The WAL

Because I haven’t posted one for a little while.

Progressing well, but I need to do some more detailed plotting.  The rough plot is only going to get me through to the 3/4 mark.  The last quarter of the book is only worked out to a “major event” per scene level.

I’ve also got one more story in need of a home.  “The Prince of Mediocrity” is a short piece, under 1400 words that might be classified as humorous sociological SF.  “Dragon Gold” had its final polish, but I want to give it one more read before I think about sending it to anyone.  And I’ve got a Christmas SF piece midway through its final edit and in need of a new title.

Something more after I’ve had some sleep, maybe.

As entertaining a tool as they are, polls are actually pretty useless.  I say this not to slander or annoy the people who make their living from them, but because it’s true.  They’re nice to identify trends and they give the pundits something to talk about every single campaign day, but they’re always wrong.  Aside from the ridiculous error bars (Exactly what does +/- 2.9% 19 times out of 20 mean, anyway?  That twentieth time is completely meaningless?  I know the math must bear things out, but come one guys, it’s like you’re admitting that you have no idea what you’re talking about.), they’re not accurate enough.

And what do I mean by that?  Well, you need to read the fine print.  The numbers usually add up to something in the vicinity of 100% which means that everyone they talked to actually thinks they know who they’re going to vote for.  So any given poll needs to be read as “XX% of decided voters intend to vote for party ABC”.  The undecided voters, by some accounts, can be as much as 40% of the total electorate (or the fraction of it that actually goes out to vote).  That’s an awfully big swing vote, don’t you think?

One more thing that bothers me about the math: can you really get an accurate picture of the way things are (even with a 3% error 19 times out of 20), by taking a sample of 1000 or so out of a population of millions of voters?  Seems to be an awfully small fraction to me, if there are, say,  10 million voters (this is very low - almost 15 million people voted in the 2006 election) and you ask a random 1000 of them what they think, you’re only getting one hundredth of a percent of the possible opinions at that moment.  The math may work, but people are more complicated than math.

Lastly, and this almost ignores my previous arguments, none of the polls are detailed enough.  A national picture is nice, but it’s not the whole story.  It’s lovely to be able to estimate seat totals if we all voted today, but it’s not the whole story.  Even going to the provincial level won’t do.  Something that really matters to me is how my riding is shaping up.  Is it a close enough race that I should vote strategically to not get the idiot I don’t want?  Or should I truly vote my conscience because there’s already a clear winner?  Yes, perhaps I should truly vote my conscience regardless of the front runner, but if it really is a tight race, then a little strategic voting could make a huge difference in my riding and the shape of the government across the country.

So my advice of the poling companies is this:  more detail, more clarity, more people surveyed.  I’ll answer a political survey every day if someone calls.  Not a marketing one, though - they can bugger off.

Okay, my tongue is completely not in my cheek for this political post.  There’s been a lot for me to be irritated about this first week of the election campaign with little enough to be impressed by.  I’m not going to hit too many details, but I have one question for all of the leaders except our fair Prime Minister: why the hell aren’t you calling the Conservatives on their record?

There’s a lot of bitching and whining, and not very very much actual debate and discussion.  Platforms are still ridiculously vague and I’ve never been much of a fan of revealing your vision for the country a tiny bit at a time.  I want actual platforms and issues and the candidates to talk about them as well as their own and each others records and accomplishments.  I don’t want mud-slinging and attack adds.

But I guess modern elections aren’t geared to me.

It frightens me a bit that some polls are showing the Conservatives in potential Majority territory, not least because it shows how dysfunctional our system is for a multi-party political environment.  But it heartens me that the Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, has won her bid to be included in the televised leadership debates.  Love them or hate them, the Greens have built the support that should included them and Harper’s childish threat to not show up if she’s there is just one more reason not to vote Conservative.  Is this really the guy we want running the country.  After all, he’s done such a fractacular job so far.

Lately, I don’t seem to be reading as much short fiction as I normally do.  Odd, because I really enjoy short fiction in both of my preferred genres.  I picked up the current volume (the 25th) of Gardner Dozois’ annual Year’s Best Science Fiction collection to fill this void.  Thirty-two stories and something over 300k words (claimed by the cover) so it should keep me busy for a while.  I’ve got several volumes of the series around and have given a couple of others as gifts in recent years and while I haven’t like all of the thirteen stories I’ve read so far, I don’t regret reading any of them.

I haven’t traditionally bought the equivalent volume for fantasy as it lumps together with horror, but considering my own recent foray into the genre, I’m giving that a second thought.  If you think you can write something, you should try to read some of it if only to see where you’re at.

On an almost related note, I sent out “The Last Eclipse” several days ago and now need to give a final polish to “Dragon Gold” before I try to find it a home.

So a Federal election campaign is under way.  Yesterday was Day 3 and while everyone had their own message and the attack adds have started to fly, things are really just getting started.

But what was everyone talking about at work?  Some football player hurt himself during the first game of the season and won’t be playing for the rest of the year.  While I feel for him, whoever he is, in an intellectual way, he’s not even a Canadian football player but for some team south of the border.  There are far more important things going on than football.  Like, oh, the Federal election.

I work in a young industry.  Not the industry itself, but the people who populate it.  At 37, I’m deep into the upper quarter of age in my department, and probably the building.  Average age is probably 25-27.  The pundits are fond of saying that the younger demographics just aren’t interested in politics because it doesn’t speak to them in any meaningful way.  I see that first hand.

Admittedly, I haven’t always been as politically aware as I am now (getting better all the time), but I have always taken the time to get at least a vague idea of what’s going on and to have a something like an informed vote.  I know a lot of people at work who don’t bother to vote because they don’t see the point.

And the rich white guys running the country don’t think the system is broken?  Well, why would they?  It keeps them in power and none of the other problems with it hurt them either.

I’m trying to pick up steam with story submissions.  “Failing Hope” went out as the anthology submission for The World Is Dead.  I also sent out a flash piece called “The Monkey is Only Bait” a couple of days ago and I’m researching markets to find potential homes for two other stories at the moment.  Add to that a dozen or so of the better stories I’ve finished in the past year that have gone through at least two drafts already, and I could have quite a bit of stuff in circulation in the next month or so.  Hopefully, I can find homes for some (dare I hope all?) of them.

So, what does this mean for my novel writing.  At the moment, nothing.  I’m still putting in my 500 words per day on Heroes Inc.  Editing and revising are separate activities and I’m doing a lot of this on my breaks at work.  It may mean changing my editing goals for after the first draft of Heroes Inc is finished.  I’m actually thinking that Dragon Summer should rest a lot longer or maybe it’s just that I know how much work it’s going to be to fix the narrative difficulties the story has.  I will still work on editing one of the two novellas by the end of the year, but I think I’m going to focus a little more on short fiction.  Novel aside, I have a lot of short stories I want to tell, and always have at least one in progress at the moment.  I’m switching back to nights in a few days, which always gives me more writing time, so hopefully will make a lot of progress in the next month or so.

Releasing stories into the wild, however, even if only two so far, has turned me into a compulsive e-mail checker.  There’s no danger of hearing back about either of them for at least another three weeks, but I’m still checking my e-mail four or five times per day to see if word (good or bad) has arrived on either.  Next time I log into hotmail, though, I have to start on a different sort of writing - messages to the half dozen people who have written to me in the last few days.

Apparently, we’re going to have an election in the Great White North very shortly, as if I hadn’t guessed that from all of the kinder, gentler Stephen Harper ads that have been running for the last week or so.  And why have they dressed him up like he stars in some 1950s sitcom?  Sure, Uncle Stevie, we believe you.

The election comes year early, some how contravening the Fixed Election Dates Act in a legal way, at least according to the PM, because Parliament is ‘dysfunctional’.  Parliament is dysfunctional because the Liberals don’t show up to vote and the Conservatives have gotten everything they wanted since they came to power?  This makes sense, somehow?  Uncle Stevie, I’ll have whatever it is you’re smoking.

Back to my point: the Fixed Election Act was supposed to make it impossible for a government to call an election when they think it’s most advantageous, but we trust Uncle Stevie, don’t we?  Transfer formulas, income trusts, corporate welfare, fixed election dates, ethics and transparency, capital gains exemptions, soft wood lumber, access to information, clean air, and on, and on, and on.

I think the motto for the coming election (and how does everyone know that it’s going to be announced, anyway?  Why is every important government announcement known by the media before it’s actually announced?) should be something like: Stephen Harper, leaving no promise unbroken.

I’m going to go out on a limb and make an election prediction: for the first time since World War II, we’re going to have a coalition government.  The Liberals and the Green Party will together gain enough seats for a very slim majority and will celebrate the coalition by announcing the Wedding of Stéphane Dion and Elizabeth May to take place no more than thirty days after election night while Smilin’ Jack looks on enviously and stamps his feet.  And poor old cousin Gilles, well, who cares?

You read it here first.

Does anyone find themselves nostalgic for Paul Martin?  Well, maybe not, but given a real chance I’m sure I would have liked him a lot better than Uncle Stevie.

I honestly don’t understand why early September is billed as ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ by a certain office supplies chain and why so many people who obviously don’t have children think that all parents must be glad when it’s time to send the offspring back to school so they can be someone else’s problem for a big chunk of the next ten months.  I’d rather summer vacation was much longer so I can have more time with my children.

I’ll admit that part of the equation is that my days off fluctuate so in the summer whenever I’m off, they’re off, too.  But even when I’m not off, they’re available more during the summer because there’s less concern over bedtime, there’s less enforced structure to their days.  Really, there’s less of just about everything that limits my time with them.  I don’t even need them to be doing something with me every possible second, just knowing that they’re around is nice, even if they are interrupting something I’m trying to do repeatedly, like painting one of their rooms.

The really funny thing is, I’m not the only parent who doesn’t want them to go back to school so soon.  My informal survey would indicate that those parents are in the minority.  Maybe that wasn’t always the case but nowadays, it’s always a little sad when September comes.