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prusikGot "Detours on the Journey Home" back from F&SF. Sent it out to SH. (One of the really nice things about electronic submissions is that I don't have to print the story out, then go to the post office.)
Thought harder about the world's most overthought purchase. I've decided that what I really want may not be technically feasible right now. So I need to decide whether to get something close to what I want for now, or to live with what I have and want for what I really want to become technically feasible. The latter would certainly be cheaper. (It is unfortunate that the hard drive in my current laptop died about 1.5 years ago. At the time, I replaced the hard drive. If it were to happen now, I'd probably replace the laptop.)
Anyway, ere are my answers to the five questions which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avocadovpx asked.
1) For the next 20 minutes, you cannot fail. The restrictions: you cannot use your power to accumulate money. You cannot use your power to get more time like this, or to give anyone supernatural knowledge. Anything you do takes the same amount of time it would normally take you (e.g, you can't write a novel in 20 minutes, but you can write a short story at your normal speed). How do you use this gift?
I'm not sure I would. I mean, the rest of my life would be such a disappointment, relatively speaking. The first thing I'd have to do would be to decide what to do for the next 19 minutes. Actually, I'd probably spend it learning how to make good, quick decisions.
How much I agonize over the placement of track points or chapter points is a running joke among a friends of mine for whom I've done some audio or video work. There's a reason I don't do much audio or video work. (Of course, I've been dithering over replacing my laptop for a while. OTOH, there's no actual rush there.)
Yes, I realize this is selfish, but 20 minutes isn't very much time. I'm stumped as to how much I can change the world for the better in 20 minutes, even in the best case scenario.
2) The American government collapses. We the people entrust you with the responsibility of choosing our next leader, who will be supreme dictator of the U. S. for the next 10 years. The stipulation: it must be someone, living or dead, who has written a book that you can find in your local Barnes & Noble or public library. Whom do you choose, and why?
I thought a while about this. I don' think I'm well read enough to make the definitive choice. However, based on whom I've read, I'd pick Richard Feynman.
He's never wanted political power, so he's likely to fix the government then get out of the way. He's dealt with politicians. He's spent time on government panels. Feynman is invariably the person who's done the work he's supposed to have done, and made all the tough, rational decisions.
At least by his own accounts, he's not one to be cowed by anyone, or to compromise for personal gain. I think he'd take the task of reconstructing American government seriously. He'd come up with one which would embody American ideals which stands a chance of lasting.
3) You are the owner of a successful restaurant. Which three dishes are unique to your menu, and how did you choose them?
This is tricky because my parents were the owners of a successful restaurant. (When they retired, they sold it to someone who proceeded to run it into the ground. Running a successful restaurant, nowhere near as easy as it looks, and it never looked easy to me.) So for the purposes of this question, I'm going to ignore the economics actually making a restaurant successful. If I take them into account, the answers would either be no fun, or I'd still be working on them.
The first is a beef noodle soup that my Mom made. There's actually a restaurant with a Taiwanese food menu in a strip mall near where I used to live which sells a version of this. However, I'm talking about the Platonic ideal here, the soup as I remember it which is undoubtedly better than my Mom actually made it, and certainly better than that restaurant made it. (This didn't stop me from ordering it on a semi-regular basis though.)
The beef stock was always rich and beefy. (Anyone who's read Cook's Illustrated knows how hard, and impractical, this is.) It was scented with star anise, and soy sauce, but without it being salty. The beef was always meltingly tender. The fat in the beef and the stock gave the soup this silky, luscious mouth feel. The sourness of the preserved mustard greens perfectly cut the richness. The noodles, cooked in the broth, always tasted both of beef and it's own substantial heartiness.
It's an open question how much of this I actually tasted though. I like chilis, and there were always some around. (My parents liked their food hot.)
The second is a dish consisting of foams aerated with helium. The foams are in a rainbow of colors. (We may have to finesse the blue) Each color would be the distilled essence of a single flavor: tomato, carrot, corn, cucumber, eggplant and some sort of exotic pepper. Ideally, it should barely weigh your tongue, but explode with flavor. (Practically, I'm not sure how you serve this.) Molecular gastronomy is definitely the wave of the future. (It may also be a fad.)
The third is dessert: barbequed bison ice cream. I like the idea of playing around with unusual flavors of ice cream. (I've had Guinness ice cream, and Grape Nuts ice cream. They were both pretty good.) The rich custard base would complement the lean, hearty, smoky bison meat. The sweetness pays homage to the notion of ice cream as dessert. The heat provided by the chilis contrast with the coolness of the dessert and provides a delightful kick to the dessert.
4) At this point in your life, would you trade the years you spent in school after high school for time spent doing something else? Why?
Hmm... What actually happened after high school was I went to college, went to grad school, talked my way into job A which lasted about 5 years, then talked my way into job B which I still have. None of this was planned, of course. (Yes, I didn't so much set out for a PhD as much as stumble into one.) However, I have gotten somewhere that I'm relatively happy with and I'm doing more or less what it turns out that I wanted to do.
It might have happened more quickly (and less discursively) if I had planned it all out and executed according to plan. I suppose that would have made me a happier person for longer. However, while there are some things I can plan, my life is apparently not one of them. Whatever I would have done probably would have lead to a discursive life anyways.
With the advantage of hindsight, I think there are a bunch of things I could have done differently. They would have to led to radically different possible lives. Some of them would have been better lives than the one I live now. A few of them might be worse. I don't think I'd risk the life I have to find out.
5) You are offered the chance to be the best teacher of young writers the world has ever seen. People who studied with you for six weeks would make progress that would otherwise take them 10 years. People who studied with you for 1 year (the maximum anyone could, without having their head explode) would go from slush rejects to the level of today's SFF grandmasters. The cost: you can never write fiction again. Do you take this gift, and why?
Finally, an easy one. I would so not take the gift. Yes, it's incredibly selfish of me to deny the world so many accomplished writers and offer up my own writing in their place. However, if I took the gift, I think I would end up accomplishing vicariously through them. That's not a good thing. (It's one thing to be proud of what your students have achieved. It's another to think of those achievements as your own.) Or it would all be quite frustrating.
The best person to take the gift is, of course, someone with no interest in writing fiction at all. (If this were a story prompt, what would happen, of course, is that the person who takes the gift develops an interest in writing fiction.)
Thought harder about the world's most overthought purchase. I've decided that what I really want may not be technically feasible right now. So I need to decide whether to get something close to what I want for now, or to live with what I have and want for what I really want to become technically feasible. The latter would certainly be cheaper. (It is unfortunate that the hard drive in my current laptop died about 1.5 years ago. At the time, I replaced the hard drive. If it were to happen now, I'd probably replace the laptop.)
Anyway, ere are my answers to the five questions which
avocadovpx asked.1) For the next 20 minutes, you cannot fail. The restrictions: you cannot use your power to accumulate money. You cannot use your power to get more time like this, or to give anyone supernatural knowledge. Anything you do takes the same amount of time it would normally take you (e.g, you can't write a novel in 20 minutes, but you can write a short story at your normal speed). How do you use this gift?
I'm not sure I would. I mean, the rest of my life would be such a disappointment, relatively speaking. The first thing I'd have to do would be to decide what to do for the next 19 minutes. Actually, I'd probably spend it learning how to make good, quick decisions.
How much I agonize over the placement of track points or chapter points is a running joke among a friends of mine for whom I've done some audio or video work. There's a reason I don't do much audio or video work. (Of course, I've been dithering over replacing my laptop for a while. OTOH, there's no actual rush there.)
Yes, I realize this is selfish, but 20 minutes isn't very much time. I'm stumped as to how much I can change the world for the better in 20 minutes, even in the best case scenario.
2) The American government collapses. We the people entrust you with the responsibility of choosing our next leader, who will be supreme dictator of the U. S. for the next 10 years. The stipulation: it must be someone, living or dead, who has written a book that you can find in your local Barnes & Noble or public library. Whom do you choose, and why?
I thought a while about this. I don' think I'm well read enough to make the definitive choice. However, based on whom I've read, I'd pick Richard Feynman.
He's never wanted political power, so he's likely to fix the government then get out of the way. He's dealt with politicians. He's spent time on government panels. Feynman is invariably the person who's done the work he's supposed to have done, and made all the tough, rational decisions.
At least by his own accounts, he's not one to be cowed by anyone, or to compromise for personal gain. I think he'd take the task of reconstructing American government seriously. He'd come up with one which would embody American ideals which stands a chance of lasting.
3) You are the owner of a successful restaurant. Which three dishes are unique to your menu, and how did you choose them?
This is tricky because my parents were the owners of a successful restaurant. (When they retired, they sold it to someone who proceeded to run it into the ground. Running a successful restaurant, nowhere near as easy as it looks, and it never looked easy to me.) So for the purposes of this question, I'm going to ignore the economics actually making a restaurant successful. If I take them into account, the answers would either be no fun, or I'd still be working on them.
The first is a beef noodle soup that my Mom made. There's actually a restaurant with a Taiwanese food menu in a strip mall near where I used to live which sells a version of this. However, I'm talking about the Platonic ideal here, the soup as I remember it which is undoubtedly better than my Mom actually made it, and certainly better than that restaurant made it. (This didn't stop me from ordering it on a semi-regular basis though.)
The beef stock was always rich and beefy. (Anyone who's read Cook's Illustrated knows how hard, and impractical, this is.) It was scented with star anise, and soy sauce, but without it being salty. The beef was always meltingly tender. The fat in the beef and the stock gave the soup this silky, luscious mouth feel. The sourness of the preserved mustard greens perfectly cut the richness. The noodles, cooked in the broth, always tasted both of beef and it's own substantial heartiness.
It's an open question how much of this I actually tasted though. I like chilis, and there were always some around. (My parents liked their food hot.)
The second is a dish consisting of foams aerated with helium. The foams are in a rainbow of colors. (We may have to finesse the blue) Each color would be the distilled essence of a single flavor: tomato, carrot, corn, cucumber, eggplant and some sort of exotic pepper. Ideally, it should barely weigh your tongue, but explode with flavor. (Practically, I'm not sure how you serve this.) Molecular gastronomy is definitely the wave of the future. (It may also be a fad.)
The third is dessert: barbequed bison ice cream. I like the idea of playing around with unusual flavors of ice cream. (I've had Guinness ice cream, and Grape Nuts ice cream. They were both pretty good.) The rich custard base would complement the lean, hearty, smoky bison meat. The sweetness pays homage to the notion of ice cream as dessert. The heat provided by the chilis contrast with the coolness of the dessert and provides a delightful kick to the dessert.
4) At this point in your life, would you trade the years you spent in school after high school for time spent doing something else? Why?
Hmm... What actually happened after high school was I went to college, went to grad school, talked my way into job A which lasted about 5 years, then talked my way into job B which I still have. None of this was planned, of course. (Yes, I didn't so much set out for a PhD as much as stumble into one.) However, I have gotten somewhere that I'm relatively happy with and I'm doing more or less what it turns out that I wanted to do.
It might have happened more quickly (and less discursively) if I had planned it all out and executed according to plan. I suppose that would have made me a happier person for longer. However, while there are some things I can plan, my life is apparently not one of them. Whatever I would have done probably would have lead to a discursive life anyways.
With the advantage of hindsight, I think there are a bunch of things I could have done differently. They would have to led to radically different possible lives. Some of them would have been better lives than the one I live now. A few of them might be worse. I don't think I'd risk the life I have to find out.
5) You are offered the chance to be the best teacher of young writers the world has ever seen. People who studied with you for six weeks would make progress that would otherwise take them 10 years. People who studied with you for 1 year (the maximum anyone could, without having their head explode) would go from slush rejects to the level of today's SFF grandmasters. The cost: you can never write fiction again. Do you take this gift, and why?
Finally, an easy one. I would so not take the gift. Yes, it's incredibly selfish of me to deny the world so many accomplished writers and offer up my own writing in their place. However, if I took the gift, I think I would end up accomplishing vicariously through them. That's not a good thing. (It's one thing to be proud of what your students have achieved. It's another to think of those achievements as your own.) Or it would all be quite frustrating.
The best person to take the gift is, of course, someone with no interest in writing fiction at all. (If this were a story prompt, what would happen, of course, is that the person who takes the gift develops an interest in writing fiction.)
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