.:. Another Likely Story

Ah, it's been a while!  I wasn't even checking my RSS feeds ...

The day job exploded (but there is, one hopes, another publication or two at the end of that tunnel), and I decided to forgo social media for a while in order to focus on ... writing a novel.  I'd never really had an idea that I felt was sufficient to spin into an 80,000+ word story, but one day I did, and I thought, eh, why not?  Everyone's first novel--unless you are Haruki Murakami--is unpublishable anyway, right?  Why not let things be what they must be.  What that philosophy in mind I wrote my Great Unpublishable Novel from last August until this past Friday.  It clocked in at 85,000 words and I had a great time.  I learned an immense amount from the experience and I feel ready to go back to attempting to write Publishable Things.

(Like a piece for the next issue of Imaginary Beasts!)

I know some people would say writing something without caring about publishing it is a waste of time, but I felt in this instance that the experience would pay for itself, and I think it has.  Also I now have, you know, 85,000 words to mine in the future.

Anyway, I'm back!  I need to clean up that twitter feed and RSS feed, and I want to make some new friends, and comment on people's blogs, and probably also convert this thing from blogger to wordpress.

I used to have a running bet with myself whether I’d get published in Day Job (scientist, for a certain value of scientist) or Night “Job” (fiction) first. Well, that’s been answered by a review committee. In a few weeks my name will be part of the lineup for a paper in PNAS*. And some indeterminate time after that it’ll be on another piece of non-fiction writing that I’ve been working on.  Both pieces are utterly unrelated to anything fiction-wise (and, more to the point, are under my Nom de Science) so I won’t spam the links here.  Sorry to have made you read all this way before saying so, whups.

* Since I live within a reasonable distance, I plan to celebrate upon publication by taking the issue in question and perhaps a bottle of coke that has been … enhanced … and parking myself on the steps of a certain structure with both items. If you see a strange woman being dragged off the hallowed marble steps, stop and say hi!

Yesteryear's Tree, by Nankichi Niimi.  English translation and accompanying artwork by the lovely Tongari.  A tiny and bittersweet tale, translated perfectly.

As a note, the original Japanese version is available at Aozora Bunko (青空文庫, or, "The Open-Air Library"), a Japanese digital library created "to provide broadly available, free access to Japanese literary works whose copyrights had expired." Do check out Nankichi's other works if you have the time; they are invariably lovely.

As mentioned in the Peter Grant series, which is a brilliant work that everyone should read, the real life UK law enforcement/London Met has an IT system called called the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System = HOLMES.  At one point, it is remarked that when the Met put out an updated version of the database they wanted to name it SHERLOCK, but nobody could make up a good acronym, so it was named HOLMES 2.

Well, I think Aaronovitch should hold a contest to find the Best Acronym. My entry would be Services/Historical Emergency Records of London's Official Constabulary of the King. (WHAT. I'm allowed to dream.)

Also, this led me down the path of pondering what would be a good substitute for HOLMES in the universe of BBC's Sherlock series (see: Celebrity Paradox). Current top two contenders: DUPIN and WOLFE. Other contenders: MARPLE, POIROT, WIMSEY. I love Father Brown but that name is  too common, and the series isn't terribly well known.

(Where have I been?  I've been doing far more nonfiction writing as of late than fiction, due to my Actual Timesuck Job.  I don't know how everyone else in the blogosphere seems to balance the two so well, kudos to each and every one of you.  I'm getting a few things ready for submission, but it's taking ages.)

(Perhaps I should've saved this for Sunday ...)

I'd like to steer gentle readers towards An Angel's Guide To Bureaucracy, a hilarious and profound short story by Pei Yi.  Set in an afterlife where each religion has its own department to handle the souls of the dearly departed, the story takes the reader through the hijinks that ensue between the Taoism and Christianity branches when it's discovered that a soul has made a last-minute religious conversion.

"A deathbed conversion?" she echoed, skeptical. "But it wasn't captured by the system at all. How did you get this data? Are you sure it wasn't a mistake on your side?"

"Oh, I'm pretty sure it isn't. Deathbed conversions can be easy to miss, so we have special receptors for that. Maybe the universal system missed it?"

"But the funeral rites?" She paused. "Oh, the Final Act."

"Right, funeral rites can be overridden by prior religious affiliations at the soul's own discretion," he quipped. After a long history of souls complaining when they'd been ignored and given the wrong religious rites by family members, enough consensus had finally been reached for the revision seventy years back. It was still recent enough to be the last act listed under the universal post-mortem processing laws - and it would probably take two more inter-religion wars before any new laws got close to approved.

The rest of the story can be read here!