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.