abcrisp – Page 2 – A Tourist Among the Cosmos

20/07/202320/07/2023

Thoughts on Turning Fifty

I tend to take my vacation in stages; a week in January and a week in July; and the week in July I always arrange to insure includes my birthday. At these times, I often undertake a personal ‘refit’ – reducing the clutter in my home, rearranging the furniture, generally cleaning up in a more thorough manner than the usual daily or weekly maintenance. When you remain in one place for a long time, having things stay the same can become dull; I have found such a refit can revitalize me in a way.

This year, as I turned fifty, that refit has taken on a special significance. I’d sold my drawing table, which I had for fifteen years but hadn’t used all that much in the last two; and I’d purchased a new bookcase. A lot of material I once considered essential was reclassified as ‘clutter’ and disposed of. My place looks quite different now than it did before, and I find I do not regret the changes.

(I did worry, as I decided to sell the drawing table, that I would come to regret the choice. Sunk-cost fallacy is a real thing which has haunted me so many times; and has had me reversing course on other opportunities to reorder my life. This year, however, I’m gratified to report it has not had that hold on me as it has in the past.)

The changes this year reflect, more so than previous years, the underlying shifts in myself that have happened recently. I’ve come full circle in my creative interests, returning to writing rather than art or comics or game development (Part of this is practical: writing a story, hard as it is, is still easier than trying to script, draw, and publish a comic, or trying to incorporate a story into a game. I have a great deal of respect for those people who can do these things and do them well; but I finally have to admit that I am not one of those people). I no longer buy art supplies; but I do buy more books, both new and used. My gaming and graphics desktop computer gets less and less attention now, while the laptop I’m composing this blog entry on becomes more and more my primary electronic device.

There can be no denying that I have changed as I have gotten older. What makes this change, this refit, different from all the last is that I have finally been able to embrace it.

On the wall of my apartment hangs a poem I’ve kept since my college days, the “Desiderata.” In it, there is the following line: Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. I’ve certainly learned to surrender a lot this past year: interests, hobbies, ambitions. It was, looking back, a much gentler process than I had imagined it to be. With so much cleared away, I feel like I can move forward on the things that remain, the things that matter.

And a good thing too; for turning fifty also mean accepting that my life is well into its latter days. We Crisps live a long time, but my oldest grandparents all passed on in their eighties and nineties. With that as a reference, I figure I have thirty years left, maybe forty if I’m lucky. I believe I now have the right mindset to meet these last decades and make the most of them.

30/04/202330/04/2023

Tooth and Social Consequences

Last Monday I had the unpleasant sensation of breaking a tooth. I certainly wasn’t expecting to spit out a quarter of a molar when biting into a rice krispie square, but there was nothing for it. I had to see a dentist.

By good fortune I was able to get the problem resolved quickly. Dr. Patel at the Fredericton Dental Clinic was able to see me the next day, and a slot for the extraction surgery opened up the day after that. By Wednesday afternoon, I was minus a shattered molar, and today I’m well on the way to recovery.

By greater fortune — or more precisely, through the grace of our society — I wasn’t bankrupted by the process. In fact, this emergency wasn’t a financial emergency at all; merely an inconvenience.

15/04/202315/04/2023

How Things Have Changed!

Earlier this week, I got a rejection letter from a professional magazine; the first in twenty five years. It was very polite, the editor saying the story didn’t quite work for him, but he wished me well in placing the story elsewhere and thanked me for showing it to him. A couple of hours after I got the rejection letter, I’d found a new market for the story and sent it out again. I’m still waiting for a response but I expect that response to arrive in a couple of weeks.

I’ve since come to appreciate just how much has changed for fiction writers and markets in the twenty five years since I last submitted stories.

Twenty five years ago – the late 1990s – I knew of only a few sci-fi short fiction markets, and generally only the bigger ones whose magazines made it to Fredericton. Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to be specific. I’d heard of others but getting access to them was more problematic. All accepted postal submissions only, which meant printing out several dozen pages, making sure they were all in the proper format and order, and mailing them off along with a SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) to the editor. Cover letters were generally not recommended. Wait times were measured in months.

Not so, now! All of the above listed magazines now have electronic submission options, and have been joined by a host of other magazines, some digital only, some with physical issues in addition to digital. Clarkesworld and Lightspeed have become some of the better magazines I’ve read. Wait times can still be months for the busier magazines, but that’s more due to the volume of submissions sent in than the speed (or lack thereof) of the postal service. The online submission systems are quite painless to use, and in some cases even let you track where your submission is in the queue. So much better!

There are also so many more resources available to writers today. In the 1990s, I often had to hunt down a thick book called Writer’s Market (insert year here), which had magazine contact information and all-too-brief guidelines. That resource is still around, but I’ve found The Submission Grinder to be a much better resource, not only for finding story markets, but also for keeping track of my own submissions. Signup is free, though they do accept donations to help keep the site running. You can search markets by genre, pay rate, story size, average response time, etc. Each market entry has its own dedicated page, with a section for guidelines (plus a link to the market’s website, for more details) as well as their preferences re: simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions and a breakdown of tracked submissions and responses. By adding your own submissions into their database you can help keep track of where you’ve sent a story as well as helping to refine the Grinder’s data on those markets.

Educational resources also abound. I’m currently going through some online classes courtesy of The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Courses are relatively cheap (and there are end-of-year sales where some course are offered for as little as US$5), and can be worked through at your own pace, and you have access to them for as long as the website is available. Cat Rambo is a veteran writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as a former president of SFWA, and she’s also attracted a number of other accomplished writers to teach courses. Some of the courses depend on videos, while others are text-only, but most are a mix. I’ve found the “Rewriting, Revising, and Fine-Tuning” course to be of special assistance, as polishing my stories has always been one of my stumbling blocks.

One “resource” that is available but which I do not recommend is AI. ChatGPT has recently become a bane to short fiction markets thanks to snake-oil salespeople pushing it as a means to “make money writing.” Oh, no: it’s more a means to get yourself blacklisted, as more than a few markets are now rejecting AI-generated works. AI “writing” tends to plagarize more than not, and still delivers stories of poor quality. For good stories, the human brain remains the best generator out there, and there is no shortcut to getting published, much less making “good money”. Do yourself a favour: avoid ChatGPT and its companions and put in the time to write yourself.

So much has changed in the past twenty five years, but sadly one thing that hasn’t changed (much) is the pay. Twenty five years ago, the professional rate was 7 cents US per word. Today, it’s 8 cents US per word, though a few markets pay more, and most pay far less. There’s a reason most published writers have other jobs.

And the other thing that hasn’t changed has been the need to keep putting out words. Good words or bad words, the constant flow of writing is the only way to get better at it. Which reminds me; I should close off here and get back to writing my next story.

10/02/202310/02/2023

The Rings of Quaoar

Shakespeare once wrote, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Certainly, scientists have been finding that out for centuries; every time we think we have a handle on how the universe works, some new discovery throws us a curveball. A recent discovery by scientists at the University of Sheffield in England has tossed a new one into the field of planetary science. The dwarf planet Quaoar has rings.

Quaoar is one of the dwarf planets that lie out past Pluto, in the Kuiper Belt. At approximately 1,110 kilometers across, Quaoar is roughly half of Pluto’s size, and its distance from the sun gives it an average temperature of 44 Kelvin, or -229 degrees Celsius. It has a small moon, named Weywot, orbiting Quaoar at roughly 14,500 km.

Quaoar isn’t the only dwarf planet known to have rings; the dwarf planets Chariklo and Haumea also have them. But the unusual thing about Quaoar’s rings – the thing that has thrown a curveball to scientists – are where those rings are.

22/12/2022

COVID’d

So, last Tuesday I developed a runny nose and a cough. This is not unusual for this time of year, especially with flu season back in full swing. I used the last of my rapid-tests to check, and was relieved to see it come back negative.

But, with Christmas holidays so close and with COVID cases slowly rising in the province, I felt it was best to be sure. While the provincial government has been annoyingly tight-lipped about the current state of disease in New Brunswick, they at least have become more generous with their rapid test kits. I was able to pick up two boxes the next day, and broke out one test, expecting it to go as smoothly as each test prior.

No such luck:

After almost three years of dodging this virus, it had finally caught up to me.

Now: I was fully vaccinated and had two boosters (but not the bivalent; I’d been hoping to get that in February next year), and that helped considerably. I spent the next five days at home, my time spent either in bed or curled up in front of the computer. High temperatures, fatigue, loss of appetite, coughing (so much coughing) were thankfully the worst I experienced. I was able to retain my senses of smell and taste (though both were mucked up in the usual way a disease that produces mucus and phlegm mucks them up). Those five days were the longest I’d been sick since my childhood.

I’m back at work now, and most of the symptoms have faded apart from the fatigue (slept over ten hours last night alone) which I gather will persist for another few weeks. I have yet to see if the brain-fog has truly lifted from me or not (I can think relatively clearly, but I haven’t had much chance to test my cognition since the disease hit). Still, if a few weeks fatigue and brain-mugginess are the worst I experience, I shall count myself incredibly fortunate.

Because without my vaccination or my continued masking practice, I’m certain it would have been so much worse. If you’re unvaccinated or are hesitating on getting a booster, I can only tell you to stop hesitating. Get the shot, wear a mask in public, please. You do not want to experience the worst COVID can do to you; trust me.