1) Finish packing (ugh)
2) Farmer’s market (6 am – 4 pm), specifically for jam/honey guy and soap guy
6) Imiloa (9-5, $17.50, but this is the most interesting of the museums  for me)
7) Place that sells unrefined Hawaiian salt near the farmer’s market
Mokupapapa Discovery Center (which is awesome and also free)
9) Hakalau bay (this actually is most relevant to my book, so it’s the most likely to get done)

After most everything closed, I still had hours to kill, so I saw Arthur Christmas. Not bad, not great, but enjoyable. I skipped dinner, likely a mistake, but I wasn’t hungry. I still have cashews. Everything else is checked. With the honey, jam, wine, coffee, etc., my new lighter bag came near 50#. I thought it was heavy.

Halakau bay was awesome in its way. I hope some of the pictures look good.

1) Finish packing (ugh)
2) Farmer’s market (6 am – 4 pm), specifically for jam/honey guy and soap guy
3) Zoo, specifically Namaste’s feeding at 3:30 (zoo’s open from 9-4, free)
4) Pacific Tsunami Museum (9-4:15, $8)
5) Lyman museum (10-4:30, $10)
6) Imiloa (9-5, $17.50, but this is the most interesting of the museums  for me)
7) Place that sells unrefined Hawaiian salt near the farmer’s market
Mokupapapa Discovery Center (which is awesome and also free)
9) Hakalau bay (this actually is most relevant to my book, so it’s the most likely to get done)
10) World Botanical Gardens (near Hakalau, $13)

Except for the zoo and the beach, all are within a few blocks of each other. Since my plane doesn’t leave until late, I could, in theory, manage several of these.

I’m guessing I’ll get the following done: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9; some of them are only a few minutes and are clumped together.

I’d planned to go to Akaka falls and the Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Garden on Tuesday, but the high bright overcast this morning meant rain wasn’t likely. After the last couple of days, that made for welcome weather prospects, so I headed north to the HTBG, went in and bought my admission and water (knowing there weren’t such facilities at Akaka), then headed to Akaka first.

Last year, I simply couldn’t manage the pathway. It’s 56 steps down, some nasty paths (which are paved at least), and about 2/10 of a mile to the falls proper via the shorter route. The longer route also visits another, smaller fall, but it seemed to have more stairs, so I chickened out on that one.

I managed it without difficulty. Further, last year, if I had done it, I couldn’t have done any other major walking immediately afterward like I did this year, when I walked all two miles of the paths (save for about 100′ where the handrailing for the stairs was underneath significant amounts of overgrown plants). Last year, I walked about 2/3 of the paths and it took me five hours because I was so tired and in so much pain. I wasn’t striving for time (since the point of going was enjoying the scenery, sitting in front of the falls, taking photos of cool plants, etc.), but it took me just under 2-1/2 hours this time. HTBG’s literature says that an average complete visit is around two hours. So I’m not exceptionally slow any more, which is great.

As a photographer, one of the problems of my lack of stamina has caused is that my hands shake when I’m that exhausted, and obviously that means I blow more photos. Much less of that this year.

However, the real point of going to HTBG is the same as last year: Isle of Pearls is set in an alternate Polynesia, and this is the closest thing I have to walking through some real rain forest. It’s not all native plants, granted, but the variety (not to mention size) is stunning. I noticed details that I hadn’t noticed before: how the cliffs are pummeled away at the water line, the difference between the water sounds and the wind sounds, etc.

From last year’s trip, I used a lot of details in other work I’ve done since, but IoP still needs a full re-write and I now feel ready to tackle it.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the rest of my day; it’s only six in the evening. Hilo being Hilo, that basically means the tourist stuff is over for the day, but there’s still other kinds of adventures like dinner.

After my reading was Peter S. Beagle‘s, so I stayed to listen. He’d been the Writer Guest of Honor at BayCon two years ago, but I hadn’t seen his reading then. He read a new piece he hadn’t read before. Below’s a photo I took with my iPhone 4S and edited in-phone with Snapseed. (Aside: best photo app for mobile that I’ve bought.)

I hadn’t bought banquet tickets, and hunger forced me to forage for food elsewhere. Naturally, the closest restaurants were closed, so it took me quite a while (sore from Saturday morning’s fall) to get across the hotel property to get to Charlie’s. I’m sad I missed the awards: Peter S. Beagle got a lifetime achievement award. One of my Clarion instructors, Karen Joy Fowler, won for best collection. Nnedi Okorafor won for best novel, and has a tweet about where she happened to be at the time.

My trip home wasn’t remarkable except that Prime Time shuttle completely failed to pick me up within the stated time period and I took Super Shuttle to the airport instead.

Getting to the bottom of my medical stuff has been something of a nightmare and has been a multi-year process of peeling the onion. In short, the celiac disease seems to have triggered other stuff, and now I think we’re getting to the last and possibly most critical bit.

Many years ago, I was given a diagnosis of fibromyalgia without excluding other diseases, and fibro’s supposed to be a diagnosis of last resort after everything else is ruled out — and nothing was. I do mean nothing.

For several years, treating it as though it were fibro was enough, but for the last few years, it has not been, and it’s been getting worse.

The good news? I think I finally figured it out. I could be wrong, but I’ve done a lot of reading lately, and I don’t think I am.

So, I found a doctor that agrees with me (thus my earlier trip), but isn’t “in plan,” so it’s more of an advisory role, and there are serious concerns about treating the issue (which I knew). On the other hand, it’s possible that I could get full remission in a few days.

I also got some work done, though I was limited by my doctor schedule and travel logistics.

The event I was coming for is, of course, World Fantasy. So last night I had the opportunity to participate in the mass signing, and I met a local writer who also happens to be a co-worker, so I introduced him to the other sf/f writer co-worker I know. I got Neil Gaiman’s autographs for a friend, too.

Today was my first full con day, and I went to the SFWA meeting at (oh my God) 8 a.m., which went well. As I was leaving, I was just out of it enough that I thought to myself, “Oh, I’m moving well now that the drugs kicked in.” Not five seconds later, I didn’t see that there was a step and took a rather nasty tumble, and I’ve been very sore since. A very sweet African-American teen here for another event helped me up and wanted to know if I was okay.

Because of the pain from the fall, I missed a lot of stuff, and spent the con sitting and talking to people for longer periods and not moving around so much (perfectly understandable). It remains to be seen how well I’ll be feeling the next two days, when the soreness from a fall is generally at its worst. Fortunately, I don’t think I hurt anything seriously.

I have a reading at 10 a.m., and I am now thinking everything I’ve written is crap, and I’m feeling the pressure; I’m reading right before someone I’ve always looked up to and it’s intimidating. I am not sure what I’ll read in the morning yet, but I brought seven things to pick from. I’ll probably read two or three.

I spent some of my downtime this trip reading Steve Jobs’s biograpy. I hope to finish it by Halloween, which seems fitting given the focus of the holiday for me (the annual honoring of people who’ve passed on). I’m going to write a longer post about that when I’ve finished the book. I started reading from the time of Steve’s cancer diagnosis forward, finished the book, then started again at the beginning. I think that’s actually an interesting way to read the book.

I’m going home tomorrow to a newly-repaired car. I have two follow-ups in-plan medical-wise on Tuesday, then a backup appointment on Wednesday with a different doctor.

According to her version of the story (a version corroborated by independent sources, like the Science Fiction Writers of America's Grievance Committee) Durgin's publisher is most certainly not keeping her book in print per the terms of their contract. The fact that they've demanded that Durgin buy back their leftover copies of book as a condition of holding up their end of the contract is without precedent -- indeed, it's a breathtaking violation of publishing norms, the sort of thing you're more likely to encounter from ripoff vanity publishers and not a respected house like Fitz and Witz. Writer Beware indeed. – Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing ,http://boingboing.net/2011/10/16/writer-my-publisher-said-i-could-only-get-the-rights-to-my-out-of-print-book-back-if-i-bought-their-leftover-copies-from-them.html

With that disclaimer, I still think this photo of the windows is pretty even though it’s not what I hoped for photo-wise.

Sagrada Familia’s construction has been going on for almost 130 years, and it is Barcelona’s most ambitious monument.

Second, filtering words. It’s a difficult topic to search for, so here’s a good blog post on it. I don’t like all of her examples, but it explains why adding that layer of indirection isn’t always a great idea.

Third, showers. There I was in the shower this morning thinking it was one of the great wonders of civilization, and I realized I’d never heard (despite reading a lot of Libertarian books in my youth) how either Libertarians or the Tea Party would handle things like sanitation engineering and water management. What changed me from being Libertarian was seeing that public health simply wasn’t doable that way, and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague was the final nail in the Libertarian coffin for me.

To paraphrase how Tim Powers described my first drafts at Clarion: the stage is bare, the actors are auditioning as the scriptwriter’s in the front row re-writing the piece, and there’s only tape on the stage to tell them where to stand. They’re not quite that threadbare, but the layer I get written first is the plot (the piece he said this about, I’d gotten the bones down for a three-plotline short that was 3,800 words and, at most, 1/3 to 1/2 its final length).

Vylar Kaftan talks about her revision statistics, including her A, B, C system for stories.

So below are mine. My first drafts fall kind of between A and B. Right now, they’re in C shape, but if I were done re-thinking them, they’d be moved up to the next categories. Submitted Previously, well, those are Bs. Out at a Market and Sold, obviously, are As.

Until such time as I have a sufficiently developed draft, there’s no point in categorizing it, but most of my pieces need significant steeping. The most recent piece I have out at market was one I wrote the first draft of in 2007. The oldest is one I wrote the first draft of in 1990, one of the first shorts I wrote and one of the most difficult pieces I’ve written.

I got to East West early [2], so I was noodling in a notebook about Disbelievers and got some good ideas. One of my standard noodling ideas is: Imagine what 100 cool things in this universe might be and write them down. You likely won’t use all 100, but the goal is to get a few new ideas that will help you. In this case, I realized what a big tentpole scene about 3/4 of the way through the book will be. It is something that’ll create an aftermath, and it’s the big scene that forces the climax.

Catherine’s stories are often about relationship with the land and environment, living as she does on a farm in northern Minnesota. They reminded me of the Vermont writers I’d heard speak on similar topics. She read a wonderful piece about a woman being taken away from her farm into community housing.

There’s something about these stories, though, that always make me feel like the weird child. Don’t get me wrong, I am the weird child, but most of the time my life feels normal to me.

Back when I was in college, we had a group writing session where we sat around a conference table and wrote on the topic of “my mother’s cooking.” We then read our entries out loud to each other. I came near the end, so I got to hear everyone’s tales of white galley kitchens and sizzling poultry, and canning.

My piece was titled “Pounding Abalone.” Here’s an excerpt.

The few times mom and I collaborated on a meal were usually on a boat working in cramped quarters. Mom and Bill [my stepfather] were avid scuba divers; I preferred to snorkel. I remember sitting up on deck while the others sought food, sitting under a light blanket (to reduce glare) while reading a book. Once, a shadow of a lobster caught my attention under the blanket, startling me. It turns out that the lobster had crawled up the blanket about four feet before I noticed it. I got my revenge though —- I boiled him.

Mom would make a great bouillabaisse, simmering the sauce all day while out catching the fish for the soup. We usually had mostly shellfish—lobster, abalone bits, tiny shrimp—rather than fish.

By far my favorite sea dish was the one I usually got to prepare -— abalone. Abalone clings very hard to rocks and has to be pried not only off the rock but out of its shell. Once out, it doesn’t have the decency to just sit there and behave. No, it has to crawl all over. Abalone is inherently tough, so I would pound it with a meat tenderizer as it crawled across the cutting board. I’d stop wailing on it with the metal tenderizer and watch it to see if it had stopped moving, but it would curl up its edges and slide away.

When we were getting ready to cook, I’d cut the abalone up, but even that didn’t prevent it crawling. It would move in my hands as I rolled it in the batter mom made. Then, when she put it on the sizzling pan, only then would it stop moving.

Since the last time mom and I went out boating together, I’ve never had abalone properly prepared. I’m not sure if it was my pounding or her cooking, but perhaps it was simply the magic of shared experience.

I think everyone was horrified, but then I never heard tales of plucking chickens….

One of the people at the reading was a licensed therapist who asked some interesting questions. She specifically asked about ego in writing. I can’t remember the exact question she asked because my mind was already racing with the question’s implications, but it made me realize what it was that bothered me about the “thou shalt outline” writers: they’re ego and super-ego writers. I’m an id writer. I describe my writing as backing into a story with blinders: I can only see where I’ve been — at least until the story catches, and at many points thereafter. That is, by definition, id writing. It’s also why my first drafts can be so craptastic.

This is, btw, one of two reasons I dropped out of James Gunn’s workshop: it simply wasn’t compatible with my process.

Also, one of the writers who’s been on an e-mail list of women writers said that, for years, people were discussing craft issues. About a year ago, this flipped, and now most of the discussions were about marketing. This has depressed me as well; I’ve been noticing it more and more.

[1] A big thank you to Shweta Narayan. When I was having a rough emotional time a couple of years ago, I asked her for recommendations for a light book to help me through, and she recommended Karen’s Wit’s End. It was perfect, just exactly what I needed, and it was really nice to be able to tell Karen that.

[2] Due to a short in a power strip that tripped the circuit breaker to my office. Great.