The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Scott Lynch:

Re: Angela, #286:

Opting to not wear a seat belt, driving fast, and dying in the eventual car wreck is what I consider a Darwinistic weeding out of morons.

Don't do that. Please. Seriously.

I don't mean to pick on you. I'm sure you were being flippant with the best of intentions. But this attitude, which is admittedly easy to cultivate, obscures the true nature of accidents.

The trouble with morons is that morons have family, friends, co-workers, and dependents. A vehicle accident is never solely about the person or persons that cause it. Morons have a distressing tendency to strike other vehicles, or pedestrians, or even buildings, at those moments when their stupidity reaches critical mass. Last year, for example, a drunk driver broad-sided a tour bus full of senior citizens about a mile from my house, seriously injuring nearly half of them. Deserve's got nothing to do with what happened to them.

A vehicle accident will also elicit an emergency response. In my county, for a 1-2 vehicle accident, that will mean anywhere from one to three dozen people in all sorts of uniforms carrying out duties on the scene. Those people are all roused out of whatever they were doing, at any hour, and sent out in any weather to dick around on scenes that are crawling with all manner of hazards. It's easy to point and scoff and say, "Oh, ha ha, that dumbass deserved what was coming to him!" Fine and dandy, but what did we, since I happen to be one of them, do to deserve getting called out to pick up the bloody, jagged pieces in South Shrimpdick, Middle-of-Nowhere at three in the morning?

I'm not an EMT. Thanks to the wonders of politics, my city's public safety department is firmly split into the three inviolate kingdoms of EMS/Rescue/Fire. I'm Fire, and my job at accident scenes is to either assist resuce/EMS (moving stretchers with or without victims) or provide scene safety (traffic control, standby fire hose, etc.). I don't do what Jim does, but in the past two years I've seen (and heard, and smelled) all sorts of disquieting things at fatals and non-fatals alike, from an average vantage point of 5-10 feet from the swearing and screaming.

A vehicle accident reaches out to involve family and community, like ripples spreading from a heavy weight thrown into water. The whole "Bah, serves the idiot right" line of thinking conceals the truth of these events behind the self-congratulatory illusion that Unvirtuous Drivers are just getting what's coming to them and that the going-smoosh process is smooth, fair, and efficient. It ain't.

Yeah, well, to people trying to decide if the headaches of getting published are worth the reward, those sorts of things can loom large.

That's a bit of an ass-backwards worry, and I say that with nothing but helpful intentions. "Getting published" isn't a sellers' market. The biggest problem facing someone looking to get published isn't the contemplation of what a headache it might be once it's accomplished; it's shaking enough crap and bad habits out of their own work to make it palatable to someone whose job is to buy.

I can also tell you this-- compared to the headache of actually writing the damn books, the headache of 'getting published' ain't nothin'. Unless the thought of letting other people take over the vast majority of the remaining work causes migraines.

The story of the writer who sends off his manuscript/screenplay and then sees it published under a different name is well entrenched. I've known people who refuse to join workshops because they fear their work will be stolen. I can't exactly use "Oooh, eek" as an argument against hiding in a hole.

All these things come together to create support for long copyright extensions

By what magic algebra does the "mean people will steal my ideas if I workshop/submit" paranoia (which Teresa could beat like a rented gong for countless reasons with every lobe of her brain tied behind her back) become an argument for long copyright extensions? If mean people prowl workshops and slushpiles looking for ideas to steal, how exactly would copyright extensions, of all things, turn them away, shrieking like movie vampires before a crucifix? (This, to stave off silliness, is by no means an argument against copyright extensions; merely a note that the one thing has nothing to do with the other).

Would you prefer that we go back to the good old days of thalidomide? I wonder how the people who developed liver problems as a result of the medication would feel about your rant?

Because a blanket refusal to allow anyone else to take the drug, under any circumstances, regardless of their own liver condition (or lack thereof), will magically give those people their liver function back! And their choice of a unicorn or a pony delivered to their front door! It's magic!

Isn't it nice to live in a world where all medications affect all people in the exact same way at all times? Say, could you possibly tell the rest of us who don't time-share in that particular la-la land how the fuck to get there? Thanks.

I'm going to patent the concept of an ambulatory semi-autonomous organic mechanism for the separation of desirable fiction from slush (Many Other Functions), and then Tor will owe me money on you.

"Nearly daily, I am having to change text of our entry on your site. Someone not affiliated with PublishAmerica keeps altering the text. How can we stop this from happening. I have posted what the text should be below."

I just spat pop across my desk. That's an instant classic!

Apropos of absolutely nothing on this thread, John, I just wanted to say that I read The Dragon Waiting a week or two ago and had a really, really good time with it.

Yeah, but you have to be careful of which Staples or OfficeMax you go to. OfficeMax #6017, near my house, is fresh out of Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, and John Fowles stand-ups. Christopher Paolini is still available, and Jonathan Franzens are 1/2 off.

As a companion to (or replacement for) flares, I recommend chemical light sticks, the "snap and shake" kind. They have quite a few advantages:

A. They're extremely cheap and readily obtainable;

B. You can use them at an accident site where there might be a danger from spilled fuel or other combustible chemicals, because they won't ignite anything;

C. You can tuck them in a pocket or elsewhere on your person without worrying about burning yourself;

D. You can secure them to physical objects (trees, signs, etc.) with duct tape for instant attention-getters. You can even secure them to yourself (chest, back, back of a hat) to increase your visibility at night; and

E. Even small children can handle them without getting burnt.

For those interested in this topic but freaking out a bit at the thought of it all-- just remember that you do not need to carry a Batman utility belt on your person at all times. Too much stuff on hand can be confusing and time-wasting if you don't drill with it regularly.

Last month, I asked a fellow firefighter for a spanner wrench (basic FF tool used to loosen and tighten hoses). He dug through three pockets on his gear, and accidentally tossed me six pairs of loose nitrile gloves and a packet of aspirin along with the wrench. Too much stuff.

A pair of nitrile gloves* and a CPR barrier mask will take up about as much space as a checkbook, if that. And if you're still averse to carrying stuff like this because you just don't think you could ever possibly use it (squeamishness, nerves, infirmity, whatever), kudos to you for your honesty, but who says you'd be the one to use it? Carry it around in a purse or glove compartment, and you might just be able to pass it on to someone who can.

----

*These suckers aren't just gloves, they're multi-tools. They can be tied around a limb (up to a certain size) as an emergency tourniquet. They can be used to tie hair back. Fill them with ice and they become little ice-packs. You can stick them on things as markers-- "We had to leave two people who couldn't move in the room on the second floor with the glove on the doorknob! Please hurry!"

It only sounds dorky until all hell breaks loose around you.

I was sitting in my hazmat operations class this evening with a bunch of other twentysomethings, the sort I think of as 'kids,' five or six years younger than me. And the details of this whole mess kept unwinding in my mind and distracting the hell out of me.

I feel such a yawning, hideous disconnect between the people actually training to deal with emergencies on the ground and the people supposedly in charge of directing us on a national level. I find it near inexpressible.

It makes me sick to my stomach. I know it's totally irrational, but it feels like the taint of these fuckers is somehow oozing downward and polluting what we do on a local level. As far as this administration is concerned, emergency responders are just like action figures-- they come in bulk, their expressions don't change, they can be posed wherever you want them, and they go back in the box when you're done playing with them.

For several years, the city in my first novel was going to be called Lorem, which I thought was a perfectly serviceable gibberish fantasy name. I eventually had a moment of clarity and named it something else.

For creating and polishing fantasy names, I like to use online phone directories-- French, German, Hungarian, etc. Too many times, I've pretzelled my brain for hours on end trying to come up with the perfect gibberish name, only to find that 50,000 people in Albania have it as a surname.

Scott Lynch: You may be the only person who knows about the last few books in the dekalogy without having been ordered to read them.

And y'know, the damnable thing is that I can't think back on them without feeling some of what Teresa described concerning The Trial of Terra. As long as I don't go back and actually re-read all the stupid things, in one irrational corner of my mind they'll always be these vast, cool, colorful epics that introduced me to so many aspects of plot, character, story arc, and science fiction in general.

When I was in fifth grade, I started reading L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth "dekalogy" ( a foul, ignorant, self-flattering attempt at a neologism if there ever was one). I finished the tenth book in the series at the end of sixth grade.

I was too young to cop to the real essence of the series (that it was Scientology's coo-coo-for-Cocoa-Puffs crusade against psychiatry, with laser guns and sex), and thought I was reading a serious, intricate, series about interplanetary intrigue. Until I got to the eighth volume or so, at which point the game was up, even for me. I finished the series out of a desultory sense of duty.

See, L. Ron died partway through the composition of this particular Crap Everest, and his literary re-animators dealt with this by the clever expedient of having the ghostwriter(s) dump the previous seven-odd books worth of plot. A whole new fucking story breaks out about 80% of the way through the ten books; the guy who narrated the entire series up to that point gets thrown in prison. Very subtle.

Teresa wrote:

Larry, all I can imagine is "not by the ears." Is there more to it?

When we covered what my instructor called "catastrophic casualties" in firefighting class, he gave us three basic pointers for this sort of thing:

A. Look around to see who might be watching (victim's family... chief of police... mayor of the city...) before you do anything.

B. Have a bag or a board or something that will enable you to transport the, um, object in question without undue haste (your adherence to Body Substance Isolation procedures, use of gloves, etc. is already presumed).

C. Whenever possible, especially when there are cameras on the scene, arrange to have another emergency responder "inconveniently" interpose themselves, standing nearby to block a general view of a sight like the lifting and bagging of a severed head. Stretchers and other equipment can also serve this purpose, especially with blankets draped over them.

The stories our instructor gave us by way of example were illuminating. They were also extreme threats to contented eating.

Doh. Wait a minute. All Saints is after Halloween, isn't it? I was under the impression that something imprtant happened on December 1st or 2nd, and I'm drawing a blank. Is there anything there?

What you're missing is the persecution complex that drives people to ignore the thought that "Happy Holidays" is a damned convenient contraction that takes in a period ranging from Thanksgiving to All Saints Day to Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and New Year's, in favor of the thought that it must be another assault by the touchy-feely pinko-atheist brigade on the Christian Societal Bedrock that All Good People Cherish.

See also Wikipedia entries on "whining hypocrite pissants," and "sad song just for you, played by the world's smallest violin."

And hey, if you wanted to be really special, I suppose you could even map out all of these separate chrono-instances from your plot diagrams onto graph paper, choose appropriate yarn colors, and use them as a pattern to knit a hat.

I would so do this, but I can't knit. In fact, I'm a negative knitting quantity. I actually suck talent from knitters when I drive past their houses; baby sweaters end up lopsided, with two necks. Dog comforters turn into Chinese finger traps.

Howdy, Alex. You've already got some good stuff here, so I'll just give you what I think was the most important lesson I've pounded into my own skull in the past year or so:

Don't forget that the characters off-stage should be taking action simultaneously with the characters currently on the page.

I had the damnedest time putting the plot of my first novel together until I realized that most of the cast (including three different sets of antagonists) was just sitting around doing nothing while the main characters were onstage. My plot at the time was a sort of arbitrary teleporter that brought them into contact for pre-ordained setpieces and then ignored them again. Total crap.

I sat down and drew up four different timelines, noting who was where, and what they were doing, at what times. When this was finished, I had a chart that showed me exactly where everyone's plots and schemes would intersect, usually with fireworks.

Once this was done, I was even able to go back and erase things, keeping the first major plot intersection as a new starting point and re-extrapolating from the fallout. It really made the whole thing seem much more organic and lively. So don't forget that every character should be active, all the time, even if the reader doesn't see these actions except through their eventual consequences.

More and more in recent years, I just haven't had the patience to deal civilly with this sort of hothouse flower theology; the idea that everyone else in the entire world should be at pains, all the time, to protect these philosophically fragile jackasses from the need to back up their beliefs with actual self-discipline. Fuck them and fuck their book-burning.

I've been exposed to books, films, and cartoons about cool robots for nearly a quarter of a century. As a kid, I was enthralled by the 'Droids of Star Wars, Go-Bots, Transformers, BattleTech, etc. Still am. So why don't I feel much like fucking my toaster oven?

Mary Kay, I *really* don't think Teresa was being literal here; she was trying to express the ultimate (ludicrous) logical ramifications of this flavor of "It does infect mine eyes" intolerance, and how it's actually fantastically *demeaning* to the philosophies people like Gerald claim to venerate, by implying that they're so ephemeral they'll blow up like a Prince Rupert drop if tweaked by the tiniest glimpse of men holding hands or Harry Potter waving a wand.

This sounds really neat, and I'd like to play with it, but could anyone offer a viable substitute for green tea? There's a major green tea allergy in my drinking circle.

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