Wake Me Up When September Ends

It occurs to me that I've dumped a lot of myself into this weblog. A fairly accurate recreation of my personality could be created, I think, if some AI researcher had enough time and fortitude to sort through and boil down the posts. For three and a half years I've been at this without skipping a day.

Three and a half years, I've come to realize, takes it out of you. While I was away in Ontario, it was such a relief to not have to dive into the cesspit that is the modern mediascape--to not have to trawl for a happening that pissed me off, that disturbed me, or was otherwise complaint-worthy. The original material that I create can't fill that entire every-other-day gap.

I didn't write a post today. I had an idea, but I couldn't muster the will to actually put it into words. Instead, I applied edits on a short story that's been sitting for a little while, and I was struck by how relaxing the whole thing was. This isn't the first time I've toyed with stepping away from this weblog, but in the end I wasn't willing to step away from it then.

Things are different now.

That being said, I'm putting this weblog in a suspended state for the rest of the month. I'll return on October 1st, possibly with a resumed daily schedule, possibly one that's less frequent but doesn't have to be padded with less-relevant fluff. There's plenty of stuff to still read in the archives, of course, if you feel like it; over three and a half years you build up a lot.

For the rest of the month, though... it's looking like a fine, clear month to me.

Photo: Birds in the Puddle

Here's something else I found at Niagara Falls, not necessarily off the beaten track but the sort of thing the average person wouldn't really stop to consider--a bunch of small birds clustering around one of the large puddles on the cliffside promenade leading up to the Falls themselves. I don't know what kind of birds they are; like I've said on similar occasions, I'm no birdguy.


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Photo: Captain John's in the Shadow of the Cranes

Even at the foot of Yonge Street, where the land meets the water, Toronto is changing. Captain John's Seafood, the floating restaurant housed in an old liner, has been a fixture of the area for decades but is now up for sale, and around it new condos rise on some of the last empty land in the downtown core. Every time I come here, it's like one frame of an animation--even after only two years.


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Photo: Ruler of the Ruin

During a recent expedition deep into the blasted wastelands of the St. Clair Disaster--an expedition which Randy McDonald and I barely survived, incidentally, as surrounded by streetcars as we were--I passed by a building that seemed to be frozen in mid-demolition, watched over by a solitary cat. I don't know if it's a neighborhood cat that likes the view, if it lives there, or what, but its presence was a welcome reminder that even in the face of the world-wrecking devastation wrought by streetcar right-of-way construction, life can still manage to hang on.


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Photo: Falls Climbers

I've never been to the American side of Niagara Falls, but it's easy to get a good view of what's going on in New York from the Canadian side. Sure, the American Falls may lack the gravitas of the Horseshoe Falls, but there are stairs and paths that practically bring visitors to within touching distance of the cascade. I took this shot with my camera's maximum zoom--all that mist must have made it a cool and pleasant day over there.


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Photo: Industry in Hamilton

Yes, it exists! It's not in the same category as the unicorn or the dodo--there are actually still factories in Hamilton, and they still make things. I took this shot looking over Hamilton Harbour from the Burlington Bay Skyway, and things look pretty active with all that smoke and fire. Probably has something to do with steel.


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Photo: I Don't Want to Set the Bus on Fire

There's a thin line dividing the 1950s from the apocalypse. As a decade, it was the first time when we actually had the capacity to deliver an apocalypse, and the retrofuturistic stylings of the Fallout series in particular dig deep into the possibilities there. Sometimes, you'll find those same stylings right in front of you. At the front entrance of the Halton County Radial Railway in the farmlands past Milton, you'll find a row of old, decomissioned city buses. #732, an ex-Hamilton Street Railway trolleybus awaiting restoration, has the look of something that scavengers might stumble across in the post-nuclear devastation.

The title is because the photo reminds me of the Fallout 3 intro.


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Photo: The Color of the Summer Skyway

Yes, I know that I posted up a photo yesterday as well--but the fact is that my being on vacation, as well as taking a general vacation from the news media, leaves me with less time to come up with posts worth putting up here. I don't think you're particularly interested in looking at worthless posts, either. So from now until next Thursday, I'm running a simple photopost week here.

For today, here's a photograph of the Garden City Skyway off towering above a Niagara field. It carries the Queen Elizabeth Way over the Welland Canal, and it's surprisingly big until you consider the scale of the ships that need to pass beneath it.


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Photo: There's A Place I Know in Ontario

Across the world, people know its name--Niagara Falls. That roaring cascade has been a magnet for tourists and honeymooners for more than a hundred years. If you've never been there and want to replicate the experience on a budget, here's what you can do. First, look at this picture. Second, set the temperature of your house to around 34 degrees Celsius. Third, stand in the shower with your clothes on for a few minutes. Fourth, buy some expensive and useless plastic tchotchkes.

Congratulations! You've just recreated the essential Niagara Falls experience on a budget that can't be beat. For an optional add-on to make it even more authentic, consider giving yourself a case of heat exhaustion.


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Taking a Break From All My Worries

Yinz may have noticed over the past few days that the posts on this weblog have been a bit more abstract than usual. At first it didn't start out as intentional--I was in Chicago to attend Worldcon, not to trawl through newspaper articles until I found something that pissed me off enough to fulminate about it, and even though it's over now I find it somewhat relaxing to not take the hobby back up quite yet.

Not because I have any particular interest in ignorance, mind you. At this point I see it more as a mental health issue. I've been in a pretty bad way in some respects over the last little while, time and again sinking into dark pits. It's easy to feel demoralized and powerless in a world like this, in a world where those we trust to lead us seem interested only in maximizing their own power and don't give a toss about what or who they have to push aside in order to get there. It's hard, sometimes, going through the day with a constant churning in the pit of my stomach, seeing all this bad news and coming away with the conviction that things won't get better.

It took a couple of days free of news before what was going on really started to sink in. The attitudes of the convention may have helped with that, of course, but regardless I started feeling more level--stopped dwelling on things I couldn't change, started feeling more at ease with the world. It's not the kind of feeling that will last forever, of course; it takes a lot of active work to not dwell on certain things, and I don't want to wallow in ignorance.

Still, it's a nice vacation of the mind. For anyone who's getting wound up by the news, I suggest that for a few days you stop looking at the papers and pretend that everything's going to be okay.

Photo: Masts in the Mist

When the remnants of Hurricane Isaac crossed over Chicago on Saturday, many of the city's towers were almost entirely hidden inside thick clouds that scudded low over the ground. In this photo, taken from East Wacker Drive, the two transmission masts are the only sign of the John Hancock Center's existence.

My suggested musical accompaniment for this photo is "Mast in the Mist," composed by Yoko Kanno for Uncharted Waters: New Horizons.


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This Writing Is Bad and I Should Feel Bad

Yesterday evening I attended one of my last panels at Chicon 7--Bad Writer, No Cookie. It started out as a panel about purple prose and how to avoid it, but quickly transitioned into readings of particularly badly-wrought examples from the archives of Thog's Masterclass, assembled by David Langford.

There are definite commonalities, and simple things to look after: a too many adjectives and adverbs are the first lessons to be drilled in, but sometimes they take a while to take, as I first put "generally" back there before I rewrote it. There's a constant temptation to refer to gazes and looks as "eyes," so you end up with things like eyes bouncing across a room or eyes being collected and and eyes doing all sorts of things that eyes just shouldn't be doing.

That's not just purple prose, though. There's a certain overwroughtness that's common among starting-out writers, writers trying to shoot for something grand and glorious, trying to make their offering stand apart from the rest. They certainly do, but not in the way that they had intended. The effect, really, is ridiculous. It detracts from the story because the ornamentation of the verse is so ornate that readers have to peer in close to make sense of it and give themselves concussions on the brass.

It's one thing to talk about, though--it's another to provide examples. That's what Thog's Masterclass is for, that's what last night's panel was for, and that's what this post is. I went trawling through my own archives of incomplete stories, most of them dating from 2008 and 2009. None of them ever saw an editor, which is fortunate, because editors can't edit as well when they're struck blind.

Let me share them with you now.

There were eight thousand and sixteen people watching the launch through the same set of eyes, but he didn't imagine any of them had been betrayed by it like he had. The rocket's vapor trail cut across the placid sky like a tower made from a whirling snowstorm, roaring and biting men like him with all the fury of a freed tiger, or a staircase of clouds leading up to the gates of heaven that would collapse beneath his weight.

Today's lesson: rocket launches are loud and make smoke. I don't even know what the hell I was aiming for here, as the "story" died after this introductory paragraph--and no one else would, either, because no one would ever read beyond a paragraph like this.

Hob McDonnell knew he would die on the moon. There was no garden plot in his future and no weeping willows would scatter the sunlight around his simple tomb. All he could look forward to was the coarse inevitability of the ashen lands and frozen skies that surrounded him, and when he looked ahead all he could see was the fanning cloud of dust kicked up as Sevket Feyzioglu slashed ahead through the regolith with all the fury of a young man drowning in draughts of imagined immortality.

Anyone have any additional ways to get across that the moon is grey and dead? I don't think I established it well enough.

The half-dozen men and women walked like they were made of glass, shuffling through the tunnel like the thirsty drivers of a desert caravan, drifting from one flickering oasis of golden light to the next in a slow, unending zig-zag.

It may come as a surprise to some of you to know that things made of glass do not tend to walk particularly well.

That's only three. Doubtless I have more that I've left behind, and despite my best efforts I'm sure that some unnecessarily-ornamented passages will creep into future prose. It's insidious like that. The best thing you can do as an author is get a sense for the purple and beat it to death whenever you smell it. That is one of the author's jobs, after all.

Photo: 'L' in Shadow, 'L' in Light

It's been a while since I was able to take good pictures of trains on the Chicago 'L' with a decent camera. Having just barely missed the Orange Line run I was angling for, I instead had a fair few minutes on the platform at State/Lake to watch the trains go by. Here, the camera looks west along the Loop to Clark/Lake, where an Orange Line train is taking on passengers and a Brown Line train is slowing to enter.


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Let's Put the World in Worldcon

Much like the World Series of baseball, the World Science Fiction Convention is a profoundly American affair. This goes all the way to the beginning, back in New York City in 1939, where the original convention was held and named in recognition of the New York World's Fair. Worldcon first bounced out of the United States in 1948, when it lit into Toronto, but on the whole most of the conventions have been held within the United States--hell, ten percent of them have been held in Chicago, including the now-running Chicon 7.

It comes through clearly in the attendance. Well over eighty percent of Chicon 7's membership is from the United States. Canada represents the largest national contingent after that, at 273, but some of those are supporting, non-attending members. To put it another way, there are nearly as many Chicon 7 members from Illinois as there are from the entire world outside the United States--825 to 844. Outside of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the largest national contingent is Japan's, with 41 members. This is reflected in the convention numbers; of the seventy Worldcons, only eighteen have been held outside the United States, and five of those were in Canada.

Here at Chicon 7, the members are already looking toward the future. For a while, we've known of two competing bids to hold the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2015, between Spokane and Orlando. With two cities going at it, the vote next year was already shaping up to be more interesting than this year's, which closes in less than six hours and has London running unopposed. Yesterday, a new challenger entered the mix--a group of fans from Helsinki, Finland announced their bid for the 2015 Worldcon.

I'll admit right off the top--I'm biased. I'm a presupporter of Spokane's bid for three reasons. The first is the simple proximity; it's not likely there'll be a Worldcon any nearer to Vancouver in the near future. The second also deals with location--in 2015, it will have been fifty-four years since there was a Worldcon in Cascadia, going all the way back to SeaCon in 1961, and even within the United States it's a region that hasn't been touched by this travelling convention very often. The third is weather; while I understand Spokane to have a relatively salubrious August climate, the Labor Day weekend that the Orlando bid is aiming for happens to fall squarely within the high point of Florida's hurricane season.

Helsinki, though--Helsinki makes an interesting case, in and of itself. It would be the first time since 1990 that Worldcon visited continental Europe, when it stopped in The Hague. It would be the first in Finland and in Scandinavia. Most importantly, though, it would mark two Worldcons in a row outside of North America--something that's never happened before. Hell, it's rare for there to be two Worldcons in a row that happen outside of the United States; so far it's only happened twice, with the 1994 and 1995 Worldcons in Winnipeg and Glasgow, and the 2009 and 2010 Worldcons in Montreal and Melbourne.

I first heard about Helsinki's bid during the Spokane bid party. One issue that is, admittedly, important is the expense; the simple fact is that many Worldcon attendees are American, and to hold two Worldcons outside North America two years in a row would narrow down the attendance list simply because of the expense. Certainly, that is a factor--but personally, I think it would be healthy for Worldcon to take its name more seriously and move out into the greater world. There are undoubtedly plenty of potential Finnish fans who don't have the resources to attend Worldcons; there are only eleven of them on the Chicon 7 rolls. Taking Worldcon to Finland wouldn't only be a reflection of it being the World Science Fiction Convention--it would be an opportunity to bring in the diversity of opinions that don't always make it to North America.

So if I have a chance, I think I'll presupport Helsinki as well. There's nothing wrong with hedging one's bets, after all.