Monthly Archives: February 2014

Writing

The Man of Business

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Imbolc                                                                       New (Hare) Moon

A day spent mostly with the query letter, an odd ritual in the publishing business, one involved in the finding of an agent.  This is the next step for Missing and for me with my business hat on.  I found the division of creative work mentioned in something I read a while back (which I believe I mentioned here) into three parts useful.

First, of course, is the creative, the artist who produces the work shoving aside the internal critic and censor, actively advancing an idea until it attains an initial shape.  Then comes the editor/the revisor who takes a manuscript and cuts out the not story, leaving only the flesh of the thing.  No fat. Finally, there is the business person who takes the work after the editor/the revisor finishes with it and sees it finds its market, its place in the outer world.

The synopsis of Missing (1,500 words) is done.  I’ve copied out the first five pages.  These go in the query, but follow the query letter itself.  The query letter opens with a hook, a compelling one sentence compression of the work.  A one paragraph synopsis follows that and, finally, a paragraph about word length, writing credits, state of the manuscript, or proposal in publishing speak.

I have a draft of the query letter now.  It will sit for a bit, cool down, then I’ll revise it. That’s what I did today for the synopsis.  It’s time for me to get this part right and I’m doing it.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Chaff

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Greg had to shift our work tomorrow to next Friday.  This morning I plowed through 7 verses in 40 minutes.  That’s getting closer to the pace I want.  13-16 a day.  In fact, with that pace, two sessions the same day would get me there.

This is all chaff.  I know that.  Who cares whether an amateur succeeds in making what will probably be a poor translation of the Metamorphoses? Nobody. I care. And that’s what matters to me, but I’m not ignorant of the global insignificance of this work.

Same with the novel.  Suppose it sells, does well.  More chaff.  If it doesn’t.  Chaff. Working on climate change.  Closer to wheat, less chaff.  Still, my single contribution?  Mostly chaff.

Why keep at any of this?  Because it is what I’ve chosen to define my ancientrail.  I don’t believe any of us have another path open to us.  It’s either choose or have it chosen for you.

(Eleusinian mysteries)

GeekWorld
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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

Fixed a minor tech glitch yesterday with the aid of a friendly resident of the Indian subcontinent.  Our Roku went down.  “It is because the remote is not pairing with the Roku, Charlie.  Don’t worry, I’m here now to help you fix it.”  Not kidding about the dialogue.  Good service.  Fix worked.

Health, Third Phase

Healing

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Imbolc                                                               Valentine Moon

After two + weeks of constant pain in my right pec, it’s begun to recede. Made an appointment with my doc, as I wrote earlier, but couldn’t get in to see her until next week.  Now it seems that by then, I won’t need the appointment.  As long I can tell an injury is healing, I’m ok with it. My desired result.  Self-care wins every time in my world. (I did have advice from the concierge doc here at 153rd Ave. NW.)

(me at the end of P90X)

Workouts have begun to get more intense again and I can see myself back in the P90X full bore after the Tucson trip.  My original hope was that I could finish the P90X (90=90 days) before Tucson, but the injury and my learning curve on the more complex moves combined to slow me down.  No big deal.  I’m going to continue learning the moves, doing high intensity aerobics alongside that, until I can work it fulltime.

 

Quotes

Yes, More Words Put Together By More People

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“Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”
— Emily Brontë
“Doubting charms me not less than knowledge.”
— Dante Alighieri
““A physicist visits a colleague and notice a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. “Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks. “No”, replies the colleague, “but I’ve been told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”””
— Niels Bohr
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”
— Hegel
“It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted.”
— Aeschylus
“Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do — can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music. You know what to do.”
— Barbara Sher
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
— John Locke
“But the images of men’s wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.”
— Francis Bacon
“Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”
— Lillian Hellman
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
— Isaac Asimov

 

“The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.”
— Buddha
GeekWorld, Health

Data

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Imbolc                                                                    Valentine Moon

Gadgets. Yes. I like them. My latest is my birthday present, a Basis watch.  The basis keeps track of my steps (not so many in these winter days), calories burned (not so accurately for reasons I’ll make clear) and, most interestingly my sleep.  basis-sleep-tracking-web

Not quite sure how the sleep sensors work, but each time I nap or sleep at night the Basis records my sleep with several different variables:  time in deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep.  It also records turns and turnovers and what it calls, interruptions.  At 67 you can imagine what my interruptions are.  These are done up in a neat graph that wouldn’t copy, but the overall data stream for last night is below.* (above is from their website)

But that’s not all. Overtime the Basis learns your patterns and gives you a sleep score based on Basis-Bandlength of sleep and all those other data points.  It also measures, helpfully, heart rate during the day, in particular resting heart rate which is a good measure of fitness.

I initially thought it would record my heart rate during exercise and give me feedback about my workouts, but it doesn’t do that.  I wanted to be able to upload my exercise data to the computer and save it, track my progress over time.

Though I’ve always exercised with a heart rate monitor (or at least I’ve done it so long I don’t recall when I started), the technology I had was only good for in the moment ft7_blulila_topleft_340x395_0readings.  That was good, but I wanted better data.  When I found the Basis wouldn’t do what I wanted (I was not the only one who made this mistake as the forum on the Basis website demonstrated), I went to Polartech.

They make a great, inexpensive watch and chest band (transmits heart rate to the watch) which, when coupled with a data synch plate, transfers a great deal of relevant data from the watch to the Polartech personal trainer website.  BTW:  I have the FT7 which the link displays and explains, but I got it for $73, not $119.00.

This means I don’t wear my Basis during exercise.  It didn’t do much helpful then anyhow. That means its calories burned per day reading is not accurate because it doesn’t reflect my workouts.  Still, it’s sleep monitoring and throughout the day heart monitoring give it a place, too.  Oh, and it tells time and the date, too.

Now I can monitor my sleep accurately, my resting heart rate and the intensity of my workouts.  With the workouts I see calories burned, maximum, minimum and average heart rate, training load (call it intensity), time in various training zones and I get graphs over time plus a calendar/diary that records each workout in a calendar format.  I like it.

*91%

Sleep Score

19 times

Toss & Turn

1 time

Interruptions

REM 25%

1 hr 48 min

Light 54%

3 hr 56 min

Deep 21%

1 hr 33 min

Memories, Music

Yeah

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Then again, there’s jazz.  Not sure how it made its way into my soul.  Sometime in my teens.  Might have been that see-it tour I took with the Methodist Church to New York and Washington, D.C.  Gene Krupa at the Metropole stands out as a memory, though just what I would have been doing there I have no idea.

Jazz, like the Coltrane piece I’m listening to right now, Body and Soul, comes along with big east coast city memories, including the wood paneled corridors of Washington, D.C.  It feels like night time and carpeted hallways with people doing significant things, well past working hours.  Smoke filled rooms, half-empty glasses with lipstick stains and cigarette butts smoking in ceramic ashtrays.

There’s also the stadium in Cincinnati where Coltrane shared the stage with Monk and Herbie Mann.  Where the jazz went on and on and then we returned to the place we were crashing, somewhere on Mount Adams, maybe on Celestial Avenue or Paradise or Monastery Street.  It had these kind of street names.

The combination of marijuana, the jazz festival, the late 60’s and Mount Adams makes for a peculiar set of memories, as if for a while I floated along on Celestial Avenue listening to tenor sax riffs, that wonderful complexity of Monk’s piano, the flute, the horn all marking a variation on the theme of heaven.  Might have been.

(Cincinnati landmark Immaculata Church on Mt. Adams in the background)

 

 

Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Quiet

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Imbolc                                                                      Valentine Moon

Again, I know it’s a common thread for these later night posts, but the stillness.  The quiet of a late February night with thigh-high snow in the yard and temperatures headed into the minus teens below zero again.  It is like living far further north where sometimes the winters bump into the beginning of summer and pick up again before the growing season is over.

Yes, and I know it’s crazy, but I like it.  Am I tired of the cold and the snow?  A bit.  Would I live somewhere that couldn’t deliver this kind of season?  No.  These outliers define us, show the edge of the world toward which we are closest.  And it’s not Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico.  No, we align with the pole, the north pole. This year we even shared the polar vortex with it.

I’m hoping we hit #8 on the coldest winters since the Civil War.  Remember the winter of 2013-2014?