I'm Back

Been going through a bit of a life roll after coming down with shingles, which meant I ran out of 'spoons' to do anything other than the bare essentials to make it through each day. It is what it is.

So, the pic above is my new computer, an earlyish birthday present from my beloved.

My old MacMini is still going strong, but oh so slow, but it's good enough to become my writing computer. Susan is going to set it up for me so I can run it on here monitor at her desk. This is all part of a plan to separate my work from the general demand of being connected in today's modern world.

Obviously, I'm behind on everything. Posting the summary of what I read last year. Talking about my progress with the next story (progress has been made), which makes me happy.

Catch you all later.

I Don't Know

 

I'm sharing, "Fine, I'll Talk About the Drones..." because it nails down the issue of the drone sighting in New Jersey, without me having to do any of the work that writing about it would have required. Life is short, and it's hard work debunking things that people want to believe in.

Remember, it's perfectly acceptable to say, I don't know to any question you're asked.

It's like the 1906 adage from Maurice Switzer, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it."

Another post as proof of life, which has been a bit difficult for the last month or so. Catch you all on the bounce.

The Games Behind Your Government's Next War

The YouTube channel People Make Games just released this piece presented by Quinn called, The Games Behind Your Government's Next War. I'm sharing because it is both entertaining, and educational.

My opinion, for what it's worth, know what you can control, and know what you can't.

It's fine to have ideals, hold oneself to a moral standard, or examine the ethics of what we do, but without an understanding of human nature, the evolutionary pressures that drive our behaviours. Arguably, everything we do is determined by a combination nature and nurture.

So, my take away... a renewal of enthusiasm to work on my wargame.

Spammers Gonna Spam

It seems my blog has become a popular site to spam. God only knows why, I'm hardly a high profile site. Of course I've always had some spam, along with spam of course, but in recent weeks there has been more than usual.

Must be spammer time on the internet. Cue for a ditty...

Spam time for Hackers everywhere

Spamming links makes them happy and gay

They're spamming to a faster pace

Look out, here come the spammer race

Or it's just spammer time! Do the dance.

Anyway, the point of this post is to report that I not only found the spammers that got through, who I then reported to Google for spamming –because service brings citizenship – but I also found a whole lot of posts marked as spam in a spam folder that I didn't know I had.

I should add, Google changes things around, and I knew I could no longer see a tag for spam and wondered where it had gone, but I couldn't be arsed to search for it. 

What can I say? 

Life's too short to be chasing irritating as fuck nonsense when I can be doing other stuff. Also, I've allowed all the non spam through, just because. Be rude not to..

To add some value to this infodump.

I've started a new draft of Two Moons (the next Gate Walker story). That's it. Catch you on the bounce.

Most Critics Suck

Welcome to my blog, and sorry for click-bait title. Today I am going to talk about critics, and why they mostly suck. Except for the few like Patrick (H) Willems who is also film maker.

I am Ashley Pollard, and Patrick's critiques are the reason why I'm writing this piece.

Critics talk about the why's, who's, how's, when's and where's of a story they're critiquing.

Patrick's piece on Jack Snyder is especially illuminating, and since I'm now going to criticize Patrick by saying his observations about translating Alan Moore's Watchmen into a film are off base. I will add, in case any of Patrick's fan are enraged at me criticizing his take on Snyder's Watchman movie, he's right about the dichotomy.

For me, he misses a salient point; the medium is the message.

Hollywood films are their own thing, and Zack Snyder is Hollywood (that's a metaphor for the slow of thinking). If you agree that the medium is the message then the use of the comic strip medium to tell a story, and Snyder's film translation of the story are going to be at odds with each other.

It's an inevitable outcome.

A critique is a message about how another's message has been perceived by the consumer of the message, and how and what they think of the message. That's my tongue in cheek critique of critics criticizing works.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-critics per se, just the way the art of criticizing works leads to circling the drain of content. Even the best critics can produce critiques that suck.

I had so much fun writing this. Just saying so you know.

Ask Lovecraft - Metaphors

Metaphors are the terrible fate that comes to take reason and sanity from 'English majors,' assuming they had any to begin with. Considered yourself warned. Step back from the metaphor.

This has been a Public Health Warning for Metaphors. Stay safe, avoid analyzing stories for metaphors.

Sharing Because

  

I'm sharing a link to another blog, Wing and a Whim by Dorothy Grant because she reviews two books that she and her husband found helpful dealing with living with PTSD. One book is for the spouse, the other is for the soldier.

So a special not to my friends David and Candace, I think if you have the money and time these books might be of help. The books are:

Arsenal of Hope: Tactics for Taking on PTSD, Together

All Secure: A Special Operations Soldier's Fight to Survive on the Battlefield and the Homefront

Please feel free to share this around to anyone who might be in need in these troubled times.

October, September Flew By

I could ask myself where did September go, but what's the point? No posts here, but I did put one on my Facebook page.

I usually post here and there, but what can I say?

In a world where brain eating amoebas were found in water supplies in the United States, as just one example, it seems the best thing to do is batten down the hatches and ride out the oncoming storm.

So I just didn't bother.

However, I thought for those of you who don't follow me on Facebook, I'd post a link to my author page, which can be accessed by clicking the picture above.

In other news, I've been working on my models, which you can see on my other blog.

Meanwhile, I'm using the model making time to meditate on issues that perplex me, as one does; or at least I do.

I'm boggled when friends say they think I'm trying to change their minds with my pieces because I thought I made it clear that they were my attempt to argue through and understand the baying mobs on social media.

As I said to friends, fact don't change opinions, and if I wanted to try and change a persons opinion I wouldn't start with facts. For a start one has to know if the other person wants to change their opinions or needs to for practical reasons.

Even when those criteria are met, it's hard to change people's opinions/beliefs. It just is. Otherwise how does one understand therapeutic outcomes being so low, or relapses after a successful course of treatment?

Emotions are the key to our beliefs.

These start when one is born, and the environment you're brought up in feeds your experiential growth. Leaven with classical and operant conditioning, and by around the age of four or so you have the foundations laid for who you grow to become.

As time goes by, more core beliefs are laid down, and we build our assumptions on them.

By your teenage years your thoughts are driven by hormones, genetics, and experience. This is why it's difficult to change beliefs and or habits. Not impossible, just hard.

Harder than you think unless one has an epiphany from a traumatic event.

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now. I must get my act together and write more, but one step at a time, because change is hard.

A Reminder of What is Good

 
Found this Patrick Rothfuss piece talking about Terry Pratchett with a transcript of an interview. Here's a clip:

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

The full post can be found here. It's well worth reading as a reminder that the root of all stories lies in the imagination.

Generalizations Are False

Taken from All Generalization are False and adapted for fiction by me.

I follow a number of blogs, not all related to either my hobbies or writing science fiction. All Generalizations are False is blog about assessing the news one reads. She admits to a slight left of center position, but to my British sensibilities it looks pretty centrist to me.

Anyway, the point being is that she does a good job of analyzing new sources and looking for bias.

What she does, is pretty much what I was taught many years ago at Trent Polytechnic when I was doing my degree in photography and film studies.

But, it struck me, that  one could also use this as a basis for analyzing fiction.

As you can see above, I've put a yellow circle in to mark where I think I'm writing from. I may be wrong about this, and I'm open to people pointing out my blind spots. Fiction is not fact. Therefore, it's aim is not to present facts, but to tell stories; and in SF this is generally about how changes from technology might impact humanity.

Remember, stories: fictions, which are therefore not facts, rather they are imaginations that develop from "what ifs."

An important distinction. And, contrary to some authors statements, stories are not lies. Fictions are functionally different to lies. One is about imagination, the other about deception.

However, when I looked at the chart, I could easily see myself pining certain authors into areas on this illustration. As I'm sure my readers can too. And, just to be clear, I offer no judgement on the validity on any position, other than is it reasonable and supported by truth.

Not because I want to avoid arguments per se, but because my training was to be non-judgemental, and have unconditional positive regard for other people's opinions, because the bottom line is that other people's opinions are not my concern. Something drummed into me during my training in mental health.

Note: If I had a complaint about the above chart it would be the use of emotionally weighted language e.g.: unfair and nonsense. My thoughts would be to replace these with unreasonable and unsupportable, but there again I may be wrongly interpreting the original authors intent.

New Mac Mini

After nine years of using my old Mac Mini it came time to part ways.  Mostly amicable, but the old girl was getting slow and crochety.  A bit like its owner, and the limits of my patience was frayed to its limits from the machine's sluggishness.  After a discussion with my partner, we scraped together the money, which effectively means all my disposable income has been spent for the next few months.

After a suitable amount of anxiety in getting said machine connected, files updated, getting the settings from my back-up transferred, and moving all my work across I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Things are now moving along at a respectable pace: programmes open promptly, picture processing is no longer like watching paint dry, and all is well.   Colour me content.

Once I Was Young and Computer Savvy

My first job with computers was circa 1974 when they were vast machines that occupied air-conditioned halls, tape decks were a thing, and programs were entered using punch cards.  Home computing was Sinclair ZX81s and I aspired to owning an Apple II, but never did.  My first computer being an Apple Macintosh, which I got in 1988.  The late eighties and early nineties I was there at the forefront of home computer use and could walk into a design studio and sort out SCSI cabling issues with aplomb.

After nearly twenty years of having the same internet service provider I find myself having to set-up a new email address, and as a result change my FaceBook, Amazon, eBay and other account settings.  To say that this has been frustrating is an understatement.  I've been reduced to shouting at my computer in frustration, which on a scale of one-to-ten rates about an eleven for pointlessness.

And don't get me started on spam filters that sent every confirmation email into a special place that would only appear after repeated logins to my new domain.

To add to the total joy, I also find that my blogger contact forms won't update to send emails to my new address, even though I've changed the email setting, and furthermore, to make my life especially miserable, the blog lost all the links on my blog list.  And then there's Yahoo, where I'm forced to change the address of each list I subscribe too individually.

And I used to take such things in my stride.

Then this morning Susan's car wouldn't start, because the battery had died.  My truck is currently in Aldershot being serviced and getting its MOT, so this was the icing on the cake of a very stressful week where I've not managed to do any work on my novels.

The good news is that I guess that sometime next week my friends will receive an email from me with my new address.  Ah the bliss!

Observations & Commentary

Carnufex Carolinenis, a recent find, which proves that the internet can give you good things as well as bad.

I'm entering the fourth week of what I'm calling the fine tooth comb edit of the second draft of my novel Strike Dog.  I forgot to say that last week I edited a total of 10,841 words.  This week however I've only managed to edit 7,812, with a total of 802 words added to the running total, which now stands at 100,379.  In some ways this is disappointingly slow progress, but given the amount of work I had to do to get a new first chapter, and the work needed to kick chapter four into shape it's probably not too bad.  Chapter four was especially troublesome because it was pretty rough with far too much telling in the form of info dumps.  So I've sent the revised version of this chapter off to my Alpha reader for comment and feedback.

I've also had updates from both of my second round Beta readers.  Slow progress being made due to various family commitments.  Still I must thank both David Barrow and Alix McFarlane for their time and effort.  I've already had some useful feedback from both of them, and hope to see their finished pieces in due course.  In the meantime it's not like I haven't got another couple of novels to polish up.

Sometimes I despair at what I see and hear on the internet, and to quote Carl Sagan,

"We aren't living in a world where people are becoming more stupid or irrational, people have always made stupid choices and behaved irrationally; it's the human condition."

And I also try to remember Sturgeons Law that 90% of anything is rubbish, and that's the nature of the world that we live in.  So people complaining about things is really par for the course, and differences of opinion will therefore arise as a matter of course.

Beside sometime we get good things.  In my case the Carnufex Carolinenis, which was lucky find as I describe an off world creature as a cross between a Komodo dragon and a crocodile, which I think pretty much describes this dinosaur.  It also gives me a solid naming convention one of my characters can use to name the alien creature.  Truly serendipitous.

I'll leave you all with a quote that I find quite thought provoking.  Machiavelli once said, "Unlike some people, I feel under no obligation to pretend that only one set of beliefs are true, and that any others beliefs are mistaken; or that I know better than people themselves what is right for them to believe.  The point is precisely for all people to decide for themselves."

Log 2014 Dec 7th: Catch Up

 

Last week we were in Cambridge at a Thanksgiving party hosted by our friends Kate & Malcolm, what with our own Thanksgiving meal excesses on the Thursday I seem to have been derailed in posting last weeks blog in a timely manner.

I have a lot to talk about, but this last week has been hectic with one thing and another, so all I'll mention in passing is that I gave a talk on cognitive behavioural therapy at Carshalton High School for Girls for the students in A2 psychology, which went down very well – tweets were sent out by the school too, and I received a lovely box of chocolates and a gift card from the students.  So I was well chuffed.  I later learnt that one of the students has decided to change her degree option to psychology too.

Over on my other blog you will see a post about the demo game I ran at Dragonmeet yesterday for which I spent most of the week painting miniatures to get them ready for the day.  Afterwards we went off to Ilford for another party with our long time friends Brian & Caroline, which was most excellent.

Log 2014 3rd Aug: Yesterday's Future of Tomorrow

Yesterday was rather exciting for the simple reason that we live next to the Hammersmith & City line, and London Underground were running a heritage train during the day.  The above picture is of one of the locomotives, they had one at each end of the rake of carriages, which was powering the service.  Isn't it glorious to look at.  One would almost mistake it for some fevered steam-punk creation if it were not for the fact it was built in 1923 and is nearly a hundred years old.  You can see more pictures of the full train here.

So lots of excitement at watching other people have fun riding the train, and the stories they will have to tell of the day.  My partner took the photos for me and I put them on Twitter, and in the process had more retweets than I've ever had for anything I've posted.  By my estimation over 20,000 people saw the pictures.  You can see the Tweets at the bottom of this page.

Today rather tired.  That's what excitement does, it wears you out.  Or it does if you are an old fogie like me.  So today I had to have a nap.  Hence the lateness of this post.

I was going to talk about re-watching Stargate Universe, and reading Sin and Syntax, but they will be mentioned in another post.  This week I've continued to work on my novel, re-wrote my short story, and received my first rejection slip (from Asimov's magazine).

Funerals and Things

I've been to two funerals this week.  One for my partner's adopted father John Leach, aka Janos Lehar,  a composer who was also well known for playing the cimbalom.  There is a good chance you have heard him play, listen here.  Pretty much anytime a cimbalom is heard in a recording the chances are it is John Leach playing, for example the Alan Parsons Project album Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

The second was the funeral of a long time friend Ken Brown.  Who was the best friend of Andy Robertson, another friend of mine who died a month ago.  Far too many deaths of people I know over the last month.  So it all got a bit emotional for me during the service, especially when singing Amazing Grace and Jerusalem.  A lot of old faces came out of the woodwork to see Ken off, including David Pringle the former editor of Interzone.  All in all, as far as funerals go, it was a lovely day, with a fabulous wake in the pub afterward as Ken wanted.

Another upside, other than supporting his daughter and giving him a send off, was meeting Andy Robertson's daughters Alice and Claire.  I knew their mother Sylvia, who died when they were babies, which was the last time I saw them.  It was therefore both a surprise and a shock to meet them again all these years later.  Their mother would have been so proud to have seen them grown up. 

As I said last week, I read a Cthulhu story, and so inspired I started a short story of my own, only to find Peter Watts had beaten me to the idea of a sequel to The Thing when I was doing some research.  Still, my story takes a different approach to the events, being more mythos based, rather than being just some poor misunderstood alien trying to communicate with the humans.  I'll say no more at this point.  Consider yourselves teased.

I've also submitted a short story to my writers group, which will see which way the wind blows.  I'm not sure they want a genre writer like me in the group, as they seem more focused on fantasy and what are described as slipstream stories.  That or I'm just a terrible writer and they don't like what I've written.  Either way, I'm coming to think I may be too old fashioned, and out of touch with modern reader sensibilities in the SF market.

Log 2014 Jun 1st: Already

There was a writing group critique meeting this Saturday, but I didn't go.  Couldn't dredge up any enthusiasm to drag myself to Victoria, and have to face getting back again using public transport, when the tube is out.  I'm still working through Esther's short story, which I plan to send back to her today.  I had a bit of a crisis of confidence when starting it, doubting the validity of my responses, which are coloured by too many emotions; I imagine from grief.

This is also making some things I come across on the internet rather too much to bear.  All the recent twitter storms and the like just makes me want to gafiate.  Still I found this amusing, article on the Guardian website about the expectation on the number of books one can read, here.  It makes me realise how far outside the norm I am.

Work wise this week has been a bust.  My partner has been at home dealing with the aftermath of the death last week.  Sorry not to be much fun to be around.

In Passing

I heard that a friend of mine died recently, and yesterday my partner's step-father died in hospital.  We had visited him in the afternoon, where he was all all hooked up to machines to aid breathing and monitor his vitals.  He lay on his bed with more tubes coming out of him than is natural.  I joked with him that he looked like some special effects set up for Dr Who.  He died a few hours after we had left, just like that.

So not in the mood for much of anything at this point, because this triggers a whole bunch of stuff about my family, and the deaths I've experienced over the years, both personal and professional when I use to be a nurse.  The above image is linked to Existential Comics, which appeals to my dark sense of humour.

Creative Madness

I was a bit ill yesterday after my beloved gave me an early Xmas present in the shape of some lurg that is going around Imperial College.  At least I can't complain that I never get given anything.  So I have spent extra time in bed and generally taking it easy.  This meant I missed going to the writers group meeting, but I'm sure they are all glad I didn't come along and give them all an unwanted Xmas present.  We also missed the Xmas Jomsviking readers group that we go along to, for the same reason; we like our friends too much to make them ill.

However, while I quite enjoy lying around being busy doing nothing, it has one side-effect.  I get terribly hyper with ideas running around my head.

So this morning I was drinking coffee, thinking about reading something, but my head was just full of ideas.  Crazy ideas that were a melange of things from my dreams, playing my favourite board game, and thinking about the film Surrogates that I watched a few of years ago.  I review it en passant here.  So this afternoon, rather than being spent reading a book, chillaxing on the sofa has instead seen me busy writing notes and laying out two novels in Scrivener.  One is about AI developments being used by the military that will not end well for the world.  The other book deals with living one's life in a world where everything you see is augmented and nothing you see is truly real anymore.

Then I decided in a moment of manic frenzy to compile my Bad Dog universe bible and twiddle with my Professionals meets Cthulhu novel.  My shoulders ache now.

Lest We Forget

Remembrance Sunday, lest we forget.

Yesterday I was at a writers critique group day, my second as a visitor, before I have to choose to become a member, which I did.  If for no other reason that I need social contacts who get what I'm doing.  I enjoyed reading both the stories that were discussed and feel I have a good chance of fitting into this group.  Unfortunately, no more meetings until the New Year.

This week has been busy with me going to the inaugural lecture of Professor Alex Blakemore who kindly invited me to attend.  This was an outstandingly good lecture on genetics and copy number variants that I took a lot away from.

Writing wise I managed 4,743 words this week, which brings the running total up to 73,559.  I got some very positive feedback from the last chapter from my Alpha reader, which is always heartening.

I'm still reading A Game of Thrones, there's a surprise, not!  He does go on a bit.

Finished watching Arrow though.  An adaptation of the DC's Green Arrow that is very good.  The first four episodes were outstandingly good.  They gripped one from the get go and I was of the mind that this was as good as Person of Interest.  

However, while both shows share similar themes, technological Batman style vigilant, Arrow is bound by its tropes, whereas Person of Interest takes the tropes, twists them and then shreds them before moving on.  

So, if you are a superhero fan then Arrow is well worth watching, if you want to see a good superhero show and don't know where to start then likewise Arrow is a good place to start.  If you are not into superheroes you may find the story a bit melodramatic and farfetched.