I recently came across this quote from Daryl Gregory on the difference between fantasy and science fiction:
Readers will read something as science fiction if the characters are engaged in the process of science. In fantasy there’s no fiddling with the rules. You pull a sword out of a stone, and that makes you King of England. There’s no, ‘But what if I put a sword into the stone?’ In a science fiction novel, everybody would be trying to figure out how to make more kings by inserting more sharp objects into rocks! A fantasy novel is almost distinguished by not asking those fundamental questions about what is going on. A science fiction novel, no matter what the rules, is always asking those questions.
Part of me likes this, but part of me disagrees completely — Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novels, for example, ask those questions and have their characters engaged in what fundamentally is science, albeit focused on magic. And yet the books are clearly fantasy.
To help me with my thousand-words-a-day goal, I’ve been using a tool I wrote called Speed. It’s a desktop app, written using Electron, and it looks like this:
As you can see, it’s fairly simple. The code is on GitHub.
Back on December 3, I made a goal to write a thousand words of fiction a day, every day (skipping Sundays). I made up a chart with sixteen weeks on it, ending March 19, printed it out, and taped it on the headboard of our bed.
And that chart is now full. I’ve written exactly 100,000 words since December 3 (I wrote a little extra each day), which is crazy considering that I used to be unable to get myself to write at all. I don’t know what actually made the change, but I’m writing every day and it’s great.
Today I tried doing my daily writing via phone dictation, and it went surprisingly well. I had to correct a fair amount of mistranscribed words, but there weren’t as many as I had expected. And I think it might have actually been faster than typing on my phone (considering that I often have to fix autocorrected text when I’m typing).
I’ll say, though, that I’m not at all used to writing things by speaking out loud. Very different. I suspect it may grow on me, though.
I’ve been working on a piece called “To Fulfil All Righteousness,” on the baptism of Christ. My initial attempt ended up a little too representational:
I decided to reframe the painting, ditch the windows of heaven (simpler is better here), and redo the dove shape. Here’s the current sketch, which I’ll paint soon:
(Using Kyle Webster’s Pencil 4H Photoshop brush, from the Ultimate Megapack.)
Lifter is “a lightweight query engine for Python iterables.” Looks nice. One of their examples:
# vanilla Python
results = [
user for user in users
if user['age'] == 26 and user['is_active']
]
# lifter
results = manager.filter(User.age == 26, User.is_active == True)
