The main thrust of the argument seems to be this:

Certain jobs get lots of foreign-born workers while others get almost exclusively US workers (tailors 54% foreign-born, crane operators 1% foreign-born). Because of this, more foreign workers won’t increase unemployment, because the foreigners would just be competing with other foreigners for those jobs. Further, more foreign workers won’t even decrease US wages, because even another thousand tailors won’t put any pressure on wages for crane operators.

No doubt my own experience as a software engineer colors my perceptions (computer engineers are 33% foreign-born), but I’m unconvinced.

For one thing, these sorts of pressures occur at the margin. Even a modest number of workers (of any nationality) willing to work for less, will have the effect of holding down wages for everyone else.

For another, there is indirect pressure. Even if a Chinese cook doesn’t compete with a US cook for a job at a diner, another thousand of them will hold down wages for Chinese cooks. That will result in lower costs for Chinese restaurants, which do compete with diners. That puts pressure on diners to hold down their costs—including wages for cooks.

Finally, people’s job and career decisions aren’t static in the face of these pressures. Perhaps few software engineers decided to become lawyers (only 4% foreign-born), but a great number of software engineers have moved on to doing something different. Each one who does so is now competing in that new field, potentially holding down wages over there.

Of course, outsourcing production overseas has had at least as strong an impact on employment and salary levels as immigration has. I’m just glad that I figured out early that I would shortly be competing with someone who could live a middle-class lifestyle on $6000 a year. That gave me a few years to take the necessary steps to arrange my life otherwise.

It’ll take place at 5:30 PM this evening (Thursday, August 26) in the Foreign Language Building on the University of Illinois campus. We’ll gather in the atrium, then move to some free room. (Campus organizations can’t reserve rooms until they get re-certified, which apparently you can’t do in advance.)

If you can’t make this meeting, we’ll be  doing a repeat Wednesday evening next week (September 1st).

And, in any case, if you want to learn Esperanto, join us Thursday evenings all semester for a free beginners class!

I am in very good company—a veritable who’s who of current Esperanto literature.

“Tiu,” Emma diris

Otto rigardis kien ŝi kapmontris. “Tiu alta viro en la drelika jako?” Li pripensis. “Filo de riĉaj gepatroj. Eksigita el pli ol unu universitato pro tro da petoloj kaj maltro da studoj. Ricevas iom da mono de la patrino, sed ne sufiĉe por vivteni sin.”

You can get it from Amazon: Beletra Almanako 8 (BA8 – Literaturo en Esperanto) (Esperanto Edition)

Or directly from the publisher.

If you can read Esperanto, pick up a copy today!

Scott’s example involved marking the note cards to indicate what sort of tension was driving each scene. With that information he could see if there were long stretches without an action scene (or if his action scenes started falling too much into a simple rhythm). That gave him useful information for adjusting the pacing—keeping things moving, mixing things up, etc.

I’m going to be using this all the time now. For example, the story I workshopped last month is both a heist story and a love story. This feature gives me a way to mark the scenes so that I can see which aspect of the story is being advanced and then view that aspect of all the scenes:

Scrivener corkboard

I was completely unaware of this feature, even though I use Scrivener all the time, so I thought I’d spell out how to do it.

1. Make sure that the “Inspector” is being displayed.
2. In the Inspector under “General” find the “Status” pop-up menu and select “Edit.”
3. Add whatever status items you’ll need.
4. Go through your scenes, setting each Status as appropriate.
5. In the Menu select “View->Index Cards->Show Stamps.”

It was step 5 that I was completely unaware of. That’s what causes the diagonal overprinting of the status to be shown across the cards.

I can see using this a dozen different ways to illuminate the story structure.

I’d take a 30% hike for energy independence and no money being sent to terrorists in a fucking heart beat.

Frankly, I would too. In fact, I’d be willing to pay a lot more than that. Unfortunately, I’m afraid it would cost a lot more than that—more than most people would pay.

First of all, Portugal was already paying about twice what we pay in the US for electricity. The 15% bump was on top of that. Second, Portugal had substantial untapped sources of hydro power. The US doesn’t.

Either of those, I expect, would doom the project. The first makes it unaffordable—I’d be willing to pay 30% over double what I’m paying now for electricity, but I doubt if very many other people would. The second makes it impossible—we have a lot of untapped wind power, but that comes and goes. Use of wind power will grow, but even with a much better grid (to distribute power from where the wind is blowing to where people are using it), you need something more reliable for baseline power.

But neither of those is the real problem, which is that the US uses three times as much electricity per person than Portugal does. (13646 kWH  versus 4663 kWH per capita in 2005, data from the World Bank.) If you look at the historical per capita energy use in each country, you can see that both countries have shown steady growth—but Portugal is only up to about where the US was in the early 1960s. (And, sadly, following right in our footsteps.)

So, to shoot for the Portugal model we’d have to:

1. Cut our energy use by two-thirds,
2. Double the price (plus 30%), and
3. Either invest vast additional sums in the grid (perhaps $100 billion) or accept brownouts when the wind wasn’t blowing.

Again, I’m totally up for that. My electricity consumption is probably already two-thirds below the US average. My typical electric bill runs just about $30; I’m sure I could stretch my budget to cover $70 if the payoff was no more carbon in the air and no more sending buckets of cash to people who hate us.

But based on the way people actually behave, I’m forced to assume that most people would rather burn the planet and fund terrorists than turn off the AC, downsize the car, and pay up for organic, locally grown food.

We’d long done two versions of that exercise, one where we just shift some of our weight to that foot, and another where we stand on that foot (lifting the other and moving it close to the foot we’re standing on). We usually start with the former and then go on to the latter after a few repetitions.

In a class last week, though, one of the instructors called out the switch differently, prompting an interesting insight into weight shifting.

The instructor just said something like, “Now shift all your weight to that foot.”

I initially thought that this was some new, intermediate version of the exercise, so I was shifting all my weight, but without actually lifting the other foot.

Right away, I noticed that the instructors weren’t doing some new version, they had just described it differently, so I went ahead and lifted my foot—but only after having shifted all my weight to the foot I was going to be standing on. What a difference! This was obviously what I should have been doing all along.

Comparing the experiences, it was clear that I hadn’t been getting the weight shift properly established before trying to lift the other foot. Of course, once you pick up one foot all your weight is on the other foot, so the result (assuming you don’t fall down) ends up being the same. But the process is much easier and more comfortable if I make a point of getting the weight shifting completed and then raising the foot only after it is no longer supporting any weight.

It’s giving me some interesting insights into intention. I’m comparing the weight shifts I do in other activities, such as walking and climbing stairs. I’m sure there’s more to learn here.

I had suggested that we might want to talk about a name for the group, simply because I knew I would want to post about it and thought it would be handy to be able to call it something, but everybody else seemed to want to go straight to the critiquing. Kelly suggested that the group could remain incognito for the time being. That was good enough for me—I’ll just call it the incognito writers group until we decide we need a better name.

It’s really nice to have a local writers group again. The actual writing part of being a writer is such a solitary activity, it’s worth making the effort to generate some amount of actual interpersonal contact. And we’ve got an excellent selection of writers: three Clarion grads and an intellectual property lawyer. (I’ll resist making a James Watt joke.)

It’s a real boost to be around people who understand what it’s like to write fiction—people who understand the rush that comes from getting a bit of dialog just right (and the anguish from trying and failing), the absorbing intensity of world-building, the stoicism needed to keep persisting in the face of rejection. When those people also understand crafting a good story, writing vivid prose, and developing compelling characters, so much the better.

One other thing we didn’t talk about was opening the membership up to other people, but I suspect the group would be even better with a couple more people. If you live in Champaign-Urbana (or close enough to attend monthly meetings), write some variety of speculative fiction,  can demonstrate a seriousness of purpose (regularly submitting stories to markets, attending well-regarded workshops, etc.), and you’d be interested in joining, get in touch.

Dora is a perfect choice—a great writer with a distinctive voice and comprehensive knowledge of literature.

To begin with, fiction was always “open source” in the sense that you can’t keep the text secret from the reader. In this way it is unlike software (where you can keep the source code secret from the people running the program). Because of this, in software “open source” was an important (and somewhat transgressive) notion. In fiction, though, it’s just the way things have always been.

Since fiction has always been open source, stories have always been pieces of a greater conversation. Some explicitly respond to other stories, but even the ones that don’t are informed by what the author has read. At least as important, the readers’ reactions are informed by what they’ve read, whether or not the writer has read the same things.

It’s rare in fiction for writers to do what’s common in open source software—use their access to the source to improve it (fix bugs, add functionality, improve standards compliance, and so on). But the reason has nothing to do with a lack of access to the text.

Putting that issue aside, the remaining issues seem to be money (how does the writer get paid) and access (how does the reader find the work).

Money

In software, the open source model offers a revenue stream for providing support. Is there an equivalent for open source fiction? Perhaps one could say that some professors of English and literature do, in a sense, get paid to support the readers of open-source literature. But I don’t see a business model forming around the idea that a writer would publish his stories free on the web and then charge a fee to explain them.

Why do people ever pay for fiction? They pay to be entertained, to be edified, to be amused, and so on, but I think the root value that they’re paying for is novelty. People will pay for access to new fiction (that they’re confident that they’ll enjoy) and there are revenue streams built around the fact that people will perceive access to new fiction (that they expect to enjoy) as being of value. (Advertising being the most obvious.)

Putting a story up on the web can only hurt its novelty value. It may be worth doing for other reasons (in particular, if you’re getting paid for it), but a piece of fiction is only new to a reader once.

Writers are as happy as anyone else to get paid, but they’re also motivated by other things. In particular, they want their work to be read: They want to be part of the great conversation that is literature—or at least part of some tiny piece of that conversation. This, I think, is the reason that so many writers are tempted to post their fiction: it means that the whole world has access.

Access

It might seem like putting your fiction up on the web would maximum the chance that it would be read, but that’s very much not true.

Fiction is different from nonfiction, where a brief glance can give the reader an pretty good sense as to whether or not a piece is worth reading. Fiction needs to be read from the beginning. Good fiction often produces temporary feelings of frustration or confusion and then resolves those feelings in a satisfying way. But there’s plenty of bad fiction that produces frustration or confusion and then fails utterly to produce a satisfying resolution.

Every reader has been repeatedly unsatisfied by bad fiction. Most of them have responded by choosing not to read random pieces of fiction. Instead, they only read fiction by writers that they trust to make it worth their while, or after someone they trust vouches for it as being worth the effort.

These pieces—fiction by writers they trust, or selected by editors they trust—they’re willing to pay money for. But fiction that lacks such credentials is not only not worth money, it generally doesn’t even get read. Just offering it for free does not make it worth investing the time to read it—in fact, just the opposite. Being available on the web for free doesn’t prove that it’s not worth reading, but in the absence of a recognized by-line or an endorsement by an editor, being offered for free is a negative.

Because of that, posting a story on the internet usually means that almost no one will read it except the writer’s friends and relations. In this way it’s very different from software, and from other things that have flourished on the internet, such as music.

[In the interest of full disclosure, let me mention that my story "An Education of Scars" is currently available to read for free on the internet at Futurismic, which paid me for the right to offer it.]

My Workspace, originally uploaded by bradipo.

I haven’t actually been writing at my desktop for the past couple of weeks. While Steve and Daniel were visiting, we were taking our laptops to the library and using one of their “study rooms” as an office.

I’m fixin’ to get back to working here, though.

What’s here:

• HP laser printer
• Yamaha speakers
• Dancing Ganesh
• iMac
• Iomega 1T backup drive
• My and Jackie’s iPods
• Picture of Jackie taken in India
• My Clarion mug

My Workspace by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Clifty Creek, originally uploaded by bradipo.

According to some plaque I saw in Shades State Park a while back, the trees in the area that turned into the park cast such deep shade it was called “Shades of Death.” I thought this shot, taken in Pine Hills Nature Preserve, right next to Shade, captured a little something of just how dark the canopy makes the shaded areas, and how abrupt the transition is between light and dark.

It was tough to see Steve, Daniel, and Lucy off yesterday, after two weeks spent visiting, but it was nice to spend a couple hours hiking together at Pine Hills.

Clifty Creek by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

I’ve signed the contract and mailed that in already. I still need to write a bio to send along with a headshot. Until I start selling more frequently, I have the luxury of writing a new bio for each sale. (I know some writers find the bio-writing step to be daunting, but I kind of enjoy it.)

Getting out of the water was hard. After four or five trips around the lazy river, I’d gotten very used to floating. Putting my feet down and standing up in three-foot water was okay, but each step up the long ramp out of the water meant a little more of my weight that I had to support myself.

Jackie and I usually float together around the lazy river, and we did that this time for a couple of laps in the middle, but Jackie had sprinted off ahead for the first lap, in a hurry to float under the fountains that sprayed over the stretch just before the ramp where we’d entered. She waited there, and once I arrived we floated a couple times around together.

Maybe it’s the nature of lazy rivers; more likely it’s the nature of my family, but it seemed perfectly ordinary that we all ended up at the lazy river: Daniel having been floating in a different part of the river, but turning up near the entrance at the same time Jackie and I floated past and noticed Steve standing near the entrance.

I pointed Steve toward the corral with the tubes. Once he put his hands on one, we headed down the lazy river as a group, in direct contravention of some rule against ganging up more than two of the tubes. It was too much trouble to keep hanging onto one another, so pretty soon we were rule-abiding again.

It was the sun that got me out. Even slathered up with sunblock, an hour of floating is about all the sun I can take.

Except for the transition of the hard trudge up out of the water, the rest of the afternoon was very pleasant, even for someone who’d gotten used to floating: A place to sit in the shade, a large soda from the concession stand, and conversation with Steve and Lucy.

George is a great jazz guitarist. He’s been a local performer since coming to town to work on a Masters and now a PhD at the university. We first encountered him playing with his trio at the Iron Post a few years ago, and have made a point of going to hear him whenever we get a chance.

He played mostly jazz standards.  I’d heard most of them many times, but the only ones I recognized were “My Funny Valentine,” “Girl from Ipanima,” and “Moon River.” (I have an odd relationship with jazz standards. I’ve heard all of them, because my dad played them when I was a kid, but a lot of what my dad played were instrumentals, so I often don’t know the names of the songs.)

It was a good show, and good food. A pretty small crowd. He’s playing a couple more times this week and next, so if you like great jazz guitar in an intimate setting, check it out.

The Sinister Leprachaun, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Jackie and I attended the Haiku Earring Party at WisCon this evening.

In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s how it works: Elisem creates pairs of earrings. You pick out a pair you like and bring it to her. She gives the pair a title. You then write a haiku or senryu inspired by the title and the earrings, which you trade for the earrings.

At least, I tended to think of it as a swap—haiku for earrings. Jackie, it turns out, had a slightly different take on it. In her mind I was winning the earrings for her via a display of skill, like winning a stuffed animal by tossing rings at the county fair.

“The Sinister Leprachaun”

Find at rainbow’s end
Not expected pot of gold.
Green stones turning black.

Or, in Esperanto:

“La Minaca Irlanda Koboldo”

Ĉielarka fin’
Ne atendita oruj’
Verdŝton’ negirĝas

WisCon, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Arrived in Madison to attend WisCon.

Ran into Dora, but failed to get a picture.

Went to The Gathering and got a fake tattoo.

Went to the dealer’s room, saw Nnedi’s new book at DreamHaven and snapped up a copy.

Had dinner at the Afghani restaurant Kabul.

Now reviewing the program book and plotting strategy for seeing Dora’s and Nnedi’s panels and readings, and as many other interesting readings as we can fit in.

Sorry there aren’t more of us from the 2001 Clarion.

WisCon by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The fact is, spills like this are an entirely predictable result of consuming 85 million barrels of oil per day. If you consume that much, you have to produce that much. And if you produce that much, you will have accidents. Some of the accidents will kill people. Some will contaminate huge swaths of the ocean.

Sure, BP et al deserve much of the blame. But there’s plenty of blame to go around. A good share of it belongs to every one of us who drives a car, heats their home, or buys anything made out of plastic.

What did you think was going to happen?

Thinking about Clarion reminds me how I’d been wrong about which activities would teach me the most. I’d imagined that the benefits would flow from writing a lot and getting critques on my stories. Those activities were beneficial, but what taught me the most was doing a critique of a classmate’s story and then hearing another 20 critiques on the same story. Especially when one of my fellows had a different take on the story from my own, I learned something. Some of those insights were pearls of great value that I secreted away and have used many, many times since then. Even when I disagreed, just the notion that the story could be viewed that way changed the way I thought about stories.

Sadly, I don’t have an active local critique group, so I’m not in a position to recreate that aspect—the most valuable aspect—of the Clarion experience this summer. But that’s okay. I can still write a lot. I can still read a lot. I can still think critically about the stories I read. And on hot days like today it will almost feel like I’m back there again.

Chickens at Creque Dam Farm in St. Croix

When I was looking for a house a few years ago, I only looked in Urbana. The main reason was that Champaign prohibits residents from keeping chickens, while Urbana allows it. As you can imagine, I was delighted to learn that the topic of legalizing chickens has come before the Champaign City Council.

I know a little about what it’s like to have chickens in the yard, from one summer when my parents got a flock of chicks and raised them up to fryer size. We didn’t keep them for eggs, but they were around for several months, and I was never bothered by noise, smell, or any of the other problems that backyard chickens are supposed to bring.

I’ve had eggs from free-range chickens—real free-range chickens, not the mockery of free-range allowed under USDA regulations. They’re not just better; they’re so much better as to not even be the same thing.

So, I’ve written to my city council representatives:

I was very pleased to see in the local paper that the topic of changing the law to allow Champaign residents to keep chickens has come before the council. I urge you to support this change.

One of the most important changes we need to make Champaign a more sustainable community is to stop viewing the household purely as a center of consumption: it needs to become a center of production as well. Allowing residents to raise chickens is a step in the right direction.

Many communities (including Urbana) allow residents to raise a modest number of chickens in their backyard. With a few sensible restrictions (no roosters, adequate space for each bird), there’s no reason that chickens can’t be kept in an ordinary backyard without adversely impacting neighbors.

I urge you to support such a change in the law.

The picture that illustrates this post was taken at the Virgin Islands Sustainable Farming Institute‘s Creque Dam Farm, which I visited in August of 2008 and about which I wrote a piece for Wise Bread: Learn Techniques for Sustainable Living. I’d earlier written a piece for them on backyard chickens called Real Eggs.

Update to add: I got a quick response from Thomas Bruno, one of the at-large city council members. He described the process for getting an item considered by the city council and adds:

Get a science teacher involved or a scout troop and your chances of success will skyrocket.

So, I guess my next step is to get in touch with some of the other people mentioned in the article as pushing for a change in the law, and see if anyone knows a science teacher or a scoutmaster.

I heard on the news this morning that Champaign was going to lose (to building renovations) a large public mural by Angela Rivers.

The mural, painted in 1978, is in pretty poor shape, which I suspect had something to do with the decision to let it go, but it’s still sad to lose. I’m a big fan of public art.

Since I had some warning, I figured I’d seize the opportunity to go grab some pictures. Here’s a detail with some faces and the signatures:

And here’s another bit I particularly like, horses plowing toward the sun on the horizon:

If you’re local, it’s worth getting up there to see it in person. It’s on the north side of a warehouse at the corner of Park and 5th Street, just a few blocks east of downtown Champaign.

They have a whole series of “introducing issues with opposing viewpoints” books, each of which contains a variety of articles and essays on some topic. I gather that the idea is to help teach students the skill of reading a number of articles, any one of which may be unbalanced or narrowly focused, and then synthesizing an understanding of the topic. It’s a useful skill, and one that’s hard to teach with a textbook, since textbooks generally try to present a comprehensive and balanced viewpoint.

I executed the license agreement back in August. The book came out in April, and the check (payment on publication, of course) arrived today!

It would probably be worth my time to market reprint rights more aggressively, but I enjoy writing more than I enjoy marketing. So, it’s especially nice when the chance to earn a license fee falls into my lap like this.

Because of the nature of (and price of) the book, I didn’t try to negotiate a contributor’s copy. If you happen upon a copy, I’d be pleased to hear a little about it.

Because I like living in places like this, I find myself conflicted on the topic of  immigration.

The largest motivation for opposing immigration (setting aside the wrong-headed opposition that springs from racism) is economic—but most of the people trying to make the economic argument get it wrong. Or maybe they just state it poorly.

Population density

The most important reason that the United States is an attractive place to live is the low population density. This was true from the beginning of European settlement. There was enough land that anyone could be a landowner. The low population meant fewer workers, which kept wages high and working conditions good. Natural resources were abundant, meaning everyone could have and use more timber, more water, more grain, and (especially over the past couple of generations) more coal, oil, and natural gas.

There is high population density in cities, and that’s the best way to arrange things: If most people live in an urban environment, it preserves the maximum amount of land for crops, timber, pasture, natural areas, and so on. Sprawling the people out in subdivisions and exurbs wastes a lot of land. But however you arrange the living and working spaces: the more people you have, the smaller the average person’s share is going to be.

Economists dismiss this argument, on the grounds that people are productive: Each new person produces more than enough to be self-supporting, so each new person can potentially raise everyone’s standard of living. That’s not wrong exactly, but it’s largely a self-serving argument. The monied interests benefit from an influx of new workers, because a larger labor force holds down wages. At the same time, the monied interests don’t suffer as their pro-rata share of nature’s bounty declines, because they don’t settle for a pro-rata share; they buy as much as they want, leaving that much less for the rest of us.

Many people understand this at some level, but view it in pieces rather than as a whole. If they’re workers, they object to other workers willing to work for lower pay. If they’re business owners, they claim that there are “certain jobs” that Americans just won’t do. (A falsehood: it would be easy to find Americans to do any job, if it were a full-time salaried position with health insurance, a pension, and education benefits—just like every job I ever had as an adult.) Others point to the increased demand on social structures when “different” people arrive—people with bigger families (more children to be educated) or people who speak a different language (public safety information needs to be translated). At this level, the pro-business argument is correct: immigrants are productive and the taxes they pay easily cover the costs of the services that they use. But they still increase the population density—and that means dividing all the resources of the country among more people.

It’s an economic issue, a quality-of-life issue, and particularly an environmental issue: there are many things that are only environmentally harmful if the demand for inputs exceed the local environment’s capability to provide them, or if the outputs produced exceed the local environment’s capability to handle them.

So: I’m not against immigration; I’m against population growth. In the context of a stable population, I’d like as much immigration as possible, because I enjoy a cosmopolitan community.

Where the anti-immigrant argument turns really wrong, is when it comes to strategies and tactics of handling a population that includes some immigrants.

Police state

If you’re going to allow people to visit, whether for tourism, cultural exchange, as guest workers, or whatever, some number of those people are going to stay here. They’ll stay for all kinds of reasons—for economic opportunity, for freedom, because they fall in love with someone who lives here, or just because they like the place they’re visiting.

If the number who stay are the number you want to stay, then everything’s fine. But if it’s more than you want, there’s no way to reduce the excess without turning the country into a police state.

I don’t want to live in a police state. I don’t want police to ask me for my papers. It’s annoying. It’s un-American. It’s unconstitutional. (Well, it’s constitutional for the police to ask, but it’s unconstitutional for them to do anything if I don’t present my papers.)

For one thing, there’s no obligation for a citizen to even have papers. Almost everyone does, because a drivers license counts and it’s so handy to be able to drive, but it’s not required. It’d be pretty tough to get along without a social security number, but you can have a number without having an identity document. (Early social security cards—I still have mine—had no security features at all: just a name and number printed on card stock.)

Since the mid-1980s, employers have been insisting on seeing identity documents, because otherwise they can face penalties if they hire illegal immigrants—an early example of  exactly what I’m unhappy about.

Even if you have papers, even if you have to keep them sufficiently in order that you can present them to an employer when you start a new job or a bank when you want to open a new account, there’s still no obligation to keep them on hand to show to the police.

Still, objecting to being asked to show papers is really just a personal quirk. The real harm comes from having people here who can’t safely use ordinary public institutions. Communities where people are afraid of being arrested or deported are inevitably bad communities.

• Crimes will go unreported, which will result in more crime—and more violence, as people who lack access to the courts have to resort to self-help to settle their disputes.
• Sick people won’t seek medical care, producing pockets of disease.
• Pernicious institutions like check-cashing stores and pay-day lenders thrive where people can’t open bank accounts.

I don’t want to live in a town where there are people who don’t feel safe talking to the police when they get robbed or the department of labor when they get cheated by an employer or the bureau of weights and measures when they get cheated by a merchant. I don’t want to live in a town where lots of drivers don’t have insurance because they don’t have a license because they don’t have the right kind of visa. I don’t want to live in a town where some people have to work for cash because there’s no legal way for them to pay taxes.

As I say, I’m of two minds. I want to keep the low population density we enjoy in the US—it’s a key factor in our high standard of living. At the same time, I enjoy living in a diverse community. But it’s impossible to have it both ways: If you allow foreigners into the country, some of them will stay, and any effort to remove them produces problems that are much worse than the small hit that any one immigrant produces to our standard of living. And yet, in the aggregate, the hit on our standard of living is significant.

In the end I come down squarely against measures like the recently passed law in Arizona—it will do a lot more harm than good. I’m generally in favor of efforts to control the border, to make it tougher for people to sneak into the country, but that’s no panacea—not unless you use control of the border to hold the number of temporary visitors below the number of permanent residents that you’d be willing to accept. I’m not sure there is a solution, except for the rest of the world to become as nice a place to live as the US, and thereby produce a balance between immigration and emigration.

Photographic evidence:

I’m the guy on the edge looking like an aging hippy hanging out with a bunch of college kids.

It looks like enough of us will be in town over the summer to make it worth having meetings. If you’re interested in Esperanto and live in or near Champaign-Urbana, join us!

Jackie and I visited the Fiber Event in Greencastle Indiana yesterday, after which we went to Shades State Park and spent the rest of the day hiking.

The spring wildflowers were just about at their peak. We saw spring beauties, trillium, dutchman’s breeches, violets, bluebells, mayapples, and others that I didn’t recognize.

Even the moss was trying to get in on the act.

Moss by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Thrift is thus a way to redeem yourself not just from the unsexy bondage of indebtedness but also from subjugation to people and efforts that are meaningless to you, or worse. Debt means staying in a pointless job, failing to support needy people or worthwhile causes, accepting the strings that come with dependence, and gritting your teeth when your boss asks you to do something unethical instead of saying “drop dead”. Ultimately, thrift delivers not just freedom but salvation—which makes it a bargain even Jack Benny could love.

To get there, though, he takes you on a wonderful journey through the American history of thrift, from Jack Benny to the Puritans and back again, with a couple of side trips to Sexyland.

Jason Fitzpatrick had kind words for my post in his piece Shop European-Style for Fresher, Cheaper Food.

Lloyd Alter was especially generous, saying (in a green-living piece subtitled “I thought I was a lonely failure as a frugalista, but I am not“):

I thought we were pretty much along among the frugal living types to do this. However, one of my favourite writers on frugal living, Philip Brewer at Wisebread, agrees…

Thanks guys!

On the one hand, this is just the sort of thing I’m a bit too prone to worry about. For me, security, privacy, and reliability are right up there with functionality. On the other hand, it had scarcely crossed my mind that I’m so reliant on Google that becoming Google-free was an important issue. So, seeing Leo’s article prompted me to give it some thought.

To me, the more fundamental issue is choosing to keep your data on your own hardware or to keep it in the cloud.

It used to be that the cloud was a loser on all four issues (security, privacy, reliability, functionality). In just the past few years, the cloud has made great strides in the latter two. I haven’t seen a careful analysis, but my sense now is that the cloud is about as reliable as your own hardware, albeit with different failure modes (less chance of a bad disk drive losing a bunch of data, more chance of the provider deprecating the tool or simply going bust). Functionality is a different kind of question—all you care about is whether the tool provides the functionality you need—but my sense again is that tools like Google Docs do fine at providing the most important functionality.

On issues of security and privacy, though, it seems to me that the cloud can never win. Well, maybe in one narrow sense: Servers in the cloud can be professionally managed with security in mind, so there’s a better chance that security patches will be applied promptly and less chance that they’ll be configured in an insecure way out of carelessness or ignorance. Except for that, though, all the cloud can offer is an unenforceable promise of security and privacy—and it rarely offers even that.

Because of that, I’ve always ended up choosing to keep mission-critical work on my own hardware. I use various cloud services, but they’re all in some way either publishing or else secondary.

Where what I’m doing is publishing (such as this blog, my account on Flickr, my account on Twitter, and so on), the privacy issues are moot—I’m explicitly making the stuff public. I still care about security, but my security interests are closely aligned with the provider’s security interests, so I feel reasonably comfortable relying on the provider to get security right.

All my uses of cloud-provided tools are non-critical. I have a Gmail account, but it’s a backup account for use when my main email account is unavailable for some reason. I have a Google Docs account, but I only use it occasionally to view a Word document or make a graph with the spreadsheet facility. I don’t use Google Calendar (I use iCal). The one Google tool that I’d really miss if it disappeared is Google Reader which I use every day, but even losing that wouldn’t be a catastrophe. I could go back to reading blogs on the websites themselves (!) until I picked out a new RSS feed reader. My latest backup of my subscriptions was really old (I just now grabbed a current one), but I’d be able to recreate the important ones easily enough.

The upshot is that going Google-free seems to be a non-issue to me. I could do it in five minutes and scarcely feel the loss. I’m glad to have been prompted to think about it, though.

Milky Slough, originally uploaded by bradipo.

I went out for my first run of the season today. I ran about 1.5 miles in 20:36. That’s not very far and it’s pretty slow, but it’s still a good sign, because I could run for over 20 minutes. I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to, because I’d been pretty sedentary this winter. It speaks well of Taiji as exercise, because it’s been about the only exercise I’ve gotten. I know from experience that once I can run for 20 minutes, it’s pretty easy to build up some endurance, so I’m starting from a good point this year.

I did my usual short run around Kaufman Lake, and noticed this scary looking white stuff flowing down Copper Slough. (Maybe it was just some sort of white scum floating on top of the water. I couldn’t tell.) It was weird enough that I felt compelled to walk back and get a picture, although the picture I managed to get fails to capture the terrible wrongness of the fluid flowing in that ditch.

Milky Slough by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

On the topic of rule two, however, I go back and forth.

I certainly see that you can’t make a career (or even a sale) out of unfinished stories. But I’ve gradually come to see that many of my unfinished stories aren’t really stories at all—they’re just a cool character or a cool situation or a cool idea.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to “finish” these non-stories. Years of experience shows that I can fool myself for a long time that these particular cool characters, situations, and ideas add up to a story. But the result is days or weeks spent generating prose that never adds up to a story.

I think a much better version of rule two for me is “Finish the stories you start, but ruthless abandon any project as soon as you realize it isn’t a story.”

I could finish two or three stories in the time it takes me to “finish” a non-story.

Wow. Just a stellar post… Philip Brewer strikes again with a straightforward, no-bull piece on why we gotta suck it up and stop eating expensive crap. Stern, but informative!

I find it surprisingly difficult to extract quotes like that—it seems too much like bragging. I guess that’s why it’s useful to have a publicist.

Here’s the gist of what I had to say:

The key to resisting the Diderot effect is to have style. Not just any old style, but a particular style. Something nicer than everything else you own isn’t in keeping with your style and that makes it easier to resist: It’s just not you.

Check out the Planet Green’s Watch Out For the Diderot Effect which includes a link to a translation of Diderot’s famous essay.

Just now, though, the equinox is still a full month off and the weather is wintery. It’s been weeks since we’ve seen the temperature manage to make it above freezing. But today it is forecast to do just that. It won’t be for long, certainly not long enough to melt much snow, but any melted snow has to be counted a plus right now.

I’m ready to get back to running and bicycling, but not quite ready enough to run or ride over the ice and snow. But, in Central Illinois, I can look at the calendar and have good reason to hope that the sidewalks and road shoulders will be soon be clear.

Frosty Morning, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Taken just a few steps from our front door, looking east.

Frosty Morning by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Subjecting children to daily unpleasantness – in the form of arbitrary rules, dysfunctional socialization, scholastic regimentation, age-segregation, teasing, bullying, verbal abuse, or what have you – in the name of acclimatization to the “real world” simply lowers their standards for the life they will accept.

via The Lazy Faire » Blog Archive » It’s OK to give your kids high standards

The idea that parents should stand aside from protecting their kids—or even go so far as to deliberately do things that are cruel or capricious—to make sure that children learn the various lessons that add up to understanding that “life is tough” or “life isn’t fair” is an insane one. No child, no matter how coddled or protected, is going to fail to confront the sorts of problems that drive those lessons home.

I’ve written on the same topic.  In particular, in Find Work Worth Doing, where I criticize mock work (such as most school work) and go on to say:

I think parents also do their kids no favors when they encourage them to take low-skill, part-time jobs to earn pocket money.  (Sometimes they do so with the explicit motivation that it will teach their kids the value of work!)  Kids will be far ahead of the game if they’re taught how to identify work that’s worth doing, and how to find a job doing that work.

Protecting a child from the hard knocks of life will not prevent your child from learning the truth about the real world. Nothing can.

Shiny Guard Hairs, originally uploaded by bradipo.

I liked the way the sunlight caught Rapunzel’s guard hairs.

Shiny Guard Hairs by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

If they can establish the one true price for the ebook edition of a new hardback, and keep other booksellers out of the market by selling the books at a loss, they’ll soon be in a position to dictate terms to the publishers in the same way that big-box retailers dictate terms to their suppliers in other markets. (Clearly they were supposing that they were already in that position, else I don’t think the “disappearing buy button” fiasco would have happened. Fortunately, it looks like Amazon pushed too hard too early.)

I think the result of an Amazon victory would have been very similar to what we have seen in the big-box stores over the past few years: Consumers would enjoy low(ish) prices while suppliers would see ever-increasing pressures on their profits. (I’m seeing the publishers as suppliers here, although the profit pressure would pretty quickly flow on to authors as well.) Choice would decline as profit pressures forced all but the lowest-cost suppliers out of business.

So, I’m glad that seems to have been headed off, at last for the moment.

Having said all that, though, I think the cross-subsidy analysis is also correct. I think Gillette made its own razors to give away, but it wouldn’t have needed to. Nowadays it would surely outsource razor manufacture, but that wouldn’t be necessary either. It could just as easily announce that it would sell any razor that matched the specs for its blades, and then sell them for less than it paid its suppliers. (In fact, that might be a perfectly viable business model. Surely some shavers would go for a cool-looking limited-edition art razor and accept the resulting lock-in to Gillette blades, as long as the razor wasn’t too expensive.)

Very briefly, mainline publishing houses would prefer to go with a pricing model similar to the model for physical books, where books start at a premium price when they’re new and then are sold at gradually cheaper prices. Amazon, on the other hand, wants to sell a cheap(ish) $10 ebook edition of new hardbacks, because that’s a price point and market segment that drives sales of the kindle, but shows no sign of further lowering the price as cheaper editions of the physical book come out. (One supposes Amazon’s theory is that there are a lot of people will pay $300 for a kindle to read the latest bestsellers for $10, but many fewer who will pay that much to be able to read last year’s bestseller for $4.)

The whole issue (Amazon taking down the Buy button for most books sold by Macmillan imprints, etc.) has produced a lot of talk by non-authors about how publishers are obsolete anyway and authors should just produce and market their own ebooks. But that sort of talk just goes to show that they don’t understand that publishers are specialized venture capital firms (as opposed to specialized manufacturing companies).

Piggy Bank Awaits the Spring, originally uploaded by bradipo.

My plan had been to capture the snowflakes in the air, but they’re pretty much invisible.

Piggy Bank Awaits the Spring by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

No Swimming, originally uploaded by bradipo.

I’ve always been amused by the “No Swimming” signs that are up year-round at Kaufman Lake Park. I thought this captured the absurdity perfectly.

No Swimming by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

There’s a reason we don’t see more self-sufficiency: It’s not frugal. It almost always takes more time to make something than it takes to earn enough money to buy one—and that’s without even considering the time it takes to learn the skills (let alone the cost of tools and materials). On the other hand, frugality is a powerful enabler for self-sufficiency. So, how do you find the sweet spot?

My wife spins and weaves. I have a beautiful sweater that she hand knit from hand spun yarn. It’s wonderful—and it’s comforting to know that my household is not only self-sufficient in woolens, we produce a surplus that we can sell or trade. But the fact is you can buy a perfectly good sweater at Wal-Mart for less than the cost of the yarn to knit it.

There’s a lot of useful tips and trick for living a more self-sufficient life at the Self Reliance Exchange. Totally aside from my article there, it’s worth checking them out.

Ginger sparkle cookies, originally uploaded by bradipo.

I was thinking brownies, but Jackie bakes the brownies and she was already spending as much time in the kitchen today as she really wanted. So I baked a post-holiday batch of ginger sparkles.

Ginger sparkle cookies by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

1. More important
2. Less important
3. Equally as important as when the road is clear
4. Shut up!  Can’t you see I’m on the phone!

4. If there’s no good reason to prefer one thing over another for reasons of convenience or cost, I’d really like to have my body eaten by vultures.

Sadly, I’ve seen no move toward making sky burial socially acceptable in the United States.

• “An Education of Scars” at Futurismic

My story submission database isn’t really set up to answer the question of how many new stories I wrote this year, but I see three whose first submission to an editor was in 2009.  Hopefully some of those will appear in 2010.

Two articles of mine appeared as guest posts at personal financial blogs:

• Living off Capital at The Simple Dollar
• How to Live a Rich Life — On a Budget at Get Rich Slowly

I wrote 71 posts for Wise Bread.  I’ve bolded a few where I thought I managed to say just what I was trying to say, and commend them to your attention:

• The “one big lump” theory of your money
• Organized tips on getting through tough times
• Book review: Game Over
• Not too late to get your IRS stimulus rebate–if you qualify
• Three bad ways to fund mortgage lending (and maybe a good way)
• Security is an illusion. Freedom is real.
• Six options if you’re underwater on your mortgage
• Too broke to be frugal?
• Not stupid–hopeless
• Needs, wants, and not even wants
• Frugality goes international
• A champion of savings over spending
• Book review: Wabi Sabi Simple
• That “What if you knew you were going to die” question
• On choosing temporary freedom
• How to bake sourdough bread (and save a buck on every loaf)
• The end of a recession versus recovery
• Borrowing, renting, substituting, and doing without
• Stag-hyperinflation?
• Don’t worry about missing the bottom in houses
• It takes a frugal spouse to make a frugal home
• Retirement accounts and money to spend
• Tactics of the rich
• Modern companies as specialized venture capital firms
• Book review: The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It
• Economic effects of pandemic flu in a recession
• Getting by without money in Spain
• Reverse engineer the best time of your life
• Another path to recovery: higher incomes
• Turn smugness into a positive virtue
• On choosing and defending your luxuries
• Borrowers, lenders, and others–beware trusting the government
• Simplify budgeting with personal money
• Crappy practice is a waste of time
• Don’t let low interest rates make you stupid
• Oh noes! Inflation!
• Stuff will never make you organized
• Teach yourself to cook
• Getting by on a lot less money: 3 ways it’s easier than you think
• Not driving your less-frugal friends crazy
• Things wear out
• The new normal economy
• Big changes or small changes?
• Book review: Life Inc.
• My best posts that got no attention
• Watch Out for Surge in CPI
• Wage slave, debt slave
• Managing Your Short-Term Money
• Optimize Your IRA and 401(k)
• The Three Interest Rates
• Understand Capital Costs
• The Many Reasons to Make Do with Less
• Thrive as a Starving Writer–Lessons from the Experts
• Avoid Bank Fees
• Learn good financial habits from your parents. Or not.
• Reject Variable Terms and Conditions
• Don’t Despair Over Small Retirement Savings
• 5 Ways to Live Better Without Spending More
• Don’t Go to College to Learn
• Who has the time (or money) for deals?
• A Society of Fear
• Can You Buy Your Way Out of the Rat Race?
• Savings Bonds as Interest-Earning Travelers Checks
• Resources for Freelancers
• Coming Soon: Good Times for Temp Workers
• Dream Job or Day Job?
• Does More Detergent Make for More Clean?
• Urgent: Check Your Withholdings
• Find Your Passion
• Living Cheaply for the Long Term
• The Best Way to Avoid the Worst Financial Problems

One of my Wise Bread posts (Understand Capital Costs) was featured in in US Airways Magazine (October 2009, page 22).

When I first moved out on my own I had only sparse Christmas decorations. Among the things that were lacking was a star for the top of the tree.

I didn’t feel it was so terrible–the tree was decorated, even if it didn’t have something on top. One Christmas, though, my brother and his wife came to visit at Christmas, and Alisa was appalled. Rather than tolerate such a defect, she cut a star out of shirt cardboard, covered it in aluminum foil, and put it on top of the tree.

I was delighted. I kept that star and used it on my trees for many years.

We went on using it for some time after I got married, until Jackie started doing needle-felting. Then she decided that a Christmas star would be a perfect little project. She needle-felted this star, which has been our tree-topper ever since.

Our Christmas Star by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Cthulhu in Hermes Scarf, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Is it just me, or do the images of horse ribbons on this Hermes scarf look like images of Cthulhu?

I’m prepared to accept that it’s just me.

Cthulhu in Hermes Scarf by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

There’s lots of good stuff there.  I don’t know of a better source of raw material for people who are interested in the Clarion experience.

People who come from wealthy families learn how to live off capital. The rules are taught along with all the other things they learn from their parents–how to dress, how to eat, how deal with bankers and trust officers. But even though most people don’t learn the rules, living off capital is just a skill, and it’s one that everybody should learn, because everybody lives off capital sometimes.

It talks about investing for income, reinvesting to preserve capital, diversifying, and keeping your expenses flexible.

Esperanto has been important to me for twenty years. I’ve traveled overseas with it. I’ve met bunches of cool people, read fascinating books and magazines, and listened to great music.  Most important, I’ve done it on equal terms with the writers, performers, guests, hosts, and other people that I’ve met.  Instead of one of us speaking our native language, we’re both speaking a second language–but one that’s easy to learn.  Easy enough to learn that you don’t need to have any special talent with languages to learn it.

Happy Esperanto Day!

Now, I don’t have any actual knowledge of what happened.  I hope there’ll turn out to be some impartial witnesses or some video of the occurrence. But in the absence of that, I find that I’m all too willing to assume that Watts’s account is true.  The fact is, I don’t really expect better from anonymous border guards. I ought to be able to expect better, but I don’t.

If you want to donate to support his (sure to be large) legal expenses, you can contribute via his paypal account at <donate@rifters.com>.

There have been Esperanto-language publications that focused on science fiction (in particular, the Sfero series published by Grupo Nifo), but none of those seem to be active at the moment. (This is not as sad as it might seem, though, because the Esperanto-language literary magazines are not averse to publishing science fiction or fantasy. In particular, a recent issue of Beletra Almanako focused on speculative fiction.)

I told Gareth what I knew about sf in Esperanto, but also reached out to the Esperanto community, asking if anyone knew translators or publishers who would be interested in doing something with Gareth’s work. Pretty promptly, I heard back from Brazilian publisher Luciana F Campos whose publishing house Lusíadas was interested in publishing Gareth’s work.

I’ve heard from Gareth that the publications are now out.  Esperanto translations of two of his stories can be found in I Antologio Luzidoj (link to pdf) as well as Portuguese translations in I Antologia Lusíadas (link to pdf).

Helping make another Esperanto connection in the world is really its own reward, but as a bonus I also got this cool link to Douglas Smith’s Foreign Market List, an annotated list of  publications that buy foreign-language reprint rights to English-language stories.

There wasn’t much smoke and no flames, so we decided to take the time to get dressed and bundled up against the weather, and then went outside.  A neighbor had already called the fire department, so we didn’t have to do anything except hang out and wait until they came.  Most of our neighbors waited in the doorway, rather than stand out in the cold and wind, but I figured I didn’t want to breath even that much smoke.

It was only about 15 minutes before they said we could go back in.  But that, together with a dentist appointment this morning, managed to put a big dent in the day.

The smoke alarm is still beeping every minute or so.  I called the apartment office which said that they had thought it had already been reset, but would check and make sure.  (Which I hope means that they’ll send someone over to take care of it, rather than just check and make sure someone said it had already been done.)

(By the way, my teeth are fine.)

I attended Clarion in 2001 and found it a positive experience in every way–I had a great time, I improved my writing, and I got to know a bunch of cool people that I’m still in touch with.

I’ve written some about my Clarion experience: I kept a Clarion journal and I wrote a few short essays about what I learned and how I learned it.

If you’ve got any questions about what Clarion was like for me, I’d be glad to answer them in comments here or by email. (I’m also willing to take a stab at answering questions about other stuff, but things like how applications are processed vary from year to year, and I really only know about how they did things back in 2001.)

Without rules that had to be followed, the builders built the complex with an eye toward maximizing their profit. If you put more units on a piece of property, you can bring in rent from more tenants. But at some point adding more units leads to diminishing returns–adding more buildings makes the space feel sufficiently cramped or crowded that potential tenants view the place as a downscale complex and they won’t pay as much. For a while that can still be profitable–you gain more from the extra units than you lose to lower rents. But squeezing yet another building in won’t just cut the rent on those units, it’ll cut the rent on all the other units as well. Eventually you reach the point where you lose more in rent than you gain from having extra units, so you stop and don’t build that building.

Zoning regulations can change the dynamic. Currently, there are rules in Champaign that limit apartment builders from jamming ever more buildings into a complex.

Apartment complex near where we live

This picture is from a newer complex just a few blocks from where we live. The buildings are crammed so close together, it seems to me that you might just as well be living in the same building as your neighbors, as far as noise and privacy go. (This picture shows them face-to-face. Side-to-side they’re even closer.)

Again, I don’t know, but I assume that the buildings are built as close together as zoning regulations allow.  That’s the pernicious side-effect of having that sort of rule.

Because, see, there isn’t just one answer to the question of how closely packed buildings can be before they begin to feel downscale.  It depends on other stuff.  It depends on what people are used to. It depends on what alternatives are available.

When you create a rule, some fraction of the builders are going to aim for the bottom–just meet the rule. Those units aren’t going to be upscale, but there’ll be some people who will rent them.

If there were no rules, of course, some builders might build complexes where the buildings were even closer together than that, but those complexes would seem especially downscale. When you set a minimum, though, everybody who was thinking of someplace in that neighborhood will tend to aim for that same point.

Obviously the people who would have aimed more downscale would be prohibited from doing so. But the people who would have aimed for just slightly better will also be drawn downward. If there were a wide range of densities, builders would see advantages to being just slightly more upscale than the next guy. But with rules setting a lower limit, we don’t see the full range. Instead, we tend to see a binary division between the downscale units that are at the maximum density permitted, versus the upscale units that offer a sufficiently lower density to stand out. The legally mandated minimum becomes normalized (because so many complexes build to that standard) and ends up being a standard, rather than a minimum.

Courtyard outside our apartment

The courtyard outside our apartment is a common area that is actually used by us and our neighbors.  There are picnic tables and grills. The space is comfortable. It’s big enough that we don’t feel like we’re sitting right outside our neighbor’s apartments, but not so big that we feel lost in a vast space.

The space outside the nearby complex, though, feels wretched to me. With the buildings so close together, the space between becomes just a dark corridor. It’s not inviting, which is just as well because there’s no room to do anything there anyway.

In one sense, it doesn’t really matter to me. Our complex exists at its present density, and I can’t imagine that it would make any sense to try find find a way to pack in more buildings. But it makes me sad to see all the other, higher-density, complexes going up. It means that we aren’t getting new options.

The rules that set “reasonable minimums” instead are producing a binary distribution, where our only choices are downscale apartments crammed together or high-priced luxury apartments, where tenants get a reasonable density, but are stuck paying for other amenities that we don’t care about.  It’s the downside of reasonable rules.

Most of Central Illinois would be wet prairie if it weren’t for a network of drainage ditches, such as the Copper Slough. It runs past Kaufman Lake and then on south and west. It merges up with similar ditches and, somewhere around Sadorus starts being called the Kaskaskia Ditch, after which it, presumably, flows into the Kaskaskia.

I liked the mirror-flat surface of the water. I also liked all the drain tiles emptying into the ditch.

The picture was taken from the bridge on O’Malley’s Alley, looking north towards Kaufman Lake.

Copper Slough by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The problem is, an excessive amount of that is just as bad. It’s not as often, but I sometimes find myself summarizing–writing the whole story as a series of brief descriptions of what happened.

I think that’s where I went awry most recently. As often happens when I’ve made a mistake, I found it very hard to write the next bit, leading to several zero word count days this week. So, today I backed up and replaced some of that summary with scenes.

I think that was the right choice. After all, this is a place where they’re going to be spending some time. So, some full-blown scenes of arriving and meeting people seem appropriate. Plus, I enjoyed writing them, which is usually a good sign.

So, that’s 800 words today. With three zeros, though, my moving average is just 216 words. Hopefully I’m over this rough patch and can start making headway again.

So, Jackie and I went to their clinic at Lincoln Square Village.

It was quite a production.  We showed up right at the time it was supposed to begin, and got number 85 of the second cohort, which meant that 184 households had already gotten numbers to go ahead of us.  It was as big a crowd as I’ve been a member of in a long time.  By the time we were done filling out our paperwork they were well into passing out numbers in the third cohort of households.

Still, despite the crowd, they moved people along quite quickly.  (I think they had 25 stations where immunizations were being administered.)  We waited for perhaps 20 minutes, got called, went in, and got our shots. Very efficient. And free, which is cool for someone trying to make a living as a writer.

I turned 50 back in June, so I was given a shot rather than the flu mist.  I had considered trying to convince them to give me the flu mist instead–as far as I’ve been able to figure out, there’s no data that suggests it wouldn’t be just as effective in someone who was five months over the cut-off age–but eventually decide to just go with the program.

My mom tells me that she got me flu shots regularly when I was a small child.  Because of the health problems that led to my being misdiagnosed with celiac, I was considered someone with an underlying health issue.  I have no memory of that, but I do know that I didn’t get flu shots from when I got old enough to quit seeing the pediatrician (age 17 or so) until about 15 years ago, when I started getting them most years.

The first time I got a flu shot as an adult, my arm was sore for days.  Most shots since then have made my arm a little less sore than the previous time.  I’ve noticed a similar trend with other immunizations–an initial shot may have made me feel quite feverish and achy, but booster shots tend to have less of an effect.  My theory is that a strong reaction means that I had a poor initial immune response–my body geared up to fight an unknown infection.  Contrariwise, a small reaction means that I was already adequately protected–my body immediately recognized the virus as a known quantity and didn’t need to mount any special response.

If that’s true, then I already had an immunity to H1N1–my arm didn’t get sore at all.

As I say, it was kind of interesting.  I don’t usually find myself with so many people in an enclosed space.  I remember thinking, while milling about with the crowd waiting for flu shots, that it was probably the best chance to catch the flu all year.

I’ve been putting in little hints of underlying complexity, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what they mean.  I figure some of them will turn into something.  The others I can leave in if they work as texture or remove if they detract.

For some reason, though, the past couple of days it started bugging me that I didn’t know where I was going.  I was at an inflection point in the story and I thought had an idea for what I wanted to do next, but without an idea of where I was going, it just turned into nothing.  The result was two days with zero word counts.

That was bad, but today I figured out I could write another chunk.  I’d made the not-unusual decision to cut the hero off from most sources of help, but I realized today that I could let him call for help without him actually getting help anytime soon.  Plus, this gives me the chance to insert some exposition if necessary–the response to the call for help can fill in whatever background is needed to put his adventures in the context of the greater story.  (I haven’t written it yet, but I’ll write something, and if it isn’t right I can change it later.)

So, even though I still don’t know what the greater story is, I was able to write 500 words today of calling for help.

Although it daunted me for a couple of days, I think I’m past this cycle of worrying about what the greater story is.  The worst that can happen is that I never do, and I’ll have spent a couple of months writing sixty thousand words that never turns into a novel.  But the couple of months would have gone by whether I’d written sixty thousand words or not.

Crane in Kaufman Lake Park, originally uploaded by bradipo.

A damp, chill, late-autumn day. With a crane.

Crane in Kaufman Lake Park by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

At one point, talking about his philosophy of teaching, he made fun of some locally available Taiji classes that focused on “perfecting” your Taiji forms.  With his somewhat limited English he made it perfectly clear that he thought it was stupid not to learn your Taiji correctly in the first place.

It made sense to me at the time.  I mean, if you’re going to practice something hundreds or thousands of times, surely it makes sense to learn how to do it correctly first, right?  Who’d want to practice doing it badly over and over again?

My current teachers, though, have a completely different attitude.  Unlike any martial arts class I’ve been in, they basically never correct anyone.  This may be partially due to the makeup of the class—mostly old people who might have limited range of motion due to arthritis or some other medical problem.  Also, I think it’s because they’re focusing on the deeper fundamentals—things like shifting your weight and turning your body. Exactly when you turn your hand is simply not as important.

Even more fundamentally, though, it’s because you have to do the practice to learn to feel the difference.  I suppose if you had a private tutor telling you that you were turning your hand too early or were forgetting to straighten your foot, you might spend a little less time practicing the form incorrectly, which would mean that you’d start practicing the form correctly a little sooner.  But I think you’d lose the chance to learn how to feel why one way is wrong and the other way is better.

I have no particular natural ability at things like this—things like martial arts or dance or tennis.  I’ve seen dancers who can pick up choreography in a fraction of a second, copying the lead dancer’s moves so quickly that you can scarcely tell that they’re unrehearsed.  I’m the opposite of that.  It takes me tens or hundreds of tries to get even reasonably close.  However, I’ve been surprised to find that I get a little closer each time, even without an instructor telling me what I’m doing wrong.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the way you learn how to do something is by practicing.  I knew that already.  But it’s been very interesting to see how effective this sort of minimalist instruction is.  The teachers demonstrate the forms, and they answer questions.  There’s no pushing people to do the forms more correctly, and there’s certainly no mocking or berating.  And yet, I’m learning at least as fast as I’ve ever learned anything equivalent in the past.

So, I think my old Aikido teacher was wrong.  It makes perfect sense to start learning Taiji at the most basic level (weight shifting, turning your body), and then to move on to foot work and arm movement, and only then to worry about things like how you move your hands.  It makes perfect sense to have an instructor show you what to do, but then let you learn how to do it through practice.  And, since you can do 90% of the practice entirely on your own, it makes perfect sense to have an advanced course in “perfecting” your Taiji forms, to get whichever small bits don’t come naturally out of your practice.

This is the view out the window in the study. The leaves on the tree are just about gone.

Late Fall Outside My Window by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

This is only the second such rewrite request I’ve gotten. The previous one was from a top market so of course I did the rewrite, but the editor still didn’t buy it. That experience stood me in good stead. I did this new rewrite with great hope, but was not nearly as surprised and disappointed this time when the story didn’t sell.

I’m not unhappy about having done the rewrite. The editor had a useful insight into how I could fix one key problem with the story, and the rewritten version is much better. My previous rewritten story did eventually sell, and I have some hope that this one will sell as well.

I suppose I shouldn’t conclude too much from just two datapoints, but it’s hard not to see this as part of a pattern. Still, I expect I’ll do the same with future rewrite requests: If the editor’s suggestion improves the story, I’ll take it and do the rewrite.

I made very good progress on the novel today, writing almost 1200 words. Yesterday’s progress of not quite 400 words was kind of meager, but managed to get me on through the point where I’d gotten stuck. My moving average, which had been declining for most of the week is now turned back up. I’m very pleased with the new stuff–it nicely sets up the next thing I want to write, and I’m especially looking forward to writing the next bit. I don’t know how it goes, but I know it’s going to be wonderful, wonderful fun.

Just 500 words yesterday and not much over 200 words today. I eventually figured out it was hard to make headway because I wasn’t sure how the next bit went. I knew where I wanted the characters to end up, but I couldn’t see a way to get them there quickly–they wouldn’t choose to go there on purpose, and the natural path that would take them there wouldn’t be quick enough to make a good story.

There are a lot of solutions to that sort of problem. You can write the slow path and find a way to make it exciting. You can just skip the intervening time–this can be as easy as “They stayed in the luxury hotel for eleven days, but on the twelfth day….” I tried writing it both ways, but neither worked well in this case.

Then, earlier this evening, I figured out how to push the characters into leaving the cushy spot they’d managed to find for themselves in such a way that they have to move on to the rather less pleasant spot I’ve got in mind for them. It grows out of the existing characters and conflicts already in place. It’s a much better solution than writing a bunch of dull stuff and then trying to make it interesting.

Bear with Giant Pine Cone, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Public sculpture of a bear in Urbana. To me that thing he’s holding looks like a giant pine cone, but that doesn’t seem very likely.

Bear with Giant Pine Cone by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

I wrote something over 600 words.  Or, rather, I wrote about three times that many, but tossed most of them.  And what I’ve got still isn’t right.  The work hasn’t been wasted–I’m beginning to understand what I’m doing wrong.  I’ve had the characters working together, when at this point what I need to do is sharpen their conflicts.  I don’t know the details yet.  Perhaps by morning it will be clear.  If not, I can write and throw away another 1800 words.  The word count tracking is in service of producing a good story, not an end in itself.

Written on the post of a railroad crossing signal where the tracks cross Country Fair Drive. I think I’d enjoy talking to the guy who wrote it, although I’m inclined to disagree.

Money Isn’t Real by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Productivity was lower today because Mondays we do Taiji and then have lunch out. All that, together with travel time, takes a couple hours out of the day–plus I usually end up wanting to take a nap.

Today we learned “push with both hands.” The instructor listed the 9 form sequence that we’re going to learn this session, and we were all relieved to see that we’ve already learned the basic moves for most of the remaining forms.

Last week we learned “lazy about tying coat.” Today I told the instructor I’d invented a new form and demonstrated it, simply moving directly from the start position to the end position. I told him it was called “lazy about lazy about tying coat.”

Besides the fiction writing, I also wrote two Wise Bread posts. One is all set to go, the other is all done except that I want to create a graph that I’ll use as the image for the post. The one I wrote yesterday didn’t go live today–it’s scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning.

This year I cut back on the amount I was writing for Wise Bread, to free up more time for writing fiction. This had the negative side-effect of cutting into my income. I’m still trying to find the right balance, and dashing off a couple of posts in an afternoon helps.

For the past couple of days I’ve been tweaking the schedule that I’d come up with. Today I came at it from a slightly different direction–I didn’t block out a schedule in advance, I just took notes of what I actually did. That provides some information that I wasn’t getting from just following a schedule, about what size blocks of time seem more natural than others and what activities more naturally follow others. I may continue to do that with weekend days, and use the information I get to fine-tune the schedules I come up with for weekdays.

Taken just north of Kaufman Lake Park, under the railroad tracks and past both halves of the I-72 overpass. I liked the dwindling fall color against the graffiti on the overpass.

Fall Color with Graffiti by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Also wrote a Wise Bread post which hasn’t been scheduled yet, but which will probably go live some time tomorrow.

Jackie spent the morning setting up the yarn room at the Spinners and Weavers Guild Annual Show and Sale, then spent the evening attending to the room, answering people’s questions, and demonstrating spinning.

Jackie and another guild member were in charge of setting up the yarn display at the Champaign Urbana Spinners and Weavers Guild Annual Show and Sale.

The Yarn Room by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

With that in mind, I’ve been going ahead and scheduling a chunk of walk/photograph time between my two morning writing sessions. Today, though, I was meeting some friends for lunch, so I postponed the walk until late morning, then did my walking and photography in the neighborhood of the restaurant.

Thursdays are my most social day–I have lunch with one group of friends (a couple of them former coworkers) and then before dinner meet with my local Esperanto group. With all that, plus the fact that I spent a chunk of the afternoon working on a short talk that I delivered to the Esperanto group, meant that my fiction word count was just 500 words. But they’re words I’m happy with.

Abandoned Bridge, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Taken from the less-old abandoned railway bridge over Boneyard Creek.

Abandoned Bridge by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Merely knowing this about myself does not automatically provide an effective routine, so I’m always on the lookout for good models.  One that I spotted a while back was the daily routine of Charles Darwin.  I tried briefly to follow a similar routine, but didn’t manage to turn it into a habit.  Now I’m trying again.

There are several things I like about Darwin’s routine.  For one thing, it was obviously effective–Darwin managed to sustain a high level of productive creativity over an extended period.  Its priorities (work, fitness, family) are general in accordance with mine.  As a bonus, the amount of time and the times of day that Darwin spent working roughly matches what I find lets me be my most productive.

So, today I tried to block out my time along the lines of Darwin’s schedule.  It didn’t quite work out, partly because of details of the schedule itself and partly because I was still lurching between ignoring the schedule and following it too enthusiastically, but it was a good start.  I’ve blocked out a modified version of the schedule for tomorrow.

Empty meter box, originally uploaded by bradipo.

An empty electric meter box on a telephone pole along Mattis, near the former Kraft plant.

I liked the rusty brownness.

Empty Meter Box by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Over the past few days, I’ve created a spreadsheet along the lines of the one Toby provided in his post on creativity and word tracking.  Mine is simpler than his; I don’t have a deadline, so I don’t need to track progress toward one.

My main input is simply the length of the current draft.  From that I calculate the words written that day.  I’m also tracking a 5-day moving average (although I’m thinking of changing that to a 7-day moving average, to smooth out the impact of weekday issues).  I calculate a “words to go” value (by subtracting words written from an estimated final length) and a “days to go” value (“words to go” divided by the moving average).  Currently I’m using 60,000 words as my estimated final length–a reasonable value for a short novel, I think–but if I come up with a better guess as I proceed I can change my estimate.

I’m currently at 7555 words and my current 5-day moving average is 745 words per day, so my estimated days to completion of a first draft is 70.  We’ll see.

Is this useful?  I’m not sure yet.  But I do know that I wrote 318 words of fiction yesterday, even though I also wrote a new Wise Bread post and was feeling a bit burned out.  The fact that I’d otherwise have had to plug a zero in for words written yesterday was significant motivation for getting me to put in the time to get some fiction written.

Moon and Microwave Relay Tower, originally uploaded by bradipo.

Across the street from our apartment complex is a microwave relay tower. From where we used to park, outside our previous apartment, the apparent size of the round face of the antenna is almost exactly the same as the apparent size of the moon, and appears over the horizon in about the same place the moon rises.

More than once we’d park our car around sunset, look up, see the round disk of the microwave antenna, and mistake it for a full moon. (The red letters aren’t visible once it gets a little darker.)

In this picture it’s pretty obvious which is which, but on a dark and slightly misty night when the moon isn’t visible in the sky for comparison, it’s a surprisingly convincing illusion.

I’m doing several things differently this time.  In particular, I don’t have an outline.  In fact, I have only the barest notion of where things are going.  This will no doubt mean that a whole bunch of rewriting of the beginning will be required (so that it ends up being a beginning that heads to the end that I end up writing), but that’s a small price to pay if the result is a novel that I’m pleased with.

The other main thing that I’m doing differently is giving chapters to Jackie to read as I write them.  Doing so has prompted me to try to make each bit exciting, which I think is having a positive effect.

Of late, though, I’ve once again felt like keeping a writing journal, and found that, for various reasons, LiveJournal wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.  However, as I do have a number of friends on LiveJournal, I thought I’d see if I could get a crossposting plugin to work.

Hence, this post, which is largely an test of crossposting.

If you are also spending less time on LiveJournal or for some other reason would rather read my blog directly or in your feed reader, check out http://www.philipbrewer.net/ for posts, feeds, etc.

[Updated to allow commenting on LiveJournal as well.]

It’s the story of a writer of serious plays, who had written one frivolous piece for his wife that had gone on to be a huge success, launching his wife’s acting career, and making the local theater group a bunch of money.  Now divorced, and with his serious plays all flops, he finally gives in to pressure to write a sequel to his one lighter piece, only to have his characters start complaining about the quality of his writing—at first on the page, and then in person.  And, since he visualizes his characters as the local actors likely to play them, the result is confusion for the character and humor for the audience.

I’m always a big fan of movies that accurately portray the writing life—movies like “Shakespeare in Love,” for example—and that’s where this movie is at its best.  The scenes where he’s preparing to write—dusting and cleaning his workspace, arranging his paper and notecards in perfectly aligned rows and stacks—are wonderful.

Unless you’re local to Champaign, I don’t know if you’ll have much of a chance to see “Revolting,” but if the opportunity arises (and you’re interested in accurate portrayals of the writing life), don’t miss it.

There’s a surprisingly active bunch of local filmmakers.  We’ve previously seen the local films Disconnect, Act Your Age and Press Start, after having gotten started seeing premiers of local films with “Gamerz” which was shown at WorldCon in Glasgow—also a locally produced film, but local to Scotland, rather than Central lllinois.  All are worth seeing, if you get a chance.

How they teach freedom at Centennial High, originally uploaded by bradipo.

I don’t walk around Centennial Park as often as I might. I’m a lot more likely to walk around Kaufman Lake, or just walk to downtown Champaign or to campus–places I can do something (like go to the library). Centennial park is nice, though, and whenever I do walk there, I make a mental note to do it more often.

The one downside to the walk is going past Centennial High School. It is, as near as I can tell, a perfectly good high school–I don’t really have any visibility into that. My perception of the place is based almost entirely on the signs posted at the entrance to the parking lot that I have to walk past whenever I go that way.

So, there’s the “private parking” sign and the “smoke-free environment” sign–both fine. The “guests must register” sign bugs me only a little. But then there’s the “Search of Vehicle” sign, claiming that just entering the parking lot amounts to consenting to have your vehicle searched, and the “video camera in use” sign which says that just entering school district property amounts to consenting to have your image captured in “video, digital or other such format as may be appropriate.”  I’m not fine with those.

I not entirely sure why it bugs me as much as it does. I never drive there, so I can pretty much ignore the “search of vehicle.” I don’t know if the video cameras are aimed at the sidewalk or not, but my actions on the sidewalk are public anyway–anybody could be taking my picture, not just the school district. And yet, it does bug me.

Probably the biggest reason is that I hate the example it provides to the students. Three or four years of walking past those signs every day–and experiencing what they really mean in practice–no doubt desensitizes students to what it means to be free. I hate the idea that a whole generation of students is growing up thinking that this is acceptable behavior, or at any rate that tolerating it is just something that people have to put up with.

Rapunzel in the Sun (photo by Philip Brewer)

I liked the way the sun illuminated Rapunzel’s face while leaving the rest of her in shadow.  I also rather liked the expression I caught here.  It looks just like Rapunzel.

Got some writing-related work done today.  I put two manuscripts in the post.  I also revitalized my old submission-tracking database, which I hadn’t gotten properly set up when I got a new computer several years ago.  I wasn’t actively submitting manuscripts, so it didn’t seem urgent.  Then when I started sending them out again I didn’t want to wait to get my tracking system working, so I just did the tracking in a spreadsheet.  Today I got the old tracking system working again, and moved over all the data from the spreadsheet.  So, I once again have complete submission information for all my manuscripts, including a few old manuscripts that hadn’t yet been submitted to every market.

I’m not sure what day they actually change out the magazine onboard the planes, but I assume for the next month or so airline passengers will be reading my article!

Pretty Sky over Country Fair Apartments (photo by Philip Brewer)

Looking west the sunset was hidden by trees and the buildings of the next apartment complex.  But looking back northeast I saw this nice view.

Just behind this building is the little courtyard where we hang out when we have barbecues and the like.

Jackie on the Bus (photo by Philip Brewer)

We were both heading out yesterday, Jackie to downtown Champaign for lunch and then a meeting with her fellow spinners, I to the south end of the research park where the Fitness Center was letting local Yahoo employees (and friends like me) renew our discount memberships.

Jackie’s bus left three minutes before mine, so I had a chance to take this photo.  I did some pretty heavy processing in iPhoto, mostly adjusting the levels so as to emphasize Jackie’s face at the cost of washing out things like the brick wall behind the bus.  I’m rather pleased with the way it came out.

"Bee on Clover" by Philip Brewer

I do fine at getting outdoors enough in the summer.  In the winter, though, I’m prone to spend far too much time indoors.

There’s a sidewalk around the interior of our apartment complex that makes for a fine short walk.  (It takes about seven minutes, so I think it’s probably close to a third of a mile.)  In the summer, I might do that walk at any time.  In particular, I do it while I’m writing, when I find that the prose isn’t flowing.  That’s usually a sign that I’ve taken a misstep in the story, and a seven-minute walk is often just what I need to figure out where I’ve gone astray.

In the winter, though, I don’t do that, because the cold and the snow turn the little walk into a big production.  Changing into outdoor clothes (and then out of them again) can easily double the time for taking a quick walk, so instead of being seven minutes it’s a quarter of an hour.  Plus, I figure if I’m making that kind of investment of time, I ought to do more than just walk around the block–I should get a real walk in, or run an errand.

That kind of thinking leads to trying to optimize my time–scheduling my walk not when I need a short break from writing to get back on track, but when I need to go to the bank or pick up something at the grocery store.  And if I don’t have any such chore to justify the outing, I tend to just stay indoors all day.  (One of the few upsides of having a regular job was that it did get me out every day.)

Since I know I’ll feel better if I do get out everyday, even if just for a few minutes, I’m thinking of creating an artificial errand:  taking a picture.  I figure it’s something that can be added onto any actual errands I have–I can just bring the camera along.  If it seems like a day for a longer walk, I can take the camera along for that, too.  And if it’s not a day for a long walk–if I’m busy, or the weather’s bad–I can just as easily take a picture on a short walk.

When I get a picture that I’m pleased with, I’ll post it here.  This one’s from a day or two ago.  When I was a boy, one had to be careful walking across a field of clover because there’d always be bees around.  This summer, finding a bee on a clover was a rare treat.

The goal of this issue seemed to be to produce a physical object was as important as the content, and what they’ve produced is full of stuff–posters, cards, etc.

One thing in it was set of pieces of cardboard to be folded and then assembled (with the addition of a penny as a weight) into a little cardboard toy called the Angel of Memory.  Jackie put it together.  I grabbed this video with my camera.  I forgot that there’s no easy way to rotate video, so you’ll have to turn your head 90 degrees to the right to see it properly.

angel of memory

(I may be missing some trick, but it seems that you have to follow that link, and then click on another link in the page that comes up to see the video.)

Pocketmint is full of personal stories turned into larger lessons.  I rather liked Downsizing appliances to save money, which tells the tale of finding perfectly good freezer in the garage of a new house. Because it was so handy–already there and running–they started using it, rather than going to the work to reorganize the garage to use their own smaller freezer. The core of the article is a link to the US government’s EnergyStar calculator, which she used to figure out how much money they’d save using their own newer, smaller freezer. Then there’s the story where she caught a mistake the bank made that could have cost them $6100.  Lots of good stuff.

I’d actually read her sf work back in the day.  She had a story in Enchanted Forests, where she shared the table of contents with Bruce Holland Rogers, and she had a story in Century, a market that I submitted to but never sold to.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for her new work, both pf and sf.

About Esperanto

• Esperanto.net General information about Esperanto.
• Universala Esperanto-Asocio The big international Esperanto organization.
• Esperanto Access An excellent introduction to Esperanto for non-Esperantists.

National organizations in English-speaking countries

• Esperanto USA
• Esperanto Association of Britain
• Australian Esperanto Association
• New Zealand Esperanto Association
• Kanada Esperanto-Asocio
• Quebec Esperanto Society

Learning Esperanto

• Learnu.net is the place to start.
• Project Gutenberg Esperanto texts includes a number of Esperanto text books, some works by Zamenhof, and some other public-domain stuff in or on Esperanto.

Local to East-Central Illinois

• East-Central Illinois Esperanto Club / Esperanto-Klubo de Orient-Centra Ilinojo
• To keep up to date on Esperanto activity in and around Champaign County in Illinois, join the Esperanto_Champaign mailing list.

My English-language writing that features Esperanto

• Frugal travel with Esperanto an article for Wise Bread about Pasporta Servo.
• Cheap international payments with Esperanto another article for Wise Bread that discusses “hawala” and compares it to the international payment account that every member of UEA gets.

She had emailed, asking for my thoughts.  I responded and also pointed her to a little essay I’d written about How I Learned at Clarion.  Looking at that piece again prompted me to revise my page about Clarion to include a link to it and to the various other things I’d written about my Clarion experience and what it had taught me about writing.

Lifehacker links to posts by other Wise Bread writers pretty often, but I can’t remember the last time they linked to one of mine.

Great Hall at Union Station

Just home from visiting my Dad in Kalamazoo.

Had a good eye for spotting wildlife on this trip.  I spotted a young raccoon about halfway up a tree (visible from where I was sitting at the table in Katy’s house).  Later, from the conversation nook, I spotted a stuffelbeam (aka groundhog), that I suspect had a den very near the house.  A bunch of spicebush butterflies appeared on the last evening we were in Kalamazoo–perhaps just-emerged from their chrysalises (as we hadn’t seen any before), and later a hooded warbler that came to bathe at the pool outside the dining room window.  There were lots of hummingbirds at the feeders, plus the usual birds–I got a good look at a cardinal that came close to the window, and heard several crows that seemed unhappy to have us come home after the art show.

That was not the end of it.  I got a great look at a chipmunk just outside the window, and spotted two feral cats (unwelcome visitors on the property, even though I suggested that cats would be the one effective way to cut down on the mice chewing up the electrical wiring in the cars).  My dad spotted a turkey just outside the dining room and we all got a look at it.  A pair of phoebes had built a nest just under the eaves of the screened-in porch.  We could see the female sitting on the nest, and then spotted her again when she took a break in the late afternoon, sitting and preening for perhaps 15 minutes before returning to the nest.  And then, just twenty minutes or half an hour outside of Kalamazoo, I spotted a fawn just outside of some woods the track ran through.  (Poor Jackie didn’t get to see the fawn, as we zipped past in just a few seconds.  I think she got a look at everything else.)

I got several useful things done–did the crucial bits of setting up my dad’s website to use WordPress (it had previously been hand-coded html) and got two of their old computers decommissioned (deleted and overwrote the data on one’s disk drive; removed and smashed with a sledgehammer the disk drive from the other).

We went to the art show (the reason for visiting this weekend rather than some other), and got to see a lot of really nice art.  Visited the booth of Peter Czuk, an artist who crafts things from wood.  Richard and Katy had years ago given me a letter opener that he’d made, and (as I actually use it to open letters) the sharp edge had gotten dull.  I’d talked to him about it last year and he’d indicated that he could sharpen it, so this year I brought it along and got a fresh edge put on it.  Hopefully now it’ll once again open letters nicely for years to come.

Also at the art show, got a chance to chat with Steve Curl, one of Steven’s childhood friends, who is working as an artist these days, making sculptures of robots and ray guns.  (But who oddly doesn’t seem to have a website.)

We took the train both ways.  Our layover on the way up was just long enough for lunch.  On the return trip it was a bit longer, so we had some time to hang out in the great hall.  I spent a few minutes trying to find a way to photograph it in a way that captured what a great space it is.  I thought this picture was sort of okay.

All in all a great trip.  Despite the long list of things seen and done, we mostly just visited with the family and did some walking.

• Up on Green Panda Treehouse is an interview where I talk about personal finance and the path I took to being a personal finance blogger.
• Up on Vega Baja Productions is an interview where I talk about the writing life and being a blogger.

She’s looking for other people to interview, so I thought I’d mention that it was fun to do.  If you’re a personal finance blogger, consider getting in touch.

A bon vivant is a person who lives well — someone who enjoys the best things in life, especially with regard to food and drink. The stereotypical bon vivant is someone who can afford the best (or has generous friends), but that’s not the only way. You can be a bon vivant on a budget.

What is “the best” anyway? Your own tastes play the biggest role, but the tastes of family and friends have a strong influence. To a lesser extent, so do the tastes of opinion leaders, celebrities, experts, and others — even fictional characters. Because of this, appreciating the finer things in life makes you vulnerable to serious “keeping up with the Joneses” issues.

There are a lot of ways to fight this.

My working title was “Be a bon vivant,” but JD thought it would tie in with his site better as How to Live a Rich Life — On a Budget.

Although some of his blog posts are practical, such as “how to make sourdough bread and save a buck on every loaf,” Brewer’s “central shtick,” as he put it, is all about doing what you love.

Ask yourself, are you working a job just to earn enough money to support your lifestyle?

“If you live frugally enough, you can change your work based on what you want to do,” Brewer said. After your family, he said, there is nothing “that has such an importance on whether or not you’re happy than your work.”

[Updated 29 May 2009:  It used to be that the News-Gazette closed articles behind a pay wall after a week, but as of today the link seems to still be working.]