More soon.