writing

The return of lily-white writing? 1

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged race writing on by

Boskone 58 pocket program coverBack in the “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” all the leading characters were light-skinned by implication. Well, all the human characters. The aliens were often green or blue. It wasn’t that the authors set out to portray white-only casts or mentioned every character’s appearance; it was just the default, and most writers (themselves light-skinned) rarely thought about it.

The situation slowly changed. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, published in 1959, presented a thoroughly international and multi-ethnic military. We’ve reached the point where characters of all physical types and ethnic origins appear in SF. It’s happened in nearly all kinds of fiction; I’m focusing on SF because it’s what I’m familiar with.

But now there’s a nasty push back. Some people want fiction re-segregated. At first I thought it was just a fringe movement with no significance, but it’s gaining in influence. I keep seeing would-be writers apologetically posting to Reddit, asking whether it’s OK for their stories to have characters whose skin color doesn’t match their own. The responses are overwhelmingly “yes,” so it’s still on the fringe, but it’s a toxic idea that needs firm rejection.
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Writing accurately about exponential functions

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged mathematics writing on by

“The number A is exponentially greater than the number B!” What does this mean? Nearly nothing. If it has a meaning, it’s that there’s some number x such that Bx = A. But that’s true of any two numbers, as long as they’re both greater than 1 and A > B. Please don’t use that expression in your writing.

You could also say that A is “linearly greater” or “quadratically greater” than B. They’re just as true and just as meaningless. “Exponentially greater” sounds more impressive because exponential curves rise really fast. In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of cases followed something close to an exponential curve. But a single data point doesn’t establish a curve.
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The Magic Battery: Now on Smashwords!

This entry was posted in My writing Personal Writing and tagged fantasy fiction magic battery writing on by

My novel The Magic Battery is now available as an e-book on Smashwords. As an expression of thanks for reading my blog, I’m offering it for $1.99, instead of the usual $2.99, with the coupon code RW83R through the end of June.

This is a novel for fans of thoughtful historical fantasy. It presents an alternate Germany where magic works, and where the authorities allow only Christian men to practice it. Thomas Lorenz discovers a way to store magic spells in gadgets that people can buy or rent, putting magic in the hands of anyone with a little money. The conflict that develops parallels the effects of the real-life innovations of Luther, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and others.

In sixteenth-century Saxony, magic is a trade. Mages draw power from the World Behind, but they don’t understand it. Thomas knows that magic needs to be scientific, that it follows mathematical laws. He draws inspiration from his master Albrecht Ritter, who knows nothing is ever “good enough,” his teacher Johan Brandt, who is hiding an infamous past, and later his wife Frieda, who sees the prospect of a more enlightened future. He faces the persistent opposition of Heinrich Gottesmann, a fanatical lawyer and witch hunter. He learns that there is more at stake than just a new way of making lamps.

I’ve been to some of the places used in the book: Heidelberg, Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Hildesheim. I’ve engaged in considerable historical research to get the period right. Apart from the magical elements, the setting is as close to the historical Germany of the 1540s as I could make it. None of the characters hold 21st-century ideas; that would be absurd. However, Thomas and especially Frieda see beyond their time.

Links, reviews, and shares will help to get the word out. You can link to the Smashwords page or to my page on this site.

Podcasts vs. text blogs

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged podcasts writing on by

It probably won’t surprise you that I’m a fan of text blogs. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of you are too, since my target audience here is writers. There are some podcasts with excellent content, but I rarely have the patience for them. Music podcasts are an exception. If an essential part of the content is musical, words don’t do the job. A podcast that interviews interesting people has a justification, though transcripts mostly work fine. But if the podcaster is just going to talk about something, it’s rarely worth my time.

The top podcasts (at least according to this list, which mercifully starts with #1 instead of starting with #100 and making me scroll to the bottom) are a mix of news, interviews, and commentary. No doubt they include a lot of interesting material, but it’s so time-consuming!

Let’s look at a few of the reasons why text blogs are better than podcasts:
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How reporting goes wrong

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing and tagged science writing on by

When you read the news, too often you find distorted and misleading accounts of the facts. It’s not “fake news” in the sense of deliberate fabrication, but the result of writers not understanding the issue, wanting to make it more exciting, or repeating errors which others have made for the first two reasons. I’ve been guilty of repeating erroneous reporting myself,

A video by Aron Ra shows how this works in reporting on paleobiology. He talks about an article that claims 800,000 year old DNA from Homo antecessor has been found.

The source was a respectable one, and its claims weren’t obviously impossible. He found multiple articles on the Web making similar claims, but only one of them provided a link to the original article in Nature. That article makes no claims about finding DNA; what was found was dental enamel containing identifiable proteins. That’s newsworthy enough to scientists, but not the same thing. Nonetheless, the report of hominid DNA four-fifths of a million years old even made it into the New York Times. (I hope I’ve got it right on whether that species is a hominid or a hominin. I think any member of the genus Homo is both.)

Ra says, “They were comparing dental enamel proteomes. What reporter is even going to know what that means?” He checked with some experts to confirm that proteomes aren’t genetic material. “They’re more like a genetic by-product.” Aside from the esoteric nature of the discovery, why did so many sources get it wrong in the same way? One reason is that “editors want to embellish everything to make it sound more interesting. Don’t ever do that.”

It’s good advice, but sometimes we get it wrong anyway. Reporting involves writing about things you aren’t an expert on. Sometimes you have to rely one another person’s explanation. But we should try to avoid making errors just to juice up our stories, and we should let our readers know when we discover our errors.

Accents and dialects in writing

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged accent dialect writing on by

A lot of would-be authors don’t understand the difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent is a way of pronouncing words. A dialect is a way of choosing and arranging words which characterizes a subgroup of a language’s speakers. Writing in a dialect is legitimate in fiction or when quoting real people. Trying to write an accent is usually a mistake.
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The target=_blank security issue

This entry was posted in Tools Writing and tagged HTML Internet technology writing on by

There’s a little-known security risk built into the design of HTML. It concerns links that open in a new tab or window. You make it happen by specifying target="blank" in an anchor (a) element. For example:

<a href="something.example.com" target="_blank">

The trouble is that when you do it, you put the page containing that link at risk. For some bizarre reason, the designers of HTML decided that the destination page should gain access to the window.opener property of the source page. This gives the target page — the one run by someone else considerable control over your page. For instance, it can redirect your page to another URL.
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Getting links right

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged HTML writing on by

Links are important in blog posts and Web pages. They give support to statements and lead the reader to further information. They make the page more valuable and trustworthy in the reader’s eyes. Broken links, on the other hand, make a page look dubious and outdated. A writer needs to pay special attention to get the links right.

Anatomy of a URL

Links are URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). They consist of a protocol, normally HTTP or HTTPS, plus a domain and a path. They may also contain parameters. For the article you’re reading, the protocol is HTTPS, the domain is garymcgath.com, and the path may vary depending on how you’re viewing the piece. The protocol is a mandatory part of the URL. garymcgath.com is not a URL, and putting it into a link will work only if the server is kind enough to fix it for you. https://garymcgath.com is a URL with an empty path. https://garymcgath.com/wp/blogging is a URL that points at my blog.
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Note on Medium

This entry was posted in My writing Writing and tagged Medium writing on by

My income from my articles on Medium.com in November is down from October, even though I have more articles up.

This is what I was afraid would happen. The removal of “claps” as a determiner of income means that whatever gets opened the most gets the biggest share of the income. Writers with a small but enthusiastic following lose with the new scheme. The pages that get opened the most are the ones that appear on the homepage. The ones on politics, society, and culture that get listed there are mostly fanatically statist. (Edit: I should have added that some titles are clear cases of race-baiting. Edit 2: And outright racism at times. I just spotted an article, prominently featured on Medium’s home page, with the title “Lindsey Graham’s Hypocrisy is a Product of Whiteness.” I don’t know if the editors selected that article, or if it popped to the top because so many readers clapped it. Either thought makes me want to throw up.)

There’s a section on the homepage for writers I follow. It lists only four items at any given time, while the list of articles the editors are pushing is huge. Evidently Medium doesn’t want to encourage writers to build their own following.

I don’t know if I’ll bother posting any more articles there.

In more encouraging news, I’ve finished the first draft of The Magic Battery!