The AV Club has nice things to say about my story in This Is How You Die. “Liz Argall’s “Blunt Force Trauma Delivered By Spouse,” a graphic, painful character study of an Australian farmer in a passionate but abusive relationship, fighting to rebuild her life in spite of her eponymous prediction.”
I’m at Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop. It’s a good thing that helps writers use better astronomy in their science fiction.
Monday – these are notes, there may be errors or misunderstandings.
Astronomy Pre-test. I know I didn’t do very well. I was a little embarrassed, truth be told! We won’t find out our result until later, but I KNOW some of them were wrong and I find it strange (and fascinating) how my chains of logic got so tangled and led to this series of cascading faults.
Scales of the Universe
Mike Brotherton led us through the scale of the universe. Space is big, really big. It was nice to spend an hour or so pushing our brains to wrap around just how big. The filamentary structure of the cosmic webbing of the universe added extra dimensions to a Things comic! This is one of the videos we watched.
And we watched You Are Not the Center of the Universe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKiT06urRpk
We didn’t watch the following video, but I found it while I was looking for images of the filamentary structure of the universe. Now that I have search terms like filamentary structure of the universe in my vocabulary I’m able to find beautiful videos like this (and when you watch it bear in mind the powers of ten video, galaxies aint small!)
Wow, right? Do you have a glowy feeling of insignificance and grandeur? What a great way to start the week.
Wolfram Alpha was mentioned as a useful resource.
Seasons and Lunar Phases & Misconceptions
Andria Schwortz (who designed our pre-workshop questionnaire and will be testing us again) led us through this challenging session.
We started by going through some common misconceptions and watched the first few minutes of a somewhat chilling documentary called a Private Universe. We really have deeply embedded misconceptions about how seasons work etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo
Lunar phases are so specific to our reality that I find it more challenging than the more abstract principles. I’ll remember stuff and then forget and we dig into such specific realities that you really have to know what’s what. I still feel like I’m mastering all the relationships between the different angles. I was pleased she brought in cross-cultural perspectives and mentioned other ways of describing seasons and moon phases (in Hawaii there are 30 named phases of the moon).
We made our way through several worksheets. Several of my questions are unanswered and I hope to work through them properly (or ask Andria for help). They’re the sort of questions where I feel like a get the answer and then it somehow drains away and I have almost a memory of an answer. The stickiest questions (for me) are mostly things I’ve read about dozens of times but they do not stick in my noggin – I’m sure if I sat down with a globe and charts I’d figure it out eventually, but only in a slow, stumbling, insecure way. They’re also highly relevant questions for anyone writing in a setting where people have strong connections to seasons and don’t have advanced technology to tell them where they are and what time it is:
Random things. I did not know that the Chinese calendar and the procession of Jupiter had a relationship (Jupiter has a 12 year procession). Dear Liz, don’t let hollywood etc fool you, remember remember remember that the dark side of the moon and the far side of the moon are different things. The moon is tidally locked, but what we see and what the sun sees are different. I know this thing (thanks to science fiction I read as a kid), but sometimes I forget I know this thing and get tripped.
Links and resources http://astro.unl.edu/ for simulations. H.A. Rey’s book “The Stars” is a good resource. The US Naval Observatory is a good place to go to for precise times around the world for sun rise, sun set, moon rise, moon set, and phases of the moon.
Hanging out with the Solar System
Christian Ready took us on a blazing fast tour of the solar system. Starting with cool images of coronal mass ejections from the sun (I couldn’t find the perfect youtube video with my current connection, but do a search and you will see plenty of pretty). There is an app you can download that will alert you to sun activity. 3dsun.org
Solar system studies are becoming planetary studies as we have more samples to work with. Eg, looking at dirt is called geology.
My notes feel more scattered now, here are some bullet points (and it’s late! I want to go to sleep, but I don’t want to forget!)
The solar system’s frostline is the line where it’s too hot for hydrogen to form into ice.
Pheonix detected snow on mars. Snow fell on the solar panel but almost instantly sublimated. Cool images of what looks like water erosion.
Andy Romine mentioned the Kerbal Space Program – a nifty, techy, and cute solar system flight simulator.
There are Gas Giants and Ice (more slushy than solid) Giants, mostly the same characteristics.
Roche limit – what rings rather than moons are made of. Getting close enough to the planet where the difference in the gravitational pull on one side of a moon compared to the other side is so strong that the moon is pulled apart.
Rings evolve and change. All the gas giants have rings (Neptune’s is just very small).
In Saturn’s Rings is a film that’s worth checking out (when it comes out). We watched several minutes that focused Saturn, but the film with have more stuff in it:
Europa Report was recommended as a good hard science fiction film.
Pluto and Charon around each other, spent a bit of time looking at what dwarf planets. Pluto is the second largest dwarf planet (Eris is the biggest)
The boundaries of our solar system probably do not have a bow shock beyond the heliosphere.
Then we went to dinner. Then others went to see Pacific Rim, I went to bed. Then I woke up and wrote this. Now it is midnight. I should probably go brush my teeth and do that sleeping thing. I haven’t slept properly the last two days, so the nap was much needed. I felt more rested rollerskating around campus at 7.30 this morning than I did by tossing and turning on my slippery vinyl bed!
Pausing to write this down it feels like we went through a lot, but thanks to the pacing and skill of our instructors it felt like a good flow of information and not at all rushed or crammed. I do wish I’d asked more questions around latitude, longitude and all that “mundane” stuff. By the looks of things we’re going to spend a lot of time gazing deep into the cosmos, but I think it’s stars and the moon in relationship to all the places we could be on our own planet that I will struggle with the most! Weather allowing we’re looking through the small telescope tomorrow night, so hopefully that will allow more time to dig into that.
I wrote a story that means a lot to me. It’s coming out on 16 July as part of This is How You Die, Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death.
It’s been getting great reviews, Publisher’s Weekly lists it as one of the best reads of Summer 2013 and Kirkus says “Funny, frightening, clever; no one in these stories emerges unscathed.”
The MOD folks have also made a short film that I sneakily showed roller derby folks on my phone over the weekend! It’s live and consumable right now over on the page with quotes and other nice info. I can tell you it made folks laugh out loud, clutch their bellies and squeal!
If it makes you ROFLMAO, please pass it on. It’s part of our cunning plan for world domination and we can’t do it without you.
For this edition of people are awesome I had to make a video blog! Yes! I am doing rambly video blogs again. The video cuts out at 9 minutes because that’s when my iPad says ENOUGH YOU SHALL SPEAK NO MORE.
Things mentioned in this blog include:
PS. I updated my things comic today as well, so posting here feels like it’s stealing my thunder! But its a sharing kinda day. Things with Owies!
I’m in the middle of the Clarion Write-a-thon! Strange but true. People are awesome, part two is inspired by big big love to my latest sponsors, Robert Crais and Julie Andrews (not the singer). Yaaaay! I’ve made a list full of linkage love to all the awesome people on the right hand side of this very website. If you would like to be on the list of neato, you can check out my writer page and sponsor me :-)
We’re in week three of six now. I’ve not been good at pressing the button (which increases your ‘days written’ button), although I have been creating at a steady clip. I’ve mostly been working on my web comic and I’ve just written a blog post about my lastest endevours over on the Things website.
The most excellent Maggie McFee coloured a comic we made together many years ago. She is awesome. I need to do a whole blog post about the value and significance of the old ozcomics/pulpfaction crew. The cohorts you start with, years and years on, they’re the people I look to and the people that keep me believing in comics when life gets hard (even though I’m not good at staying in touch and mostly lurk or fondly remember).
This comic was inspired by Forgi, a friend I’ve known for much of my life. She told me I had more than one guardian angel, I’m not really a guardian angel kinda person, but at the same time I was really touched by Forgi’s caring… and somewhat shenaniganny words (shenaniganny is a real word, I swear! ;))
Here’s a tiny thumbnail, go check it out on her website.
I have an awesome new iPad thanks to my sweetie. Now I can draw drawings at a much higher resolution, run moire sophisticated apps, the keyboard is more sensitive AND I now have a camera in my iPad.
On Thursday afternoons I meet with fabulous folks to co-work and talk about all things writing (inspired by Portland’s Fireside Writers). I love these folks and here’s an image of some of them :) the lighting conditions were terrible, so I’m pleased it captured faces and everything… I’m still figuring out all the focusing options, hence the ‘artistic’ blur.
Two more comics drawn today, so my write-a-thon self is satisfied. I might try for some words too :)
Happy hugs to all.
Sooooo, I was cleaning the house today and I whacked/wrenched my toe against a swivel chair so hard I sprained it. Three days before tryouts, nooooo!
I was worried I might have done something truly horrible to it, given how janky it felt, but initial prognosis is sprain and that works all right with me. Toes hurt like a beast, but on the plus side it’s forced me to put more weight on my back wheels and I think that’s helped my crossovers (although my agility’s not so good right now). I do whimper like a sad puppy when I put my skates, but hopefully it’ll be better by tryouts.
In other exciting news, Kate from PFM gave me a Lego doll avatar as a bacon camp graduation present. I am quite chuffed. Behold the Liz!
Behold the Liz fighting the fierce purple monster!
Quite some time ago (was it 3 months? I cannot remember if it was before or after the last Rat City tryouts) I got some new rollerskates. I am quite fond of my Crazyskates and I know they’ve been kinder to me than other skates would have been, but it has still been something of a rough ride. In part because of my own ignorance around proper lacing technique and in part because I have somewhat sensitive feet and ankles.
The first thing I did in my Crazyskates was have my left toenail go black. I’m not even sure why. My toe just got really painful and the nail went black! I hope its part of my overall foot improvement – I have big toes that curl up like crazy and carve holes in my sneakers. The toes are slowly descending, thanks to stretches and skating, but the joints aren’t so used to normal planes of existence.
Anyhow, the black toenail has been a thing for quite some time now, then it suddenly became 50% normal looking. I got excited, but then a few days later it went yellow and started to distort when I got it wet. I had hoped the whole thing would be gone by tryouts, but I suspect I’ll still have my snaggletooth in place on Saturday. I’ve never lost a toenail before. It has been painful on occasion, but not half as screamingly awful as I thought it would be. Now that it’s just a snaggle it doesn’t really hurt. Phew! If you’d told me a year ago I’d have a toenail come off I would have been full of fear, but it wasn’t that bad at all.
In Memoria, weddings, parties, write-a-thon, comics, derby, anything.
Sometimes all you can do is make art. My Things Without Arms and Without Legs comic has become something special to me. When I found out my father-in-law died a drew this between the hours of 2am and 5am. Tree.
Tina Connolly has produced a marvelous podcast version of my short story Shadow Play. I wrote the story just before Leonard Pung, Clarion classmate, died and now it comes to your ears just after Lester’s passing. Life is a funny old thing. I hope you enjoy the story. “Every time the shadow puppets play someone is saying goodbye”
Yesterday I was skating at the Rat’s Nest for four hours. First we had a bacon camp scrimmage (aka we played an informal game of Roller Derby) and then I went to a two hour practice with PFM. I’m trying out for Rat City in less than a week and I want to get better at all the things. I love roller derby and I love how much I’m growing by aiming high (according to current WFTDA rankings Rat City’s travel team is ranked number six in the world). Try out early, try out often is my motto, and this will be my third attempt. I learn something and grow as a skater every time.
I was more than a little tired when I got home, but I realized it was day one of the Clarion Write-a-thon, so I dug deep and created some Lifestyle advice from a small pink bunny.
It’s nice that the pressure of the write-a-thon has already caused me to create where I might not have. You can sponsor me and join in the shenanigans if you want to. Thank you to everyone who has sponsored me already. There’s an honor roll on the right hand side of the page.
For the write-a-thon I am in a writing team with Shauna Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson and our fearless leader Ken Schneyer (for now, the team might grow). We are the Pungent Wedding Guests. Pungent – in memory of Leonard who loved puns. Wedding Guests in honor of our delightful classmates Ed Gauvin and Nicole Taylor who just got married. We stink with happiness for them. They are seriously (perhaps profoundly) adorable and it makes me happy thinking about their future adventures together.
Now on with the words, the exercise, the eating healthy food and drinking LOTS of water.