A few months back I wrote about the "Year Without A Summer". As you may recall from the earlier post, in 1816 New England had frost and often snow every month of the summer. That was probably due to the impact of the large Tambora volcano eruption in Indonesia, much larger than Krakatoa. Scientists have long suspected that there was another volcano, about half the size of the 1815 one but still huge, a few years earlier. Now that seems to be nailed down, at least to the year:1809. The volcano was apparently somewhere in the tropics.

While 1816 was the worst of the years, the entire decade from 1810 to 1819 was cold, colder than any other decade since we started keeping records. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091205105844.htm)

Volcanoes cool climate both locally, and in the case of the big ones, globally, by ejecting sulphur dioxide particles into the atmosphere. They block enough sunlight to change the earth's energy balance for a few years. To add insult to injury they also deplete the ozone layer.

As super volcanoes go, Tambora was a relatively small one. A really big one like the Toba super volcano 74,000 years ago apparently triggered a decade of 'years without a summer' and may have been behind a human genetic bottleneck that happened about that time. If something like that happened again, well let's just say it would make Mad Max look optimistic. Fortunately the really big ones are rare, though volcanoes large enough to have an impact on civilization have happened with a fair amount of frequency.

**FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009**

So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything.

And finally some answers to some questions:

( Read More and Get Some Answers... )

Over at Tribal Writer: building your author platform even if you're not published yet, part one, a series I started partly because the information I have found on author platforms for fiction writers is so unsatisfying (it's been much more helpful to immerse myself in books about social media and Internet marketing) and surfing the brain waves: managing your mind and unleashing your creative beast.

Been getting into a YA frame of mind in order to write a YA paranormal story due for an anthology end of Jan (I have 10,000 words to play with, so I'm psyched). Hit the bookstore yesterday and picked up SHIVER by Maggie Stiefvater, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY by Jay Asher and HOW BEAUTIFUL THE ORDINARY: Stories About Identity including one by the awesome Francesca Lia Block.

And found a new blog to adore: WHITE HOT TRUTH by Danielle LaPorte because of articles like this one.

What a gray, rainy day.

That is all. I'm off to kick some ass and look cute doing it.

....plans for which were promptly curtailed by back spasms.

I went into Metropolis for my Saturday coffee, and when I was coming out with my drink, I glanced down at the free newspaper rack, and - OMG! An Art Institute RED CUBE! I had thought my chances of lucking out and finding one of these would be impossible, so upon seeing it, I grabbed it before somebody else noticed it. Huzzah!

I happened to have my camera in my car, because I was heading out to do some photography, so of course I had to memorialize the moment. I hefted the cube with one hand and tried to shoot it with the other - this can be surprisingly challenging. ;)

This girl suddenly ran across the street. "Oh my god, where did you get the red cube!?"

I told her - Metropolis Coffee. She glanced wistfully towards the coffee shop, realizing without being told that there had only been one there. (Or maybe there was another...? But this is the one I saw!)

So we spent a couple minutes exclaiming in excitement about finding one of the cubes, and then I carefully placed it in my trunk to head off to photographic adventures.

I've registered my cube and now my project requires me to go over to the Art Institute to do the next part of it. :-)

"To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art

of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic

suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices

which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should

wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be.

They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!,

to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already

the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience

to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that

house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach

for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own

free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension,

quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash

the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize

into defiant

eccentricity." ~Christopher Isherwood, “Los Angeles” (via Communicatrix and Ukiah Blog Live)

Forgot to say that I posted why you need to write like a bad girl at my other blog Tribal Writer and the response has been gratifying. This is one of my favorite posts.

1

Last night I went to the Digital Family Reunion, a gathering of tech and business people, because I want to mingle with the digerati and talk to bloggers and soak up information and ideas. I had to talk myself into going through with it -- a little voice in my head kept saying, You won't know anyone there except for two people, and either or both of them might not show, or you might not be able to find them.

So instead of going straight there, I stopped off at Fred Segal's, which was nearby, and bought a draped off-the-shoulder sweater and wore it out of the store. The sweater made me feel better. Clothes have a mysterious power.

Once at the gathering -- which seemed to be labeled both a 'holiday party' and a 'conference' and turned out to be giving some kind of award to the man who owned my house before I did, small world -- I had that fish-out-of-water feeling and so of course did what any courageous and confident woman would do. I sat on the couch and played with my iPhone.

Then a woman sat across from me and we started talking, then I went to the bar and another woman complimented me on my sweater and we started talking, and she turned out to be a reader of books, which was awesome, and we were still talking when a friend showed up and found me and from then on the night went kind of great.

I like these smart creative tech-y people. I wish to move among them.



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Had a conversation with a friend about shame. People will say we live in a shameless culture, but this is bullshit; we shame others and are shamed all the time, especially as children.

We learn to hide parts of our lives, parts of ourselves. Beware the person whose life appears perfect. What they've learned to master isn't their life so much as the image of their life, and god only knows what goes on behind it.

Psychologically abusive relationships are all about making the other person feel small, less-than, incompetent, unloveable, wrong, ashamed. In order to flourish, shame requires isolation and secrecy. When something is exposed, it loses its power; it becomes part of a larger context, placed within the broad communal experience of being human. Other people can relate. Other people can help you. Other people can say, It's not that bad, or, This happened to me too, or You are not alone.

Without that context, shame creates its own self-perpetuating reality. And it can kill off parts of your soul, your self-esteem.

It's why abusers instinctively find ways to isolate their partners. They do it not just to cut off the kind of emotional (or financial) support that might help the partner break free of the relationship, but because other people help tether that person to the reality outside the reality the abuser creates and controls within the relationship. That private world is dictated by the abuser and steeped in power, control, and shame, where you are the one who is wrong and must change in order to win the abuser's approval.

Except -- other than hints and glimmers that will keep you pressing the lever, like rats in those partial-reinforcement experiments -- approval is never forthcoming. The whole point is to keep you off-balance and walking on eggshells, twisting yourself inside out to achieve something that doesn't exist. The abuser is always right, which means you are always wrong, and hiding this 'wrongness' from everybody around you, which makes you feel smaller and smaller until you disappear.

There's this idea that your source of shame is also your source of power, and I've been mulling that over. I think what that means is that if you can own the things that shame you -- and find ways to use them to your advantage, like birds building nests from pieces of garbage -- then no one else can ever have that power over you. You are free.

(courtesy of Huffington Post and Yahoo!)

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

http://bonniers.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/impaired-executive-function/

I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm looking for practical ways to cope with this.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is over for 2009. I wrote almost all of the way until the end--stopping at a little before 11:30 pm yesterday. During the month of November I wrote 99,733 words (roughly 350 pages). I didn't finish the novel. I'm guessing I have another 25,000 words or so to wrap it up.

Writing that much in a month is not something I would recommend for someone with other work obligations, especially ones that involve sitting. It's been a tad stressful and probably a tad unhealthy. That much sitting can't be good for you. On the other hand, I got the bulk of a novel written in 30 days, which quite an accomplishment. How good is the stuff? I don't know, and won't for at least a couple of months because stuff has to cool before I can really judge it. Parts of it seemed quite good while I was writing them. Others? Well lets just say they got the plot from point a to point b.

I wrote an average of 3324 words per day, with the 'worst' daily word count coming in at 1668 and the best daily word count 6245 words. I had two days with over 6000 words and one more with over 5000 words. Most days I was in the 2500 to 4000 word range, with 14 days in the 3000 range, and only 4 days lower than 2500 words.

This seems to have answered one question for me. I've always wondered if I wrote better as a 'plotter' or a 'pantser' (as in writing by the seat of the pants). This varies from person to person, but for me, doing a lot of plotting ahead of time seemed to help. I spent a month and a half writing up world-building notes, character sketches, and plot notes. By the time I started writing the story itself I had probably already written 25,000 words about the novel. I didn't always follow the script. Characters evolved. The plot changed. The world even changed a few times. Having the notes helped a lot though. I did most of the plot notes in YWriter 5, a piece of novel writing software. I did a lot of the writing using Write-Or-Die, which really helped my concentration.

This is science fiction--sort of alternate history but with a twist. I'm going to be changing a few character names, because they are confusingly close. With that in mind, here's an excerpt:



“I’m glad I’m doing something right. Where’s Heather?”
Amelia pointed and said softly, “She’s having a little tiff with the Haigh chick. Hair will eventually get pulled, maybe even later today, but right now they’re just trying to smile and get the digs in.”
Greg spotted the two. “Amanda Haigh? Looks to me like they’re getting to be good buddies.”
“Yeah, doesn’t it?”
Heather said something and then walked away. Amanda Haigh shot her a look of pure hatred. Greg whistled. “Wow. You sure called that one. If looks could kill my darling wife would have just burst into flames.”
The crowd thinned out, and the pallbearers took the casket to a waiting pickup truck. Reuben and Terry Haigh were among the pallbearers, as was Ermaline.
It was well after noon before the graveside service and the following reception got over. At the end of the reception, Pastor Julius walked over and told them that he was taking his tour bus out to the Lyle farm with the ‘Dunnes’ and a few others. “I can’t look too close to you three. If you mess this up I need to be able to walk away from you and keep my place in the community.”
“Leaving us dangling in the wind,” Greg said.
“Dangling in the wind. That’s a good way to put it. Mind if I steal that for one of my sermons?”
“It’s a common expression where we come from.”
“That’s one thing I did enjoy about being over in your snapshot. I love words and I got to pick up nearly sixty years worth of new ways to play with them while I was over there.”
“Did you do the Peter, Paul, and Mary thing on purpose?”
“Yep. I heard one of their songs while I was over there.”
Amelia shook her head. “Old people cultural references. Boring.”
“It’s all new to us over here,” the pastor said. “The Beatles, Peter Paul and Mary, Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and God preserve us, rap, disco, reality TV, and the Brady Bunch.”
Greg watched the Haigh family go by in a pickup truck that was nearly dragging a muffler. “You picked up a lot in a few days.”
“I wouldn’t be a pastor in this community if I couldn’t pick up culture fast. Of course we got twenty years worth of Buddy Holly instead of just a few, and overall we’ve had nearly sixty years of music and movies and television you’ve never seen too. There is going to be a lot of money made in moving that stuff back and forth between the snapshots.”
Ermaline drove by in jeep with Lyle in the passenger seat. She had changed into blue jeans and a grey and black flannel shirt. Tears were flowing down her cheeks and her long red hair flowed out behind her in the wind. Lyle glanced at Greg as the jeep went by, but didn’t smile or acknowledge him in any way.
"She's not really a Neanderthal, is she?" Amelia asked.
"Sure, why wouldn't she be?"
“But she was driving.”
“Yeah, and she comes to church once in a while and eats with a knife and fork, and she wipes her chin with a napkin after she’s done. I imagine she even brushes her teeth, though I’ve never seen her do it.”

Happy birthday to abennettstrong!

http://bonniers.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/back-in-the-saddle/

I hope, plan, and intend to spend more time keeping up here and on my other blogs. That's going to mean cutting something -- deciding on what I want to do as opposed to what I would like to do. The kind of decision and commitment that I've been very poor at making in the past. But it's time for this one.

I had a lesson the other day when I was trying out blip.fm. (For those of you who don't know, and perhaps don't care except you happen to be reading this, blip.fm is a music service where you can play DJ and send out your song selections on Twitter.) I blipped exactly two songs...and my Twitter 'followers' count dropped by five.

On Twitter, your follower count is never stable. Often people (and spam accounts) will follow you just so you will follow them back. If and when you don't, they remove you from their list, and your 'followers' number goes down by one. And of course you lose followers because you annoy or offend them or they check out your tweetstream when you're having a bad stretch and your tweets come off more moronic than usual. You can't please all the people all of the time.

I don't worry about it.

Except it seemed clear to me: the people who follow me don't care what songs I'm listening to and tend to find 'blips' annoying as hell. The 'blips' take up space in your tweetstream, there's no substance to them, they're not amusing you or engaging with you or linking you to something interesting. Hearing someone's music choices is a bit like listening to someone describe the dream they had last night: there is such a personal and subjective element to it that it doesn't mean much to you. And bores you.

I had the feeling I had kind of violated some unspoken but important tweeter-reader contract. And it drove home a point that Seth Godin and Chris Brogan and other social media rock gods are always making: you have to give people something that they actually want. You have to provide value for their time and attention. When you don't, they drop you, and why shouldn't they? It's a point that seems so obvious, and yet so easy to forget; we get too involved in our egos, wanting to sell our stuff or promote ourselves or construct some clever online persona or show off the music we're listening to because we think it's cool and by extension makes us cool.

So this little experience deepened my sense of respect for life in the attention economy. There's only so much attention to go around, and I have to earn it -- and continue to earn it. Other people can pull off the blip.fm thing, but me? Not so much.

1

I am thankful for the amazing people in my life and the ability to do work that I love.

I am thankful that in the last year and a half I could feed my soul with the conversation and connection I was craving.

(And I am thankful that my turkey came out well. Moist, tender, and well-seasoned!)

2

I am in Pacific Grove, near Cannery Row: John Steinbeck country. I came up with Dude to visit Dude's parents, sister, and niece. One of the best parts is collecting stories about Dude when he was younger: "He always had a girlfriend," his sister told me. "So many girls were in love with him."

"When he got divorced," his father told me, "younger women and older women would come up to me in town and say, 'How is Dude?...Tell him to give me a call."

Dude managed to look appropriately bashful.

I went on a long walk to work off the previous day's turkey and apple pie, blissing out to ocean air and exercise and Nine Inch Nails on my borrowed iPod. We had dinner at a place that served deep-fried olive-and-blue-cheese concoctions (they were good), and crayons to draw on the paper tablecloths. Afterwards Dude, his sister, niece and I went to a bar and danced to live music. Dude and I rounded off the night with the movie Pirate Radio, which I recommend, partly for its awesome soundtrack.

3

At Tribal Writer I posted the writer's show and tell: show us what's important, and tell the freaking story and why you need to write like a bad girl, part one. The latter is first in a series (and my experiment in turning essays into more blog-friendly posts).

4

Amazing to think of where I was -- emotionally and mentally and physically -- this time last year, and how far I've traveled since.

I'm thankful for that, as well.