Prescient, gripping, and intimidatingly good. Definitely going to read more of Butler’s books.

I’m rather sad that she wasn’t able to complete a new Earthseed series, like she planned, before her death.

Three more things she taught me about writing:

• Perfectly acceptable to have the sequel start out as more "and then this happened".
• First act turn is a great place to upend what the characters have built previously, have the outside world come in with the force of a storm.
• Editors and compilers of biographies can have agendas just like other characters, and become more interesting when they reveal them

So frustrating. I had high hopes going in that Elixir might be my next server-side language of choice. It’s built on the Erlang VM, after all, so concurrency should be a breeze. Ditto distributed applications and fault-tolerance. All supposedly wrapped in a more digestible syntax than Erlang provides.

Boy, was I misled.

The syntax seems to be heavily Ruby-influenced, in a bad way. There’s magic methods, black box behavior, and OOP-style features built in everywhere.

The examples in this chapter go deeply into this Ruby-flavored world, and skip entirely over what I thought were the benefits to the language. If Elixir makes writing concurrent, distributed applications easier, I have no idea, because this book doesn’t bother working examples that highlight it.

Instead, the impression I get is that this is a way to write Ruby in Erlang, an attempt to push OOP concepts into the functional programming world, resulting in a hideous language that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole.

I miss Elm.

Day One

• biggest influences: lisp, erlang, ruby
• need to install erlang *and* elixir
• both available via brew
• syntax changing quickly, it's a young language
• if do:
• IO.puts for println
• expressions in the repl always have a return value, even if it's just :ok
• looks like it has symbols, too (but they're called atoms)
• tuples: collections of fixed size
• can use pattern matching to destructure tuples via assignment operator
• doesn't allow mutable state, but can look like it, because compiler will rename vars and shuffle things around for you if you assign something to price (say) multiple times
• weird: "pipes" |> for threading macros
• dots and parens only needed for anonymous functions (which can still be assigned to a variable)
• prints out a warning if you redefine a module, but lets you do it
• pattern matching for multiple functions definition in a single module (will run the version of the function that matches the inputs)
• can define one module's functions in terms of another's
• can use when conditions in function def as guards to regulate under what inputs the function will get run
• scripting via .exs files, can run with iex
• put_in returns an updated copy of the map, it doesn't update the map in place
• elixir's lists are linked lists, not arrays!
• char lists are not strings: dear god
• so: is_list "string" -> false, but is_list 'string' -> true (!)
• wat
• pipe to append to the head
• when destructuring a list, the number of items on each side have to match (unless you use the magic pipe)
• can use _ for matching arbitrary item
• Enum for processing lists (running arbitrary functions on them in different ways, like mapping and reducing, filtering, etc)
• for comprehensions: a lot like python's list comprehensions; takes a generator (basically ways to pull values from a list), an optional filter (filter which values from the list get used), and a function to run on the pulled values
• elixir source is on github

Day Two

• mix is built in to elixir, installing the language installs the build tool (nice)
• basic project template includes a gitignore, a readme, and test files
• source files go in lib, not src
• struct: map with fixed set of fields, that you can add behavior to via functions...sounds like an object to me :/
• iex -S mix to start iex with modules from your project
• will throw compiler errors for unknown keys, which is nice, i guess?
• since built on the erlang vm, but not erlang, we can use macros, which get expanded at compile time (presumably, to erlang code)
• should is...well...kind of a silly macro
• __using__ just to avoid a fully-qualified call seems...gross...and too implicit
• and we've got to define new macros to override compile-time behavior? i...i can't watch
• module attributes -> compile-time variables -> object attributes by another name?
• use, __using__, @before_compile -> magic, magic everywhere, so gross
• state machine's "beautiful syntax" seems more like obscure indirection to me
• can elixir make me hate macros?
• whole thing seems like...a bad example. as if the person writing it is trying to duplicate OOP-style inheritance inside a functional language.
• elixir-pipes example from the endnotes (github project) is much better at showing the motivation and usage of real macros

Day Three

• creator's main language was Ruby...and it shows :/
• spawn returns the process id of the underlying erlang process
• pattern matching applies to what to do with the messages a process receives via its inbox
• can write the code handling the inbox messages *after* the messages are sent (!)
• task -> like future in clojure, can send work off to be done in another process, then later wait for the return value
• use of Erlang's OTP built into Elixir's library
• construct the thing with start_link, but send it messages via GenServer...more indirection
• hmm...claims it's a "fully distributed server", but all i see are functions getting called that return values, no client-server relationship here?
• final example: cast works fine, but call is broken (says process not alive; same message regardless of what command sent in (:rent, :return, etc)
• oddly enough, it works *until* we make the changes to have the supervisor run everything for us behind the scenes ("like magic!")
• endnotes say we learned about protocols, but they were mentioned only once, in day two, as something we should look up on our own :/
• would have been nicer to actually *use* the concurrency features of language, to, idk, maybe use all the cores on your laptop to run a map/reduce job?

A series of confusing, racist, Anti-Semitic stories. None of the characters are admirable. The mysteries are mostly atmosphere followed by “as you know” mansplaining. The only memorable characters are the ones he gives over to racist caricature.

Taught me several things not to do:

• Don't lean on description over plot. A thin mystery is a boring mystery, no matter how you dress it up in thick descriptions.
• Don't hold your characters in contempt. If you don't like writing about them, why would anyone want to read about them?
• Don't assume that insisting two characters are friends is enough for the audience. If they're friends, readers should be able to tell without being told. If no one can tell, then, maybe they're not friends after all?

Oddly compelling. Told any other way, it’d be just one more story about giant robots and the people piloting them. But by telling it through interviews, to make it feel like you’re reading a classified dossier, makes it feel fresh and compelling.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Even old ideas can feel new again when told in a different way.
• Interviews can let you do first-person narration without having to actually narrate. No need for detailed descriptions, etc. Can take a lot of shortcuts and still feel real.
• Don't forget the interviewer! They have their own agenda, and that should come through in their questions and reactions.

Disappointing. Most of the essays are too short to be rewarding, stopping just when they might be getting to something interesting. Several of them repeat the same answers to the same questions (what is the Doctor’s personality?).

However, a few of the essays stand out as offering interesting takes on the Doctor and his world:

• The Doctor is a combination of id (easily bored, cravings for fish fingers and custard) and superego (this world is defended). No discernible ego, though: his companions fill that role for him (!)
• The Doctor and the Cybermen represent opposed views of masculinity. The Cybermen are an emotionally stunted (but all too common) masculinity: closed off, suppressing emotion, stoic and expressionless. The Doctor is a healthier alternative: still paternal, still protective, but emotionally open and compassionate.
• Weeping Angels are terrifying because they turn what should be a Great Mother archetype into the Shadow. From nurturers they become deepest evil; and worse, we cannot run and hide from this evil, we must look at it, must confront it, even though we don't want to.

Eerily prescient. Takes place in a California where water is scarce, most government has been privatized, and the President uses racial politics to push through reforms that weaken protections for workers and the poor.

Felt all too familiar. And she predicted all this over twenty years ago.

I usually don’t like post-apocalyptic books, especially ones that go in for the “slow apocalypse” where everything just collapses over time as people stop taking care of the things that keep civilization going. It’s depressing reading, but Butler’s writing is so compelling, I had to see it through.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Scarcities in society will be reflected in the social order. If food is scarce, being fat is a sign of wealth. If water is scarce, being clean (taking baths) will be seen luxurious. In both cases, being poor and engaging in "rich" behavior will be seen as uppity.
• There's life in the hero's journey yet, if explored from different angles. Here the young protagonist grows up in a small town, yet feels called to greatness, then compelled to become a leader when driven out of their home.
• Adopting a diary structure can let you skip past boring parts of the story will zooming in on the important ones. A well-written diary will do that, and still give you a chance to convey the rhythms of life, since it's the story the person is telling themselves, as they live it.

Insightful, like all of Scott McCloud’s books on comics. Not enough on its own for me to go out and start writing my own comics, but helped me to see connections between storytelling techniques in comics, films, and novels.

Three things I learned about comics and storytelling:

• Comics adds additional choices to the way you tell a story. It's not just the events themselves, but which moments from those events you choose to show, as well as how you frame the "shots" for those moments, and how you render the images within those frames.
• Manga often uses aspect transitions between panels to build a scene. Instead of a single wide establishing shot, will focus in on different "aspects" of a scene (e.g., rain falling from the sky, puddles forming in concrete, raindrops battering steel and glass buildings, etc) forcing the reader to assemble the scene in their own mind.
• Giving your characters different philosophies of life can both enrich their inner lives and make the world you're building feel more real to the reader.

Between the move and the election and the holidays, took me a long time to finish this chapter.

But I’m glad I did, because Elm is – dare I say – fun?

The error messages are fantastic. The syntax feels like Haskell without being as obtuse.  Even the package management system just feels nice.

A sign of how much I liked working in Elm: the examples for Day Two and Three of the book were written for Elm 0.14, using a concept called signals. Unfortunately, signals were completely removed in Elm 0.17 (!). So to get the book examples working in Elm 0.18, I had to basically rebuild them. Which meant spending a lot of time with the (admittedly great) Elm tutorial and trial-and-erroring things until they worked again.

None of which I minded because, well, Elm is a great language to work in.

Here’s the results of my efforts:

• Day Two
• Day Three

Day One

• haskell-inspired
• elm-installer: damn, that was easy
• it's got a repl!
• emacs mode also
• types come back with all the values (expression results)
• holy sh*t: "Maybe you forgot some parentheses? Or a comma?"
• omg: "Hint: All elements should be the same type of value so that we can iterate through the list without running into unexpected values."
• type inferred: don't have to explicitly declare the type of every variable
• polymorphism via type classes
• single-assignment, but the repl is a little looser
• pipe syntax for if statement in book is gone in elm 0.17
• case statement allows pattern matching
• case statement needs the newlines, even in the repl (use `\`)
• can build own complex data types (but not type classes)
• case also needs indentation to work (especially if using result for assignment in the repl)
• records: abstract types for people without beards
• changing records: use `=` instead of `<-`: { blackQueen | color = White }
• records look like they're immutable now, when they weren't before? code altering them in day one doesn't work
• parens around function calls are optional
• infers types of function parameters
• both left and right (!) function composition <| and |>
• got map and filter based off the List type (?)
• no special syntax for defining a function versus a regular variable, just set a name equal to the function body (with the function args before the equal sign)
• head::tail pattern matching in function definition no longer works; elm is now stricter about requiring you to define all the possible inputs, including the empty list
• elm is a curried language (!)
• no reduce: foldr or foldl
• have to paren the infix functions to use in foldr: List.foldr (*) 1 list
• hard exercise seems to depend on elm being looser than it is; afaict, it won't let you pass in a list of records with differing fields (type volation), nor will it let you try to access a field that isn't there (another type violation)

Day Two

• section is built around signals, which were removed in Elm 0.17 (!)
• elm has actually deliberately moved away from FRP as a paradigm
• looks like will need to completely rewrite the sample code for each one as we go...thankfully, there's good examples in the elm docs (whew!)
• [check gists for rewritten code]
• module elm-lang/keyboard isn't imported in the elm online editor by default anymore

Day Three

• can fix the errors from loading Collage and Element into main by using toHtml method of the Collage object
• elm-reactor will give you a hot-updated project listening on port 8000 (so, refresh web page of localhost:8000 and get updated view of what your project looks like)
• error messages are very descriptive, can work through upgrading a project just by following along (and refreshing alot)
• critical to getting game working: https://ohanhi.github.io/base-for-game-elm-017.html (multiple subscriptions)

Inspiring. I could not imagine daring to try to write dialog for Greek gods and long-dead philosophers, but she did, and does it brilliantly.

Made me miss my days as a philosophy major, and that’s a good thing.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Long explanations of things are ok, but only after the reader has come to know the characters, and care about them.
• Switching first-person narrators is fine, so long as you keep the number of them down and clearly label each chapter so we know which character is speaking.
• Sense of place can come through not just by food and clothing, but architecture and leisure activities as well.

There’s a video making the rounds on Facebook that claims to show how the “average American” views the Trump inauguration.

It’s shows a lone white male, surrounded by flag art, talking about how we liberals should suck it up, and that real Americans, like him, are happy Trump won.

This video pisses me off for several reasons.

First, the guy being interviewed isn’t one of the “real Americans” he claims to represent. He’s an artist, not a coal miner. He profits off of the people he wants to speak for, but he’s not one of them.

Second, the whole idea that “average Americans” are just like this guy, and all happy about Trump, is a lie. It’s code, code that only white, uneducated males are real Americans, and everyone else should sit down and shut up.

What would a video wanting to accurately show an average American be like?

Most Americans are female. So we have to swap the dude for a woman.

Most Americans live in liberal, coastal areas. So now we have to move the woman speaking out of the implied RustBelt setting and to one of the coasts. Maybe New York, maybe California.

Most Americans do think of themselves as white, so she can be white and still be “average.”

But uneducated? Not this woman. She’s got her high school diploma, and taken some college classes. She probably has an associate’s degree, which she’s used to get a better job.

So we have a white, working-class but educated, woman living on the coasts.

She’s probably Democratic. She probably voted for Hilary. She’s likely in favor of the ACA, and the protections it provides for her access to women’s health care.

It’s the exact opposite of what the video portrays, which is why it ticks me off so much.

But more than that, I hate the implication that other people, who aren’t white, or male, or uneducated, are somehow lesser citizens.

I hate the smug superiority the video reinforces. It’s the refuge of bullies and cowards, of people looking to blame someone else for their situation.

I understand that it’s hard to make a living without a college degree. I understand it’s difficult to change careers when the factory you depended on shuts down. I understand you don’t want to move to a strange town to chase a new job.

But if I could offer some advice to them: suck it up.

Because you had their chance. You made fun of guys like me all through school. You ditched classes and slacked off on your studies. You didn’t go to college, didn’t think it was something “real men” did.

You rule out taking on all kinds of jobs, from nursing to teaching to customer service, as “women’s work”. So your wife or your girlfriend has to support you, while you wait for the Industrial Age to roll back through town.

It’s not happening. No one is coming to save you: not Trump, not Pence, not Paul Ryan. They want your votes, but they aren’t going to help you one bit.

You’re going to have to do it on your own.

And it’s your own fault. You voted to cut the ladder of economic advancement out from under yourself and everyone else.

I sympathize with you, but I don’t feel sorry for you.

You’re a crybaby, whining about the good times that have passed you by.

You’re lazy, unwilling to do the work to make something better of yourself.

And you’re a coward, afraid to join the ranks of those who have their own business, who have to justify their existence through service to others in the marketplace.

You’re an un-American burden on the country, and I can only hope the next four years open your eyes to how your pride and the Republican party have deceived you.

We’re here! Made it into San Diego last week, despite freezing rain (Flagstaff), gusty winds (most of New Mexico), and fog (Cuyamaca Mountains).

No, we’re not unpacked yet. Yes, I unpacked the books first :)

So, back to work. And also back to writing.

I’ve decided to do another editing pass on the first novel. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about writing in just the last few months, and I’d like to apply what I’ve learned to it, see if it makes it better.

I’d also like to go back and fill in a lot of the worldbuilding details I left vague in the first two drafts. Flesh out character backgrounds, city histories, etc. I don’t want to add a huge info-dump to the book, but I do want to make sure everything holds together better, the various pieces of book matching up to make a more powerful whole.

And after thinking through the plot more, I’m really not satisfied with the way I’ve handled the female protagonist. That’s part of why I need to flesh out the character backgrounds, specifically hers. I realized her character arc is muted, a victim of me being unsure who I wanted to be the protagonist in the first draft.

She deserves better, so I’m going to pull out her conflicts and struggles into its own storyline, an independent path to follow while she also contributes to the central plot. I think it’ll make the book stronger, and the ending more compelling.

Some of these changes will be dialog or description tweaks. Some of this will probably end up being major surgery. But I’ve got to try.

Wish me luck.

Easily worthy of the awards it won. Fantastic ideas, presented through conflicts with interesting characters, and writing that describes just enough and no more.

And I almost stopped halfway through.

There’s a point where the protagonist does something so amazingly dumb, that I wanted to put the book down in frustration. But I kept going, and I’m glad I did. Because it only got better from there.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Beware delaying explanations for too long. A character that says "I don't know why I did X" too often, before their inability to explain is outlined to the reader, can lead to frustration.
• Don't have to wait for the character to say "and then I told them my story" to tell that story to the reader. Can layer it in, piece by piece, via flashback chapters.
• Small touches, like bare hands being considered vulgar, when followed-through, can do a lot of work to make a culture feel real.

Fascinating. Examines both what we know about Anne Boleyn (very little), and the stories that have been told about her (very much).

Turns out most of what I thought was accepted history is in fact based on gossip spread by her enemies.

Three things I learned:

• Execution of Anne was the first time a queen had been executed in English history
• Anne spent a good deal of her childhood on the continent, under the tutelage of Marguerite de Navarre (sister of Francis I of France) who ran the most philosophically glittering salon in Europe
• The intelligent, pro-reform Anne of the second season of The Tudors is due mainly to Natalie Dormer, who wanted to portray an Anne closer to the historical one than had been done before

No writing this week. The novel’s done (for now), so I’ve been focused on the upcoming move, getting everything boxed and labeled and loaded. 

It’s like having our lives flash frozen, to be thawed on arrival in California.

Not having a writing project to work on is, as ever, weird. It’s as if school exams have been canceled, but just for me: I feel like I should be studying, but I’m not. Because I don’t have to.

Not that my brain has noticed. Woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for another story. I think it’s a flash fiction piece, but there might be more there. Have to write it and find out.

It’ll have to wait its turn, though. Behind the move, and the novel edits, and the short story edits, and querying agents, and the…ye gods, I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Excuse me, I need to go write.

Dear U.S. Media: Please stop reporting both sides.

I know you want to appear impartial. I know you want to be trusted.

But here’s the thing: by reporting ‘sides’ instead of facts, you reinforce the idea that having sides is legitimate. Instead of pushing both sides to acknowledge the truth, you let their opinions stand.

The result? Neither side trusts you. Because you’re no longer digging for the truth, you’re just a parrot, repeating what you’ve been told.

This idea that you need to repeat both sides is itself a political one. It goes back to the days of President Nixon, when his staff used the threat of the loss of FCC licenses to get tv news organizations to spend more time giving the President’s “side” of things. Instead of just sticking to facts.

I know, I know. You think the “truth is in the middle.”

But that’s false.

There was no middle ground between Saddam Hussein having nukes or not.

There’s no middle ground about where President Obama was born.

And there will be no middle ground about the lies a President Trump will tell.

So please, stop pretending to be impartial.

The facts aren’t impartial. The facts always support one side over another.

It’s time you started supporting them.

Thank the gods 2016 is over.

I think it’s been a rough year for many people. My rough 2016 actually stretches all the way back to fall 2015, when my wife and I upped stakes and moved back to the mid-south to take care of her mother.

The stress of that time – her mother’s health, the terrible condition of the house we bought, the shock of discovering that all traces of the friendly South we’d once known were gone – almost undid us. We felt abandoned, hated by our neighbors and resented by her family.

Things improved when we were able to tread water enough to reconnect with our friends, plug back into the community of accepting nerds and geeks we’d missed.

But the presidential campaign, culminating in the election of a liar, a swindler, and a bigot, convinced us that nothing could make up for the fact that we don’t belong here. And never will.

So we’re moving back to California.

Back to a state that takes life seriously, and so passed the most restrictive gun control laws in the country.

A state that takes liberty seriously enough to want to offer it to refugees from a horrible civil war.

A state that knows the pursuit of happiness means respecting the many diverse ways that its citizens go about it.

I can’t wait to be back home.

Novel’s complete at 50,122 words!

At least, I think it’s complete. Last time I thought it was done, there turned out to be another 45,000 words of story to tell in there.

The cut-off point this time felt more natural, but could seem just as arbitrary to a reader.

Only way to find out for sure is to hand it off to those brave friends willing to read and offer feedback on something so rough and ragged (bless you all).

Till then, it’s back to editing my other projects. I’ve had some ideas for how to trim my first novel into a better shape. cracks knuckles

Hope you have a Happy New Year! May your words sparkle, your stories captivate, and your edits be painless :)

Other people have more and better things to say, so I’ll just link to my favorite, an article highlighting Fisher’s talents as a writer.

What Went Wrong

Let’s start with the protagonist. Throughout the movie, she is almost completely passive. I don’t know if the actress is any good or not, because most of her screen time consists of her gazing gratefully at the men that are doing things for her.

Compare this with Rey, who we see surviving just on her wits and her skills in her first few minutes of screen time.

An example of how blatant her passivity is: in one scene, there’s a glorified claw game that needs to be manipulated. Not difficult, certainly something that anyone with any manual dexterity at all could use. But rather than grab the controls herself, and execute the mission we’re supposed to believe she passionately wants to succeed, she hangs back and let’s the nameless guy next to her take over.

Her actions are just one piece of the story that’s problematic. At several junctions, characters make decisions that are out of step with what we know about them, and don’t make sense within the world as a whole. Why assassinate an enemy scientist, when you could capture them? Why send a signal to a fleet that you’re on the planet surface, when the reason they’re there is because they know you’re on the surface?

Why film a 2-minute scene with one of the classic villains of cinema, just for him to throw puns?

Perhaps the film as shot would have better explained all of these inconsistencies. But the edited film is so choppy, so eager to hop from place to place and set of characters to set of characters, that it becomes a confusing mess. We never spend enough time with the protagonist to care about her, or any of her companions (save for two, which I’ll get to later).

Again, I can’t help but contrast it with Episode VII, which used long takes and wide establishing shots to give us a sense of mood and place. And for the protagonist, it takes its time letting us know who she is, following her for a day before the main storyline gets going.

We get no such chance to learn about the protagonist of Rogue One. Only 2 min scene followed by 2 min scene, emotional beats chopped off at the wrist, ad infinitum.

How To Fix It

That’s a great story. It directly addresses the moral problems in the Star Wars universe, where we’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of a battle station on which hundreds of thousands of people were living and working. Were they all worthy of death?

Unfortunately, that story has been buried underneath disconnected characters, sloppy editing, and a tension-free plot.

We need to make some major plot tweaks, trim several characters, and bring the focus back to the central character.

We open by fleshing out the party scene that was a 10-second fuzzy flashback in the film. It’s a good-bye party for her dad, one last night of drinking and dancing in his Imperial uniform before moving out to farm country. Jyn’s sneaking downstairs to grab some extra dessert after bedtime, mostly oblivious to the dialog between her father and the Director (who is trying to convince him to stay, ribbing him about getting his hands dirty, etc). She gets caught, of course, giving her father a chance to sweep her up in arms and dote on her, calling her by her nickname.

Right away, we establish that we’re going to humanize the Imperials a little, and that our protagonist’s allegiance might be ambiguous.

Next we show the family at work on the farm, years later. Jyn doing chores, eating with her parents.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s their old family friend, the Director.

Her father invites him inside, outwardly friendly but it’s clear there’s tension between them.

They talk. The Director pushes her father to come back to work. Says he can’t do it without him. When her dad refuses, the Director responds with a threat: “You won’t like it when I come back tomorrow. I won’t be alone.”

Her dad again refuses, and the Director leaves. Her parents stay up late, talking about what to do. They decide Jyn and her mom should leave at first light, heading to the shelter.

But when the Director returns the next day, with troops, as promised, they’re ambushed by a rebel squadron. Jyn and her mom flee as her dad is captured, but her mom is killed in the crossfire – by the rebels.

Jyn gets to the shelter, waits as she was told, where she’s found by Saw.

Now we’ve established a lot of backstory in just a few scenes: the ambiguous relationship her father has with the Empire, the dangers of living in a civil war, and why Jyn might hate the rebels as much as she mistrusts Imperials.

Next scene: Jyn a little older, running a scam for Saw. We learn Saw is a scoundrel, one of those living just outside the law that sometimes help the rebels, sometimes the Imperials, as suits them. She returns home, flush with cash, when she sees a rebel leader leaving. She confronts Saw, finds he’s been helping the rebels out, sometimes without pay. Angry that he’s working with those that killed her mother, she strikes out on her own, leaving Saw’s home and his friends.

So now we have more backstory, another layer to Jyn’s personality. And we’ve introduced Saw, and know who he is and what he’s doing in the movie. We care about both, the protagonist and her surrogate father. We can take either side in their argument, and feel justified.

Next we see Jyn, a little older now, committing another theft. She gets caught this time, and sentenced to a labor camp for her crimes. It’d be nice if we could see an example of swift-but-cruel Imperial justice here. It would give the audience a reason to lean toward the rebel side later on.

The rebels attack the prison transport, freeing everyone, including her. Most of her fellow prisoners are rebels, but she curses them. They restrain her, take her back to base – can’t let her go, she’ll run right to the Imperials and give them away – where they find out who she is, and her connection with Saw.

Saw, it turns out, is their only connection with a mole deep inside the Emperor’s Death Star project. The mole’s used Saw to pass intelligence to them for years. Saw’s holding the last message for ransom, though. He says it’s too important to let go without getting properly paid for it.

The rebels make Jyn a deal: if she meets with Saw, and negotiates a fair price, they’ll let her go.

She agrees. They assign her Cassian and the droid as her minders (jailers), and send her off.

She still meets Chirrut and Baze, but not as strangers. She knows them both, because she grew up on their planet. They know where Saw is, and readily take her there (after disposing of the Stormtrooper patrol that tries to grab them).

Notice: we don’t need any backstory on Cassian, or the pilot, or any mysterious goons working for Saw that capture them. Since everyone knows each other, we can spend more time showing what matters. Also, the stakes are higher, because these characters all have relationships with each other.

We also don’t need any scenes showing Director Krennic and his problems. Why do we care? It’s enough to see the Death Star looming over the horizon, and firing on the city. We can find out later they did it just to test-fire it.

So, we have Jyn reunited with Saw. This scene is filled with tension now: will he welcome her back? Will she put aside her antipathy for rebels long enough to get free?

And: what’s the message Saw’s holding on to?

Saw is glad to see her, still feels guilty for letting her go. Won’t stop working with the rebels, though. He’s seen too much of the Imperial yoke to want to wear it forever. Jyn says she doesn’t want to negotiate, that her jailer should do that.

Saw tells her negotiating won’t be necessary. Because the message is for her.

That’s when he takes her back and plays it for her. She hears her father for the first time in years, explaining how he was taken from her, and how he’s been working against the Empire from within.

This scene is the turning point of Act One. The moment when Jyn starts to have something to live for besides herself. And when she starts tilting toward the rebel side.

We still have the Death Star blow up the town, and Saw’s people have to leave. He doesn’t hang back to commit a pointless suicide, though.

Instead, the pilot kills him.

We don’t know anything about the pilot at this point. We’re told he defected, and so Cassian breaks him out of jail when things start collapsing around them. He breaks off from the group, though, and finds Saw gathering some last-minute things to take with him (including the message from Jyn’s dad).

The pilot shoots Saw, then hurries to the transport. Tells everyone Saw died under a pile of rubble. Too bad the message was lost.

Because the pilot’s a double agent. The Emperor’s set one of his classic traps for the rebels: give them what they think they want, but be there to snatch it away at the last minute.

Now we’ve got a reason for the pilot to matter, for the audience to care about him. And to worry about Jyn’s survival.

They get back to the rebel base, where they’re assigned to go fetch Jyn’s dad, now that they know he’s the mole.

Cassian still gets secret orders, but they’re to kill her father only if it looks like he’ll be captured and interrogated by the Imperials. Since he’s been their mole for so long, if they fail to get him out, the Empire can learn exactly how much they know, and change it so their knowledge is useless.

They get there, stage a rescue, but it all goes bad when Imperials bomb the place. The pilot, forced off his vantage point by Cassian (who was readying his sniper rifle), used the opportunity to sneak off and radio them what was going on.

So no Director Krennic, but we still have Cassian make a choice not to kill Jyn’s dad, when it’s clear the mission has failed and the Imperials know about their mole. He and Jyn still have a fight as they take off in a stolen shuttle, but this time it’s him as the only rebel against her crew of rogues, instead of Jyn the captive against a group that Cassian leads.

When they get back, there’s more reasons for Jyn to abandon the rebel cause. She makes her case to the Council – shrunk to just a dozen people, instead of seemingly everyone in the rebellion crowded into one room – but they decide not to go after the Death Star plans. They want to prep for a conventional assault on the station, they don’t want to waste people and resources on a likely suicide mission with dubious benefit.

She’s crushed, wondering what to do, when Mon Mothma takes her aside. She can’t give her any official backing, she tells Jyn, but she can see that she gets off the base safely and has access to enough equipment to pull off her raid to get the Death Star plans.

So there’s hope. Jyn gathers her crew – the defecting pilot, the two temple priests from her childhood – and starts prepping the raid. Cassian comes to her, asking to be part of it, to prove to her that he can be trusted.

She agrees, and her crew is complete. There’s no group of redshirts going with them. They’re going in stealthy and quiet, using the pilot’s knowledge of the facility and her ability to get into places she shouldn’t to pull it off.

One more change: as they’re stealing the shuttle for their mission, and asked for the call sign, she tells the pilot: “Tell them our call sign is Rogue. Rogue One.” It’s a symbol of her independence, her refusal to submit to authority of any kind, no matter how seemingly benign. She’s on the rebel side, for now, but she’s not really a rebel. She’s a rogue.

When they get to the planet, things still go pear-shaped. The pilot betrays them again, radioing Darth Vader that the rebels are there.

His betrayal turns out to be a boon, though: since he’s connected them to the Imperial network, they’re able to get a signal to the rebel fleet that they’ve gotten the tape, and they should send a ship into orbit to receive the transmission.

So we still get our space battle, with the rebels sending in more and more ships to both get the plans and then try to get their people off the surface (which is the real reason they need to drop the planet’s defense shield). We still have Jyn’s squad being picked off one by one, as they race against time to both get the plans and get them transmitted off-world.

But having spent so much more time with them, as a group, we care more. The victory – their victory – comes at a high price.

Amazing. I had no idea Wonder Woman was so directly connected to the history of American feminism. Lepore’s account shows how Wonder Woman joins the feminism and suffragist movements of 1910-1920 to the second wave of the 1970s.

Weaves together family histories, feminist politics, and all the messy complications of love without pulling punches or demonizing any of the participants. An incredible book.

Three things I learned:

• Feminists (word arises around 1910) distinguished themselves from 19th century reformers by saying women and men were equal in all ways, that neither sex was superior to the other in any way, and that women therefore deserved equal rights.
• Not only did the Harvard of 1910s not admit women, they weren't even allowed to speak on campus. When the Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage invited British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to speak, they had to book Brattle Hall, in nearby Cambridge, because she was not allowed on campus.
• Margaret Sanger and Ethyl Byrne (sisters), both trained nurses, opened a birth control clinic in New York in 1916. Women lined up for blocks to get in, till the two were arrested: it was illegal to even talk about contraception in New York (!)

Novel’s at 39,412 words.

Decided to brainstorm my way out of being lost. I took the climax I’m working toward, and mapped out short, medium, and long ways to get there.

They all had scenes in common, but only the long path gave me the chance to wrap up all of the plotlines I’ve got going.

So I’m taking the long path.

It’s still likely to end up a short novel. I’m definitely in the final third of the book, so I know I need to pile on the pressure to build things toward my climax.

With luck (and a lot of work), I’ll be finished somewhere around the first of the year.

Then I can turn back to editing my second novel, and maybe doing another pass on my first novel, and another edit on this short story I wrote in September…

sighs Maybe best to ignore that for now. One story at a time.

Riveting. Perlstein’s book is long, but moves at a fast clip; I stayed up late three nights in a row to finish the last half of the book.

He doesn’t explicitly draw any analogies with our last few elections, but the parallels are there: disillusioned voters; party elites that ignored insurgencies until it was too late to stop them; division of the world into good people and bad people, with any tactics that stopped the bad people allowed.

Not exactly comforting, but it did make me feel better to know that these problems are not new, and they can be overcome.

Three of the many, many things I learned:

• Republican Party of 1976 was much more liberal: party platform that year supported the Equal Rights Amendment, like it had every year since 1940.
• The idea that there are still hundreds of POWs in Vietnam is based on a lie: Nixon inflated the number of POWs from 587 to 1,600 so North Vietnam looked worse. Once the real POWs came home, he didn't reveal the truth.
• New York City almost declared bankruptcy in 1975. When the city asked President Ford's government to bail them out, Ford (and Reagan, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney) not only said no, they were glad to see the great city brought low.

Novel’s at 33,986 words.

I’m at a point where I’m not sure how much story is left to tell.

I could be two-thirds of the way through, and so on my way to the end. If so, I should be quickening the pace in each scene, pushing the narrative forward faster and faster to reach the climax.

Or I could just be halfway through. In which case, I should be steadily building toward the next major turning point in the story, pacing things so that the reader’s not exhausted by the end of the book.

I feel like this is something I should know.

I’ve got the rest of the book outlined (even if it’s in my head). I know the scene for the story’s climax. I know the characters that are there, and what happens afterward. But damned if I don’t know how they got there, or how much time there is between the scene I’m currently writing and the last one.

It mystifies me that the only way to find out is for me to write it. As if I weren’t writing a story, but reporting on events. And until those events happen, I’ve got nothing to report.

NaNoWriMo’s over. Final word count: 30,836.

So, I didn’t make it to 50,000 this year. But I don’t want to dwell on that.

Here’s what I did do:

• I started a new novel, which is still not easy for me.
• I proved I could still write 4,000 words in a single day, like I did last Saturday.
• I learned that starting with a short story set in the world does help when it comes time to write the novel. I've written more each day, and more easily, for this novel than the previous one.

More modest than NaNoWriMo, true, but I think it’ll keep me focused, keep me pushing forward on the book. I’d like to have this first draft done in three months instead of twelve, so I can spend more time revising it.

Wish me luck.

Life changing.

It’s changed the way I watch movies. As I watch I’m now looking for the beats within each scene, paying attention to the rise and fall of emotional charge throughout the film.

It’s altered the way I’m approaching the novel I’m currently writing, helping me to think more clearly about each scene and its purpose in the book.

It’s even got me thinking about going back to outlining everything before starting.

If you’re a writer, I think this book is essential. It’s forever altered the way I approach my writing, and somehow made me more confident in what I’m doing, even as it’s shown me what I’m doing wrong.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Archetypal stories uncover a universal human experience and wrap it in a singular cultural expression. Stereotypical stories do the opposite: dress a singular experience in generalities.
• An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.
• California scenes: two characters that hardly know each other share deep secrets about their past. It happens, but only in California. Nowhere else.