Saturday, August 9, 2008

Not the Rock. The Point.

I have dropped off the face of Toronto for the next week, returning to the magical land of orange tabby and slate-grey cats Gibralter Point, and to an annual writing retreat that I haven't attended for a few years now. My primary goal is to finally hammer those fiblets I've been dribbling into a coherent story. You might be surprised, given how sparsely I've been rationing the suckers out, but there's a good 15K worth of prose in that tale— not to mention an awful lot of pot-holes, untidy seams, and placeholding asterisks which have to be filled by actual numbers once I finally work out the morphometric algebra. There've been 15K for a couple of months now, just sitting, and not getting any better; and the damn thing's due at the end of September. So this is it. This is the week I buckle down and whip the sucker into shape (and not incidentally, get some feedback from fellow writers).

So I don't really know how much I'll be posting to the crawl over the next few days. If it goes exceptionally well, I might shower you all with glee and excerpts. Likewise, if I make no progress at all I might shower you all with displacement activity. But if you hear little or nothing from me, perhaps that means I'm plugging away, and I shouldn't be disturbed because it's slowly but surely coming together.

In the meantime, I would just like to point out that D=Danielle has got the most endearing user pic ever.

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9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good luck! The fiblets look incredibly promising, i hope you can pull them all together.

August 10, 2008 at 12:06 AM  
Blogger A.M. Dellamonica said...

May I just say that morphometric algebra is a terribly sexy phrase?

August 10, 2008 at 10:28 AM  
Blogger TheBrummell said...

Wait, those little scraps of narrative are related to each other, and susceptible to scraping together into some sort of semi-coherent whole by a human?

Huh... guess you learn something strange and wonderful every day.

August 10, 2008 at 4:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is this the Gibraltar Point with the antique lighthouse over on the Island?

And if you've managed to expand upon Bookstein's explanation of his methods, feel free to share it - I get the impression that he explains things in such a way as to demonstrate how very very smart he is, and how dim all of the rest of us are. Thank God for morphometrics software - not very satisfying, but at least you get interpretable results.

Cheers - Lars

August 11, 2008 at 7:12 PM  
Blogger D said...

Happy slogging! Don't leave too many head-imprints at the desk in an effort to break through a block -- it doesn't work.
Most endearing ever? You only say that because it's got a wee kittensnoot.

August 12, 2008 at 12:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

15 Kelvins worth of prose, huh? I'm not familiar with this mix of literature and thermodynamics.

August 15, 2008 at 4:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Remember, when you pull meaning out of chaos you hasten the heat death of the universe. Don't take too long. That makes it worse. You are the greatest hard SciFi author I have ever read.

P.S. Saving my pennies to buy it when it gets released.

August 18, 2008 at 1:37 PM  
Blogger Peter Watts said...

TheBrummell said...

Wait, those little scraps of narrative are related to each other, and susceptible to scraping together into some sort of semi-coherent whole by a human?

Believe it or not. I workshopped it on Friday, convinced that it was a well-written but talky, motionless piece of crap. I only passed it around because I didn't have any more time to work on the damn thing. And everyone actually liked it quite a bit. Even people who don't like science fiction. Even people who don't like my science fiction. They even encouraged me to restore a scene with a cat, which I had previously cut for length.

I'm still half-convinced they're setting me up for something.

Lars said…

Is this the Gibraltar Point with the antique lighthouse over on the Island?

That's the one. The world's most useless lighthouse. I mean, it's inland. It's further inland than the actual Artscape building. It's in the middle of the woods. I don't even think you can see it from the shoreline.

Picturesque, though. I took a picture.

And if you've managed to expand upon Bookstein's explanation of his methods, feel free to share it …

OK, I'm blanking on this one. Remind me about Bookstein?

D said...

Most endearing ever? You only say that because it's got a wee kittensnoot.

I only say that because I'm not currently using Banana as my userpic.

August 19, 2008 at 3:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My mistake, I guess - I thought that you were talking about thin-plate spline analysis. The Bookstein that I was talking about is the man who brought this in to morphometric analysis. A red herring, obviously.

Cheers - Lars

August 20, 2008 at 2:00 PM  

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