Kelly McCullough – Page 79

New Zealand Diaries #2 (Courtesy Laura McCullough)

Pre-New Zealand* (Hawaii for Christmas!) part 2**

26 Dec. Wake around 8:00, pretty exhausted still. A slow breakfast on the lanai: pineapple, banana, yogurt, POG juice, cheese, and boiled eggs. Wander out to the beach again. There is a beach warning up: Jellyfish. Signs all over the place. Stay out of water! Despite the warning, many are in the water. And many get out of the water to go to the lifeguard station for jellyfish sting treatment. Lots of folks with bags of ice held to various body parts. Quite unimpressed with the parents of the 2yo whom they were treating for a sting. Read the signs, people! There is a huge military ship far off in the water. Several para-sailors out a ways. One adventurous group of tourists was in a large catamaran, paddling away. There are a lot of homeless people here, sleeping in the beach huts. The surf instructors seem to be a tight community. One sits down on the bench next to us with his breakfast. A barefoot little girl approaches him cautiously, no parents in sight. He offers her a bite. Obviously he knows her but she isn’t his. Police officer walking the beach said good morning to two likely-homeless older people on the bench near us. He went out surfing later, she was applying makeup. Surfers are in good shape–you have to be. One surf instructor is typical polynesian body type with wide shoulders and broad chest. Gorgeous long black hair. He carries a surfboard back to the hut one handed, board straight up. Then he tosses it in the air and catches it to put it away. I admit to admiring that one a bit!

We walked to the same fish tacos place for lunch. They were that good. Walked back to hotel via the canal. Fish fish fish! There is a tiny 3-story building visible from our room in the midst of skyscrapers, so we find it to identify it. Cooper Apartments. How old must this building be? Several of the hotels have pools with koi, and we see the biggest koi we’ve ever seen. It must have been well over a foot long and very thick. Definitely seeing the carp side of the family there. Back to the hotel for a poolside mai tai, taking advantage of the free wifi there. It’s hot and humid and sunny, so we perforce are staying in the shade in a little pavilion poolside. Another dinner on the lanai of banana, pineapple, ham, cheese. I finish off the bottle of barely adequate wine, while Kelly tries a pineapple rum drink from a can. His drink is quite good! More lounging about–the Honolulu interlude is all about resting up for the real trip.

27 Dec. Today we leave Hawaii for New Zealand! Uber excited! Up around 7:30 for a five-fruit breakfast: pineapple yogurt, passion-orange-guava juice, and fresh papaya halves with lemon. I guess that is six fruits! We check out at noon, but our airport shuttle picks us up at 7:30 pm. Mostly a day of rest. Walking around, looking at people, looking at the beach. Tacos for lunch, and then tacos for dinner too. Yes, they really were fantastic. And we were in the land of chain restaurants, so this at least was local food. Several hours spent poolside with mai tais. Great service from the poolside bar. We picked up our luggage at 7:00 pm and went to wait for our 7:30 shuttle. The 7:00 shuttle showed up around 7:15 so we grabbed that one. Turns out President Obama was in town and there were lots of traffic jams all over. We had an exciting loooooong trip to the airport with secret service agents and local police officers re-directing traffic. Our flight check-in period ended at 2030 and we arrived at 2020. Cutting it close! No problem at check-in despite the 7 kg carry-on limit and our bags are 9 and 10 kg. Great service from Air New Zealand at check-in. Usual annoying wait outside the waiting room (most Hawaii flights do this). And the usual crabby people heading home from Hawaii. We’ve had flight attendants tell us they love the flights TO Hawaii, with excited people starting vacation. They don’t love the return flight with sunburned crabby exhausted people. Another wait in the waiting room, and then we board our flight to New Zealand!

NZ Travel Diary #1

NZ Travel Diary #2

NZ Travel Diary #3

*I’ve been traveling in Hawaii and New Zealand and will be posting links to the pictures soon.

**Whenever we travel my wife does a travel diary while I take most of the pictures. I use her notes as my references for later use for books and other things. She has been gracious enough to allow me to share them here on my site for those who are interested.

New Zealand Diaries #1 (Courtesy Laura McCullough)

Pre-New Zealand* (Hawaii for Christmas!) part 1**

24 Dec, staying with friends before flying out. It’s 12 below F out as we wake up in St. Paul. Cab picks up up at 7 am. Major accident on bridge across Mississippi: more than 14 cars on the side of the road in various states of smush. Charge up our iPads and iPhones at the gate. The plane 2-3-2 seating and we are on the right side, very comfortable. We use alcohol wipes on the trays and seats, having just read about MRSA and other nasties on airplanes. Woman across the aisle notices, asks if we have an extra wipe. She is tiny, maybe 4′ 10″. Flight from MSP to LAX is fine. 3 hour layover in LAX. Eat at Rock&Beat; gluten free pizza! A drink called Blue Suede Shoes. Kelly has a burger and Jameson. People at next table make trouble for waitress and she flees for 15 minutes. Other servers take her place. Gate agent says “Merry Christmas” into PA microphone, waits for response from crowd. No response. Tries again: “Merry Christmas!” and crowd at gate responds “Merry Christmas!”.

Flight from LAX to Honolulu is OK. Bumpy, but a quiet companion in our aisle. Arrive in HNL around 6 pm and it is already dark! Surprising. We usually arrive in early January. Agents for our vacation package are at gate with leis. Leis and alohas all around. Shuttle takes us to our hotel via downtown street. Festival of Lights is happening and there are beautiful displays all over. We saw a snowflake! (In lights.) Driver had a good patter. Our hotel is nice: Ohana (means Family) Waikiki. Check in around 8 pm, and there is a gift from our travel agent, a box of chocolate macadamia nuts. How sweet! There is a restaurant in building (Chilis, but, what the heck) with a GF menu. I have salmon, Kelly has tilapia. Somewhat disappointing to have no local food on menu, but the food is fine. Back to our room on the 14th floor for bed at 10 pm.

25 Dec. Mele Kalikimaka! (Merry Christmas in Hawaiian). Up around 7:30, though dozing since 5:30. It’s a four-hour time difference, so that’s not bad for our first night. Shower (aaaaaaaah) and head across the street to the grocery store. POG! Pineapple-orange-guava juice. Yum yum yum. Also yogurt and cheese and meat. We eat on the lanai (deck) looking at beautiful views of downtown Honolulu. There is a beauty to the urban environment, though I prefer more rural views. A gorgeous double rainbow shows up to serenade us. White pigeons flitter around looking for handouts–we don’t feed birds so they leave us quickly.

Clean up, head for Waikiki Beach. We have some trouble finding our way past the hotels, but eventually make it out via a hotel pool yard. Lots of sun, high 70s temp, people in shorts, swimsuits, sandals. The waves are little tiny things, though out a way there are lots of people doing surf lessons. Santa hats made from aloha fabrics. Xmas tree on beach: an older lady with a funny Mrs.-Clause-in-a-bikini coverup takes our picture for us. Very few boogie boards–sad, that. Splish about in the water and walk along in the bright sun past hotel after hotel after hotel. Sit on park bench between road & beach for maybe an hour, enjoying the ocean view and the people watching. Lots of Asians around. Lots of bikinis–few single-piece suits. Many people leaving the beach barefoot, and many with surfboards. They aren’t that much weight but they are very awkward to carry. There is an odd optical illusion on the ocean: the far-out water is much darker and our boogie boarding reflexes keep making us think it is a HUGE wave. It is quite distracting for a while.

We walk along the main drag to the International Market. I remember this place from our first time in Honolulu many years ago. It is rare for me to remember anything long-term, so this is fun for me. We pass a guy with a shirt from Emily, MN. Stop to chat with him; he is here on vacation. End up at a food court, looking for fish tacos. I really want fish tacos for lunch. We find Hawaiian Tacos, with GF-labeled tacos! Delicious fish or shrimp with pineapple cream sauce. Oh so yummy. Back to hotel for noon siesta–a two-hour nap. We laze about while the sun is strongest. Then onto the pool deck level for a few minutes of wifi. Head back to grocery store for dinner supplies. We eat on the lanai again: banana, pineapple, ham, cheese, peanut butter and wine. Fancy, yes? The tree below us might be a banyan, and is filled with loud birds. They are noisiest at dawn and dusk. Magpies? Can’t tell. Sun is down by 6:00 again. Still exhausted.

NZ Travel Diary #1

NZ Travel Diary #2

NZ Travel Diary #3

*I’ve been traveling in Hawaii and New Zealand and will be posting links to the pictures soon.

Kindle, Text to Speech, and the Author’s Guild

It is with extreme caution that I dip a toe in these waters, but several people have now asked me what I thought of the Author’s Guild position on the Kindle II, and particularly how it may cause real harm to blind or visually impaired readers, and…I do have an opinion. I know that’s a shocker, isn’t it.

To begin with and just to be absolutely clear, I’m in support of the Kindle’s voice feature being generally available. I feel that the benefits to those who have difficulties reading are greater than the potential future hazards to author income.

Now, on to the explanation, which requires some set up. Start with my understanding that (due in part to ADA mandates) all modern American book contracts always include a voice rights for the disabled clause. So, for example, when Minnesota Radio for the blind wanted to broadcast WebMage, that was automatically an allowed usage. I didn’t even hear about it until the book had been running on the radio for several weeks. Had it been the case that they’d had to ask, I’d have been delighted to give permission, but that’s neither here nor there. The important first point is that audio rights for the disabled are automatic, and I don’t know of anyone who is opposed to that.

Next step, the Kindle II and what the author’s guild is trying to do. If the Kindle’s voice feature was aimed only at the disabled audience I am quite certain that the AG would not oppose this. However, it’s a generalized feature and that means that anyone can use it.

Now, an excellent argument can be made that this in no way competes with actual audio book rights because there’s simply no comparison between a talented voice actor and a machine conversion of text-to-speech. A counter argument can be made (and this is I think at the core of the AG objection) that that’s true now, but…what if in 20 years text-to-speech advances enough that it does become a real competitor? If that happens and no protest was made at this point, a court could well find that in not protesting the Kindle II, authors waived their rights to protest the new advanced technology for which they are now not going to be paid. For that matter, what about non-fiction where intonation and story-telling don’t really matter?

Since the publishing industry has a long established tradition of grabbing rights and not paying for them, the changing technology puts the AG in the position of either protesting Kindle II in a way that makes them look really bad right now, or not protesting it and possibly causing significant loss of revenues to their membership at some unknown future point, or, possibly, tomorrow for non-fiction. Now, as I said at the outset, I think the generalized good of allowing the Kindle to use text-to-speech outweighs the possible risks to future authorial income, but at the same time, I sympathize with the fact that it puts the AG between a rock and a hard place. It is not nearly as easy a question as it seems.

So, no, the AG is not insane or evil, just in a difficult position and quite probably wrong.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 13 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

Watch me do a bunny shadow next!

Okay, now bring me a bucket of fish!

It’s my chair now, buddy.

See! I do too fit under here…I just can’t get out.

I’m paused. Now, what?

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 10 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

Wha…oh, it just you.

I’m ready for my closeup.

It’s snowing and I blame you

Why yes, I did walk on your breakfast. Why do you ask?

I knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…me!

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 5 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Friday Cat Blogging

Wait, who put that world out there?

That was me. Totally my fault. Let me just find the off button, and I’ll fix it.

What are you two on about now?

All shall love me and despair!

I’m thinking not. But that may just be me.

Words…Maybe I Do Care

Okay so a while back I talked about not getting hung up on the words. Today I was asked a writing question that made me think about how I use words and at what level I do care about specifics. The question came from a fan who is also a writer, and it went roughly like this: You always seem to have the right word, adverb, adjective, to capture the scene. Is that natural? How did you develop it?

Now, I don’t know that I would agree that I always have the right word, and I’m sure the Wyrdsmiths could point to any number of times where I absolutely don’t have it in the drafts that they see. And that’s in part because I really try not to get hung up on things at the sentence level when I’m going through a first draft. If it’s taking much longer than a few seconds to find the perfect word, I’ll just toss an approximation in there knowing that I’ll get closer to what I want on the next pass. That said, I do strive to make my prose smooth, sharp, and appropriate. Here’s my response to the question of how I worked to get my sentence level construction to the place it’s at currently:

It’s actually something that I worked hard to develop. My natural style is both more verbose and more academic. There were four conscious components involved.

The first was writing a bunch of short stories and having them critiqued by a friend who writes really bare bones prose. He made me much more aware of my multi-clausal and 25 cents word tendencies which got me to thinking about my prose on a more spare structural level.

Then I got in the habit of going back through stories after a year or more of ignoring them while I sent them out. By not even glancing at a story for a year I was able to arrive at a place where I was no longer invested in it at the sentence by sentence level. At that point I would set a fairly arbitrary goal of cutting ten percent of each story and trying to do it entirely by editing out redundancies and excess words at the sentence level rather than wholesale scene cuts. Another friend calls work at this level sentence origami because you’re taking sentences apart and refolding them to say the same thing with fewer words.

The third was a years long process of integrating those practices into my first draft process. The four things I really focused on there were teaching myself never to use a 25 cent word where a nickel word would work (less than ten characters wherever possible), trying never to let a sentence go over three manuscript lines (keeping it to two or less if I could), keeping paragraphs to a quarter page or less where possible and trying never to let them go over a third of a page, and eliminating passive voice constructions wherever possible. That last is probably the hardest for me and the one that I most often have to fix in successive drafts. It’s also the one that most forces me to find the right short word to express something.

The fourth is a practice of trying to find subject-appropriate metaphors, similes, and analogies. So, if I’m writing about Greek gods and computers I try to draw my comparatives from the classical myth structures and programming or electronics, whereas if I’m writing a theater book I strive to use theater language, or numismatics language for a coin-magic book. Something might be as black as the waters of the Styx in a WebMage book, or the velvet black of the front curtain in Winter of Discontent (my as yet unpublished Shakespearian magic book) book, or the tarnished black of a long buried silver penny in Numismancer (also unpublished).

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 30 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

Friday Cat Nap Event, First Heat

Friday Cat Nap Event, Second Heat

Sunbeam and catnip-pad, a powerful combination

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 28 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

Guest Pets Edition:

My dad’s cat and Jupe the wondermutt wearing a pink plastic conehead:

Cross me at your peril, human

Layer cake napping.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog on March 23 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

Make sure you get my good side.

I resent being your photo-object, you know that right?

Skinny cat tries to camoflage herself by aligning with the floorboards.

Don’t you wish you were as pretty as me?

More pictures. Rapture. How will I survive the excitement.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 13 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)