You can read the story here, but the headline really does tell you everything you need to know.
Month: December 2019
Book review: Dear Writer, You Need to Quit
Dear Writer, You Need to Quit by Becca Syme
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have read so many books on writing without writing that I feel it’s become my official career to write about books about writing.
Dear Writer, You Need to Quit is a good book about writing and manages to put a bit of a unique spin on the usual advice. Instead of addressing story structure, plot, characters and other mechanics, or providing the nitty gritty about finding a good agent or other specifics of the business of writing, Becca Syme instead tackles the things a new or indie writer needs to quit doing–including up to the possibility of not writing anymore.
It’s a light read and the tone is conversational–perhaps a bit too much at times–and the way Syme repeats key phrases, like “QTP” (Question The Premise) makes sections of the book feel more like a transcription of a class or talk (which it is, more or less, based on material she uses in coaching sessions and classes). On the plus side, this lends a kind of authenticity to the topics, as Syme isn’t just writing what sounds good, she’s providing advice based on her own experiences with authors. As a bonus, she is not afraid to point out where she has plainly blown it herself.
A lot of the book is built around tempering expectations and looking after yourself while pursuing the dream of making a living as a writer. Syme flatly states that for most people that this will not happen. Don’t quit your job is not a cliché here, it is a repeated mantra. Chapters are spent framing writing as a hobby you might make a little money from, but that’s all. Do it because you love it, but work it into your existing routines, don’t forfeit your job, time and money pursuing a dream that is unlikely to come true.
That sounds like a downer, and Syme admits as much–that if you don’t have the drive, it’s perfectly fine to just quit writing altogether.
She does address more specific topics, too, taking on the idea that you must plot out your story first (or just improvise and never plot), pulling back to essentially say what works for one writer may not work for you. Do what works for you.
In all, this is a breezy and eminently sensible set of tips on how to tackle the writing life. While it seems aimed at indie writers who have a few published novels already, new writers will benefit from at least considering the advice on offer.
Recommended.
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Run 644: Down by the riverside
Run 644 Average pace: 5:45/km Location: Brunette River trail Start: 2:58 pm Distance: 5.02 km Time: 28:52 Weather: Partly sunny Temp: 7ºC Humidity: 76% Wind: light BPM: 170 Weight: 1706. pounds Total distance to date: 4830 km Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8 Shoes: Saucony Switchback ISO (190 km)
After messing around on the treadmill for a few weeks, I could not deny that today the weather was perfectly fine for running outside. I did deny it, a little, and as a result got a late start, not beginning until almost 3 p.m. Because of this, I opted to run at the river, rather than the lake, but compensated a little by walking to the far end of the trail before starting.
Conditions were actually pretty similar to the last run back in November, with little wind and partly sunny skies. I made no plans to push, I just wanted to complete 5K without any embarrassing pratfalls. Or falls.
And I did! Perhaps the workouts on the treadmill have made a difference (though the river vs. lake is generally a faster, easier run), but I lopped an entire 17 minutes from my previous pace, coming in at an average of 5:45/km. I experienced no cramps or other issues, just a general sense of still not being in great shape. But it was okay.
Being outside reminded me of how different it is than the treadmill. It’s cold. You have wind resistance. Did I mention it’s cold? You never know what that giant unleashed dog is going to do. The river trail kind of stinks a little. But when it isn’t stinky, it’s nice to run on a course that actually has turns, to feel that breeze, even if it freezes your cheeks, to see other people, even if they have giant unleashed dogs.
And I was pleasantly surprised by the pace, though the BPM is right on the edge of what I’m comfortable with.
In all, though, a nice return to the great urban outdoors.
On the first day of winter…
I forgot to post.
Yesterday was the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year, and thus my dread enemy. Today, the sun will set very slightly later and before you know it, summer will be here.
The day itself was pretty typical of winters here…damp, cool, but not frozen. And I saw a 10 p.m. showing of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which I will expand upon in another post.
As for the now-completed Fall 2019, it was…okay. Some thing improved, some stayed the same, some got worse. I will focus on the positive:
- I managed to put the brakes on my annual fall weight gain. It’s holding steady and before the end of the month I hope to start sending it downward.
- Related to the above, I continue to use the new treadmill regularly
- I did Inktober! 31 drawings, yay! I’ve only done one since, true, but still…
- I made the right call to skip National Novel Writing Month. I am not ready…yet.
- I got my ears cleaned, my eyes checked and thought about stretching. Soon I’ll actually stretch.
- And some other stuff I can’t remember
Tech quote of the day, December 20, 2019
This is from The Verge’s article The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech, in reference to the Microsoft Band:
Microsoft’s first attempt at wearable hardware looked more like a prison experiment.
Which is pretty much a perfect summation of how the device looked. Too bad Microsoft never kept developing it, because I think, like the Surface line, they would probably have nailed it after a few iterations and the thing was loaded with sensors. Alas.
Treadmill walk: And I would walk 5000 meters
Today while waiting for a Telus tech to arrive and install a fibre connection, I killed some time by doing a walk on ye olde treadmill. I sweated like the proverbial pig (do pigs actually sweat a lot?), so a top priority now is getting a fan mounted to help keep my cool ‘n dry.
I put on The Proclaimers’ Sunshine on Leith, which remains a gem of a pop album and is great for working out to and also, just, you know, listening to. It was also long enough to meet my criteria of exercising for either 50 minutes or 5 km, whichever came first.
As it turned out, I hit the 5K mark before 50 minutes, making it the first time I’ve done so on the treadmill. I then kept up for another minute or so to get the 50 minutes, too. I’m really into fives, apparently.
This time I put the towel in a place where it wouldn’t slip away after the first few minutes, and this was good due to the aforementioned buckets of sweat.
Other than that, it was a good workout. I let the music and my thoughts absorb me, so the 50 minutes went by quickly. My pace was eight seconds faster and BPM was a little lower, so pretty good overall.
Stats:
Speed: 6 km/h Incline: 10 Pace: 9:51/km Time: 50:05 Distance: 5.08 km Calories burned: 533 BPM: 144
Treadmill walk: Wish you were here
In which I did the same thing as Sunday, swapping The Dark Side of the Moon with Wish You Were Here. As a bonus, this album is about four minutes longer. Toward the end I was getting a bit stupid and tired, but saw I was close to getting 500 active calories burned, so that became my new goal and necessitated me adding the Pink Floyd classic “San Tropez” to the mix. I hit 500 before the song concluded and celebrated by sweating copiously.
In all, this was my longest treadmill walk and my latest. I started at 9:13 pm and ended at 9:59 pm. At this time last night I was climbing into bed.
My pace also matched my ending time, ten seconds slower than Sunday, but I walked farther, so I call it even(ish). My BPM was lower, which was nice. My total time was exactly four minutes longer than the previous walk, which is weird.
The stats:
Speed: 6 km/h Incline: 10 Pace: 9:59/km Time: 46:11 Distance: 4.62 km Calories burned: 502 BPM: 146
ScareTrain
This morning I did something I almost never do.
I got off the SkyTrain. You may be thinking I actually do this a lot and you would be correct. During a normal work week I exit a SkyTrain 28 times.
What was different this morning is that I exited at Royal Oak station instead of the usual Waterfront. Was there a system malfunction? Did I suddenly develop an allergy to rapid transit? Did I decide to play hooky and irresponsibly gallivant around Burnaby?
No. Or at least not this time. Rather, I was on one of the original trains and with SkyTrain just this month celebrating its 34th anniversary, that means the train I was riding was significantly older than many of my coworkers. Jeff and I affectionately (?) refer to these trains as three wheelers because they are noisy and tend to offer a rougher ride than the newer ones.
This morning that rough ride was, as they say, turned up to 11. The car was swaying enough that I looked out the windows to see if trees were bending in half from high winds that might also be buffeting the train. But it was calm, with only a light rain falling.
As the train traversed from Edmonds to Royal Oak it began to pitch from side to side strongly enough that I put a hand on one of the poles to steady myself.
I was sitting at the time.
I’d had enough. Carefully hanging on, I got up and exited at Royal Oak, waiting in the light rain for the next train and hoping its twin was not coming. A woman also got out and stood by me in the rain. We exchanged knowing looks.
Fortunately the next train was a Mark II and the rest of the ride was uneventful.
But I’ll be on the lookout for 046. If I want to feel like I’m on a boat pitching in the high seas, I’ll get on a boat that is pitching in the high seas. I prefer my commuter trains to be a little steadier.
UPDATE: Today (the 17th) Jeff reported experiencing the same thing on another train, this one 152. We have your numbers, SkyTrain!
Treadmill walk: A walk on the dark side of the moon
Today I would normally walk to the lake and do a 5 or 10K run (I’m currently doing 5Ks again as I build my stamina back up). It was cloudy, but without a real chance of rain, thought it was cool, hovering around 4-5 Celsius in the morning. I had breakfast, did some chores and thought about running and a persistent voice keep saying, “I don’t wanna.” And I listened to that voice, because I am fat and lazy.
Normally that would be the end of the story, but now I have my good friend, treadmill. I mulled over a few plans–maybe a combo of a walk and a run or something. I decided to start with a 30 minute walk on my now-standard settings of 6 km/h and a 10 incline (yes, it really is walking uphill all the way). I then put on The Dark Side of the Moon because I’ve been in a Pink Floyd kind of mood recently.
And then I decided to walk for the entire album. As a side note, the final track, “Eclipse”, is a rousing way to finish any workout. The choice of music seemed to inspire me, as I walked at a very brisk pace, finishing with the following stats:
Speed: 6 km/h
Incline: 10
Pace: 9:49/km
Time: 42:11
Distance: 4.29 km
Calories burned: 476
BPM: 149
By way of comparison, a 5K run usually nets me about 330 calories or so burned, so walking uphill definitely burns better, though it’s not as intense, given the lower BPM. But I sweat way more. Somehow it all evens out.
Anyway, it was a good workout and offered proof on how having the treadmill is too convenient for me to avoid exercise without feeling massive guilt. Well, so far, anyway. Hopefully it stays that way.
P.S. I have created a new tag cleverly called treadmill walks to record such events apart from treadmill runs.
Book review: Recursion
Recursion by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This type of story is catnip to me: high concept present-day science fiction wrapped around a slick, fast-paced action-adventure.
The story asks a simple question: Do our memories determine our reality? What if we could not just revisit memories, but control them, effectively making the past, present and future exist simultaneously? Could our minds cope with multiple timelines occupying them?
This is a story best read without too much knowledge of the specifics before hand, so I’ll simply say I enjoyed watching the main characters of police detective Barry Sutton and neuroscientist Helena Smith interact as they grappled with the very nature of reality. While the nuts and bolts of the depicted science are kind of hand-wavey, it’s perfectly acceptable for the type of story Crouch is telling, which is less about how we might be able to manipulate memory, but whether we should, and what the effects could be.
As with any story that dabbles in time travel, you can pull apart the plot and argue about how things wouldn’t really work this way or that—the characters themselves even have these kinds of conversations—but this is a romp, full of both spectacular disaster and quiet moments that show what it means to be human.
If you like this kind of story, Recursion comes highly recommended.
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The new Mac Pro wheels
The internet is aflutter over the announced price for adding wheels to the new Mac Pro. They cost $400 ($480 Canadian). The jokes, of course, write themselves.
Could these $400 wheels on a $6,000 computer turn out to be a surprisingly reasonable value?
No, of course not. They’re wheels. I’m pretty sure the fourth wheel will start wobbling in a few years just the same as any cart-like wheels would.
The only weird part is these ludicrous transportation units or whatever Jony Ive might call them (if he still worked at Apple) stand out against some actual reasonable things Apple has done recently, like upgrading the 15 inch MacBook Pro to a 16 inch model without raising the price (though it ain’t exactly cheap to start with), and actually dropping the price of this year’s equivalent to the iPhone XR while improving the specs.
The price doesn’t actually bother me as the Mac Pro is very much in the “maybe if I win the lottery” category and it probably still sucks for gaming. But given Apple’s track record with Macs (inconsistent at best, a disaster of neglect and quality control issues at worst), if I were one of those so-called pros who wants a pro-level machine, I’d be casting back to 2013 when Apple released the last Mac Pro.
It didn’t receive any updates in 2014.
Or 2015.
Or 2016.
Or 2017.
Or 2018 or 2019. It was, in fact, never updated. Apple essentially killed it the day it was released, they just never formally announced its death until four years later, then they continued to sell it for two more years before finally re-inventing a basic, modular PC that optionally comes with $400 wheels.
What I’m saying is if you want to get a new Mac Pro, keep in mind that what you unbox may be the exact same thing you might unbox in six years. And it will be the same price, too.
So will the wheels.
Five things I like about winter
The first day of winter is 10 days away, December 21st. This is the shortest day of the year, with approximately 30 minutes of daylight. The bears are warm in their caves, while humans are in full thrall of the whole holiday thing, crushing against each other in malls for last-minute gifts and possibly some nice frozen yogurt at the food court.
I generally don’t like winter because I am not a big fan of the cold and dark. But in the spirit of being positive, here are five things I do like about winter:
- If it’s officially winter, we’re less than one season away from spring and t-shirt weather
- A little snow looks pretty and gives the world a fleeting peaceful quality
- You can skate outdoors if it gets cold enough
- No need to run the air conditioner
- Risk of a sunburn drops dramatically
Hmm, that’s not really a great list. Let me try a few more:
- A warm mug of hot chocolate can hit the spot
- Running a base heater to warm your toes is far more satisfying than it ought to be
- Watching TV under a thick blanket is nice and relaxing
The obvious theme here seems to be, “Winter is cold, the fun is in finding ways to stay warm.” Some people will argue that it’s easier to get warm than to keep cool, that putting on a sweater will warm you up on a cold day, but taking it off on a hot day may not do much to cool you off on a hot day. This is perhaps true, but given how hot it generally gets here (note to historians reading this in the far future: in late 2019 the metro Vancouver area is not yet a tropical paradise), I don’t find it a big deal to keep from profusely sweating during the summer. And removing layers is somehow better than piling more on.
Anyway, that’s the best I can come up with. To stay positive, we are only 192 days away from summer. Yay!