Brass and Steel: Inferno - Done

It's done. It's done. It's done. Hallelujah, Brass and Steel: Inferno is done. Now to find it a home. -JRS

Cuttings

Just a little snippet of Brass and Steel: Inferno that I'm cutting out in this (hopefully) final polishing pass. It has several nice bits of research - gungee candy, for example - and I hated to see it go, but really most of this scene was repeated in another chapter, and it slowed the pacing down too much. So here it is, completely out of context. All I'm going to say is that the narrator is Dante Blackmore, the hero of Brass and Steel: Inferno, and he's a very powerful cyborg. She is Josephine Li, the heroine of this story. The year? 1895. It's steampunk. :)

The tiny woman sits bolt upright in bed with a stifled whimper, breathing hard. She blinks and fumbles for the covers. Pulls them tight to her chest.
“Bad dreams?”
She stares at me next, her breathing slowing. The eyes squeeze tight. “Marshal. Shit.” The lower lip quivers, tears fill her eyes again, and in a moment she’s sobbing. “Oh my God. ‘M sorry.” she says. “‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have. I. Oh my God.”
Shrug a little bit at her, and get up from my chair, slow as you please. Stretch. My joints crackle. Metallic sound that makes my teeth ache. “Let’s not go through all that again.”
Her brow furrows, and she exhales slowly. Her nose quirks. “I’m drunk.” she says, a little more meekly than last time. She fumbles under the blankets, and her expression goes puzzled. “We didn’t?”
Shake my head at her. “You made an offer. I let it ride.”
She takes a deep breath and nods. “I don’t remember. God. I’m sorry, Marshal.” she says. She looks down. “How bad was I?”
“You were rubbin’ your teat in my ear, and generally carryin’ on to make a man sell his soul for you. We talked a bit after that. Then you went to sleep. Nothin’ too bad.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, and slowly sinks down to the bed, sobbing. “Oh God.” she says. “Oh God. I am a whore. Just like my sister. I’m sorry, Marshal. I’m so sorry.”
“You had a lot to drink. Don’t worry about it.”
“Did I say anythin’ that wasn’ bad?”
“You just asked me to tuck you in.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just looks down. Closes her eyes, and breathes.
I try not to look at her bare shoulder, the sweep of her bare neck, the angle of her lower jaw, and the smooth skin underneath, and the broad chin that makes her look less Chinese than she might. Try not to look. Try not to picture the bare flesh in my arms, or the bloody furrow and spraying blood. Close my eyes a moment.
“I ain’t gonna be sick.” she says, finally. She takes a slow breath and says it again. “I am not gonna be sick. I can hold my liquor. I used t’drink a lot more’n I do now. I ain’t gonna be sick.”
She repeats it often enough that I nudge the chamber pot her direction. “You ain’t goin’ temperance, are you?” I think of McInnis. Maybe have a joke at his expense.
She looks at me, pupils nearly black in this light, glistening darkness that draws my eyes. “No, no. I got tired of bein’ sick, you know? Annabel likes gungee candy. Sometimes she gives me some. Mostly I drink. Used to drink. Try to move on now before things get so bad …” Her eyes glisten like a newborn fawn’s a moment before she closes them, sobs freely.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Hippocampus Shrinkage, and PTSD (Revised)

So my local fish wrapper, the Denver Post, carried this article. http://www.denverpost.com/ci_21960079. The print version had some pretty convincing MRIs showing the vascularization of a previously damaged area of a given veteran's brain. I'll buy that. Extra oxygen lets tissues metabolize faster, and this encourages the increase of vascularity. What struck me at the time was the almost throwaway mention that oh yeah, these veterans also had reduction/elimination of their PTSD symptoms in some cases.

This caught my eye, since somewhat less recently, I read studies like this: http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(10)01013-9/abstract and others, which suggest that PTSD has a strong component of hippocampal shrinkage, and that antidepressant therapy with SSRIs can reverse the shrinkage and ultimately cure the PTSD. Wait, whoa, stop. Antidepressants can change your brain structure? Permanently? Yes, they can. According to the wikipedia article, (I know, I know.) SSRIs can cause the formation of new neural pathways and act as an anti-inflammatory in the brain.

My question is, are anti-depressants and HBOC doing the same thing to the PTSD sufferer? Are they revascularizing and/or reducing inflammation in the hippocampus? And if these things are possible, what else can you treat with HBOC and/or antidepressants?

Unlike what we were taught when I was in high school, our brains make new neurons every day. The difference is if we don't use them, they die. Why? I haven't read any theories about why, but I'll speculate. If you can destroy cancer by normalizing the vascularity of a cancerous tumor (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/307/5706/58.full), and if vascularity of muscle increases as the muscle becomes hypertropic, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9737744, and if we can effect the vascularity of a human brain by increasing activity levels in existing brain tissue and reap the benefits of better cerebral circulation, then it stands to reason that some neurons are retained and others lost based on usage might be a result of available circulation. If you have neurogenesis in an area of your brain you use continuously, the circulation might be better, and the new neuron might stay. If it occurs where you're not using it, it might not. If that, in turn, is true, then the very act of increasing activity of existing neurons and thus causing them to demand more circulation might be not only improving circulation to existing neurons, but encouraging new neurons to replace the ones that were lost in the original brain damage.

As a mechanism, this is fascinating. How many mental diseases resemble, on their faces, parts of the brain not getting enough circulation? Can you treat, for example, depression with HBOC? Could you cure it?

Medicine is complex. As with all science, there's probably more to it than this. But circulation seems like at least the most basic, brute force tool to make permanent changes to someone's brain short of sticking an ice pick through their eye socket. And what is really fascinating is that the 'mind' changes with these structural changes. Allowing the hippocampus to regenerate relieves some forms of PTSD. Revascularizing damaged brain tissues releaves chronic pain, coordination, and yes, PTSD again in some veterans who've had head trauma. While brain chemistry is excruciatingly complex, circulation comes down to plumbing, and that's something we humans have a pretty good handle on.

Exciting stuff.

-JRS (Revised for clarity. Yesterday's version kind of fell apart at the end.)

Felix Baumgartner Breaks Sound Barrier

Unless you've been hiding under a rock today, you already knew that Felix Baumgartner made his parachute jump from more than 26 miles up, and made a maximum speed of 833.9mph - faster than the speed of sound - in freefall on the way down. Among the records he broke were Col. Joe Kittinger's altitude, freefall time, and freefall speed records. This stuff interests me - there's a scene like that in Irreconcilable Differences, of course, but really, right now, congratulations belong to Baumgartner and his team - including Kittinger himself - for a successful jump, a safe landing, generally not punching a very large, messy hole in the desert floor. -JRS

Taos Toolbox 2013

Taos Toolbox 2013 is looking for applicants. What's Taos Toolbox, you ask? Well, you asked the right guy. Taos Toolbox is a master level writing workshop, taught by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress at the Taos Ski area in New Mexico. The website for it is here: http://taostoolbox.com.

I was at Taos Toolbox 2011. I came in with some chops. So did everyone else who was there. Even if it hadn't been for an advanced graduate course worth of instruction crammed into two weeks, even without instruction by writers who are some of the best in the business - Walter Jon Williams, Nancy Kress, and guest lecturer Jack Skillingstead - having two weeks away from my real life, workshopping my peers' work was incredible. I learned a lot just from those people - things like building magic systems that don't make me itch.

And then you get the instruction. How novels work, down on the nitty gritty level, and how to plan and execute them. What details you include for the sense of reality, and what ones you don't. How your plot advances, what it reveals about the story and when. There's much more, of course, but this was the stuff I went to Taos for.

Last year, when crowing about Taos, I used hypothetical examples. This time I'm going to lay out a personal example of what I got from the instruction at Taos.

All my training, lo these many years ago, was in short stories. When I wrote Looking Glass, it came out as a 50,000 word short story. It didn't even have chapters. Short stories are different animals, because you can keep the whole plot in your head and make it up as you go. I still like Looking Glass, but the plot is simple and linear. Cath and her team are attacked, she survives, they don't, and the rest is a quest for revenge and justice that goes like a traceroute from one node to the next until she finds the perp. The roadmap I had for writing it was simply that. The traceroute. I knew that kind of storyline would work for the story I was telling, because it's how Cliff Stoll put together one of my favorite nonfiction books, The Cuckoo's Egg. Cath's mom issues were one of those kismet things that fell into place during revision and made the book far better than its original, linear plot allowed. (Let's say I needed to do some nonstandard things with the fourth wall and needed to have set the precedent for doing so all the way through.) It came out remarkably well.

As I progressed to later work, it become painfully obvious that the more complex the plot I tried to invent, the more my existing planning was just not up to the job, and that a novel is just too big to try and keep the whole plot in my head. Finding the plot, asking, begging kismet to once again drop the plot element in my lap that would make the novel really sing doesn't work reliably. Brass and Steel is in the polishing phases now. There are 56 chapters in the current beta, as I go into the polishing phase of this novel. I wrote 69 other chapters that won't be in it. That's no way to write a novel. At Taos, some time in the first week, I was finally able to ask the right questions to tell myself what the novel is about. What the main character, Dante Blackmore wants. It's a redemption story. Dante starts the novel lost, and over the course of the novel finds some measure of redemption (and what that means.) Since Taos, the process for finishing the novel has amounted to chipping away anything that doesn't support that, and fleshing out all the missing pieces for how that is accomplished.

The future: At Taos, one of my fellow students and a very fine writer volunteered the novel she was stuck on up for storyboarding. I've never been one to pre-plan a novel that way before. It always seemed to me that it takes the joy out of writing if you know what's going to happen next. What happened amazed me. Really. Laying the whole book out on stickinotes on the wall gave us the whole flow of the plot, all its emotional beats, and also where it lost its way forward, and with the author of the novel, Walter Jon Williams, and the gang of us, we hashed out the problems and laid out a plot line that worked in four or five freaking hours. It took me over a year to really understand what Brass and Steel: Inferno wanted to be about. Storyboarding this other writer's novel let us see the emotional beats of the novel clearly, and tune them directly. In hours. I want that. Next novel: Getting storyboarded. I have stickinotes. I just need to find wall space.

Writing is hard. When the finished, published book looks effortless on rereading, it means you've done your job. Taos is hard. It's no mean feat to read, critique, and workshop and in part, write 197,000 words in two weeks, when you're also spending four hours a day in instruction. But if you're an up-and-comer, if you write and you've sold but you want to grow your talent, if you're stuck and you don't know why, do Taos. It's hard. It's not cheap. But it's worth it.

-JRS

Simplepi Blogger Comment/Reply Processing

Just in case there're any simplepi users out there desperately searching (as I was) for how to deal with comments from Blogger/Blogspot, here's the code that works for me. I've broken the code into what should be legitimate PHP lines so wrapping doesn't look so dang bad on my website, but some sanity checking after cut-and-paste is probably in order. The actual PHP code is available in the downloads section of my website in functions.php. (Scroll all the way down.)

//I'm not sure why I had to put the namespace link in this tag when all the other get_item_tags calls don't need it. I know it does not work without that namespace link, however. Took quite a while to find where Blogger actually got that xml from.

$temp= $item->get_item_tags(
	'http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'
	,'total'
);
$num_of_replies=$temp[0]['data']; 

//Blogger puts all kinds of useless crap in their post_id field, so while get_id is a standard method, we have to do a bunch of explode processing to sieve it out. There are probably better ways in PHP, but I learned LISP at a young and impressionable age, and this is the LISP way. Don't throw away the temp array, as we need other elements from it shortly.

$temp=explode('-',$item->get_id());
$postid=$temp[2]; //this one is the post id.
$temp=explode('.',$temp[1]); //this one is the blog ID. 
$blogid=$temp[0]; //Now set the blogid to the value we need.

//with those values gathered, we can generate the url to link back to the specific article reply page. We could probably also generate the reply feed url and feed that to simplepie, but why make work for ourselves making our own reply page?

$reply_link=implode(array(
	'http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID='
	,(string)$blogid
	,'&postID='
	,(string)$postid
));

//Now we have all the pieces we need to dynamically generate the html for a Comments: /somenumber/ link that points to the Blogger replies page. It's straightforward PHP from here.

I don't normally post code snippets in my blog - it's not that kind of blog - but I stood on the shoulders of giants to get simplepie working in as little time as it took, and this was the one bit I had to figure out for myself. -JRS

Web Site Changes

As promised, I've finished the website changes. Other than the sudden appearance of book reviews in the area that used to be just my blog feed, there shouldn't be any major differences. You can subscribe to both the blog and book reviews (goodreads) RSS feeds on the front page.

Under the hood it's a different story. I've finally gotten switched over to simplepie in place of the antediluvian magpie, and simplepie's ability to handle and blend multiple feeds is why my reviews are now showing up in the blog window.

re: Twitter: I was going to hook Twitter in the same way, and in fact the code is in place to do exactly that, but it's turned off, as I have yet to say anything of much substance on twitter. Plus, I know some folks who like blogs can't stand twitter (I lean this way myself, but I'm getting over it), so for now they'll stay unblended. Look for me on twitter as Ubergeek72

There is, as they say, one more thing. All the pages in this site now pass w3c validation. I went through and fixed all those & signs in cut-and-pasted URLs, fixed where my dynamic HTML wasn't closing tags, and a hundred other little things.

As always, if you find bugs, please let me know.
-JRS