Translation and transition

Posted on February 16, 2012 by gydle

There it was this morning, on the front page.

Un jury unanime plébiscite le nouveau stade de Lausanne.

Lausanne is going to get a new stadium with an Olympic-size swimming pool. I’m happy about this, because I like to swim laps. I love doing flip-turns at the end of the lane, stretching out for that long glide off the wall. I love the baby-blue of pool water and the crisscrossing, wavy lines of light that form on the bottom. I love doing breast stroke and watching the bubbles form at the tips of my fingers as I carve out the water in front of me.

But I digress. What really caught my attention was the word plébiscite. No matter how many times I see it, I still do a double-take. Is it just me, or is there something icky about this word?

Plébiscite.

Usually when I read in French I have a good sense of what a word probably means. But this word? Undermine, infiltrate, infect? It almost sounds like someone blowing their nose loudly into a handkerchief.

Continue reading →

Did you read the manual?

Posted on February 15, 2012 by gydle

After a discussion about books and publishing at the monthly meeting of my writing group, my friend, fellow writer and book designer extraordinaire Sue Niewiarowski forwarded this video to the group. It captures the whole issue I wrote about last week much better than I did. Hilarious!

I do believe we will evolve into the world of new media.

The life of the book

Posted on February 12, 2012 by gydle

Last question, said the moderator, scanning the room.

I’d been ruminating on something said in an earlier workshop at the writer’s conference I was attending. An agent, one of two who had come to help all us clueless writers try to figure out the labyrinthine process of getting a book into print, had responded to a question about contracts with a sentence that included the curious phrase “the life of the book.”

The life of the book. This resonated. A book is a living thing. Like a baby, the idea is planted, it gestates, you work and work and work, and then one day it is born into the world. Yes, I thought, it’s more than just a a physical thing, or even an electronic thing – it’s a living thing. It’s the distilled energy, hope, effort, blood, sweat and tears of its creator, offered up in human communion. It’s the physical (or electronic) embodiment of the relationship between writer and reader. What a beautiful concept!

I had carried that idea around with me all day. The life of the book.

I raised my hand. Last chance to look like an idiot. The moderator nodded at me.

I looked at the clean-cut representative of Scribner right in front of me, here to help us navigate the confusing world of traditional publishing, and said:

Suppose you manage to get an agent, who then gets a contract with a publisher – how long does your book stay on bookstore shelves, once it’s published? How long does your book last? What is the “lifetime” of your book?

He looked uncomfortable.

Realistically? he said. I just stared. The moderator stared. We all stared. He squirmed a little.

I wasn’t interested in the one-in-a-million blockbuster bestseller that no one saw coming. (Although, of course, he was.) Miracles happen — but I’m not counting on it in my case.

Realistically? Six weeks to two months. If it’s not selling well, it will be pulled off the shelves.

The room was quiet.

But as long as it’s selling electronic copy, even just one, it will still be available in e-book format, he added quickly, brightening. Several people started breathing again. Phew.

What a lovely baby, fantastic job, I know it was a tough pregnancy, you did everything right, but sorry love. We did everything we could, but this one isn’t going to see its first birthday. In fact, it’s going to die even before it’s gotten over that tricky three-month colicky stage. You can keep the pictures, though.

I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. But I was very, very glad I’d asked the question. Because his answer hammered the last nail into the coffin that holds all my former ideas about what a book is and how it’s published. Now I can bury it and move on.

The internet is changing everything. The industry’s gatekeepers – publishers who decide what readers get to read and how long books stay on shelves, agents who decide what publishers get to see, all in an effort to make as much money as possible for themselves in the process – are so twentieth century. The traditional publishing model, as another speaker at the conference had said earlier, is broken.

Last year, Dave sent me a link to a blog post written by author Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She made a very convincing case that the publishing industry is now where the music industry was ten years ago. I think she’s right. I think the panel of agents and publishers at the conference were representing a dying industry, one that no longer serves the interests of either writers or readers. In a last gasp effort to keep the money rolling in and their jobs intact, to stem the hemhorraging influence of e-books and the Internet, the industry preys on nobody writers like me, writers who are naive enough to entrust them with their babies in hope that someday they can say with pride: I’m a published writer.

UPDATE: I didn’t like the way this blog post ended, so I’ve changed it.

I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know if Amazon is evil, out like everyone else for one thing and one thing only: our money. Probably. But I do know one thing: if you’re willing to do the hard work involved in exploring new territory, it’s a good time to be a writer. The paradigm is changing. There are possibilities today that were not there yesterday.

I came away from the conference a bit lost and confused. A week later, I’m optimistic and motivated. I’m having a “baby” – hopefully the first of several. Like any expectant mother, I’m anxious about whether or not I’m up to the task. But I’ve done pretty well with humans, so I like my chances with books as well. Cheers!

Storytelling

Posted on January 18, 2012 by gydle

Last fall, I promised to do a series of posts on cognitive biases. A cognitive bias, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is a kind of built-in mental shortcut that we take when making decisions. Usually, we’re not aware we’re doing it.

Here’s a classic example, the framing bias: You’re sitting in front of a bunch of potential investors. What do you tell them – A: that your product has a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding, or B: that it has a 90% chance of failure? Doh.

Here’s another, the anchoring bias. You’re in a store. Everything on the rack is over $200. You see a sweater for $50. What a good deal! Now you’re in another store. Everything on the rack is under $50. You see the exact same sweater, for $50. Not such a good deal after all?

I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the subject, and it turns out we’re brimming with biases. We think we’re rational, that we can look objectively at a situation or listen to someone and weigh his or her words impartially, but we can’t. We’re highly illogical creatures bound up in a complex net of emotion and suggestion, living under the illusion that our brains work like computers.

It’s so bad that I’ve totally lost my desire to write about it. If you’d like to get depressed, too, here’s a short reading list:

Part of my disgust stems from my observation that the current political charade that is going on in the US, otherwise known as the Republican Primaries, is a stunning and vivid example of how to exploit most of these biases. Biases like the exposure effect, in which you tend to increasingly prefer something when you are repeatedly exposed to it (like a face or a slogan), and the illusion-of-truth effect, in which you are more likely to believe a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it really is true. That the machine so blatantly exploits our cognitive weaknesses should perhaps not come as a surprise, but I still find it deeply disappointing and disturbing.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve taken away from all this reading is that humans have an innate need to tell a story. We may vary somewhat in our tendency to make irrational decisions, to act on instincts that lie far beneath the surface of our consciousness, but the one thing we all have in common is our need to create a narrative that ties it all together. We do something or make a choice, and then we make up a story to explain why we did the thing or made the choice. Experiment after experiment has shown this to be the case. That’s what most of the billions of neurons inside those big brains of ours are doing: making up stories to rationalize our knee-jerk reactions.

We’re storytelling machines.

I think it’s high time we stopped settling for fairy tales, where everything is nice and simple – good versus evil, rags-to-riches, a stranger came to town – and started insisting on stories that reflect the real complexity of the world we live in. Then I think we might actually have a fighting chance of making decisions that would benefit us and our children in the long run.

Here’s a snippet from a TED talk on the subject by Tyler Cowen. I highly recommend you watch the talk or read the transcript. And then think about the political landscape. Then pass the Prozac.

One interesting thing about cognitive biases – they’re the subject of so many books these days. There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories.

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like “this” instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it’s a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we’re too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it’s, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don’t have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you’re lowering your IQ by ten points or more.[…]

If the presidential candidates followed this rule, lowering their IQ by 10 points every time they told a good versus evil story, they’d be brain dead by now. Wait. They are! Welcome to the world of zombie politics.

I saw a video the other day on YouTube, classic Newt Gingrich blasting Mick Romney. You know what he saves for last? The ultimate thing that should slam Romney into the ground, make him a laughing stock, un-electable? Hint: he shares it with John Kerry.

You’ll have to see it to believe it.

Now, enough depressing stuff. Here’s the good news: Somehow I got through the quality control filter and snagged a spot in Friday’s TEDx Lausanne audience! I’m particularly looking forward to a talk by Steve Edge, who describes himself as “Designer, branding guru, dyslexic and madman.” More on that next week.

Image: wingedwolf

Conversions

Posted on January 11, 2012 by gydle

No, this isn’t a religious post. It’s not about converting tablespoons of butter into grams, or pounds into kilograms. It’s not even about the conversions between dollars and Swiss francs I made (somewhat gleefully) in my head as I turned my credit card over time and again during our trip to Santa Fe over the Christmas holidays.

No, this is about skiing.

Last Sunday I did my first back-country ski outing of the year. Correction: my first back-country ski outing since winter 2005, when Marc’s parents were here for two months and we could do whatever we wanted on the weekends without worrying about being bad parents.

We were going to go back-country skiing last year, except it didn’t snow. The year before that, we rented an apartment in a ski area for the season, and went there on the weekends instead. The year before that, well, I don’t remember. It can’t have been that memorable. Now the babies definitely don’t need sitting anymore. What’s more, they have strong opinions on how they want to spend their weekend mornings (such as sleeping), and these plans usually don’t involve us. We’re once more free to head to the mountains.

Maybe I’m getting grumpy in my old age, but I find that ski lifts, crowds, music blaring from loudspeakers on ski parks, decks of sunbathers drinking alcohol at 3,000 meters, and – did I mention it? — crowds – just make me grumpier. Any time school’s out in Switzerland, the entire country goes skiing. The slopes are packed with people moving at high speeds. The red-and-white helicopters are busy buzzing back and forth transporting accident victims to hospitals in the valleys below. The autoroutes get backed up for miles. Thanks, but no thanks. The only kind of skiing I’m interested in doing now involves strapping skins on my skis, shouldering a backpack containing a bar of chocolate, a thermos of hot tea and warm mittens, and heading for a mountain.

You just don’t get this kind of solitude and awesomeness in a ski area.

It’s pretty stupid to go traipsing around in the “back country” on skis, though, unless you know what you’re doing. Every weekend, people who go off-piste in the Alps end up buried in avalanches — even people who are accompanied by mountain guides. Not only am I not quite ready to die yet (the novel isn’t done), but I also don’t want some poor hiker to come across my rotting corpse in June when the snow starts melting. (It does happen).

So, since Marc and I definitely don’t know what we’re doing, we did the only sensible thing and turned to the pros. We joined the local chapter of the Swiss Alpine Club. We took an avalanche course. We learned to “read” the layers of snow, we dug endless avalanche beacons out of snowdrifts, we practiced shoveling at high speed with little metal shovels, and we learned to climb up mountains on our skis and ski down through all manner of different kinds of snow. We also toured a cheese-making place. I bet you don’t get that in US avalanche courses.

To climb up a mountain on skis, you have to do switchbacks. You cut along the slope for a while, then you turn and go the other direction, in a complicated ballet-like maneuver called a “kick-turn,” or, in French, a conversion.

Several years ago, I had mastered the conversion. You turn the uphill foot about 130 degrees (think 4th position in ballet), then lean forward into the slope and lift the back ski up, kicking the tip in around the ankle of the planted foot and sliding the ski alongside its mate. Here’s a picture of someone doing one:

In this photo the person hasn’t yet swung the right ski up alongside the left ski, which is planted. Depending on the steepness of the hill and the snow conditions, this exercise can be seriously nervewracking.

Sunday’s Alpine Club outing was rated F for Facile (easy), so the hill wasn’t steep. The snow was nice and deep and powdery. No problem getting a good foot plant in it. I was enthusiastic, third in the line of 9 people climbing up the slope.

Wow! This feels good!

Did I mention that the critical thing about the conversion is that you need to lean into the hill?

Everything went fine until I forgot that.

I swung my uphill ski 130 degrees around, up the zigzag. Then I put my weight on it and lifted the back ski off the ground.

Two seconds later, I lost my balance and promptly fell backwards down the hill. Everyone was watching me. Now when your head is down the hill and your skis are up on the slope above you, you’ve got to do some maneuvering to get things sorted out. I had to wait for all of them to climb past me to get myself upright again.

Merde! I cursed, humiliated in the extreme. My face was hot and I felt the suspicious prick of tears behind my eyes. I avoided looking at anyone as they skied past. I just knew they were all laughing at me.

All of them, that is, except one very nice guy called Alex, who very gently and calmly said he was going to show me how to do a conversion. Which he did, emphasizing the leaning into the hill part. I practiced a couple of times and felt a little less like I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me up.

It was a good idea to practice. It’s one thing to mess up your conversion on a gentle slope in cushy powder. It’s another to mess up on a steep slope with a pile of rocks down below. A little humble pie is preferable to brains splattered on rocks, any day.

We kept climbing. The higher we got, the harder the wind blew. It started spitting snow. Genevieve, a 70-year-old energy bomb of a woman just in front of me, was struggling and had to stop and breathe hard several times. At the top, the wind was whipping the snow up into our faces and we could hardly see a thing. Nevertheless, we engaged in the Swiss kissing ritual. Kiss, kiss, kiss, – it must have been at least -10 C with the wind chill, and as each person arrived, he or she had to make the rounds. I admit I air-kissed a few. My fingers turned numb as I took the skins off my skis and tried (not very successfully) to attach them to their paper backing. Oh, so this is why you’re supposed to use the plastic backing and not the paper one, I realized. Man, I really am out of practice.

Alex seemed totally unfazed by the weather and went around offering everyone a dried fig.

Our leader wisely counseled us to keep each other in view during the descent. This is why you go with the Alpine Club, I thought, as we blindly followed him down the slope. They know what they’re doing. For all I knew, he could have been leading us off a cliff. On the positive side, I only fell once and I don’t think anyone saw it.

At one point we had all stopped together and there were two skiers still above us. Everybody watch Rita, said the leader. Rita, a little round gnome-like person in a purple parka and a pink knitted hat with a pom-pom on top, didn’t really look like an athlete. Once she turned her skis down the hill, though, all that changed. She just kind of floated effortlessly back and forth down the slope. It truly was a thing of beauty. The rest of us were more or less making our way down the mountain – Rita, she skied.

Once we were out of the worst of the wind, the leader found a spot under a tree to eat our lunch. No kidding. Apparently, part of the definition of an outing is that you have to stop for lunch. I think it’s part of the Alpine Club charter. I took advantage of the opportunity to try and get technique tips from Rita.

Genevieve was too exhausted to eat anything. Maybe she shouldn’t have skied the entire previous day and then come on the outing as well. Getting old is the pits, she informed me.

An hour or so later, we were heading back to Lausanne, after a stop in a bistro for hot chocolate and mulled wine on the way (that’s also part of the definition of an outing). Nobody mentioned my humiliation. When they asked what I did, I told them I was a writer. Writing a novel.

Wow, I thought to myself as the words came out. If I’m saying it out loud, I guess it must really be true.

Yet another kind of conversion. 2012 is starting out very auspiciously!

Photos: CAS Morges

Out with a bang

Posted on December 31, 2011 by gydle

Happy New Year, everyone. Looks like the world made it through another revolution around the Sun, despite Harold Camping’s careful calculations.

I have it on good faith, however, that it really is going to end in 2012. Yes, it’s more eschatological stuff, this time from the “Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar” (e.g. the Mayans). So set your clocks for December 21, 2012, and get all your unfinished business out of the way by then. I know I’m going to finish this novel and to hell with everything else. Taxes, schmaxes. What a colossal waste of time.

One thing I might do to get ready is memorize the Scrabble dictionary. If I end up in heaven with a lot of time on my hands, I don’t want to be at a disadvantage like I was this Christmas. On the other hand, that would be a pretty convincing version of hell — being in an endless Scrabble game with three other people who know every single esoteric word in the Scrabble dictionary. Of course ‘ka’ is a word! Isn’t it just too bad that it blocked you from putting ‘quiz’ on the triple word score…

I think I’ll play it safe and do the memorizing.

Looking back at 2011, I’d have to say it was a watershed year. Here are some highlights:

I started the Gydle publishing empire. I have written more original words this year than ever before in my life.
My world was rocked when I figured out that we are being crowdsourced by bacteria. I certainly hope yours was, too.
My bare feet discovered that the ground is a surface that can bite back.
I finally gave myself permission to live my lifelong dream – (the novel).
I learned that I’m not 25 anymore thanks to a surprise sucker punch from a blood pressure monitor.
I finally broke my jelly belly addiction. I may have to change the banner on the blog. Sugar snap peas? Carrots?

What about you? What did you do in those precious months after May 21, when the world was supposed to end? I certainly hope you made the most of it.

In the meantime, since I’m clearly too late for any preventive measures, before you go to bed tonight, take a vitamin B supplement and an advil. It might help with tomorrow’s hangover, according to a press release from the Loyola University Medical System.

And if the world is spinning because you drank too much? Here’s why.

On a final note in this final hour of the penultimate year of human existence, I’d like to thank all of you for coming here. Thanks for your attention and support. Thanks for your comments, your suggestions, your ideas. Thanks for making all my efforts so very worthwhile. Thanks for joining me in my many-flavored world and for making it so much more interesting!

See you in 2012!
Photo Credit: sunsurfr via Compfight cc

Late-night thoughts on holiday travel

Posted on December 24, 2011 by gydle

New Mexico is in the midst of a major winter storm, with snowpacked, icy roads all over the place, gusty winds, the whole shebang. And my family is up in it in a flimsy tube of steel. Continue reading →

Santa’s in a time warp

Posted on December 8, 2011 by gydle

It’s December. How did that happen? Good grief.

Oh, that’s right, November disappeared in a blur of self-imposed word-count goals. So far, December is disappearing in a fog of research into stem cell technology. I had no idea how much I didn’t know about biotechnology and genetics.

Today, as part of this ongoing self-education marathon, I opened up my Newswise daily press-release wire, and happened to see this in the “most popular” column:

Researcher explains how Santa Delivers Presents in One Night

Under this provocative title, released at 7:35 am EST on December 6 (St. Nicolas’ day), the words Expert available were highlighted in red. How fortunate! Continue reading →

A race well run

Posted on December 2, 2011 by gydle

I know you’re all dying of anticipation. Did she make it? Did she make the 50,000-word NaNoWriMo goal?

Nope. I didn’t. I maxed out at 45,137. I just couldn’t pop out another word. My brain circuits shut down. I poured a glass of Bailey’s and called it a night at 10:30.

I could have forced the issue. I could have just typed away, oblivious to the actual content of what I was typing, but as much as I like editing, that didn’t really seem like the point to me. I felt like the exercise had served its purpose.

Here’s why:

It forced me to get started on the project. It won’t ever happen unless you actually start the writing.
It forced me to keep moving forward. You can’t afford to waste valuable time editing already written words when you’ve got ideas flowing. My typical approach is to write, and then obsessively edit, everything. I had to change that.
It forced me to take the project seriously. I’m not going to spend that kind of time and effort on something that never goes anywhere. I’m going to see this thing through!
It forced me to get organized; I have to keep all those words easily accessible in case I need to go back and check something.
It forced me to pay attention to setting aside time every day for my own writing, no matter how heavy my workload of remunerative translating and editing was. It’s only going to go forward if you spend time on it. Those words piling up (or not) are vivid proof of that.

I’d say that in terms of the novel, I’m about halfway done. I’m really starting to get to know some of these characters. I had to change the plot because I couldn’t imagine my Swiss post-doc being evil at heart. I like him too much. I’m hooked.

I’m going to take a couple of days off, and then get back to work. Next week I have some interviews set up with people to get a handle on some of the scientific and technical details.

I’ll also be able to get back to the blog, and some gripping stuff I want to write about cognitive biases (I did slip one in just a couple of days ago, in case you didn’t catch it) and mice.

Keyframing

Posted on November 30, 2011 by gydle

It’s the last day of November. I have less than 12 hours to go on the NaNoWriMo challenge. In a last desperate bid to hit 50,000 words, I’m going to keep on writing all day, with just this little break to keep the blog alive. I’m still under 45,000, so it’s a stretch. Speaking of stretch, Thanksgiving was way too much eating and not nearly enough writing.

Once again, I could take a lesson from Smokey. Look at him. He’s just lying there, I’m standing right above him with the camera, and he doesn’t even budge. In fact, after I took the picture, he calmly turned his head away and closed his eyes again. I need some of that focus!

Continue reading →