The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by OtterB:

Caroline @56
I didn't actually have to apply this on my dissertation, but I've used it on other things. It is close to the antithesis of the "arse glue" rule, so if one doesn't work for you, try the other. Take the project that seems overwhelming as a whole and break the next steps down into smaller and smaller pieces until the next piece is so small that you feel silly NOT doing it, or until you reach the level where you can say, "Oh, I can do that!" Then do it. And then reward yourself. Sometimes this gets you sufficiently engaged to go on. If not, at least you've taken a baby step forward.

This is from one of Martha Beck's books. I find her most recent stuff a little on the flaky side, but much of her earlier motivational writing is spot-on for me.

SylvieG
I hope there's some consolation in having company.

Here's Kipling, the beginning of The Power of the Dog

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

The "Worst Product Ever" (Particle) is a title not bestowed lightly, I'm sure, but in this case I'd say it was justified.

I don't know. It's obviously nuts to use this while actually driving, and there are bound to be people who are that nuts, but I can imagine sane uses of it if it attaches and detaches easily. While waiting to pick up a kid or a spouse somewhere. If you have the kind of job where you drive from customer to customer and want to make some notes at the end of each appointment. If you take a car-carrier ferry to work. This would let you work on a full-sized laptop or (hey, what a concept) write on paper instead of being limited to a Blackberry or iPhone kind of task.

I'm not planning to buy one, but surely there are worse.

I do enjoy the books where an author creates a fake brand and, just by the way the characters talk about and react to it, you can imagine what kind of thing it is supposed to be. But a little of that goes a long way, and the real thing dates quickly. (And, as Charlie Stross and Mez point out, is culturally limiting.)

Terry Karney @79
I have friends, whose families have been here since the 1700s, who get asked for green cards.

I have a Latina colleague from New Mexico whose family has lived there since the late 1700s. She says her grandmother says, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us."

More reading suggestions for Michael Roberts. I also like Heyer - and didn't even count her in "romances" as I read her stuff back in high school & college and loved it then - but my husband, whose SF taste seems to overlap with yours (he reads mostly hard SF and techno/military thrillers), finds her "meh." On the other hand, to the surprise of both of us, he thoroughly enjoys Nora Roberts, especially the J. D. Robb "In Death" series but also some of her standalone contemporaries, in particular Northern Lights. He also enjoyed some of Susan Grant, e.g. The Star King, and Linnea Sinclair, The Down-home Zombie Blues. (I leave these scattered around the house like bait, and sometimes he picks them up, but he's released to the wild afterward and not harmed in the process.)

In the SF-with-romance category, unless I missed it, you didn't mention Lee & Miller's Liaden books. I'd recommend starting with either Agent of Change or Conflict of Honors; both have been reprinted in ominbi.

And there was a post on tor.com a week or two ago about steampunk romance, so you might look back at that. The only book I remember offhand was "A Clockwork Heart" by Dru Pagliassotti, which I found enjoyable but not OMG outstanding.

Michael Roberts @425
I've been a SFF reader since the mid-60s. I'd always disdained romance books, but sometime in the mid 80's, while in graduate school, I started reading them for stress relief and found that I really enjoyed some of them. Sturgeon's Law applies, but then so does YMMV.

What are some examples of SF and fantasy books or authors you particularly like? Might help in picking some suggestions.

Re Frankenstein. Been a long time since I read it too, but the comments here are skewing toward the assumption that Dr. Frankenstein's creation was a human being and entitled to the respect & care due a dependent human being for which one is responsible. I would agree, but I wonder if Shelley or most of her readers were capable of seeing it that way? I get the impression many of them didn't even view their servants that way, much less this "monster."

I have tried NaNoWriMo a couple of times and never gotten very far. (I have, by the way, completed manuscripts of two unpublished/unpublishable novels in the past, so it's not just the length that's an issue.) It's my intent to try again this year. I haven't actually started yet, having had trouble deciding between two or three possible projects, but in the interest of breaking the logjam and getting words on paper, I have picked one and am about to Go Forth and Commit Novel.

Daughter the elder (high school) went to school Friday as a ninja. The hit among her friends, writing geeks for the most part, was the girl who came dressed as Hester Prynne. Daughter the younger was going to be a cowgirl, but had a cold, so we kept her home since it was raining lightly.

We only got two or three trick-or-treaters, fewer than usual. Our neighborhood usually has lots, but most of them don't come to us; we're the last house before you pass a couple of transition-zone businesses and then get to a main road. Most people circle the block deeper in the neighborhood.

One of the kids' schools is collecting leftover candy to donate to an organization that uses it in filling Christmas stockings for armed forces members. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Open threadiness, and counterpoint to the sidelight on the decline of newspaper circulation

Joel Achenbach, in this morning's Washington Post, on the power of narrative in an increasingly online and crosslinked world. (may require registration)

Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this. They know that the story is the original killer app.

Lots of good thoughts. I recommend highly.

candle @164 *applause*

there was a mailing list for kink & fetish players named "LMNOP"

That's going to mix Really Badly with the muse of preschool entertainment, and I don't think it's the sense of "twisted" that KeithS meant. Trying really hard to clamp brake on brain before it goes there.

'Elemenope' sounds like it should be some linguistic or poetic phenomenon like syncope or synechdoche.

I think it (she?) belongs on the list of the muses. Joining Calliope, Mnemosyne, etc., is Elemenope, the muse of preschool entertainment.

"Fire all bassookas!"
1812 overture with real cannons?

Joel Polowin @143. Haven't read the Brown story, but you've made me curious. Never saw the Twilight Zone episode either, but that doesn't surprise me since I recall seeing only one or two of the original shows and finding they were sufficiently creepy to be Not My Cuppa.

Serge @123 That reminds me of the revived Twilight episode "Cold Reading", in which a radio serial's people realize that every time they refer to a sound effect, it becomes real - for example, a rifle literally pops up and starts firing.

Which reminds me, in turn, of the Anthony Boucher story "We Print the Truth," where the newspaper publisher is granted a wish that his paper will always print the truth. A high-minded wish, to be sure, but like all such, with its down side. As I recall, the first problem occurs when a typo in an obituary reports a woman dying at the age of 18, instead of 81, and there's a frightening youthful corpse at the wake... I've forgotten how it ends, though I think it's with the destruction of the printing press.

And on The Mouse That Roared, I remember the book and at least one or two of the sequels but don't think I ever saw the movie. *Add to Netflix queue*

Charlie, thanks re Northern Lights. I saw them once in the 10 years I lived in the Chicago suburbs and, having Edinburgh pegged in my mind as "further north," hoped they might be more visible.

David Harmon @89 Either way, the greatest danger to an occupation might well be bankruptcy!

Tangential, but this reminded me of The Mouse that Roared. I haven't reread that for years and years. Anybody else remember it?

Charlie Stross @45 Thanks. That's about what I thought for weather. Do you get opportunities to see the Northern Lights?

Edinburgh - never been there, but planning a short visit next February. Not, perhaps, an ideal time to visit, but I'm taking my daughter who is applying to University of Edinburgh and to St. Andrews, and that's the best combination of available time and available flights with frequent flyer mileage. And I figure if she's deciding on whether to go to school there, she might as well see some of the down side.

Xopher @294, David Harmon @299. I agree, unfortunately, that a simple "inattentional blindness" doesn't describe Teresa's experience. I was thinking of that concept more for the chorus of "It happens to me, too," many of which weren't quite so ... egregious. I generally believe behavior has some reason or serves some purpose for the person who is behaving that way, even if it's not always obvious to the observer, but no amount of looking sideways at it makes what Teresa experienced make any sense to me.

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