Monthly Archives: April 2013

Music, part three

music

Another Friday, and time for some random music recommendations from me!

This is a nice song that sounds like one should be listening to it at the end of a sunny day while sipping at a cocktail. Or dancing between cocktails:
.

.
This one would fit in the same dance set, I think:
.

.
I’ve been listening to this song on my iPhone for months, and loved it. I hadn’t seen the video until I wanted to share it here, and the video makes me love the song in a completely new way:
.


.
Hot Chelle Rae is a bouncy, lightweight band whose music always makes me smile:
.

.
And this is just beautiful. You don’t have to understand the lyrics. Just watch:

My afternoon cuppa

life,

At work I drink the coffee provided in the kitchen in the mornings. They have a big grinder that is set to deliver a measured amount of grounds, and the coffee selected isn’t bad. There are enough of us drinking coffee that the pots usually contain reasonably fresh coffee throughout the morning.

I switch to tea in the afternoon. I don’t really remember when or why I started doing it. It was before I came to work at this place. And usually I make the tea using stuff from my private stash, rather than the variety of teabags provided in the kitchen.

One of my co-workers, who grew up in China, seriously dislikes the very notion of tea bags. Sometimes you can even get her to explain why loose leaves are better (you can actually see and smell the quality, for one). That’s not why I keep my own stash. Mine are bags, after all. Yes, some of the teas I bring in at least look more like a pinch of loose leaves inside a little cloth baggie, rather than unidentifiable clippings inside paper, but it’s still teabags.

I just have certain teas that I like, and they aren’t the kind that get stocked in an office kitchen. My very favorite is a lavender-earl grey. Alas, it hasn’t been in stock for months at the store where I used to get it. Which means I’ve been drinking a lot of my second fave: jasmine blossom green tea. Or aged earl grey. Or sweet ginger black.

I try to keep two or three varieties in stock in my desk, so that I always have a choice. But I’ve lately been having trouble finding good versions of my alternates. I probably just need to shop further afield. At least I hope that’s all it is. I hope there hasn’t been some sort of global lavender or bergamot shortage. More my luck that not enough other people like it to justify shipping the product.

That happens with a lot of things I like. When I find something I like, I want to keep enjoying it. Yet what makes products fly off the shelf (or at least one of the things that makes this happen) is being new and different. In order to make room for new and different, something has to go, at least temporarily. Of course, I’m as much a part of that problem as anyone. Before I discovered the lavender earl grey tea, one of my faves was this rspberry black tea—the bags had little dried raspberries mixed with the tea leaves, and the taste was incredible. I stopped buying it when I started drinking the lavender, and I didn’t even notice that the raspberry wasn’t on the shelf any more.

It doesn’t just happen with teas, of course. I am a sucker for the serial story. Whether it be a good television series or series of novels. I love coming back to find out what happens next to characters I have come to love (or love to hate in the case of a well-done villain). It’s probably why when I’m working on a novel, I’m also thinking about the sequel. I just can’t help it.

Though lately I think it’s gotten me into a bit of a jam. I keep having scenes that have nothing to do with the current plot—scenes that can’t happen until after the end of this novel—popping into my head when I’m trying to work on this one. I gotta figure out how to get them out of the way so I can finish the story at hand.

I’ll let you know if I find a magic solution…

Green(ish) thumb

nature, ,

When Ray and I first started dating he had a small collection of houseplants, each with a story. Ray had been working in the home health care industry for several years at that point, and a lot of his work had been taking care of people who were dying. The families of several of his patients had sometimes asked him to take a plant that the patient had been tending. Ray said that often friends of people who were that severely sick would bring in plants to give the person a bit of the outdoors, or something. So after the patient died there might be a dozen plants in the person’s room

I had once or twice previously tried to keep a houseplant or two, but they never lasted long. When Ray and I first moved in together, taking care of the plants was his chore.

We acquired a few more. I wound up with some office plants from him (it had to do with my employer moving to a new building and several of us experiencing weird hay fever type symptoms in our offices; once I had a couple of big plants, mine went away). I had to learn to keep the plants alive. So I bought a couple of books. Soon, I was keeping multiple kinds of plant food around, managing the rotation of which nutrients and how concentrated based on the time of year.

When Ray got sick, I went from merely helping him with the home plants (while being fully responsible for my office plants) to being in charge of all of them. By the time he died, when a bunch of people sent flowers and sometimes plants, I was no longer convinced that any houseplant I was taking care of was doomed.

So it was a bit of trauma for me when one of the plants I had inherited from Ray—one of the plants he’d already owned when we met—began dying. At first I told myself that maybe it was just naturally dying of old age. But then I learned that Christmas Cactuses have lived for 70 years or more in greenhouses, getting to be the size of small trees. So, I learned more about them. I re-potted it, I checked the moisture level and pH of its soil every couple of days, and basically obsessed over it for weeks.

It still died.

This weekend I finally admitted that four of the houseplants that have been dying for months are unsalvagable and replaced them. Some of my friends think I should have given up on a couple of them a while back. I frequently adhere to the rule best articulated by the character of Keith the AIDS patient in the movie Latter Days: “We never throw anything out that isn’t completely dead. Right?”

Told in flashback

writing, ,

One of my pet peeves as a reader is the story told in flashback. Admittedly, one of the reasons I dislike it is because, having been involved with several small press and fannish projects over the years, I’ve read, in an editorial capacity, a huge number of stories written by aspiring/beginning writers. And a beginner usually doesn’t understand how to use a flashback.

The most common problem with the told-in-flashback story is simply that there is no dramatic tension. In the opening scene we meet a character interacting with some other people. The dialogue is often a bit of clever banter. Something happens in the scene which causes the main character to mention something that happened to him a long time ago… and in the next scene we are in that long ago time, and we watch the stuff happen.

The reason there is no dramatic tension is because usually the plot of the flashback portion of the story seems to place the main character’s life in jeopardy—except the reader knows that the character isn’t in real danger because in the opening scene set far in the future the character is alive. These amateur told-in-flashback stories suffer from an additional problem. Most of them all fall into the same outline:

  • Opening scene in which protagonist gives the story’s ending away by saying something like, “This reminds me of the time I almost died because of an engineering mistake…”
  • Several scenes of story in which the character gets into trouble because of said mistake, nearly dies, then survives somehow.
  • Closing scene in which we return to the opening and the other characters say something along the lines of, “Wow! That’s some story. You almost died because of an engineering mistake.”

It took me years of reading those stories or complaining about those stories before I finally realized what was going on. What is the most common way people are taught to write either informative essays in school, or to make presentations in either school or business: 1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, 2. Explain it in detail, 3. Reinforce their memory by summarizing what you just told them.

When I reviewed such stories in an editorial process, I always advised the same thing: drop the opening scene! It’s unnecessary and gives away the ending. Start when the character actually gets into trouble and tell how he gets out of it. If you want to then flash forward to a a point long afterward to make an additional plot or character development point at the end, that’s fine, but don’t just rehash what the reader has just seen.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some value to be had in the story told in flashback. Particularly if you have a story in which it takes a while for the plot to develop (and that while is necessary, not simply a matter of the author rambling), a scene that grabs the reader’s attention, making them strongly want to know how the character(s) got in that situation, without giving anything away, can be a good opening. There are a couple of things you have to keep in mind even thing: the opening has to be quick—don’t spend a lot of time getting the reader involved in the framing sequence before you flashback, don’t give away anything.

I know I repeated the “don’t give away anything” part, but it is so important.

I’m watching a new TV show right now, mostly a typical modern police procedural with the soap opera-ish ongoing character plots. My main reason for watching it is because one character in the show is played by an actor I like a great deal. Only four or five episodes in, I’m already at the point where I’m putting up with the rest of the show just to see the actor I like doing his usual excellent job.

One of the things I’m putting up with is that not only is the entire series told in flashback, but each individual episode is also told in flashback. Each episode begins with another scene from the future period of the original flashback that introduces the incident about to be shown. Then each episode closes with another flashforward that ends with some sort of “shocking” revelation about the future of one of the other characters featured prominently in the episode.

So far, the individual opening scenes have always managed to either a) give away a plot point of the enclosed story of police solving a case, b) telegraphed in often laughably obvious ways the shocker we’re going to get in the closing scene, or c) both!

One reason they keep doing this is because the opening scene is always too long. Worse than that, they aren’t really all that interesting. The protagonist talks to someone while they walk from one place to another, generally.

If you think you need to tell a story in flashback, keep the future scene as short as you can. Make it intriguing, but don’t fall into the trap of trying to cleverly drop hints about what’s going to happen. For a story in flashback to work, the only thing that needs to be in the reader’s mind is a single variant on this question: how did this come to be?

Anything else gives things away, which makes the entire story a waste of the reader’s time.

It is a sin to waste the reader’s time.

It is April, and sometimes I am a fool…

life, , ,

…but I am not posting an April Fools’ Day joke.

I have done a few. In college as member of the editorial board of two different campus papers, I helped produce a few April Fool’s Day editions. On my old LiveJournal I am still rather proud of the post I wrote explaining why I had decided to become a Gay Republican and start actively working to oppress myself.

If I were to do an April Fool’s Day post, I would adhere to the following rules:

  • I plan it out in advance, giving myself time to edit it a time or two before it is posted.
  • The topic is not something that will make people worry (nothing about fake injuries or illness, not pretending to be angry at my friends, anything like that)
  • The butt of the joke needs to be me

I have, over the years since I started blogging, only come up with a few that met those conditions. Even though I tried to pick things that I didn’t think would upset someone, I managed to do so two of those times—the opening sentence of the Gay Republican joke made one friend think that Michael and I were breaking up, and one of my fellow bibliophile friends fell for the one where I Michael and I decided to throw away all 6000+ books in our house.

The point of a joke is to make people laugh. If they aren’t laughing, it isn’t funny.

I am fond of a good news April Fool’s Pranks. Among my favorites:

NPR: Portable Zip Codes

NPR: Exploding maple trees

Garden News: Dinosaur vine

And I can’t find a link to this one: one of the local radio stations did a story claiming one of the island out in Puget Sound had come loose from its moorings and was floating wildly around the Sound. They kept giving updates throughout the afternoon as the island was sighted in different places, along with attempts to try to capture it and tow it back.