First Story of 2010: In Adversity
Jan. 6th, 2010 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuI finished "In Adversity" today, a tale of two old cold war opponents encountering one another again for the first time in a very long time. My lovely and talented wife read it, and liked it, so now it's printed out and sealed into a manila envelope with a cover letter and SASE, ready to be mailed to Fantasy & Science Fiction tomorrow morning. So, technically not in circulation yet, but...I'm going to count it anyhow.
That makes 13 stories out in the world at the moment. Most of the others have been in the editors' hands for a very long time, so the odds aren't good. But I'm not ready to give up on them yet. A few are fairly recent submissions, so I'm still waiting for word on those.
Printing my stories is getting to be a real pain in the ass. The printer reliably connects to my wife's computer (Win XP), and to the kid's (also Win XP). But MY computer (OpenSUSE 10.3) frequently loses its connection, and I can't figure out why. The only way to get the damn thing to recognize the printer again is to delete the printer configuration in CUPS and reinstall it. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it's goddamned annoying.
I had to do that again tonight before I could print out the story, letter, SASE and mailing labels. Grrrr. But it's done now.
In other news, I finished rereading Flashforward by Robert Sawyer today. I enjoyed it. It's quite different from the ABC television series, which took the basic idea and then quickly ran off in different directions. The book is definitely better, though the series is probably more appropriate for a general audience rather than the genre-reading audience the book was aimed at.
I'm also working my way through The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. It's nonfiction, about the psychology of language, and what it can tell us about how the mind works. More specifically, it's about how we acquire language as children, and what innate rules the mind seems to use in doing so. We're not simply parrots, learning by rote. But while children make mistakes, overgeneralizing sometimes and extrapolating logical (but incorrect) rules from what they take in as they learn to speak, they manage to avoid literally millions of mistakes. There are rules--unspoken, but real--about the way words may and may not be strung together that kids seem to intuitively understand. There's a structure to it all, based on how the mind appears to organize concepts separate from the words themselves, but it's not easy to tease out, and that's what the book is about.
It's interesting stuff, though not quite as fascinating as How The Mind Works, also by Pinker, which I read a while ago.
Stories in Circulation: 13
Rejections: 24
Stories Accepted: 5
That makes 13 stories out in the world at the moment. Most of the others have been in the editors' hands for a very long time, so the odds aren't good. But I'm not ready to give up on them yet. A few are fairly recent submissions, so I'm still waiting for word on those.
Printing my stories is getting to be a real pain in the ass. The printer reliably connects to my wife's computer (Win XP), and to the kid's (also Win XP). But MY computer (OpenSUSE 10.3) frequently loses its connection, and I can't figure out why. The only way to get the damn thing to recognize the printer again is to delete the printer configuration in CUPS and reinstall it. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it's goddamned annoying.
I had to do that again tonight before I could print out the story, letter, SASE and mailing labels. Grrrr. But it's done now.
In other news, I finished rereading Flashforward by Robert Sawyer today. I enjoyed it. It's quite different from the ABC television series, which took the basic idea and then quickly ran off in different directions. The book is definitely better, though the series is probably more appropriate for a general audience rather than the genre-reading audience the book was aimed at.
I'm also working my way through The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. It's nonfiction, about the psychology of language, and what it can tell us about how the mind works. More specifically, it's about how we acquire language as children, and what innate rules the mind seems to use in doing so. We're not simply parrots, learning by rote. But while children make mistakes, overgeneralizing sometimes and extrapolating logical (but incorrect) rules from what they take in as they learn to speak, they manage to avoid literally millions of mistakes. There are rules--unspoken, but real--about the way words may and may not be strung together that kids seem to intuitively understand. There's a structure to it all, based on how the mind appears to organize concepts separate from the words themselves, but it's not easy to tease out, and that's what the book is about.
It's interesting stuff, though not quite as fascinating as How The Mind Works, also by Pinker, which I read a while ago.
Stories in Circulation: 13
Rejections: 24
Stories Accepted: 5