No time for a big post, it’s late and I am tired.
But I have no completed 38,000 words on Cawdor and I hope to bring it in around 90,000. This book is just flying along.
At times I look at it and I just love it and think it my best work, but then I look at it and I still love it but I feel that no one is going to like it.
le sigh
So Monday night I went in for my sleep study. It was not the most pleasant of experiences nor was it the hell that I know some have endured.
First there was the rush to get the hospital with the sleep lab. I got off work at five and I need to eat and get to the hospital by six-thirty. They were clear that I needed to eat first and get there by six-thirty. That meant I wolfed down a burger and nothing more for my dinner.
My sweetie-wife dropped me off at just after six and I checked in. Then I waited. Finally the tech showed up and I was taken up to the sleep lab. Since I was first — I could have had a much more relaxed meal — I got my pick of rooms and beds. There was a short dvd video explaining the process and then I was left to my own devices until it was time to get wired.
Sadly while I had brought my laptop I had not brought my powercord. I got some writing done but not as much as I had hoped. I spent most of my evening watching the History Channel and it had a sad lack of history to it. (Mostly it was the show American Pickers.)
Near ten the tech came in and wired me up. Electrodes everywhere until I looked like a hi-fi nut’s nightmare. Unlike other sleep studies I have been told about, I was allowed to sleep anyway I wanted. I sleep on my stomach and I thrash, it’s what I do.
It was rough falling asleep with the wires on my face but I did and slept in my regular fashion. (Lots of periods whereI wake up.)
The worst part was the next morning when I showered and there was no shampoo. The electrodes in my hair had used goop and that goop remained in my hair most of the day. (At lunch I went for a haircut and shampoo and that fixed that.)
Now it’s just waiting for my doctor to call and set up the follow-up appointment.
Tonight I have my sleep study. I will take my laptop in with me and so I may post but if there is no wi-fi I will not.
So this weekend had its ups and its downs. There was fun had at board and card gaming on Friday night. My friend Ray ran his D&D game on Saturday and though we had one player die it was a really fun game and a very exciting combat.
On the down side I have had a headache for more than 24 hours. That has made life less than fun.
Later in the week I will review Clash Of The Titan which I saw today.
So if you follow political columnist at all then you should already be familiar with Michelle Malkin. Ms. Malkin  is a very conservative opinion writer. She’s known for fiery opinions defended aggressively with a penchant for name-calling.  Ms. Malkin’s frequent posting are aggressive, and in-your-face which has earned her plenty of die-hard supporters and an equal number of die hard critics.
I am in neither camp. I do not care for name calling and I feel whenever you you do so in an argument you do nothing but weaken your case. I find her blog to be depressing. There is very little joy in her posts and nearly every post is about something that has offended, enraged, or irritated her. That’s fine if that is what she wants. It’s her blog and she can put up anything she likes, but it make for a repetitive and angry tone. I seriously can not think of a post that was truly just happy or joyous.
I frequent her site because it is a very good reflection of where conservative thought and feelings are for a number of subjects.
For a woman who like to call people to the left or her Socialists and Communists I have been surprised lately with her love affair for Communism. Thought I am sure it is one born out of ignorance.
Recently she’s been posting that Conservatives need to have an “I am Spartacus” moment of resistance to the health care reform, base on the stunning scene from the movie “Spartacus“.
Here’s the scene:
Spartacus is one of my favorite films and I will be so happy in a few months when I have it on DVD, but the film is a communist allegory.
The film was based on the novel Spartacus written by Howard Fast, who was a communist. I don’t mean that in the current Republican way of anyone left of me is a communist, Mr. Fast was a member of the American Communist Party. He was so hot politically no publisher would touch the novel Spartacus and he was forced to self-publish it. On the audio commentary to the Laserdisc of Spartacus Mr. Fast made it clear that the story was a communist allegory about the rich and the workers.
The film screenplay was adapted by Dalton Trumbo, another Communist. Â Trumbo spent 11 years in prison for contempt of congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Â Spartacus was the first film he was credited with writing after the blacklist. (Thoigh he had written many just denied credit.) He was proud of having killed films in Hollywood that were deemed anti-communist.
I have no doubt that if either man was still alive today they would happy tell Ms. Malkin that in their view she and her fellow conservatives are more aligned with Marcus Licinius Crassus than with the workers uprising symbolized by the slave revolt in Spartacus. (To be clear I am not a communists and I ignore the communist allegory of Spartacus, but then I am not trying to lift the film for my own political ends either.)
I am deeply amused by the irony that a communist hater is aligning herself with communist writers and with what they saw as communist characters.
So if I continue at my present pace I will reach the halfway point in the rough draft of Cawdor about April 15.. That’s tax day or the anniversary of the Titanic’s disaster depending on where your head is at I suppose.
I am really quite happy with the rate of progress and the ease by which the plot and the characters are unfolding. the six months of prep work has really paid off for this novel. I’m also finding more and more idea floating around in the background for the books that follow this one. Yeah, it looks like Cawdor will be followed by Exodus From Cawdor and Return To Cawdor.
Tomorrow I will post and explain how conservative sweetheart Michelle Malkin luvs Commies.
I’m having a really bad arthritis knees day so I will leave you with this one thought.
How Many people live on Coruscant? Wikipedia lists the fiction planet as having a population of 1 trillion.
From the films we can see it is a densely populated world and we are told that the entire planet is one big city. (In George Lucas’ mind all planets have one dominate feature, Desert, Ice, Forrest or City.)
So let’s assume a population density matching that of Manhattan. (That’s a low ball figure considering the height of the buildings but it gives us something to work with.)
And a surface land-area equal to the earth’s.
Manhattan Density : 27,485 per km square.
Earth Land Surface area: 148,940,ooo km square.
27,485 X 148,940,000 =4.0936159^12 people. or 40,936,159,00,000 almost 41 trillion people.
Seems to me the wikipedia entry is a bit of a low ball figure based on the fantastic nature of the planet,
Here’s an interesting thing to run, given that population density how big of an area would the Earth’s current population take up?
Current population: 6,812,000,000 / 27,485 = 247, 844 square kilometers.
That’s smaller than the state of Nevada at 286,367 square kilometers. Every man woman and child on planet earth fits into Nevada if we all live like New Yorkers. That really gives SF colony designers something to think about.
Today i experienced one of the joys of writing and that is the moment of epiphany.
Writing can be like laboring across an unknown landscape, trying to find shelter during a storm with only the vaguest ideas of where the inn is actually located.
If you are an organic writer you set out looking for the inn without even a map or any idea which direction is lays. I am an organized writer, i.e. one who writes from an outline. This helps, it’s like having a crude hand-drawn map and a compass to held you, but it is still dark and rainy.
A moment of epiphany is like a sudden lightning strike that illuminates the countryside, revealing the road to the inn. It’s that moment when not only does the solution come to you for a problem, sometimes a problem you didn’t even know was there, but the greater shape of the story is enriched by the answer.
I had such a moment today riding the bus and it required such a small change it hardly amounted to a paragraph, but the tone improved so much I was awestruck by it.
truly one of the joys of writing.
Last night I was in the mood for something darker and yet fantastic, so I settled on the original film, The Wicker Man, made in 1973. (Let’s make this clear NOT the remake staring Nicholas Cage.)
This is a film I first heard about when I watched the Academy of Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror’s televised award broadcast in 1979. To give you an idea of their commitment to horror they are the ones who unleashed William Shatner’s — interpretation — of Rocket Man upon this world. Â Anywho, that year they award the Best Horror film award for 1978 to The Wicker Man. (I guess horror is such a thin field you gotta let a film five years old compete.) So a few months later I got a chance to see this movie in HBO and it blew my little mind. Continue reading
So in the first section of this rambling set of thoughts, I covered how some people feel that rights begin at conception, and that these people in general will draw a distinction between a fertilized egg and an induced pluripotent cell in terms of what is a person. (The fertilized egg being considered as person with the protections that implies. While the Induced Pluripotent Cell does not.) It seems that being a person in potential is the key factor.
In the second section of the missive I discussed the new field in biology, epigenetics which deals with the factors that govern when and how genes function and that these factor can be influenced by environment and these environmental influences have surprisingly been show to be inheritable.
Now it’s time to combine these two idea and see where they lead us.
With epigenetics we can now see that action we take today can have an adverse effect on generations down time from us. This is not a generalized or metaphorical statement, but a direct corollary of cause and effect. For example let’s hypothesize that smoking can have an inheritable epigenetic effect that makes your grand children much more susceptible to autism. This is pure speculation at this point but not an unreasonable one. So what rights of the unborn and unconceived grandchildren have? Does my choosing to smoke violate their rights? IF I know that my smoking can cause autism two generations downstream, should I be held criminally liable for smoking and the damages it creates?
Of course I could never have children, but this is an exception to human  behavior not the rule. Most people want to have children and want families. So do those future generation have rights?
I am not answering that question. My intention was merely to pose it. Everyone has to find their own answers, but what we do know that is life, biology, and the realities of inheritance are far more complex than we generally give them credit for.