The Dork Lord, on His Dork Throne

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Note to the Galley:
Romulan ale no longer to be served at diplomatic functions.

Current Mood: Oh, wow, my head...

In Saratoga Springs
Got into Albany last night on a fascinatingly wobbly flight (regional jet + high winds = wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee) and drove north to Saratoga Springs. Milling around this afternoon, buying a few essentials and waiting to go to dinner with one of my lovely editors... drunken fistfights over the literary legacy of H.P. Lovecraft are strictly prohibited before 8 PM on WFC opening days, but I'll be sure to let y'all know who takes one to the jaw over At The Mountains of Madness.

Update Fu
I have been a bit muted about it, because I haven't been sure how to react in public, but it's no secret that The Lies of Locke Lamora is a nominee for a World Fantasy Award this year. I'm buzzed as all hell about this-- having read all the novels that have previously won the award, I think it's a marvelous and eclectic body of work and I'm tickled just to have an also-ran in its shadow. I'm also pleased that two of the novels I voted for made the final five, and I'm really looking forward to losing to one of them this weekend.

I will be leaving tomorrow (Wednesday) for Saratoga Springs, NY, and will be returning on Monday November 5th. For those attending WFC this year, I'll be having a reading on Friday afternoon, 4:30 PM, in Broadway 1. I think I'll be pulling two excerpts from The Republic of Thieves.

In other news, Jen and I are delighted to report (frazzled though we are by the haste and hustle of it all) that we are escaping from our townhome and our annoying management company to a beautiful rental house about a mile across town, more on the southeastern side of the city. Four bedrooms, two baths, finished basement, and a fenced-in yard for Valkyrie's sake... all I can say is that I picked the right day to buy a paper and read the classifieds. My better half will be setting things in order while I'm gone, and we'll be moving the heavier stuff as soon as I'm back, and then perhaps we can have a proper housewarming party in an actual house rather than the tiny living room of this place.

Edit: Hot tub. The place has an outdoor hot tub. Didn't even notice last time we were there. Doubleplus bonus. Outdoor hot tubs on freezing December and January nights are truly part of life's rich pageant.

Another One Too Soon
Jim Rigney, better known to literally millions as Robert Jordan, passed away this weekend. I read this at Nielsenhayden.com last night and found myself in an unexpected funk.

I was not a fan of the Wheel of Time books, probably because I came to them in my twenties with my tastes already fairly developed. I was never able to get past the opening of the second book, and those of you who've known me for ages I'm sure absorbed my criticism and invective years ago. I once wrote at excruciating length upon the weaknesses of the books as I perceived them, and while I thought it was extremely clever and somehow necessary at the time, the years since have drastically mellowed my taste for mocking the work of other authors who aren't huge assholes in person or pushing a distasteful agenda with their work. About the best I can say for my mosquito bites is that I sincerely hope Jordan himself never had them called to his attention. Something tells me he would have given them the eye roll they deserved.

I was bitten at a very impressionable age by the Hugely Epic Series bug. I read L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth decalog starting in fifth grade, and was too young to realize that it was schlocky, thinly veiled Scientology propaganda. Somewhere in the back of my mind I still have the glowing impression of my personal Misconstrued Mission Earth, a heroic galaxy-spanning epic that seemed to unfold endless promise in front of me. And if that glowing feeling is what kindled in the minds of Jordan's readers when they thought of the Wheel of Time sequence, then he helped them conjure something to be treasured.

It's pretty fashionable, in the online goldfish bowl that seems to be the majority of genre criticism, to reflexively spit on the very concept of the fantasy series. But fuck 'em. Snark is the cheapest of all forms of prose, and it comes no cheaper than from those who never had the vision or the persistence to create something grand with their own words and time. Robert Jordan brought a huge audience a little dose of the numinous; something that caught their imaginations and helped the slow and painful parts of their lives pass more quickly. It takes a freakish combination of drive and ambition to lay out the architecture of a literary work so vast, let alone actually write the damn thing.

What Jordan created was grand, and worthy, and special. I regret that the words at the end of the last page will trail off into nothingness, and that he didn't get whatever time would have been needed to close the sequence as he saw fit. I envy his readers who found themselves caught up in a private magic while reading his books.

His was a good work, and a difficult work, and the rest of us should be so goddamn lucky as to do what he did.

My condolences to all of you who were his family, friends, and readers.

Your Powers Are Weak, Old Man!
I am Stumbly McSlow this fine afternoon... Excedrin and caffeine have restored some of my powers of movement, but I won't be riverdancing any time soon.

Late Saturday night we had a call for a house fire in a neighboring township, and quite contrary to routine it was an actual, honest, fully-involved structural blaze. We worked on it for a good three hours, came home, cleaned up, and dispersed... only to get paged out again at the crack of dawn for a suspected "rekindle" at the same location. When we hit the scene again the place was once again fully involved, flames shooting through the disintegrated roof, and so forth. Everything we'd managed to save the first time around was now hot 'n' spicy. So we worked on it another couple of hours, until there was essentially no structure left to go 'whoosh' again .

Last night, a wave of extremely violent thunderstorms swept through the Twin Cities metro area, finally hitting us about half an hour after our department meeting and drill had ended. Heavy rains lashed the hell out of the town for just a few minutes before my pager started going off, but what a few minutes they were... a tree was down across the road I usually take to get to the station, loose foliage and yard crap was tumbling across every street, visibility was approximately five feet, and I had to stop twice to drag branches out of my truck's front grill.

Our pages kept coming and coming... power lines down, trees down, houses damaged... every resource we had was more or less continuously engaged from the start of this mess until just before dawn this morning, plus backup from two nearby departments. My crew's first job was to cut up and clear a tree blocking the main road to the city's hospital... then we ran around downtown pulling out emergency stop signs at intersections where the lights were off... then we ran around blocking off downed power lines with cones and borrowed construction barricades. Natural gas leaks, electrical fires, lost and stranded vehicles... I couldn't pay more than perfunctory attention to the messes all the other crews were dealing with. As the night wore on, I found myself hosing down a tractor-trailer engine that had caught fire (a freak accident unconnected to the storm), investigating more downed lines, investigating structural collapses and smashed trees... it all just sort of ran together.

We were busy as hell and the county briefly went into full-blown emergency management mode, setting up a command post at our station, but all in all I think it went well... we were hectice, sweaty, drenched, and sleep-deprived, but nobody was seriously hurt and we covered everything that came our way. About the only sore note, other than our actual physical soreness, was the behavior of many drivers our during and after the mess. I swear, the sheer number of people who completely ignore emergency vehicles running full lights and sirens only seems to increase over time. And don't get me started on people who would try to drive past our barricades by going over the trees or power lines that we were marking... what, are we building a fucking obstacle course for your amusement? Think we're going to hold up score cards while you play live-action Xbox with your SUV? This crap really shouldn't surprise me any more, but I guess my naivete hasn't quite finished drinking its full cup of hemlock.

Assholes Last Night, Fire Calls Today.
So, last night Jen and I attended her uncle's wedding in Stillwater. Any worries we had about the event were pretty much unfounded. It was held aboard a river boat, the service took about ten minutes, and then it was straight to dinner and drinks with no reception line or pause for the symbolic release of flocks of doves or anything like that.

The boat pulled our around six and got back just after nine. It was a great time and we were eager to head off to Bloomington to hang around at Convergence for a few hours.

Except two monstrous jackasses with nice cars had double-parked us (and two other cars) completely in against a row of concrete barriers. No possible escape. Not even a note on our damn windshield-- "If you're parked in, call this number."

Downtown Stillwater, on a Saturday night in mid-summer, is chock full of tourists and bar-hoppers. The city is jammed. Trying to hunt down the owners of the vehicles proved utterly futile. They could have been anywhere, and to make things worse, they might have been out on other boats, and hence out of touch for hours.

We asked the boat company what they could do, and they said that the parking area in question was city property and they had no power over it. So we called the Stillwater police. After checking with her sergeant, the responding officer said the area in question was private, and did indeed belong to the boat company, so no citations or towing were forthcoming from there.

Jen tried to tell this to the folks at the boat company-- not even demanding anything, just letting them know that the place was indeed theirs to do with as they saw fit-- and got literally screamed at. So, cool as river boats are, I can't recommend ever spending a dime on 'em in Stillwater.

We borrowed a truck from Jen's parents to get home, and by returning just after the bars closed at two in the morning were able to finally rescue our vehicle.

Anyhow, that's why our night went from fantastic to fucked up, and we didn't get to visit Bloomington as planned.

*****

Major storms blew through the area this afternoon. I woke up around three (as our electricity died) to the sound of my pager going off... and going off... and going off... four calls at once, three for downed power lines and one for a tree across a road. After those were handled, we got a fifth call for a "smell of fuel oil" at a nursing home about a block from my house.

As we were pulling up, another firefighter who lives in the neighborhood ran up shouting that the boiler room was full of smoke and it was pouring out the back of the building. So we geared up, pulled a hose, and made entry, working our way down into the basement through narrow stairways and corridors.

The boiler room was indeed filled with a cloud of chalky gray smoke, too thick to see through, but we were unable to locate any flames, sparks, or unusual sources of heat. We poked around the building for a good long time (after ventilating the basement and the other areas of smoke buildup). Someone eventually concluded that a fuel-oil heater had come back on after the restoration of power with its exhaust vent somehow clogged or shut, and the exhaust had filled the boiler room and gone all over the place through the vents. Mungo not know, Mungo is but pawn in game of life. But nobody got hurt.

Frazzled now. Sentences shortening. Curl up, sleep, yes.

*Headdesk*
Gah. I belong to an e-mail list that reports on every known line-of-duty death or serious injury for firefighters in the United States (and tries to cover the rest of the world as best it can). Via CNN:

"'Tornado of flames' kills 9 firefighters"

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/19/charleston.fire.ap/index.html

Current Mood: depressed

Amsterdam
I should really install Photoshop on this laptop so I can web-size my digital photos in the field, but until I get home, here's a shot of the Herengracht, the canal on which I'm staying, from a few days ago in someone else's Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/florian-alt/461256271/

They have a whole set on Amsterdam, actually, that's more or less exactly is it is now, a whopping six days later.

Interesting Linguistic Discoveries
Density of information conveyed in Dutch appears to be inversely proportional to how much noise is actually generated. For example:

"Hooip het vingle dokk ploob gak ack bit ningle hop dock-dock ack vit mit nickle plooy-ya heps du ka ya dan pla shuvel zoop ach it yep donk mit plaz!"

= "The taxi is coming!"

"Grep geeble gak!"

= "Grab the foolish American author, steal his passport, take his Euros, and dump him in the nearest polder field! Let the sheep be the only witnesses!"

****

Man, it's cold at night in a polder field.

From the Orion Books Rights Department:
Allianza Editorial has bought Spanish rights to Red Seas Under Red Skies, which probably means that Las Mentiras de Locke Lamora was a good experience for them. RSURS will now be published in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish, at the very least... I know I'm forgetting a couple and need to consult my charts, but this web of sales is getting so very complicated... ;)

Amsterdamned!
Actually, Amsterdam is a really cool (literally and figuratively) place; the weather is lovely (low clouds and brisk breezes, rain would be fantastic), the canals are wide, and the drivers are inscrutable. The city's own official tourist guidebook describes the city's streets as "a baffling maze," and I'm forced to agree, often while dodging mopeds.

Amsterdam is splendidly fucking weird. I stood at my window last night (I have a fourth-floor hotel room, and I spend an awful lot of time staring out at the clouds and 18th-century building facades and canals)and watched a pair of drunks stumbling down the cobblestones beside the Herengracht, alternately yelling:

Drunk One: "Yoga FIRE!"
Drunk Two: "Yoga FLAME!"
Drunk One: "Yoga FIRE!"
Drunk Two: "Yoga FLAME!"

If only I could accurately simulate Chun Li's yip-yip-yipping, I would have shouted down at them.

Later that night, some crazy tried to kick in the glass display cases in the hotel lobby and rob the night steward. He was defeated by the fact that he was a) too drunk to operate his central nervous system, and b) armed only with his empty, twitching fists. Approximately every police officer in the city paid a visit.

Half the pages in the aforementioned tourist's guide are taken up by advertisements for escort services, and without exception, their idea of a sexy woman is a silicone-and-baked-leather mannequin with spray-cemented hair tall and wide enough to land small aircraft on. I want to wave a crucifix over the little book and yell, "Back! Back to the 80s! Back!"

Tomorrow, I have six interviews, including one with the Dutch Penthouse. Will the semi-permeable language barrier lead to comedy or tragedy? Can't wait to find out.

Gone, Daddy, Gone-- Lynch is Gone:
The Netherlands, April 17-22
France, April 23-24
United Kingdom, April 25-27

While I'm out, the cats are in charge.

But they knew that already.

My beautiful website update!
Server unavailable due to scheduled maintenance?

Aaaargh! Leave me behind, will you? Kill you! Kill you filthy, internets!

Today's Moment of Dippy Joy
Inspired by Steve Gilliard's post at thenewsblog.net, a link to a (different) YouTube video of a radio-controlled scale-model B-29 Superfortress with a 20-foot wingspan.

Did I mention that it carries an equally functional scale model of the Bell X-1 that deploys in mid-air?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih7ltp3gVWM

Never underestimate the amusement power of human obsession.

Technical Notes and a Question
-The scott@scottlynch.us address has been hosed for a bit now. I found out in the most wonderful way imaginable. I will shift the address to a new provider; for the time being, talldorkstranger at gmail dot com is wide open.

- I am working on a massive website update for Thursday or Friday.

- I'm interested in possibly starting a Wiki to provide in-depth info on the Gentleman Bastard sequence, but I have no idea what would be involved (I know how to navigate and edit one, sure, just not how to set one up). I am not interested in a free service or a service I cannot own and control; I am therefore begging those who know better to take the noob by the hands and guide him gently toward enlightenment. If there's any to be had.

RSURS Excerpts: Chapter 12-- Port Prodigal
So, a bunch of pirates and two con artists walk into a bar in Port Prodigal, my pirate haven twenty-five hundred miles from the closest major power... fair warning: fictional characters behaving badly. Contains violence, bad language, and drinkin'. The ESRB would not give this game a rating, even if Rockstar produced it.

( Cut for some mild spoilers... )

Hey, Folks--
I have been away for a month, for two major reasons:

A) The need to work feverishly for several weeks, complicated, as is only dramatically appropriate, by various real-world things, and:

B) A sudden bout of intense, flabbergasted loathing for all forms of internet argument, which may seem very odd considering who's typing this, but it seems to happen to me about once every two years. As I was kvetching to

matociquala a few weeks ago, the catalyst seemed to be the stuff I found in certain Amazon reviews of Peter Watts' Blindsight, an awesomely brain-bending masterwork of hard SF wth only one or two little bitty flaws, at least says me.

For example:

"Watts would have been better off writing a nonfiction book or essays on the ideas that he was trying to convey in this novel. To me they are theories that he has formed based on various nonfiction articles, reviews and literature that he has researched on sociopathic behavior, pyschological disorders, and/or autism. The thing is some of his theories may have validity, but this was not the forum in which to present them (a sf novel)."

Do you hear that, authors? Your works of fiction are not the place to present the ideas you scrounge up from your research!

It astonishes me that this still needs to be explained to some people presumably competent enough to work elevator buttons without help, but sometimes, just sometimes, at special hours on certain magic days, authors include certain elements and ideas in their work merely because they're fun and/or intriguing to play with, and not because we're pushing any particular viewpoint concerning them.

Yes, indeed, there is a very real species of book in which the author, whether unknowingly or with malice aforethought, is out to pound a polemic right into your forebrain, dear reader, at the expense of all other considerations including plot, character, atmosphere, punctuation, and plain coherence. And generally speaking, these books a) suck mightily and b) engender silly-ass little cults, and must be fought with the pitchforks of sarcasm and the torches of keeping one's money in one's wallet.

However, sometimes something is just there because ideas are like cat toys for authors; they're what we play with as cutely as possible when we think people are watching. Some get discarded after one use. Some get played with until they're fraying, saliva-soaked, and coming apart at the seams.

To wit, Watts isn't pushing any fucking agenda concerning the assorted neurological anomalies of his cast of space freaks; it's just a menagerie that, when folded together in a confined space and baked under stress for three hundred pages, is heaps of fun to watch and dissect.

The presence of any given story element in a book is not necessarily endorsement or advocacy. Sometimes a cat toy is just a cat toy.

Now, don't even get me started on the guy who actually said "this author only uses big words to sound cool and important."

*****

Whew. I'm back now, feeling refreshed. Ready for a bit of the old give-and-take. You wouldn't have liked any of the curmudgeonly shit I would have written in the past few weeks, anyway.

Firefightin' Year in Review
Time doesn't just fly. It screams past at hypersonic velocity and takes your fricking nose off if you're not paying attention. Hard to believe I've been at this for a year and a half now.

My turnout gear, which was bright and pristine when first issued in June of last year, is now scuffed up and be-sooted by my deployments. We wash this stuff off after fires and hazmat incidents, but the gunk builds up regardless. In a way, this gear is a bit like new tennis shoes when you get them as a teenager; you run around kicking curbs and rolling in the grass in an effort to get them respectably broken in so the cool kids don't laugh at you. But there's really no substitute for real fire and smoke. I'm both satisfied and melancholy, I suppose, that my gear now looks like it's been on the hook about as long as that of the people around me.

Here's some numbers for your amusement.

(DISCLAIMER: These numbers are useless as an indicator of number or type of Fire/EMS calls for my city or for St. Croix County in general. They apply only to that fraction of total calls that I was available to respond to. Please do not reproduce or cite these numbers anywhere as an authoritative representation of anything but my individual experience).

General Stats

2005 Stats: 84 runs, out of which I made a truck¹ 32 times (38%)
2006 Stats: 100 runs, out of which I made a truck 51 times (51%)
Total: 184 runs, out of which I've been on an actual scene 83 times (45%)

2006 Runs Broken Down By Type

Propane or Natural Gas Leaks: 4
Structure Fires: 9
False/Nuisance Alarms: 19
Tree Fires: 1
Power Lines/Power Poles on Fire: 2
Appliance Fires: 1
Dumpster Fires: 1
Grass Fires: 6
Vehicle Accidents: 34
Hazmat Incidents: 3
Smoke or Carbon Monoxide Present, No Fire Found: 8
Mutual Aid Calls:² 1
Vehicles on Fire: 6
Rescues or Body Recovery: 3
Misc./Bizarre/Unclassifiable: 2

1. Re. "made a truck," when a call comes in our engines are generally filled on a first-come, first-serve basis. Some volunteer departments have specific truck assignments. Mine does not. Those of us not on a truck for any given run remain at the station in case further deployment becomes necessary or another call comes in. We tend to pass the time by performing maintenance, checking our gear, or just hangin' out.

2. "Mutual aid" is when a neighboring department requests one or more trucks with attendant personnel from us.

On a More Positive Note...
I am delighted to report that I have been hired by the Minnesota Vikings for their 2007-08 season, to form part of their new offensive line. Also hired for this task are my maternal grandparents Don and Georgene, two of my cats, and my good friends Binky, Cuddles, and Mr. Wigglytail:

Team owner Zigi Wilf will hold a press conference in just a few hours at which he'll announce these hirings, stressing that "at this point any change will be a drastic improvement, and no, the baby bunnies will not be a problem, because by the time the next season starts they'll be young adult bunnies, rippling with confidence and hopping power."

Jen and I discovered last night that

rabidsnowbunny passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly just a few days after Christmas. She was barely older than me.

She leaves behind a husband whose grief I can only begin to imagine. Carrie and David, unbelievably, drove all the way up here from Texas in late '04 to attend the party I supposedly threw to celebrate the sale of The Lies of Locke Lamora but was really throwing for the sake of proposing to Jenny.

She was a long-time gamer and LARP organizer; I thought of her as one of the few people I know who'd truly understand the peculiar pains and pleasures of organizing that sort of event for fifty or sixty people on a continual basis. She was one of the first people I ever added to my friends list, actually, way back in the day when this LJ was a new toy and the sun shone brightly on the Cretaceous age.

I honestly wish sometimes that I believed anything about better places and next lives. It always seems like such bullshit to me, something necessary that we tell ourselves, but bullshit nonetheless. That better place was here; that next life was every day to come after her last. She's gone, and she shouldn't be, and it's a goddamn shame.

Jen and I are so sorry, David.