As it turns out, there are people who spend more time on YouTube than me...

Check this out: commercials made by celebrities before they were famous. The funny thing is I remember a lot of these, I just never realized that was Sarah Michelle Gellar (or Matt LeBlanc). "A young Keanu Reeves is stuck in a dead-end job, catering banquets for the leisure class. Only two things sustain him: His love of interpretive dance and how pissed those bourgeoisie cocksuckers will be when they find their caviar replaced with Corn Flakes." Plus Seth Green's really bad haircut. It's all good.

This and that

I just saw a call for submissions for an anthology I simply must be in: Paper Blossoms, Sharpened Steel. Stories from Japan, China, and Korea? Sweet! I've already written two Japanese short stories: one is still with WOTF and the other is awaiting the final word from Black Gate (wish me luck, all; I'd absolutely kill to be in Black Gate) (metaphorically, of course). I've been waiting for the perfect story idea to make it a triptych; this might be a nice opportunity to get to work on that. But there is also a little voice in the back of my head that points out that I've written stories set in Japan and stories set in China, but I've never written a story set in Korea. Of course I don't know much about Korea really; I'd have to submerse myself in Korean things to get a feel for it, and I'm still soaking in India at the moment. Well, I have until mid December to work out what I'm going to do, but I will be submitting something.

This week is vacation week from homeschooling, and I plan to spend it revising a certain short story with airships in it and trying another pass at the middle chapters of Tao of Troth. The beginning and end of that book I'm pretty much happy with, but the middle is seriously pissing me off.

I'm getting anxious to call it done and move on, though. After a month of Indian immersion the up-until-this-point-disparate elements of the story I'm planning to write next are starting to link up in really pleasing ways. It's gotten to the point where I'm ready to start committing words to paper (or Word document, I guess, since I gave up the notebooks). Did I mention that was what the Bollywood was all about? Novel research? You'll probably never be able to tell from reading the finished product, but there it is. It's always weird how that works. I had story problems solve themselves in my head while watching Veronica Mars, even though my solution did not in any way resemble what was going on in VM. I just play "what if?" in my head while watching movies and TV, changing the plot and characters in my head to how I would have written them differently. Not necessarily trying to improve things, just messing about and experimenting in my head, although on occasion I've gone back to watch something again and caught myself expecting a scene that never took place because it was one I was making up when I was watching it. Movies that almost work are my favorite for doing this to. By the fifth or sixth extension out of "what if... but then what if..." I suddenly realize I'm not really rewriting the show I'm watching anymore, I'm fixing that problem that's been stumping me in the WIP. And it always takes me by surprise, which is a bit silly, I suppose.

One last little thing, here's a cool quiz to find out what book you are. I'm not terribly surprised to find out what I am:

You're Ulysses!
by James Joyce
Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Cool!

Typical Homeschooling Day

I still tend to think of myself as new to homeschooling, but just this morning I was counting back and realized this summer makes six years of doing formal school everyday. That kind of makes me an old hand at it now. Not only that, if we follow the plan and have Aidan take college classes for the last two years of high school, that means I'm halfway through with his schooling. Now that feels really weird. So, for those who wonder just what it is we actually do all day, here's a sort of amalgated "typical" day around here.

8:30 a.m.: Aidan, the pathological clockwatcher, wakes me up, then wakes his brother up and the two of them get their own breakfast. I wonder out to the computer and read blogs, consume something caffeinated, and don't officially wake up until about 9 a.m. (Not because I'm lazy, I should point out; I work til midnight and take at least an hour to wind down after that before I can sleep. I need 8 1/2 hours of sleep to function properly, which I'm hoping I'll be able to get again in about ten years...)

9:00 a.m.: Mom's awake; time for the fifth grade class to get going. (Grade level is pretty meaningless when you're homeschooling. "Fifth grade" here only means we're following that level of curriculum in Well-Trained Mind, so he's doing biology for science all year, and he's starting logic. He's not quite ten so he's considered a fourth grader this year on the forms we send to the public school. He's doing Saxon 6/5 this year, which is for normal 6th graders or fast 5th graders, but in other subject areas like spelling he's doing fourth grade work. I would guess it averages out to fifth grade, but again pretty meaningless.) Aidan gets a sheet with all assignments to be done during the week every Monday morning, and he has until 6 p.m. Friday to get it all done. He picks what order he does things in and how much he does each day. We had a few very stressful Fridays at first, but he's worked out how to pace himself now, mostly. Logic stage history has a lot more reading than he's used to, he's constantly reading one novel or another about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or some other Middle Ages story.

10:00 a.m.: Time for the first graders to get started (again, the grade is a bit meaningless; Oliver is 6 so for reporting on public school forms he's still a kindergardener, but he's already halfway through first grade math). First graders and fifth graders don't mix well; if you try to put them in the same room they'll kick each other under the table. Worse, the first grader is the class clown and lives to distract the fifth grader from his work. Life has been much easier since the first grade relocated to the little table in the living room. Today, he's brought a stuffed octopus in a plastic tote to class. He says her name is "Octopussy". Not that he's seen any James Bond yet, apparently he came up with that on his own. He senses there is something about that word, though; you can tell, as he keeps watching for a reaction everytime he says it. Keep your game face on.

Aidan is studying the middle ages for history (we fell off the WTM schedule fairly early on so he never made a complete circuit of history for the grammar stage. On the plus side, he knows ancient history pretty well). For science they are both doing biology, and specifically studying animals at the moment. We have a tank with eight African lion frog tadpoles swimming in it. (The kit from Insect Lore insists that most or all of these will die before they make it to frogs, but we've yet to lose one. It would be just my luck to end up with eight full-grown frogs that have to stay in captivity since African frogs don't belong in Minnesota.) He also does math, writing, spelling, logic, and Latin. He's already looking forward to finishing Latin, as he gets to pick which language he learns next and he has his heart set on Hindi (I wonder why?). He's only halfway through the first of two levels of Latin, so he has plenty of time to change his mind a million times on what he does next (hopefully to something Mom already knows a little of, although with Hindi at least we know a native speaker he can chat with).

Oliver does math, writing, science (also animals; he already watched his caterpillars turn into butterflies and released them in our garden), and history (ancient history for him). He reads at night with his dad rather than with me, which gives me a little more time with Aidan during the day. We've been studying Egypt for a while now, as Oliver is mad for Egypt. He has a death fixation (Quin has taken to referring to him as "Tim Burton" lately because of his decidedly morbid leanings) and is also taken with the idea of having lots of different gods, so it's just his sort of thing.

10:00-12:00: I hope you didn't think you were going to sit down. Give the first grader his math drill sheet so he can practice addition, then go see how the fifth graders are doing. The fifth graders are out of their seats again, watching the tadpoles eat. Shoo them back into their chairs and get them going on something from their assignment sheet. Go back to the first grade room. Octopussy was getting stuffy in the tote, so she's now wrapped around his neck. Unfortunately he's having a tough time seeing the math sheet with the octopus in the way. Get that sorted out and head back to the kitchen in time to stop the fifth grader from shutting all the windows because he's cold. The fact that he's only dressed in underpants didn't occur to him as possibly being the source of this problem. Send him downstairs to get dressed.

Dhol Baaje just come up on the Party Shuffle. Everyone get up and leap and spin around the house! (Um, recess?) While it's generally understood that the Party Shuffle randomly plays songs (and it runs all day most days; we like music to think by), what's not commonly known is that the teacher can tell it to play something specific next. Don't spoil the secret! (What we do for "recess" changes a lot. Sometimes it's going outside and running around the house, sometimes it's running up and down the stairs. Mostly it's an excuse to get out of chairs and move around, which I think is particularly important for boys, and especially particularly important for my boys. Aidan is calm now, but when he was 4-6 I got asked a lot by "well meaning" types if he was ADD. Nope, just a normal boy with lots of energy). Sometimes, to everyone's surprise, Dhol Baaje comes up twice or three times because it's just that kind of day.

12:00: Time to make lunch while giving the fifth graders their spelling test and checking their memory work (he knows all the kings of England, all the US presidents, and all the dynasties of China plus a bunch of poems. We're working on the time periods of Japan now). Consider once again putting your school on bag lunch, but then you remember you'd still be the one packing the lunch. (I love teaching school; I hate making lunch).

12:30-2:00 p.m.: The first graders have wrapped up their work (although they're still carrying Octopussy around in that plastic tote, and she keeps farting through the plastic in the direction of the fifth graders. Have the first graders sit down and watch Crocodile Hunter. We're going to call that a science supplement, OK?).

2:00 p.m.: Technically the school day is done. This is "nap time" when everyone goes to separate rooms and does their own thing. This is supposed to be your writing time, but you haven't gotten on the treadmill yet, Aidan has left you a stack of reports to proofread, and the house is a mess. Don't be surprised if it takes you until 4 p.m. to get this all sorted out.

4:00 p.m.: Nap time is done, time for doing math homework, correcting the math homework, starting dinner, and checking work e-mail before everyone in the office goes home for the day.

4:30 p.m.: The boys sit down and watch their favorite show, Arthur, and fantasize about what public school is like (no lie; they are completely fascinated by this show. It's like anthropology for them).

5:00 p.m.: Get Aidan settled in with the computer and Teach Me Piano. A human teacher would be nice, but expensive, and just when are you going to take him to lessons? Luckily he likes the program and it doesn't take any time from you. Although the first graders and Octopussy are still lingering in the living room looking for trouble. You can usually lure them into the kitchen if the music is good, although his interest in food preparation waxes and wanes.

5:30-6:00 p.m.: Dinner with the family. This is also the only 30 minute time in the day you spend with your husband, and you'll be lucky to get a word in edgewise. This is the downside to homeschooling and working both. He'll sneak down to your office later to steel your gum out of your drawer, no worries.

6:00 p.m. to god knows when: Slaving for the man. Although you like your job; there is always a cool new word you have to hit the books to check the spelling of, and even the old words are just fun to say. Crista galli. Diastometamyelia. Astrocytoma.

Now you can probably see why I prefer books that lend themselves to being read in 5 or 10 minute chunks, held in one hand while you stir something or unload the dishwasher. Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love spending every day with my boys.

Watch me try to tie this into Heinlein

So I've decided to go ahead and tackle those Heinlein novels. I've read some of his later stuff, but now I'm going through it all in chronological order. My husband is a big Heinlein fan. Back when we were just friends ("just friends" here means only one of us was crushing badly over the other. The other was bragging to his friends how cool it was to be platonic friends with a girl. I only occasionally rub his nose in that), we used to trade books to read. To start, I had him read The Power of Myth, and he gave me Stranger in a Strange Land. So that was the first Heinlein I read. We've discussed Heinlein's open relationships and lack of sexual jealousy back when we were "just friends" and again when we were married (we never really did date properly), and more recently as it came up again when I was reading For Us, The Living. I think it's a nice enough idea but totally unworkable for most humans, and the idea that people who are "more evolved" can handle it I find a bit repulsive. (And don't even get me started on the idea that everyone should be nude all the time. I have a prudish streak embedded in my DNA, this is true, but just speaking purely physiologically, I could not be naked all the time. 'nuff said).

My husband will say he is more in line with Heinlein's thinking than I am, but between you and me he really isn't. He did admit when I first read the book and came back to talk to him about it that on his first time through when he was a teenager, when he reached the scene with Michael and Jill and the circus performer he actually threw the book away. He didn't read it all the way through until he had left home (and more thoroughly discarded his fundamentalist upbringing). But it is his favorite book of all-time, and his cat is named Valentine for Valentine Michael Smith.

But he's not as "evolved" as these Heinlein characters. Now, it's entirely possible I've been having a bit too much fun at his expense of late. He caught me watching the movie No Entry while in my office the other day. I wasn't really watching it, it was on in the background for noise, but I saw his jaw drop in mid sentence and glanced over at the screen. It was this scene, with Salman Khan comes up out of the water, shirtless natch. Now, for my money he's much hotter when he gets out of the car at the hotel, wearing a shirt and a jacket, but Quin was so appalled I just had to rib him a little.

"I know, it's like looking directly into the sun, isn't it?" I said.

"That's so not what I was thinking. Good god, those are tiny shorts," he said. You should've seen his face.

So that night we sat down to watch Salaam-e-Ishq, which I was supposed to wait to watch with him because it has Govinda in it. It's an ensemble modeled after Love Actually (only it's nearly four hours long). We were about 30 minutes into it before Salman Khan turned up, and Quin actually pegged me in the head with a papertowel.

"You didn't tell me he was in this!"

"Yes, I did! Look, he's on the box and everything."

Then the DVD glitched halfway through (ironically enough just when Salman had taken his shirt off) and I have to wait for my replacement copy to get here before I can see how it all ends. Now we're watching Baadshah instead, a Shah Rukh Khan movie. He's fun too. He reminds Quin of Jerry Lewis from the old Martin and Lewis days. I get more of a Michael Jackson feel from him, but maybe that's just because he likes to sing and dance while he's chasing women down the street.

So you'd think that would be the end of it, but no. I woke up this morning and my desktop had been changed from this:

To this:

I haven't said a word. I did sneak over to his side of the computer and change his picture of airplanes to this:
Only because I couldn't find one where she was showing off her butt. I was looking to change mine anyway. I like darker colors on a desktop. This shouldn't offend, I don't think:

Writing colorblind

I'm piggy-backing on a very interesting conversation that's been happening on Scalzi's blog here, as it got me thinking about my own writing. "Writing colorblind" means the writer does not give any racial identifiers to any of their characters; it's up to the reader to fill them in themselves. The argument against this is that for nearly all readers, the default is all-white. Which leads to the debate: who's the racist, the writer or the reader?

Yeah, I don't write colorblind at all. Quite the opposite. There are a couple of reasons for that. I have very clear ideas in my head what all my characters look like, for one. In order to write characters with no tip-offs as to their race, you'd have to leave out any mention of their appearance, wouldn't you? I couldn't do it.

But mostly it's because the culture my characters come from is so integral to who they are I couldn't possibly leave it out or try to be oblique and let the reader guess what background I'm referring to.

I think this is one of the ways that fantasy is different from science fiction. To have people in separate cultural groups in a fantasy novel is the default setting. But science fiction looks to the future, and the majority opinion seems to be that in the future we'll all be mixed. No one will be Asian, European, or African anymore; we'll all be sort of tan and not really have any cultural identifiers at all. We'll all eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and of course no one observes any religion.

I find that vision of the future really dull, frankly. Give me Tobias Buckell's Caribbeans, or Ian McDonald's India of the near future.

This is going to have to be a half-formed thought for now, as school beckons. I'll just close by saying one of the things I find really cool about YouTube is watching how other places around the world reflect American culture back at us. Take, for instance, hip-hop and in particular the "pimp walk". When you take it to Taiwan:



Or to India:



What you get back does not look to me like a melting together into one meta-culture. It's an exchange of ideas where what you get back is a thoroughly Chinese take on it, or a thoroughly Indian one. Cool.

Jaan-E-Mann

I remember the first time I saw Moulin Rouge very well. It was the very night it came out on DVD. Not a good night for Oliver, who was single-digit-months-old at the time; I watched the whole movie on foot walking back and forth across the room because he refused to be laid down until well after midnight. I also saw all of The Mummy on foot walking back and forth with a single-digit-months-old Aidan, but it was at a drive-in, so I couldn't even hear it. Which is fun in it's own way, but we gave up and went home five minutes into The Matrix. You kinda have to hear that one. But I digress, I was reminiscing about Moulin Rouge. Hot, sticky night. Cranky baby. Husband in the "I'm in indulging you watching this with you. I'd rather be watching the Discovery Channel" mode.

Then the line came up. "Suddenly an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof. He was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun." I turned to my husband and said "This is the best movie ever." And that line is in the first five minutes of the movie, before any of the musical numbers. But I already knew. And yes, I re-watched it a lot in the following weeks, so much so that Aidan, not quite 4 at the time, took to singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" when we were shopping at Target.

I really hoped that more musicals would follow. I love old musicals, but I crave the new. Sadly, that never happened. Unless you count "Once More With Feeling", the musical Buffy episode, which I've also rewatched about a million times (I'm counting it).

I've finally found a movie that not only is a musical but has the same kind of surreal, silly, whatever humor that lends itself to lines like "Suddenly an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof. He was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun." It's almost metafiction: the characters in it are well aware that they are in a musical. The back of the set morphs into a huge stage with colored lights, and the MC tells his uncle it would be easier just to show him his flashback than to explain everything. And the present day characters walk in and out of flashbacks, look at younger versions of themselves. When two of them are about to sing the cabinet in the living room rattles until they open the doors and let the band out so they can set up, because you can't sing without a band. And dancing girls. And dwarves in brightly colored costumes.

Now, this is a Bollywood movie, so this means 1) it's in Hindi (although you'd be surprised how many English loan words and slang phrases are used in Hindi films) and 2) it's three hours long. I had to watch it in two segments because I just don't have 3 hours of TV time all lined up like that. The first half, which is very much a Cyrano de Bergerac story with the cool guy helping the mega-geek score with the woman he's adored since college, had me laughing my ass off (all alone; my husband didn't watch this one. It's possible he's Bollywooded out, so we've been watching the BBC episodes of the The Office together). The second half nearly had me sobbing (of course with all this extra stress I've been carrying around lately, that doesn't take much. But it's nice to have the release. And watching The Office, about a company where everyone may or may not be about to lose their jobs, helps as well).

The director does so many cool things with digital effects, the angles of the camera; it's a gorgeous movie just to look at. It has a little Singing in the Rain homage. It has an Irish step dance complete with bagpipes (in a Bollywood movie - so cool). It's also written incredibly well. It circles around the same events from the past, but everytime it revisits them, it adds a layer that changes the context from the last time you saw it. Then there is a huge reveal which was such a complete surprise. It made me appreciate how cool it is to see a movie I've never read reviews of, or seen trailers for, or heard people talking about. I haven't felt that level of surprise since the first time I saw The Sixth Sense.

(I've not just been watching movies, honest! I wrote a short story in two days, which is tremendously productive since it's a school week. I hope to have it all nice and polished by tomorrow for my critique group to have at it with the mallets and hacksaws. I might have to settle for semi-polished. I think it came out pretty well though, so we'll see.)

"The End" but not really

I typed those words yesterday, but I don't feel like I've finished yet. Some things are still bugging me, but in a vague way I can't quite pin down. I'll see if next week brings any enlightenment. I hope so; I'm kind of looking forward to starting the next thing.

I was watching another one of those Bollywood movies last night (yes, we call this obsession; this is the way I do everything), where Salman Khan plays a half-Italian who goes to India to learn singing from a master. After the teacher accepts him as his student, he tells him the difference between a false singer and a true singer. A hungry singer is a false singer, because he sings from his stomach; a true singer always sings from his heart.

Which is a much more poetic way of saying what I was trying to say earlier this week about my writing.

My July Book Report

I didn't get much read this past month, and what I did read were all new arrivals, so nothing came off my To Be Read stack. At least what I did read was all cool.

Of course I started off by rereading the first six Harry Potters. Two of them fell apart on this go-round; the spines split and the pages now come in a few discrete chunks. (They still look better than my first copy of An Elegant Universe, which is held together by a rubber band, but I have to keep it because that's the copy with all my notes in it. Yes, I'm the evil kind of person who writes in books). But I finished off the rereading a few days before Book 7 was due so I plunged into Lois McMaster Bujold's Legacy, which is the second half of The Sharing Knife two part series. I liked it better than Beguilement, the first half; she took her world-building to some interesting places. She is trying to do something different here than with her Vorkosigan books or even her other fantasies, so you can't really compare them, but even so I felt like these were just slighter stories than what she usually does. A pleasant way to spend an afternoon or two, but I didn't get that buzz in my brain reading Bujold usually gives me.

I was still only two-thirds of the way through with Legacy when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turned up (I had ordered it from Amazon.com; I don't know why. I had the day off work just to read it, I certainly could have started the day with a trip to the grocery store to pick up a copy. Force of habit, I guess). It took almost exactly 12 hours to read it. On the one hand, she did lots of things I liked (not the least of which was not killing off Harry), but mostly I prefer that other version of Book 7. You know, the one I was writing in my head since I finished Book 6. My version took place at Hogwarts, went deeper into the history of the place, and had a lot more of Snape, Neville, and Ginny. I think when all is said and done, I'd rank Deathly Hallows after Order of the Phoenix for sure, that one's still my fave. It might be second or third after The Half-Blood Prince. I don't know; I'll let you know in a year when I've read it for the third time.

The next book I read this month was another one I plowed through in a day, The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, otherwise known as Lemony Snicket. I had no idea he had written other novels under his own name until Andrew Wheeler mentioned this one on his blog (and if you're like me and are on the look out for new things to read, his blog is the bomb. I could never read that many books, but Wheeler's tastes are a lot like mine (SF and fantasy but also mainstream and literary novels and even comics) and I've found him a pretty good guide to what's cool). You know, I have lots of writers I admire for one thing or another; Handler is one of the very few that makes me outright jealous. I wish I were half so clever with the word play. This book isn't for kids; it's about some kids in their last year of high school. It has elements of Heathers and Fight Club in it, but mostly it's Handler and well worth a look.

The only other book I read is actually a 3-in-1 of Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness books called The Magic of Reason. If there is one thing that bugs me about Harry Potter, it's that the magic has no rules or cost. If it's convenient to the plot, anything can happen because she doesn't really have a magical system she has to fit it into ("The wand chooses the wizard" might be considered a rule, but it's so lightly used it's really inconsequential. The fact that it becomes a major hinge point for the plot of book 7 is another reason why I prefered the one in my head. I don't get this business with the wand). At any rate, Larbalestier's books are the opposite of that. Her magical system is very clearly thought out, and it rocks. Different characters have different ways of perceiving magic (the MC Reason sees it as math, most of which went over my head in the most delightful way. I love a writer who doesn't feel she has to talk down to me just because I never made it farther than pre-calc). Even cooler than the clearly defined way magic works is the cost: the characters give up years of their life every time they use magic, but if they don't use magic at all they will go insane. So these 15-year-olds are constantly weighing the costs of any action they take: will they take a step closer to dying before they're even 20, or a step closer to madness? And just to show how suggestible I am by other people's use of language, when I was writing the other day one of my characters was in zero G and chundered. Delete, delete, delete; my characters are Greenlanders, not Aussies; they don't chunder. (The book actually has an index for all the Aussie-speak used).

Well, that's a brief wrap-up, but I'm hoping to get another 2000 words in today before I have to go to that picnic thing. I'm off!