October 2018 – Philoquialisms

Here’s a book thing: “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson

I had never heard of Adam Johnson before. The local library had a display of short story collections, as part of their year-long reading challenge that I somehow missed signing up for; I had already grabbed Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman, but something about the cover of Fortune Smiles appealed to me. It seemed pop-art-y, for some reason evoking my memory of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay even though they don’t look very similar at all.

I liked Fortune Smiles

From that, I learned that the book that put Adam Johnson on the map was all about North Korea. I put it on hold and added it to the enormous pile of library books that are currently sitting on my couch; I’m tearing through them as quickly as possible in anticipation of NaNo, knocking out all the novels before I dive into the dauntingly-huge short story collections that remain.

Come Sunday evening, it was The Orphan Master’s Son‘

The book is dark, depressing, haunting. It paints a vision of the DPRK that is unrelentingly awful. My understanding is that it was painstakingly researched, that life there is really just as terrible as the book shows, and even if it’s only a tenth as bad as the book makes it out to be, the North Korean regime’s iron grip on its populace is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. This is something I knew in the abstract, of course, but reading about it–even in fictional form–makes it much more visceral, much more real despite the irreality of a story.

And, more than anything else, this is a book about stories. The DPRK is a place where everyone lies as a matter of course, from morning until night when the power goes out, because to tell the truth is to implicate yourself in doings which officially never happen, even though they absolutely do. The ability to lie on demand, to concoct a tale that cloaks events in such a way as to satisfy your interrogators, is just as critical a survival tactic as knowing which flowers are edible, or how to set a snare to capture a swallow and eat it. (Both of these acts are illegal, of course. Everything is, other than worship of the Dear Leader.)

The Orphan Master’s Son questions the meaning of identity, both personal and national, when survival requires that identity to be made of lies. It does not look away from horror, from the everyday evils of a brutal despotic regime that starves an entire nation to death while convincing them that their demise is righteous and just. It had passages that actually forced me to look away from the book for a bit, utterly defeated by the hopelessness and depravity. And it also finds hope buried deep within that unblinking despair.

Like the stories that the characters have to tell in order to survive another day, the story of The Orphan Master’s Son has holes, problems, issues. And like those stories, it is not about being true, it is about being convincing.

I am not sure I have ever been so convinced.

Weekly status update [0038/????]

As promised (and expected), a comparatively peaceful week.

I read eight or nine more novels in the pre-NaNo rush. Five of them were The Long Earth and its sequels, a collaborative effort by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. They were… fine, I guess? The setting was neat, but none of the books really had a plot, per se, other than the fourth. Mostly they were picaresques. Easy reads, though. Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net was much more interesting, a pretty obvious reaction to the typical cyberpunk stories that the man had popularized with his Mirrorshades compilation. I’m currently in the third (of four) “Okie” novels by James Blish. The compilation sorts them chronologically rather than in publication order, and it shows; this third one was the first written, and feels a lot rougher than the others, in the weird sort of way ’50s sf often does: absolutely crazy stuff happens (like sending a planet out of the galactic plane as if it’s no big deal), and the book treats it as a fait accompli. It’s weird, but a nice change from the headier modern stuff I’ve been reading otherwise, so I’ll finish it up in the next day or two.
That said, I’m still going to have a ton of books left on my sofa at the start of NaNoWriMo, only four days away now, which means I’ll have to keep reading throughout the month. It’ll be less of a problem than usual, I guess, since I don’t also have a job sucking up the oxygen (and time), but it’s going to be something of a first for me.
Speaking of NaNo, I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about my upcoming novel, including thoughts about how it’s likely to end. I think I have a pretty workable (if very rough) outline of the main body in my head. That sort of thing often changes with the writing, and I’ll definitely let it if it needs to, but it’s a good start.
As part of the prep work for said upcoming novel, I had to look into the modern state-of-the-art for Google Web Fonts. (You’ll see why… hopefully.) I think I’ll be able to do what I need to do with a minimum of pain, although I’ll have to write a custom text-to-HTML translator for this novel so it’ll look right. I’m… actually kinda looking forward to that?
Still watching a bit of TV. I manage an episode of Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine most days, and Luke Cage and Orange is the New Black every other day or so. I’m looking forward to finishing both of the latter shows, mainly because I want to bump The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina up on the queue for timeliness/thematic reasons.
Other than my usual free-to-play gaming, I’ve put quite a bit of time into video pinball in the last week or two. Pinball FX3 has the Williams licenses now, and those tables have been fun to mess around on, but I’ve mainly been grinding Sorcerer’s Lair, which I still think is the best table Zen’s ever made. I find it really strange that it’s their free-to-play table, particularly given how many hundreds of dollars I’ve sunk into all the other ones… but that’s fine. It was interesting watching a Twitch streamer play the table for the first time, having the same dawning sense that I did many years ago of “oh, there is actually something to this whole pinball thing!” Yes. Yes, there is.
The diet’s been pretty much derailed for the last couple of weeks, at first due to the visit and then later because it’s always easier to say “tomorrow” than it is to actually buckle down and do the right thing. I’m typing this up as a bit of public self-shaming to, you know, buckle down and do the right thing.
On a meta note, the new Gutenberg editor for WordPress is horribly buggy; it tends to eat anything after italics in a bullet point unless you do some stupid shenanigans, as one example that I had to deal with several times while writing this update. I may go back to the classic editor for a while until they fix more of the bugs.

In the middle of next week begins the month-long adventure of NaNoWriMo, which will be… interesting, for sure. I look forward to it with no small amount of trepidation every year (and wrote about it earlier this week), but I do look forward to it. I don’t know how it’ll mess with my posting schedule here, though. We’ll find out together, I guess!

(Also, Gutenberg ate the last couple of sentences of this post three times because of that stupid italics bug. Ugh. Back to the classic editor I go.)

Certainly not showing

NaNoWriMo approaches, and I grow more and more apprehensive with each passing day.

I’ve been doing NaNo ever since 2004; see this earlier post for a breakdown of what I’ve written over the years, but basically it amounts to a novel a year, two each in 2005 and 2006, and failure in 2012 when I was getting ready to move cross-country for a job.

As time goes on, the actual act of writing has gotten easier, which isn’t too surprising. What hasn’t gotten easier is writing something good, something worth reading. NaNo operates under a tight time constraint, so my default response when the first story I try to write in November starts to stumble is to write something else, something easier, something that I know I can bang out over a week or two.

It’s, inevitably, garbage.

In the past I’ve had the excuse of, well, life. I had a full-time job. November is never exactly a calm month with the holidays approaching. There were other distractions, other events, that made taking the easy way feel less like a cop-out and more like a reasonable coping mechanism. It’s either garbage or I don’t write anything

This year is different, though. The excuses are much more evidently just that: excuses. I’m not going anywhere next month. I don’t have a job to distract me.

If I fail, I have no one to blame but myself.

It doesn’t help that I’m actually excited about this particular story idea, in a way that I haven’t been since I wrote Rewind

The readership of this blog is tiny but non-zero, and I feel some level of obligation to that readership, an obligation to provide something interesting to read. NaNo seems like it could be an excellent source of that material… but it could also be an excellent way to watch my attempt crash and burn.

It’s not that I’m worried that I can’t pump out 50,000 words over the course of the month. It’s that, this year unlike all the previous ones, I feel it’s important that those 50,000+ words actually be somewhere in the vicinity of good.

So: I worry.

I still plan on sharing the story here, but I’m going to wait until I’m far enough “in” that it doesn’t seem like I’ll be tossing it aside. That seems like a reasonable compromise, to me, and it’s still no promise that it’ll actually get finished. Or be any good. We’ll have to see.

Wish me luck.

Weekly status update [0037/????]

After several quiet weeks, this one ended up pretty much jam-packed from start to finish.

But first: the deluge of words doth continue. I read my first Christopher Priest (of The Prestige fame) and enjoyed it enough to make an exception to my “no more holds before December” rule so that I could get… well… The Prestige. John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, about the Theranos debacle, was a sobering (and fascinating) read.
Most of the week, however, was spent with my cousin from Louisiana, who was visiting the area. She stayed in Asheville through Tuesday, then headed my way Wednesday until Friday. It was a pleasure hanging out with her, driving around to the various sights, eating a bunch of food I probably shouldn’t have had but, y’know, guest!
Monday I rode a horse for the first time in my life. I wrote about it here. We also visited downtown Asheville–yes, I made the obligatory stop at The Chocolate Fetish, although I forced myself to only get one thing there, a single dark chocolate and sea salt caramel–and I spent time going over a bunch of puzzle types with her, as she’s new to the whole paper-puzzles thing.
Tuesday was game night back home, but I took the opportunity to write up the horseback outing. I decided to do something different stylistically, treating it as a story rather than the looser form of a blog entry, and inasmuch as that sort of thing “works,” well, it seemed to work; a couple of people were surprised to learn that “Along for the ride” wasn’t just a short story of my own devising. Which, I mean, I guess it is? Just not a fictional one.
Said game night was spent playing Spirit Island, which was fun and frustrating and fascinating in roughly equal measure. We lost, although I feel we hung on considerably longer than I felt we would after a terrible start. I’ve already decided that it’ll be making the trip back home for the holidays; I want to get more plays in.
Wednesday was mostly spent in and around town, starting with lunch in Hickory (Vietnamese, yum) and including a stop at a local antiques store so that my cousin could pick up some knick-knacks to bring home. We went up into the mountains for a bit, hiking a scrap of the Green Knob Trail before the sun got too low.
An early start Thursday had us back up in the mountains. We hiked Linville Falls and Mount Mitchell, which was… perhaps a bit more than we should have done, given that neither of us are at peak levels of stamina. But it felt good exerting myself in a way that I basically hadn’t done since I retired, and my cousin was duly proud of her own efforts. The day closed out all the way down in Charlotte at The Glow, which was fine if a bit underwhelming. The carvings were amazing, but they had to all be at a distance behind ropes to keep kids from messing with them, which made the experience feel rather detached. Still, it was the sort of thing I never would have done on my own, and I’m glad my cousin dragged me to it.

I slept like a rock most evenings this week thanks to high levels of physical exertion, and although I had a great time, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to next week being a quiet one.

Along for the ride

Sun shone through the shifting leaves and dappled the stony path ahead. That same breeze pushed against us, inconstant, cooling rather than cool. I had dressed for chillier weather than this, had already shed my undershirt back at the car, and the wind through the trees did a perfect job of keeping me balanced, neither hot nor cold.

Babe was recalcitrant. Ten feet ahead of us, she balked again, stopping in the middle of the path. I pulled gently on the reins, said “whoa” in a low voice. Unsure as to whether Echo responded more to the sound or the motion. My cousin kicked once, twice, on the sides of the large brown horse, which was enough to get her moving again. I had already lowered my hands, and after a moment Echo stepped forward, continuing our slow progress through the forest.

A thing I had noticed: Echo wasn’t fond of mud. The lead horse–I never caught its name–tromped through the soft patches that regularly crossed the stony path with no particular regard. Babe seemed to follow it precisely; I never quite figured out whether that was the horse’s doing or my cousin’s, although I suspect the former. Echo, though. Echo wasn’t fond of mud. She nosed around, looking for a different way through the patch. Horses don’t mince, really, but she clearly preferred ways around the muck that involved getting less dirty than her compatriots.

I approved. I’m not big on mud either.

A thing I had noticed: Echo wanted to be in the lead. Or, at least, ahead of Babe. Whenever the other horse stopped in the middle of the path–which was depressingly often, usually halfway up a mild slope–I had to pull back on the reins to keep Echo from passing the large brown horse (and my cousin) up. We had been told to keep a horse-length between us, and to stay in the same order, and I was doing my best to follow those instructions. My ride would come to a halt after a moment, waiting patiently while my cousin kicked Babe’s sides once, twice, to get her moving again. This happened at least ten times over the course of the ride.

A thing I had noticed: Echo never needed to be kicked. Not once. Whenever Babe decided to actually move along, Echo would start again as well after a moment. After the first ten minutes or so, her desire to be in the lead had mostly quieted down, and she kept herself at a distance from my cousin’s horse without me having to guide her. The same happened whenever we made our way across one of the several streams on the trail. I would bring Echo to a halt, and she would wait patiently until Babe crossed, and then would make her own way across without my guidance, without me goading her to move.

A thing I had noticed: I was, in effect, completely superfluous. The horses knew the route, knew the process, knew how to behave. The stony sloped path would occasionally shift under their feet, but it was clear that it bothered me and my cousin way more than it troubled the horses. This was well-trod ground for them, literally and figuratively, and I was there merely as an overweight accoutrement, tolerated by the tan mare rather more than being needed by her. Every time I tugged her head left or right to return to the center of the path–which was not often–it was because of a low-hanging branch, or a tree on the side of the trail that I might rub up against. None of these affected Echo, only the gangly lump sitting inexpertly on top of her.

She did want to stop and eat grass, though, and I had been explicitly told to not allow that, to pull up on the reins and keep her moving. That happened twice in the hour-long ride. That was the sum total of my contributions to the process: stopping a horse from feeding itself. Twice.

We saw a fawn, nibbling on the underbrush. It eyed us warily but did not flee. The horses, after all, were a regular occurrence there. This surprised my cousin. It did not surprise me.

I could barely hear the guide when she spoke–Cara? It was only yesterday, and already the name slips from memory–thanks to distance and my troublesome hearing. I didn’t mind. What could she be saying that was very important? Well, one thing: I wasn’t letting the reins down far enough for Echo to drink easily from the water when we crossed. I finally figured that out, leaning far down the horse’s neck as she lapped at the burbling stream. But the ride was the sort of thing better passed in silence, in the non-silence of any living forest, birds and animals chittering in the distance, the rustle of the canopy overhead as the wind swirled around us, the steady clop-clop-clop of the horses on the stones a contrapunto to the white noise of nature.

I had never ridden a horse before. Cara (if that was her name) complimented me on how well I did, and I silently replied: how could I not do well? I barely did anything. Echo knew the way. I was just along for the ride.

Weekly status update [0036/????]

This morning was the first time this fall that the temperature dropped in my house overnight below my AC settings. I have never been so prepared for autumn.

The mad reads continue. I did a rare re-read of a library book this week, The Rook by Daniel O’Malley, because I had also checked out the sequel. To be fair, I didn’t know for sure it was a reread until the first page, when I went “this seems strangely familiar,” sending me digging through my library history. It was worth re-reading, though; it’s basically a more comic (and less cosmic) take on the premise of The Laundry Files, which is one of my favorite series of all time. The sequel was good, too. That said, the real star of this week is the book I finished about twenty minutes ago, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. It was very, very good. I cried a lot.
Quite a few puzzles, too, although the pace slowed down during the week as I realized that I have a lot of reading to do if I want to be done with the stacks before November starts. That’s almost certainly not gonna happen, but I have to try the best I can.
The same goes for television; I’ve managed to watch an episode of Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine most days, but it’s been a while since I watched one of Luke Cage, and I haven’t picked up another dramatic show either. That’s fine, though; I’m never going to feel bad about minimizing my time spent watching TV.
The only real event this week: there was a Hallowe’en shindig at my old workplace this Friday evening, and I finagled a +1 from someone. It was nice to see folks–particularly the kitchen staff, who I miss like hell–even if I kept getting asked when I was coming back. I’m glad I went, though. It gave me an opportunity to taste a cherry-flavored Hint water as well. They’re great.

Next week will be quite eventful; I have a cousin coming into the area for vacation, and we’ll be doing touristy stuff while she’s around. Should be fun! And then NaNoWriMo’s right around the corner…

Baby Bear brain

I’ve recently been working on getting one of my cousins into puzzles.

It all started back in March, when I was visiting back home. I showed her the basics of sudoku with a kids’ book I had bought for my Mom. (Would I put money on Mom having not touched that book since I left? Yes. Yes, I would.) The ones that really grabbed her, though, were Fill-Ins; she told me later that she had bought a magazine of them and regularly worked on them in the evenings.

Cue me spending something close to $100 on various magazines and books for her, covering a wide gamut of puzzle types. What can I say? When someone seems to share a passion of mine, I want to make the most of it. She’s actually coming to nearby Asheville next week on vacation, and I’ll be bringing her the second wave of puzzle books in person.

Teaching someone how to do puzzles “from scratch” has been an interesting experience for me. I’ve been doing them since I was a kid; I used to walk around with a big brown tote full of puzzle magazines when I was seven or eight, and am still pretty bitter that my Mom threw them away sometime in the early nineties. I only managed to save a single magazine from that apocalypse, a Dell Crosswords Spectacular from 1991. It happens to have one of my favorite puzzles of all time, one I transcribed over a decade ago. Here it is. (The rules: make a single, Nikoli-style loop in the puzzle through the centers of the squares. The numbers represent how many boxes in that row or column are part of the loop.)

That puzzle used to be the hardest one I had ever solved, and it took me years as a kid. I’ve done tougher since, but going back to basics–as is necessary when you’re teaching someone who hasn’t been steeped in puzzles for the vast majority of their life–has been enlightening. I get to experience the “a-ha!” moment of understanding, internalizing the ways that a good puzzle design works through someone else’s eyes.

I’ve also come to realize that, if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t really like very hard puzzles. This was made crystal-clear by a particular puzzle that I recently worked on from a Japanese magazine called 超難問ナンプレ&頭脳全開数理パズル, which roughly translates to “Super Difficult Sudoku & Math Puzzles.” It’s not lying. The magazine contains a section of Slitherlinks, my favorite puzzle type, but even though I’ve solved literally hundreds of them the ones in this magazine regularly cause me to fail miserably. You can actually play the breaking-point puzzle here, thanks to the Javascript version of Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection and my fastidious transcription. I don’t recommend it, though.

Put simply, the puzzle is brutally hard, and at the end requires what amounts to “guessing wildly and see what happens.” This sort of arbitrary “what-if?” logic sets my teeth on edge in puzzles of all types. In fact, I personally see it as a kind of failing. If your puzzle can’t be reasoned out from first principles, then I just don’t think it’s very good. I did eventually solve the puzzle, with some help on a couple of deductions from an online acquaintance, but it wasn’t satisfying at all. I didn’t get to the end with a feeling of accomplishment; I got to it with a feeling of defeat.

The problem is that a lot of very hard puzzles end up making me feel that way, whether I manage to actually solve them or not. And so: yeah, they’re just not for me. I can accept that, although it pains me to admit that there are entire swaths of puzzles that I’ll never like or enjoy because of simply being too hard for me to enjoy.

Puzzles that are too easy have a different sort of problem: they feel rote, mechanical, like I’m doing the pencil-and-paper equivalent of writing lines. Which, uh, I guess is just writing lines? I still do them on occasion–most Fill-Ins are like this for me nowadays, actually–and there is some satisfaction to be gained from the process, from taking a disorganized list of words or an empty grid and putting it all together the right way based on the rules of the puzzle; we humans crave making order out of chaos, after all. But they’re like over-sweet candy: nice every once in a while, but not really meal material.

So, like Goldilocks, I suppose I like my puzzles neither too hard nor too easy, but just right. Fortunately for me, the majority of Nikoli’s publications fit into that spot. They have a couple of harder-than-average puzzle types (Heyawake being the biggest outlier), but most of their stuff is eminently doable even at the highest difficulty level.

I’ll still buy my every-other-month copy of 超難問ナンプレ&頭脳全開数理パズル, but it’ll mostly be to gawk at the ridiculous puzzles. And then I’ll turn back to Baby Bear’s books and magazines, the ones filled with not-too-easy, not-too-hard challenges, and actually enjoy myself.

Weekly status update [0035/????]

This’ll be a short one; it was a very quiet week.

Reading continues apace, although I got “stuck” for a bit on The Two Georges, an alt-history novel by Richard Dreyfuss (yes, the actor) and Harry Turtledove, who I assume did all the actual writing. It was a just-fine book, honestly; the real problem was that it was a 1000+ page book in a 450-page binding, which meant the font was tiny and single spaced. It took a lot of energy to read.
Continued watching The Last Man on Earth, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Luke Cage. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch another episode of OITNB.
More puzzles, including a ridiculously hard Slitherlink that, I think, has permanently turned me off of the ones in the Gakken publications. There’s “interestingly hard” and then there’s “requires flat-out guessing or psychic powers,” and a few too many of their puzzles are of the latter type. It’s a shame, because I find even the hardest ones by Nikoli pretty trivial at this point, but I’m not willing to beat my head against those crazy-hard ones, so…
Nothing meaningful on the videogame front. I did learn that Zen got the license for Bally/Williams tables after The Pinball Arcade lost it, which has me very excited; I much prefer the polish of the Zen tables, so seeing them do real pinball rather than the fantasy tables they usually do will be very interesting.

Like I said, a very quiet week indeed, perhaps the most “just the usual” week I’ve had since I retired. No complaints here, though! Other than that there’s no way I’m gonna get through my stack of books before NaNoWriMo starts in a few weeks…