Monthly Archives: October 2013

The Importance of Emotional Balance to My Writing

For me, this has been a real roller coaster of a year. The sudden los of gainful employment in April sent shockwaves throughout every aspect of my life. When I found myself with loads more unaccounted for time I really thought I was going to get loads more writing completed.

The plan had been that the mornings would be dedicated to job searching (as task made much easier by the internet) and the afternoons would be spent writing. Boy, that plan never worked.

The stress of not having a regular job really took away my ability to concentrate. While I did get some writing done, including I think one of my strongest stories even if the coordinating judge at the Writers of The Future Contest disagrees,  by and large I got very little written. Certainly my novel suffered.

Two months ago I landed a job as a temp at the healthcare giant, Kaiser Permanente. I almost passed up on the job as the offered pay was barely more than the unemployment compensation I was receiving, but I did take the job.  (One reason was that I prefer to work to no and another my belief that having a job makes it easier to land another.)

While I am still a temp, things are looking optimistic that I will transition to a regular full-time employee at Kaiser. This is very good. We’re talking good pay, good benefits, and a union to help protect me for the inconsistencies of poor management.

Currently at Kaiser we are doing a lot of overtime. This is the busiest time of the year for my division. For the last three weeks I have been working 10 hours a day for 5 days a week, and then putting in a half day on Saturday. It would be expected that so much overtime would be an additional drag on my writing, but that would a conclusion at odds with my observations.

I purchased a backpack – I need to walk a mile and a half everyday to get from work – and began taking my MacBook Colossus with me to work. Even dead tired and working like a dog, I am writing every day on my lunches and my breaks. I’m not yet back to thousand words a day, but I will be hitting that goal and exceeding it soon.

It’s not the tiredness; it’s not the hours, it is the emotional stability of having my problems in my rearview mirror that seems to be the singe most important factor.

I must say, it feels good to be back.

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Movie review: Gravity

Sunday morning a friend and I caught a 3D showing of the new film Gravity. I normally steer clear of 3D showings as I feel to often the effect is used as a gimmick and a way to needlessly boost the ticket prices. However with a few directors, men of vision, I will often GRAVITYgive them a short if they can sell me that the 3D is a part of their vision and not just a revenue device. Alfonso is one such director.

Gravity is a film set in orbit high above the Earth. Two astronauts, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Mat Kowalski I George Clooney) a part of a shuttle team making repairs to the Hubble Space telescope. A disaster occurs stranding Ryan and Kowalski alone and shuttles in orbit. This is a story of survival against extreme odds, and that has been a genre that has always fascinated.  The film follows closely and with a hard edge of forgivingness as the two struggled to find some way out of their dire situation.  It very much has a feel like the classic SF short story ‘The Cold Equations,’ but is sadly not as rigorous in the application of know physics.

That is NOT to say that this film just makes stuff up like most SF films do. No, compared to what we are generally fed from studios this is an amazing movie with a high degree of fidelity to science. It warms my heart that this film is doing great box office and it has the best use of silence in space since Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

What did the filmmaker’s get wrong? Mostly they imagine orbital space to be one area, not understanding or ignoring that orbital has inclinations and altitudes. The trip as seen in the film is simply not possible. However some of this I can live with. I ignore the words Hubble and simply imagine that the crew is working on a different space telescope, one that lies in the right orbit for the plot.

They also did understand surface tension in space. Tears do not float off a person eyeballs in weightlessness, but rather t stay there, making vision impossible until manually cleared. There is also a bit with momentum that when you think about just is plain wrong – I can’t go into details it would be spoiler material – but it’s a rather larger error in my book.

That said, I was blown away by this movie. The errors do not detract from my enjoyment any more than the multiple errors in Jaws. This is a movie after all and not real life.

This film also has the best zero-gee effects, besting Apollo 13 who used real zero-gee.

What the filmmakers have given us is a vision of space that is unmatched in cinema. Curaon use of 3D is masterful, the best 3D I have ever seen. Not only that his use of the camera of lenses or movement and framing combine to make an experience that is simply beyond words. I was breathless as I watched this movie. Even when I knew something was wrong I was still deeply engaged in the characters and their drama. I gasped out loud several times and that I rarely do. This film is phenomenal.

Do not wait for video.

Do not wait for cable.

Do not see it in 2D.

If you have to drive 60 miles, do it, this film is worth it.v

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Feeling alright

Despite the Republican insistence on going total ‘dirka dirka jihad‘ as an approach to governance, I am having a pretty decent week.

I’ve had some insights into a secondary character in my novel that I think brings out a more fully realized character and provides a nice bit of motivation for why she does what she does. She also surprised me by being married to another woman. I’ve heard author talk before about that their characters tell them whats what, but that’s not really how I operate. In this case I had started considering the spousal relations for Katarina and I know I did not want the usual power-couple you find in politics. Once i had the broad outlines of the kind of person for her spouse, I let my mind wander through scenes with different spouses and different bits of dialog.  Again and again I kept coming back to the same, off-world Scandinavian blonde. If that’s where my thoughts keep ending up, like some sort of orbit, then that where I need to be.

Also things look up on the job prospect. Right now I am a  temp but I’ve been told that my bosses are very pleased with my work and so I think when the probationary period ends it is likely that I will transition to a full time regular and unionized employee.

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