Month: September 2019

I still look at bookshelves when I visit other people’s houses. Do they read fiction or non-fiction? What genre do they read in? Do the books look read, or are they there for show? Is their collection eclectic, or is it specific to a genre/subject? Hardback or paperback?

I don’t realise I’m thinking about these things, but I do.

I looked at my own bookshelves today.  Everything in them is old. My paperbacks—science fiction, fantasy and mystery—are yellowed, and 70s, 80s and 90s vintage. My non-fiction includes a 1994 ‘C++ How to program’ (Dietel and Dietel, for those older coders out there), more computer books from the same era, and an eclectic set of whatever I was interested in around the same time, including a book of silviculture.

The few new books are mostly unread.  We have one shelf—which used to be double-stacked but isn’t any more—of S. K. Dunstall books (funny that), and various random books we’ve picked up from places or that have been given to us that we haven’t read and probably won’t read because we’re not really interested in them. We keep them for visitors who might enjoy them.

Even our music CDs stop at the nineties.

Frankly, all these shelves are dust catchers now. Not to mention junk collectors.  As well as having all these old books, the shelf just next to my desk has two old iPads, three dead laptops, an unused router, and old computer cables.  I’m sure the cables breed.

Nowadays, my bookshelf is my iPad. I adopted eBooks early, and almost completely right from the start. For a while I’d buy something, read it on the iPad and if I loved it, buy the dead-tree version for the shelves, but I don’t even do that now. No, nowadays I spend that money on another book by the same author.

I think it’s time to accept the future and get rid of some bookshelves.

There’s a black hole somewhere in my refrigerator.

Dinner last night was a hash brown plus (grated potato with extra ingredients made into a large flat pancake). I brought out the food processor to grate the potato and chop the onions.

Lightbulb moment. While the food processor is out why don’t I chop the onions for the big batch of bolognese I plan to freeze? I can cook that tonight, too.

I peel the onions.

It’s late when I started, that’s why I decided on hash browns for dinner in the first place. It’s a lot later when I finish, because I don’t use the food processor that often, and it takes time to work out how to set it up. Then to remember how to chop onions with it.

I fry up seemingly mountains of onion and garlic, but there’s no way I’m cooking the rest of the bolognese that night because I’ll be up till one am, and I’m exhausted already. I put it all into a container and put in in the fridge.

Next day, I take out the makings for bolognese sauce.

Except I can’t find the onion.

I know I was tired last night, but this is ridiculous. It’s not even a big fridge. I go through the fridge. I go through the freezer. I even check the cupboards, in case I was so tired I put it there instead. There is no onion.

It has disappeared into some dimensional hole. I’m sure that one day that same vortex will spit it back out again and it’ll be right there in front of me, where it has been all along. I just can’t see it right now.

p.s. Bolognaise or bolognese? I’m one of those who use ‘ai’, and I thought most Australians did, but I notice there’s a trend back to bolognese (which is more technically correct), so I’ve made an effort to use that here. Spell check doesn’t like it either way.

Here Melbourne winter is coming into spring.  It’s warming up, or it should be, and in general the weather is getting better, but I have to say it’s been so cold lately that instead of sitting at my desk to write I’ve taken the little Go (Microsoft Surface) into the kitchen and sat at the table.  There’s a heater vent just underneath.  Only problem is, the heater thinks it’s coming into spring, too, and turns itself off after a while.

My fingers are frozen as I type this.

We’re getting some exercises ready for a full-day course on writing that we’re running in November at the Victorian Writer’s Centre (VWC), here in Melbourne.  (If you live in Melbourne, and want to fine-tune a manuscript, check it out on the VWC website. It’s on the 9^th November, and it’s called First Draft: It’s all in the Details.)  This is editing beyond the major structural edits down into line edits.  Really trying to tidy up your story.

One topic we plan to talk about is whether you can tell your characters apart.  We’re not perfect, we know, but like most writers, we try.

So, as exercise, if you’ve read our books, can you tell whose point-of-view we’re in for the following paragraphs.

Character one

Santos Greene wore a company of starched green, with shiny lapels that had been fashionable two years ago. His skin was an even olive that blended with the cloth, like an Antares chameleon, and blended in turn with the grey-green wall behind him.  Even his eyes were green, although a deeper shade, and one eye was slightly darker than the other.  A neat mod, except for the mismatched eyes.

Character two

“Even his cartel master wanted to get rid of him, so he sold the contract to Lady Lyan, and now she can’t get rid of him either.  She’s tried.  Grand Master Rickenback came out to see him and try to get him back into the cartels, but Cartel Master Rigel wouldn’t take him.”

They’re a tad clumsy, sorry, but hopefully you’ll recognise them.

Last week I spent two days at UX Australia, a conference that talks about user experience. (I work in UX.) This year there was lots of fodder for science fiction ideas as well, along with some old terms that seem to be making a comeback.

People grokked things. So much so that I felt like I was at a science fiction convention sometimes. Especially when another term that cropped up a lot was the singularity.

If you’re unfamiliar with either of these terms, both were coined by science fiction writers.

Grok comes from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and is a term that means to understand intuitively.

The singularity comes from an essay by Vernor Vinge called Technological Singularity (1993).  It’s a term that describes exponential technological change.  At UX Australia the term was used more broadly, I felt.  Mostly tech, but you could also say we’re reaching a singularity in climate change as well.

The conference is, and has been ever since I have been attending, heavy on ethics, which I like. It’s scary, because working in IT you can see how easily people’s rights are being, or can be, eroded. It’s good to go to big conferences and have people talk about the consequences.

Other big topics this year included designing for disability, and how far artificial intelligence has come without us even realizing it.  We keep waiting for AI to arrive, but it’s already here, every time you talk to Siri, or Google Home, or turn on your keyless car.

Deep fakes.  Oh, my goodness.  They’re amazing.  And they’re computer generated.  You can create a person out of stored images. You can change them to have whatever attributes you like. Scary, though, if you’re looking at videos as a source of truth.