Ok, didn't post nearly so much to the blog this past month as I'd hoped.  Been a rather busy month, and I still haven't figured out how to get blogging time back into the schedule/priority list.  I'm sure I will, when I give myself permission to breathe and relax. 

So, here's my month in summary:

Reading:  Three novels.  Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear. (Well, technically, started that in December on vacation and finished it up in January)  A Memory of Light, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.  And The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.   Yeah, those are some rather big books.  What can I say, I like my Fantasy with enough heft to use as a lethal weapon.  Well, except that these days I'm mostly reading ebooks.  Dammit you know what I mean.  All three were great reads.  Two beginnings and one finale.  I will miss reading the Wheel of Time.  I look forward to book two of Bear's series.  I believe that's on the way soon.  And I have book two of Rothfuss's series, but I need to meter my reading.  Three books in one month definitely ate into my writing time.  I paid a bit more attention to that this year.  I pushed to do a LOT of reading last year, and my writing paid the price in productivity.  Hey, I only get the same 24 hours a day as everyone else, the hours reading are hours not writing.  BUT, I'm keeping in mind Steven Gould's advice from VP.  You cannot just breathe out, you need to breathe in too.  So, I've seriously cut back my TV time in some effort to compensate.  Still, have to meter the reading.  I'm technically also "reading" the Audiobook of Crime and Punishment.  But it's long.  I thought I'd get through it by now, but I'll be lucky to get through it by end of February.  Still, I like taking on the classics on Audiobook.  A good reader can hold the attention where my more modern eye would probably wander on the page.  I will probably pick something modern and shorter after this for commuting.

Writing:  Started three short stories.   Completed one full first draft.   The other two are in progress.  (One sort of fizzled when the "idea" didn't pan out a real story, so I need to take that one back to the drawing board and start over.   The other needs a bit more research and care, and I'm doing a little reading beacuse I want to make sure the why of things matters.   I completed two drafts on another story, including what I think might be my final draft, but I fear isn't.  I'd planned on submitting that as my submission for the month, but I decided I needed a bit more feedback, so that's out to some beta readers.   It means I miss my goal of getting one story out in the wild per month.  However, I think just submitting it without one more look over from independant eyes when I have a nagging feeling in the back of my head a bad idea.  Arbitrary goals are arbitrary.  I set them as measure and to drive myself to take on and do more.  I'll submit that story one way or the other in February, and I'll count it as my January submission, which means I'll need to do another story for February.

Submissions: None.  See above.  Falling behind and I'll have to dig in double to catch up.

Editing: No work this month.

Music: Due to circumstances, I came into possession of a digital copy of one of the recordings of music my band made.  The recordings were never 100% compelete, though I think there might be one other copy with more complete versions of the songs (only two on this copy have vocal tracks for example, although most of the songs had words), as well as I recall that we had recorded at minimum two MORE songs than are on the "album" that I have.  I can't believe we did that 20 years ago.  It's pretty cool, and I think we did a decent job for all the low end equipment we had, and the fact that our lead guitarist was I think 17 at the time.  (Not me, I'm strictly a rhythm guitarist).   But it's got me bit by the music bug again, so I've started practicing once again on the guitar.  Not every single day, but at least several days a week.  And I've written a song, though, it's really just the rhythm part, so, kind of not a complete song as of yet.  I might poke around and do some recording of it to see if I can come up with other parts too.  This falls into the fun category.  Of course, that eats up a bit of the time I'm freeing up by not watching TV.  So, a trade off.  But, if I can do some cool stuff with it, I'd much rather have more music in my life than more TV.  (I'm not down on TV, but I know I can too easily get sucked into it, and end up watching so much TV that I stop producing.  I'd rather be a producer than a consumer if I can manage it.)

So that's the state of the Ed.

How about you?  How'd your start of the year go so far?

When I was in college, I was a member of the Rutgers Oratorio Choir.  I'd been in a choir for as long as I could remember, though I think the formal concerts/choirs started in about 3rd grade.  Bergenfield had an excellent music program and they got you signing and playing instruments on the early side.  When I went off to college, choir was the only formal music I kept up with. (I'd let clarinet and percussion fall by the wayside)   For the final concert I ever performed in a choir, I had the distinct joy and pleasure to perform music not only written by, but to be conducted by, Dave Brubeck.  Yes, that Dave Brubeck.  I only got to meet him personally for the dress rehersal, and the performances.  He was, to say the least, most gracious.  When he was there conducting us, and talking to us, you got the distinct feeling like he felt we were doing him a favor by performing his music.  Can you imagine? 

When that semster started, and we got the sheet music, I didn't even know who Dave Brubeck was.  Or rather, I'd heard his music before, but I didn't put two and two together between the person who had written the choral music we were performing and the jazz musician I'd heard on the radio.  I did learn enough by the time of the concert to have a respect for him.  Though I'd probably have had that no matter what since I don't think I'd ever really performed an entire concert of music by a single composer before, with that person conducting.  That alone was daunting.  How would he feel about how we performed his work?   But I was young and niave enough to not have been awestruck, no moment of: OHMYGODIMONSTAGEWITHDAVEBRUBECK.  If I'd been in that choir today (which I could be, if it were still around, because it was open to students, faculty and alumni, but is sadly to the best of my knowledge no more once the founder/conductor of the Choir retired) I would have been at least initially in a bit of shell shock.  And I would have been much more aware of how rare and spectacular that opportunity was.

Out of many experiences I had in college, this was a singular and cherished one.  I wish I still had a copy of the music or program from it.  Alas, all I've been able to find of the concert was a single flyer that I kept with a box of mementos.  But yes, I had the distinct pleasure and honor of having met and performed with a truly singular talent in music. 

He shall be missed.

Happy New Years to all you of the paganic persuasion.  (That might not actually be a word.  Um.  Yeah.)

I managed to make it to work today, and am able to get caught up on a few things.   But it's been a long power out at home since the storm.   There's no major direct damage to the home that I've been able to find, but it's been cold and no power, so hard to crawl around every nook and cranny to be certain.   A large (50+ foot) pine came down in the back, but did not appear to hit anything or anyone.  And we had to take out the tree next to the house, because it was leaning on the power/cable/phone lines enough to make me nervous they might snap.

But despite the lack of power, we persevered on.   The kids, well, they have the big challenge because they don't really know life without electricity too well.   Going to have to fix that.  They adjusted, if a bit begrudgingly.   Otherwise, we don't have heat either, and it's been getting a bit colder each day.   So, scary, but there's hope that soon we'll have some power.   We had some for a bout 10 minutes yesterday, and a test call just reached my answering machine.   Now if the power just keeps up, we'll be in good shape.

Time to try and get the house and life back into shape.   Still need gas in the car, and the lines for gas remind me of the gar crisis in the 70s.  Not so many fist fights, but there seem to be cops at most of the working gas stations.

Otherwise, that's my status.   Hope to have enough left in me soon to get back to writing.  Worrying about things like power and heat and food, boy they take a lot out of you don't they?

A long time ago, in a university not so far away, I wrote a paper on the works of one Mr. George Lucas.  That paper has since vanished into, well, wherever it is that college essays go to die.  The essay graveyard or some such.  In any case, I had discussed some of the particulars of this essay I had written some time ago with some folks at VP, and I thought, why not bring up a point or two on the blog.  I'll note that at the time I wrote the paper, and come up with some of my original theories, the only versions of the story that existed were the original tales.  (If you haven't watched the original trilogy by now, you may want to skip the post, as I will reveal a few spoilers.)

To anyone over a certain age, one of the great storytelling tragedies of our time is how one creator, Mr. Lucas, decided he just had to go back and fiddle with his movies.  His movies had become classics; giants in the SF movie field.  Loved by, it seemed, nearly everyone.  When it was announced that he was re-releasing the movies into the theater, with some special effects enhancements, digital touch-ups, and perhaps tweaking back in a deleted scene or two, well, the audiences got excited and flocked to the theaters to get another taste of something that they loved. 

And it left a bad taste in many mouths.

You've probably seen the T-shirt.  Or read the clever meme photo, or seen a parody that amused you.  But almost universally, when asked about the one thing Lucas did when he tweaked the original trilogy into the Special Edition, the thing he did that upset the most people was to change the fact that Han Solo shoots Greedo first.  Oh, there's plenty of reasons why this is bad.  The effects look clumsy.  It doesn't scan cleanly in the scene.  Han doesn't look like someone that had just missed death by pure luck.  Simply put, the scene doesn't work.  I think, however, there's a deeper reason that this particular scene bothers people, and it has to do with dual arcs.

In the original Star Wars, we're introduced to a character who is a small time character with what most people would call questionable morals.  He's a smuggler.  He's worried primarily about himself.  He's a mercenary, in it for the money.  And yes, he's a cold blooded killer.  Oh sure, Greedo probably would have killed him without too much worry.  But Han didn't wait to get shot.  He took calm, cool, pre-emptive action and kills Greedo without even blinking about it.  At best, as we know Han upon introduction in the movie he's a grey character, more dark grey than light.  And yet, we see him change over the course of that first movie.  His character arc is to go from someone on the edge of darkness, a known criminal with a price on his head, to coming to the rescue just in time.  From darkness, into the light.

Why is that important?  Because it is the small character arc of Han Solo, that enables the audience to buy into the larger character arc of Darth Vader.  We watch Solo's interaction with the other characters, see how they influence him, and turn him around to being a hero, and in the back of our minds, it sets us up to believe it when by the end of the third movie Vader does the same.   If Solo can change from a cold hearted criminal to a hero, why not Vader from Sith Lord back to a Jedi?   And that's the crux of it.  It's subtle, and for a very long time, I thought it completely intentional.  Until the Special Edition came out.

Herein lies the danger of spending too much time fiddling with any particular story.  How much time is too much?  I can't say for sure.  But the more you play and tweak and change, you need to be aware that you could be destroying some beautiful serendipity in your tale.  It may be that you'll be too close to the story to even know it when that happens.  About the only thing I could say, is this: once the work is out and part of the public sphere, be really damn sure you have to change something, before you do.  Because whether you mean for them to or not, people will attach themselves to your story in ways you can't possibly anticipate.  And what might seem like a minor tweak, might break the suspension of disbelief of your audience.

What do you think?

So I am home from the wonderous experience that is Viable Paradise.  As they say: to those that have not experienced it, no words will convey, and to those that have, no words are necessary.  For any such intense experiences, that is a true encapsulation of how we, as people, process them.  How then can I convey, dear readers, what it is like?

A good friend asked me what I thought was the best pece of advice I learned at VP.  I don't recall exactly what I responded with, but  I thought about that for some time after, as you do.  Contemplating as I washed the dishes and cleared the table from dinner, etc.  Now I think the best piece of advice will change for me over time.  What I walked away from the conference firmly in my head, has already shifted over the course of the long journey home, and the brief respite of a few days before diving headlong back into the work-a-day treadmill that is ordinary life.  I expect that to change over the weeks and months, probably years to come.   Sometimes, we're just not ready for the lesson that life and opporutunity present to us now.  But if we are careful, if we are lucky, and hoard a piece of that away, perhaps when we are ready, we will stand in the middle of a store somewhere and say: Aha!  I know what that means now.  Then go on to put that into practice.

We twenty-four students all came to the workshop at somewhat different points in our carreers.  Some younger, some older.  Some more accomplished, some with few or no successes yet under our belts.  I would be surprised if you asked all of us that same question you didn't find twenty-four different responses.  That's human nature.  What surprised me, though perhaps shouldn't have, was the hints I saw of the instructors also going through their own Aha! moments.  I guess there is truth that a part of teaching, is learning things anew.  Learning, it seems, like many other aspects of the world, is a cyclical thing.

I find it very hard to sum up a week of intinsity in any small way, but if I had to, I think I would say: be true. 

It seems, perhaps, strange to say that.  Since we, as writers of fiction, are inherently liars.  We tell made up crazy stories to entertain.  But so many of the lessons at the core, about the writing voice, about what we have to say, what we care about, what moves us, that's as close as I can get to summing it up.   It reminds me of a scene in Walk the Line. 

There's a scene when Johnny Cash is trying out for Sam Phillips.  He and his band are singing something, and it's sort of mediocre.  It's not bad, but it's not special.  Sam stops them, and is ready to dismiss them.  Johnny, incredulous, asks why.  Is it the song?  Or how I sing it.  Sam comes back with a great line, that I'm about to flub.  He tells Johnny that he's just going through the motions, one of dozens of decent sounding gospel singers, but that he doesn't believe it.  He doesn't believe how Johnny feels as he sings that song.  Then he says, "if you have one song to sing, if you lay dying in the gutter, and had time to sing one last song, what would it be?"  And of course, being a movie, Johnny comes back with Folsom Prison Blues. 

I don't know if I can answer every single time that if I only had time enough to tell one more story, the one I'm writing is it.  But I aim to work as if it were.

I'm up, the boys are fed, and I'm mustering what I've got to get my car loaded, and head on out to Viable Paradise.  I've really been trying not to freak out about it, and a very busy day job has helped on that front tremendously.   But now, today, I head up to Martha's Vineyard.  Even though it doesn't offiially start until tomorrow....oy.  The butterflies have woken up with a vengence.

In any case, I will muster whatever I've got, get on the road, enjoy an audiobook, and meet up with a friend for lunch before hitting the ferry and crossing over.

Hmm...crossing over.  Isn't that some sort of Fantasy Trope?  Uh-oh.  Will the hero find the elixir?  Will he bring it back to save his kingdom? 

Will he not run around with his arms flailing like a muppet?

I don't know.  But I expect it will be an adventure.

See some of you there. 

First things first:  It's BACK IT UP WEDNESDAY!!!!  Did YOU backup your work today yet?  If not, go do it now.

Great.

Look, I certainly hope you aren't waiting for me to tell you to back up your data.   Bad stuff happens.  It happens all the time.  I've had Blue Screens of Death.   I've had hard disk failures.   I've had servers at work go belly up, with no warning.  What has saved the day in each case?   Backups.   Things happen to good authors.   Just this year, John Scalzi lost his laptop during his big round of travel for conventions/promotional tour for his latest novel: Redshirts.  But John makes backups.  So John was able to keep working.  (Actually, John lost his laptop twice.)  Just this week, Mary Robinette Kowal (maryrobinette) had water accidentally spilled on her laptop.  She was able to keep working--because she performs backups.  

Okay, strictly speaking, both of those authors could have kept working even if they hadn't had backups of their work.  It just would have made a crappy situation all that much worse if they'd each lost even more work.  As it is, even just a few hours work would be pretty annoying for most of us to lose.  And I've done that by forgetting to save something routinely when a program crashed.  So, yeah, that's a stinker.   A good lesson you might pick up from both these fine authors, is that each has spare computing equipment ready to go.  That's a sign of professionalism right there: not just making backups, but being prepared for BUSINESS CONTINUITY.

See, these examples highlight the difference between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.  In a DR situation, you're covered.  But you'd have to wait until you could purchase a new laptop, get it setup, configured, all necessary software installed, etc, and then restore your data and you're good to go.  With Business Continuity, the idea is, something bad happens, you pick up your redundant hardware already set up to work (probably of lesser quality than your primary) grab your current files from the backup, and you're off and working again in almost no time.  Both John and Mary show near perfect Business Continuity solutions in action.  Sure, glitches happened along the way.  BUT, the thing is, they were able to get back to work promptly.  Business Continuity is about having what's absolutely necessary to keep going.  Extras are nice, but shouldn't be a focus.  The focus should be on the minimum to get working again as quickly as possible.   The goal is to have everything you'll need for at least three times the estimated time it will take to execute your DR Plan.  (Because things almost always end up taking longer than you expect.)

Disaster Recovery, in contrast, should be about everything you need to get back to square one.  Top line equipment.  All software and accouterments as previously configured.    What counts as top of the line?  Well, that's your call.  It's your business after all.  But you should have an estimate of how long it will take to replace your equipment (down to the last detail) including how long it will take you to obtain the necessary funds (if such aren't set aside).   It's your call if you want to include estimates of things like insurance in the replacement time, which in my own experiences has been not an inconsequential length of time.  

Now in your backup plan, and your BC and DR plans, you might choose to avail yourself of some Cloud services.  That's a pretty sound strategy.   From what I've read of both John and Mary's incidents, having stuff backed up online in such places as Dropbox, helped save the day, and countless hours of toil for each.  But that advice comes with a big caveat.  Things outside your control are outside your control!   Really.  Just recently, there's been news that Dropbox was hacked, and people were warned to go out and change their passwords.

And then there's THIS HACK.

No really, go read that.  You should.  It's kind of scary, and kind of important.

The lesson I take away from that is be careful of your assumptions.   This poor guy may have lost all the photos of his baby daughter because he trusted them all to the cloud for backup.  When the hacker managed to wipe out his backup account online, and his iPhone, iPad and Mac all remotely...well, that's just scary.  When you trust everything to the cloud, you put yourself at a higher risk.  Now I'm not saying trust solely in local hardware.  That's not exactly practical either.  There's plenty of good reasons to use and place a measure of trust in online environments as good forms of storage.  I'm just cautioning, don't let guard down.  Even if you avoid the "mistakes" Mat Hogan made, the biggest mistake he made was in trusting too much that the vendors he chose would be cautious, alert, and protect him.  These weren't small start ups.  These weren't tiny, fly-by night companies.  These were among the big names in the industry these days.  Amazon.  Apple.  If you can't be safe with them....you have to assume that no one makes you safe.   Don't abrogate your responsibility.  At the end of the day, it's your livelihood, not theirs.

Back up your data.  Twice.  Do it routinely.  Do it to discrete systems.  One online, one offline.  One virtual copy, one physical, something you can touch and hold in your hand.  Get the best of both worlds.  Be prepared.  Hopefully, you'll never need it.

So, how prepared are you to keep writing if you lost your PC, whether to damage, lost, stolen, or OS corruption?

Ok, so legitimately, they have a right to do it.   But legitimately, I have a right to be cranky that they did it.  So I'm going to kvetch.

Amazon sent an email where they explained to me that they are altering the terms of their free Cloud Player.  Up until now, the Cloud Player and Cloud driver were kind of linked as one thing.  Going forward....well I'll get to that in a moment.

Now, on the positive, it appears as if with the new improvements that Amazon will automagically check your purchased and imported files and will automatically register a high quality version of the song on your account for you.  How they do this magic in the background?  No damn idea.  But it's supposed to be super cool that it does this, and the improved quality will blow you away.  Or not.  Frankly, I haven't noticed one iota of difference so far.  

Now for the bad.  In the previous incarnation, my Cloud Player/Drive combo granted me 5 GB of free space to use in whichever way I fancied.  Doesn't sound like much, but I think I've used up less than 10% of that so far.  Oh, and by purchasing at least one album through Amazon MP3s, they bumped that space up to 20 GB.  Which I'm using decidedly less of.   Sounds good.  Reasonable limits all, since disk space is pretty cheap these days.   So I spent some time, took out my relatively meager CD collection and started to covert to MP3.   This seemed smart to me in any case, so that if I lose or scratch my CDs, I'll still have a copy.  I haven't yet managed to get everything "burned" and uploaded yet.  But I've got enough to have almost 1200 songs.   It takes up less than 1 GB of space.  Not a lot right?   Should be no big deal for me to maintain that.  Pretty much all new music I'm getting these days are from Amazon MP3.  So, that makes life easy for me, since you don't have to worry about storage costs on the music you buy through them.   The catch?  Starting September 1st, free accounts can only upload a max of 250 total songs.   Wow.

So my choices are: re-buy stuff I own from Amazon MP3, and those songs don't count against my limit.  Or pay the annual fee and then I can upload up to 250,000 songs?!?!   Now look, the annual fee is not much.  And if bumps up my Cloud Storage to I think 50 GB of space for the same annual fee.   Which is cool.  But ouch.  And this is a separate charge from Prime membership.  So, if you want that too, you're paying out a lot.  Meh.   If they had a level in between that was incorporated into Prime, that would be one more benefit that would get me to pay for Prime.

Of course Amazon has a right to modify their agreement.  And I can be cranky about that, but in the end, I never paid anything to make use of it.   From my perspective, I like it because I can listen to my music anywhere I have internet access, and I don't have to lug around a dedicated device for it.  Alternatively, as long as I have my Android phone, I have access to all my music without having to use up a ton of the (somewhat) limited space for music.  Which is nice.  And since I tend to prefer to have music playing while I write....it's good to have it stored in the cloud so I can access what I'm in the mood for whenever and wherever I choose to set down words.  Especially if I go through the trouble to set up some theme play lists.  Will I cave and pay up?  I don't know yet.  Still pondering.  

But it just goes to show, that when you use or rely on any Cloud type service, you leave yourself at least in part to the mercy of the vendor.   All these vendors hide into their terms things like: "We may amend the Agreement at our sole discretion by posting the revised terms in the Service..."  And by hiding I mean including such clauses somewhere in the text past the first four lines of the service agreement.   Some number approaching 0% of us ever actually bother to read through line by line the entire service agreement on most of these services we sign up for.   Which is why from time to time, you get big internet hooplas about some service provider or other having a horrible bit of text in the code of their licensing agreement that makes everyone panic and think that said vendors are trying to steal all their Intellectual Property.   But invariably, they all include such a phrase, and invariably they do change the terms.  When that happens some of us get upset.  Some of us choose to take our business elsewhere, and the rest just go along as if nothing big had ever happened.  Which, excepting this little rant, is probably where I'll be in another week.   Life's too short to get up in arms over the fact that corporations are trying to figure out new and better ways to fleece us of our money.

So what about you?  Do you use an online music service of any kind?  Which one?  Why do you prefer them?

This is my weekly* reminder folks, especially you writers out there, BACK UP YOUR DATA.

Yeah, you should be doing it regularly.  You should be doing it automatically.  But maybe you got out of habit.  Or your thumb drive is full.  Or the software went FUBAR, and you meant to get around to fixing that.

Back it up.

Don't wait for tomorrow.   Don't wait to do it later.   Do it now.  Make sure you've got your important files somewhere other than on that one single computer.   Make sure you know where the INSTALL files for your software are too.  Where is your MS Office install DVD? Where do you have your download for Scrivener?   What other apps are critical for you to work?   Where's the install media? 

What's that?  Your DVD is four years out of date, and you've just been using the "update" feature online?   That's fine as it goes, but maybe it's time to download the latest install so you have a copy that can save you a lot of time later.  What about license keys?  Does the software require it?   Do you have them somewhere available at a moment's notice?   How about putting them all in an email to yourself, tagged and placed in a folder of your online email account.   Does it mean if your email gets hacked, your license key could be compromised?   Sure.   If whomever hacks your email wants it for anything more than to snag a copy of your address book and forward off more viruses and spam to everyone therein.

Things happen.  Computers crash.  Hard drives go belly up.  Software corrupts the file you've been slaving over for two months.   Backups prevent heartache.  Backups save hours of toil.  Backups bring peace of mind.

So, when did you last backup your data?