Category Archives: A Writing Life

411. WordCamp Sacramento

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Saturday, September 16th, I attended WordCamp, Sacramento, and it was a disaster. I left when there were still hours remaining in the first day of a two day conference.

Don’t get me wrong. I was impressed; the conference was well organized and the presenters were knowledgable. The problem was in the advertising. There should have been a disclaimer to warn people like me to stay away. I’ll explain further, below.

About three years ago I decided to blog and set about learning how. It took a while and there were lots of wrong turns along the way. I began by studying HTML and CSS. (see 408. Behind the Curtain) I’m glad I did. That study gave me some deep background knowledge, and some specific skills as well.

Do you check out the comments when you read someone’s blog? I always do. There is a lot of back patting but also some interesting insights. J. M. Williams, in a comment on the post above, said that HTML served him better than algebra. That sounds entirely reasonable. I don’t use it often, but I couldn’t do without it when I need it.

Well into learning HTML and CSS, i stumbled on WordPress and found a way of blogging without coding. There are others who provide the same kind of service. Blogster comes to mind. I have seen blogs done on Blogster that looked great. I’ve never used it, so I don’t know how seamless the user experience is. That’s all I can say about Blogster.

On the other hand, I have worked with WordPress for about two and a half years. It comes in two flavors, WordPress.org and WordPress.com. From the user’s viewpoint, they are quite different.

WordPress.org is the master organization, largely staffed by volunteers, which provides the basic code that underpins everything else. They do not provide themes, plugins, hosting service, and so forth, but they are quite willing to help you find those things for yourself. They are the people who put on WordCamp and more power to them, even though it didn’t work for me.

WordPress.com is a one stop shop. The provide WordPress software (via the dot org people), hosting, themes, a plugin master pack, and they will sell you a URL or let you use one of theirs for free.

Big hint: if you plan to blog, buy your URL as soon as possible, before someone else gets it. The name you call your blog is much less important. If you google sydlogsdon.com, you’ll get me every time. If you google A Writing Life, you’ll get me and a hundred other bloggers who call their sites the same thing.

If all you want to do it write a blog, go WordPress.com. If you love the tech stuff, or if you have sophisticated tastes in aesthetics, or if you plan to run a business, dot org gives you much more flexibility. You pay for that by working harder at the tech side of your craft

WordCamp Sacramento was by and for the dot org side of WordPress. Three-quarters of what they presented had no application in my dot com world. The other quarter, I already knew.

Bottom line: If you are a dot organism there are WordCamps all over and you will probably find them useful. Most of the readers of my blog are dot commies, and don’t need what WordCamp provides. more Wednesday

410. An Honest Novel

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I wrote an honest story. Everything that happened, could have happened in my real world. Many of these things were close analogs to things that did happen.

That is what I said in Symphony 2 and I stand by it, but I also have to explain it.

I wrote Symphony in 1988 and 1989, about a middle school much like the one in which I taught. That means it was small, underfunded, understaffed and blessed or cursed (you decide) with a racial mix of about half Hispanic and half Anglo. Keirnan School in my fictional world is on Keirnan Road, north of Modesto, California, in a mixed agricultural and industrial area.

Kiernan Road is real. Every road and most structures in my fictional world existed in the real world as well, although much has changed since then. The place where my fictional school exists was open agricultural land in 1988. On Kiernan Road, west of my fictional school, was and is a school of a different name which is part of the Modesto School District. My fictional school is not that school. Mine exists in a tiny two-school district, much as the school where I taught. That means severely restricted resources, which will become apparent as the story progresses.

The opening sequence of chapters The Ides of March and May 1988 may seem unbelievable to any modern teachers who reads this, or to any retired teachers who were teaching in the same era in large school districts. Yes, the police should have been involved, but in those days a powerful board member like Alice’s father could easily sway his board. Yes, Child Protective Services should have been notified and they should have made determinations. Again, this was a questionable judgement call. Clearly, similar to calls are still being made my some universities today.

If things had gone as they should have, Neil would have escaped censure and there would have been no novel. However, things often don’t go as they should, in fiction and in the real world.

Under these circumstances, Neil could not have been hired for a year by any large district, even in 1988. But a small district, with minimal pay, constantly struggling to hold on to its teachers, is in a very different place. It could easily have happened in such a real district, as it did in the novel. I have seen far more questionable hires go through.

Symphony faces a conundrum. Every movie or TV show about teaching is wildly inaccurate in dozens of ways. Since that is what readers regularly see, Symphony, which looks very different, seems questionable precisely because it is accurate.

I ran every situation in Symphony through this truth test: Could that incident have happened in the school where I worked? If the answer was no, I changed the story.

Anything that seems strange to you — sorry, I’ve seen weirder.

409. Man Stuff

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I wrote this last Thursday. The post, not the quotation.

          Marquart and Dael took a bench in a completed corner. “Tell me how you have things arranged,” he said.
          “None of the wardens will leave their houses until late in the morning. The first will arrive here about midday. We will have roast krytes ready by then . . .” Marquart waved away her recitation. He didn’t care about preparations for food and drink; he was satisfied that there would be plenty of both.
          “Who will sleep where? Who will arrive first, who will stay latest, who will want to get me alone to talk to, who will get drunk quickest, who is likely to pick a fight, and with whom?”
          “Oh, man stuff.”
                                          from Valley of the Menhir

Today, I was writing chapter eleven of my latest steampunk novel. So far my hero (I don’t do wimpy protagonists) has served aboard four dirigibles and has risen in rank from Sub Lieutenant to Lieutenant Commander, brevet, in the British air service. These craft are the result of an unscrupulous Brit who, through theft, intimidation, and assassination has crippled the German airship effort and stolen all their ideas.

Earlier this morning (as I wrote) Lieutenant Commander David James and I settled thirty passengers into their berths on the Henry V, a dirigible of war acting as a passenger vessel carrying diplomats the the Grand Durbar in Delhi. If you don’t know what a durbar is, you’ll find out in coming months. David hated every minute of it.

Then we got a break of several hours as he got to go back to his real job as the lowest member of the group of senior officers, seeing to details as the dirigible, nicknamed Harry in reference to Shakespeare, leaves London for Paris. We have been following David’s career for eleven chapters now, and he has done a little bit of everything as he worked his way up. He will do even more in the future, and we will (metaphorically) stand at his shoulder and give him our moral support.

Man stuff.

The year is 1887, Victoria is on the throne, and our Britain is even stronger than the real one was since they just won the German War, largely through a squad of spies and assassins that remains Britain’s guilty secret. David is one of the few Brits who knows this.

Now its time for me to take David by the shoulders and march him down to the lounge to preside, as a stand-in for the massively scarred Commander VanHoek, over the first evening meal of the cruise. He hates the idea. Actually, so do I. In writing, as in life, sometimes if you want to go to a certain place, the path to get there passes through places you would rather avoid.

I’ve been researching Victorian aristocratic gossip in order to build a world like yet unlike our own. It’s not my cup of Earl Grey, but it is the job I’ve taken on, and I will do it well. Well enough, in fact, to move my readers through the event without arousing their distaste. That’s the writer’s equivalent of “never let them see you sweat”.

Still, I’ll be glad when the dinner is over so David and I can get back down to the engineroom where we can try to get another horsepower out of those damned, recalcitrant McFarland engines.

Man stuff.

Blatant Commercialism

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Greetings, new friends.

Recently, a number of new people have found their way to my website, and I am glad to see you. All my old friends have already heard this.

I began this website two years ago, shortly after finding out that my novel Cyan had been picked up by EDGE publishers of Canada. The original idea was to make myself and my writing known in order to find new readers for my novel. The website has grown well beyond that since.

Cyan came out in April as an ebook, and later became available in paperback as well. If you just found this website, you missed all the build up.

Cyan is a realistic, near-future science fiction novel about the exploration and colonization of a planet around a nearby star. With complications, of course.

If you click here, it will take you to the Amazon page where you can read reviews, see the blurb, and even use the Look Inside function to read a chapter or two. You can also click and buy.

If you do buy and like what you read, please take time to write a review. That way publishers will buy my next book. And then so can you.

End of commercial. Thanks for listening. SL

408. Behind the Curtain

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Most of the time, I assume that the people who read this are writers or would-be writers. I also know that most of you are bloggers, but I don’t get the idea that you are blog nerds.

Before I started this blog, I did a lot of research and started studying HTML and CSS. Then I discovered WordPress and found out that I could blog without learning them. I already spend more hours than I can afford just writing, so I was happy to let WordPress take care of what’s going on under the hood.

I get the very strong impression that most of you have made the same decision.

My Dashboard tells me that I have made 799 posts in the two years I have been blogging. If it weren’t for WordPress that would never have happened. Still I find myself frustrated when I can’t do everything I want, or when my results aren’t all I would like, so I am going to a WordPress convention in about a week to see what else I can learn.

Meanwhile, a week ago I screwed up. I had to drop in an extra post titled OOPS because post #406 was eaten by the machine. We always say that, but it’s always our fault. In this case, it reminded me that I do something I have not seen any other blog do — I run twin, independent blogs on one site. That’s where the screwup occurred and it reminded me that some of you might want to know how to run multiple blogs.

So it’s nerd time. Minimally.

It is typical for blogs to appear on a website’s home page. That’s the first thing that usually comes up and it works fine. If you want two separate blogs, you have to put them elsewhere. This requires you to do two things.

First, change your home page to a front page. Go to manage site pages and use page templates under page attributes. Afterward, whatever is on your front page remains unchanged, no matter what posts you write. If you go to the top of the page you are now reading and click on Welcome to my Worlds you will see my front page. It pops up whenever you come in via sydlogsdon.com,  but if you get to me by another route, you may never have seen it. This page has only changed two or three times in the last year, when I felt a change was necessary.

Second, you need to set up a category and category page for each blog. Uncategorized already exists and is the default. If you look down on the right column of this page, you will find CATEGORIES and under that, A Writing Life, Into the Storm, Serial, and uncategorized.

Into the Storm is simply a relic from when I was learning, which I never bothered to remove. Ignore it.

A Writing Life is the name of the blog you are reading. It also appears in the menu across the top of the page. Serial is my other blog, also in the menu at the top. If you have never explored Serial, click there now and it will take you to today’s post on that blog, which happens to be Symphony 2.

Every time I write a post I have to choose a category — either A Writing Life or Serial — so the computer will know where to put it. If I don’t make a choice, the computer puts it into uncategorized. That is what happened to post #406. My dashboard said it had been published, but it didn’t show up where it belonged. The computer didn’t know where to put it, so it didn’t put it anywhere. Hence, the extra post called OOPS.

As I said, I am as little nerdy as possible on WordPress because computers will eat up your life if you let them. If you want to know more about all this, go where I went two years ago, https://dailypost.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/using-category-pages-to-organize-content/. You can use Further Reading on the upper left side of that page to backtrack to category and to creating category pages.

Most people don’t do any of this. Then the software places their posts into uncategorized and puts them on their homepage.

That’s all I remember from when I set things up two years ago. If you know more, or want to comment, make a reply.

407. Where Life Is

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This is a repost from very early in the history of this blog.  SL

I was in the shower getting ready for a day at school when my wife called to me. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I dried and dressed, the second plane had hit.

Twenty minutes later, driving to work, I listened to the radio as the towers fell.

All day long I taught science, keeping to the lesson plan. I didn’t want to teach, and no one wanted to listen, but it was necessary to keep a semblance of normalcy. Every break we teachers watched the television, but we didn’t take any news back to the classroom. Our students needed to be in their own homes, with their parents, before they began to deal with the details of America’s disaster.

At the end of the day, I drove home. I had upon me the need to write, but not of the tragedy. Others wrote that day of what had happened, and wrote well. I needed to write of love and joy and beauty – and of my wife who is all those things to me.

Poems come slowly to me; usually they take years to complete. This one rolled freely about in my head as I drove, and when I arrived at home, I only had to write it down.

                    There Am I

Where there is water, there am I.
In sweet, soft rain and in hard rain,
driving and howling,
or filling the air with luminescent mist.
Water is life, and there am I.

Where there is sun, there am I.
In the soft heat of morning or in the harsh afternoon,
or heavy with moisture, forcing its way through clouds,
or dry as a lizard’s back.
Where the Sun is, is life, and there am I.

Where Earth is, there am I.
Whether dark loam, freshly plowed
or webbed with fissures, hard as stone,
or sandy, or soft as moss.
Where Earth is, is life, and there am I.

Where life is, there am I.
rainforest or desert,
broad plains of grass, or brooding jungle,
Where life is, there am I.

Where She is, there is life,
and sun and rain and earth, and all good things.
Where She is, is life,
And there am I.

The “I” was supposed to be me, of course, speaking of my own love for wilderness, and “She” was, of course, my wife.

However, when it was done it felt more like a religious poem. Strike the last verse, let the “I” be God and it sounds like something written by someone with a great deal more faith than I have. Odd.

OOPS

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I goofed. I won’t give the details, but post # 406 was lost, temporarily, in the innards of my website. If you follow regularly, and saw Into the Storm 2, then went away, look just below this and find the post that was scheduled for two hours ago. Sorry. SL

406. Arthur C. Clarke Invents the Modern World

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If you hang a satellite over the equator, 22,300 miles up, it will appear to remain stationary. Everybody knows that, or should, since global communications is based on the fact. A generation ago, everyone in the science fiction world also knew that this cornerstone of modern society was “invented” or discovered by Arthur C. Clarke.

I’m not sure that Clarke is still generally remembered for this. The origins of everyday things tend to be forgotten.

Clarke’s observation first appeared  February 1945, in a letter written to the periodical Wireless World.

When Wireless World began in 1913, wireless had a completely different meaning than it has today. It referred to wireless telegraphy, invented by Marconi, which used radio waves, interrupted by a telegraph key, to send messages. That allowed ships at sea to send and receive messages.

Wireless World remained on the cutting edge of electronic technology. so it was the right place for Clarke to write his February 1945 letter, which included these words:

An “artificial satellite” at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e, it would remain stationary above the same spot . . . Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give . . . coverage to the entire planet.

In October of that same year, Clarke was back in print in Wireless World with his article Extra-Terrestrial Relays, in which he fleshed out his idea.


Fig 3. Three satellite stations would ensure complete coverage of the globe.
Illustration from the 1945 Wireless World article.

Clarke discussed the difficulties of early radio and television transmission. Radio, particularly the lower frequency AM radios in use then, were erratic. Sometimes they only carried a short distance from the transmitter; at other times, they would bounce off the ionosphere and travel for a thousand miles. Television signals, being higher frequency, did not bounce off the ionosphere and so were limited to line of sight.

Relaying through orbital repeaters was the answer to both range and reliability. An orbit of 42,000 kilometers above the center of the Earth would provide a geosynchronous station.

The figure given at the top of this post –23,300 miles — appeared in every early popularization of space travel. It is not only a switch to miles, but also that distance is above the surface of the Earth, not the center.

To power his satellite, Clarke suggests mirrors concentrating the sun’s rays to heat water in boilers for turbines to run generators. He also suggests that “photoelectric developments may make it possible to utilize the solar energy more directly”. That is exactly what happened; only thirteen years later, Vanguard became the first satellite to use solar cells.

Clarke then went on to specify what kind of rockets would be needed to place these geosynchronous satellites into orbit and predicted, correctly, that such rockets would soon be available.

He also said:

The advent of atomic power has at one bound brought space travel half a century nearer. It seems unlikely that we will have to wait as much as twenty years (i.e. 1965) before atomic-powered rockets could reach even the remoter planets with a fantastically small fuel/mass ration — only  a few per cent. The equations developed in the appendix still hold, but v(elocity) will be increased by a factor of about — a thousand.

Oh, if he had only been right about that, too. Then our world might come closer to resembling the world envisioned by Harold Goodwin in his Rip Foster novel.

405. Blondel’s Future

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You really should go to Serial and finish Blondel of Arden before you read this post.

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I enjoyed writing Blondel of Arden. I like formal language, and I don’t get to use it often. I also rarely get the chance to write something completely light.

Blondel was pure fun, with every possible cliché in place. Quite sexist, actually. Somewhat like John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in McClintock or in The Quiet Man. She gives him hell in both movies, and he paddles her at the end. (Pun unintended, but noted.) That is actually more than I can tolerate and I usually turn the TV off somewhere short of the end.

I understand the bondage symbolism in this kind of fiction. The climax of McClintock when O’Hara is running from her husband with all the town cheering him on is too much like a rape scene with spectators for my taste. I stopped well short of that in Blondel of Arden.

Blondel is a cynic, Grat is an innocent, and Sylvia is a twit. That’s thin characterization, but adequate for a short semi-comic piece. I enjoyed this brief encounter with more-or-less cardboard characters.

However, I’m a sucker for people, even people on paper. I thought Sylvia had some quality hidden beneath her flirtatious exterior. I liked her. I thought she had potential.

You have to understand that I wrote this many years ago. I thought of turning it into a novel, but I never will. I have four or five novels waiting in the wings now, and by the time I finish them, I’ll have a half-dozen more tugging at my sleeve.

But when I was considering a novel, this is what I had in mind —

#                    #                    #

Sylvia returns home, sans broach, to a pointless round of “women stuff”. She hates it. She misses the one great adventure of her life. She also reviews he own behavior, and finds it wanting. Grat and Blondel served her well and she served them with contempt. She broods about her behavior, and works to make herself better in her everyday round.

This is not enough. She owes a debt. (See, I told you she had quality.) If she can’t pay it, she can at least acknowledge it.

Something – I don’t know what – happens which frees her from her obligations at home. She sets out to find Blondel and Grat, to do something for them if she can, or at least to say thank you and I’m sorry I was such a twit.

Blondel and Grat have become companions. Grat is beginning to lose his innocence. Blondel fears that it is from associating too closely with him. Grat is also lovesick; Sylvia was his first romance and he can’t forget her. Blondel finds this alternatively endearing and irritating.

Blondel’s crust is thinning, and that is dangerous. He is a smart, little guy in a world of ignorant, thundering clods. His ability to “do unto them” quietly and unnoticed is his only defense. Every time he does something self-serving – which is basically how he survives – Grat looks on, once again disappointed in his friend.

Sylvia eventually finds them and joins them. Nobody is really happy with the arrangement. Any pair of the three could find a way to coexist, but the three-way relationship cuts too close to each of their hidden weaknesses.

Each person finds him/herself in peril and escapes that peril only through the aid of the other two. Grat and Sylvia grow in romantic love, while Grat has to wrestle with the understanding that Sylvia is no longer a damsel in distress. Blondel, to his external disgust and his disguised satisfaction, find himself in an avuncular relationship with these two innocents.

What perils? How do they overcome them? Beats me. Writing peril and escape are the easiest parts of writing a novel. They will present themselves as needed, if you know your characters and where they are going to end up.

I was also planning to use this as an excuse to build a story around a fantasy version of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a real event in 1520 when Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France held an extravagant series of jousts in the fading days of classical knighthood. Think kings in golden plate armor whacking each other for sport and bragging rights, in a world where cannon balls could blow fist sized holes through either of them if the battle were real.

This gives us three real and relatable people trying to survive on the fringes of empty magnificence. Now the kings are cardboard — which is their normal state of being.

I don’t have time to take six months to write this novel, but I would love to spend two days reading it.