The 7 Habits of Amazingly Cool Characters

Amazingly cool characters:

1. Enter (entrée) in an Amazingly Cool Way. Camp is best, but sexy, outrageous, or dramatic is good, and funny or silly is less so. Those first few seconds matter!

Camp is more important than anything else in an amazingly cool character. It is the source of all their distractingly larger-than-life qualities that what we love most about them would totally unendurable in real life, and camp is all of these. Example: Austin Powers.

2. They do Amazingly Cool Things. A three to nine year old must be able to exclaim with astonishment if they saw them do it in reality. Example: Spice Girls.

3. They ignore limitations. Their attention is firmly fixed, thankyou very much, on fulfilling the requirements of their Role. They are therefore Amazingly Cool about their Role.

The above 3 combined are the Private Victory. The following 3 are the Public Victory, describing how the Amazingly Cool Character must work with others.

4. They practice overhearing themselves. They are about to do something because of their thoughts, overhear themselves thinking, and change what they do because of what they hear. Example: and great Shakespearean character.

5. Their purpose in being is at odds with their creator's purpose in creating them. In short, they are just life real people in this sense alone.

6. They make us want to be a better person. Example: As Good As It Gets.

Finally, the thing that keeps us coming back to Amazingly Cool Characters, and what in the end makes them so rare, and which only Sir Falstaff perhaps, James Bond, and Austin Powers posess, is this:

7. They tire us out without ever quite exhausting us.

Thankyou very much!

uhh

Drowsy day. Three days before new year 2005.

My cat is annoying me.

I shut her in the rest of the house when she meows, but she keeps on going. Right now she's on my lap. I have had a small pink prescribed pill so I am languidly struggling to lift my fingers.

Today I wrote some of my novel, some of an epic fantasy story, and some of my meritocracy book-plan. It was weird to do so but I liked what I wrote anyway. I also did a LOT of online reading. I feel like I've not accomplished much, which is silly I know.

I also cooked a superb lentil-curry topping for baked potatoes. Yummy.

On Kangaroo Island:

Yesterday on Kangaroo Island I bought a journal. This spells a bit of a slowing down of my net usage. I have been offered a job here yesterday.

In the rush of excitement at having a new job, I hastily wrote down a whole list of dreams and visions of what I would like to be doing and living. This involves in the present month studying my workplace trainer, and export and import, courses in order to stir up effective business overseas, whilst continuing my chinese language studies in order to speak to my new friends in China!

And the writing? Well, in the thick and thin of it, I have succumbed to the notion that one must build credentials in order to successfully publish a book project. I have had two ideas for tourism-based articles on Kangaroo Island which I would seek to sell to an East Coast Capital Daily. The first is to review a friend's bed and breakfast, and the second is to showcase my potential workplace, the Hog Bay Cafe.

I almost wished I were home feeling grumpy, panicky and anxious. But the presence of so many positive people has brought out the good in me. I hope I can do this new job! More to come...

Homeric style and technique: Kevin Anderson:

I wonder how Anderson and Herbert's writing methods—which appear to involve dictating their story onto tapes for later transcription—affect the pacing and delivery of their narrative. Perhaps this return to a kind of Homeric oral storytelling is perfectly suited for the creation of future myths!

- Paul di Fillipo.

From Anderson himself:

Questioner: You are renowned for your persistence. What kept you going when things looked dark?

Anderson: What looked dark was that people didn't see that I was going to be around anyway. I never had any question. I just wondered how long it would take the other editors and writers to see. I've had a lot of rejection slips, but I don't look at them as failures, I look at them as steps along the way to learning what I was doing. I'm a lot better writer now than I was when I was getting rejected.

It's not entirely because I'm successful and famous that I don't get rejected as much anymore. It's because I'm a better writer. You learn your trade as you go through. You're not wasting your time.

AND another quote:

I have written many of my STAR WARS adventures while hiking in Death Valley (where part of the original movie was filmed). I have been snowed in up in the mountains and crunched through pristine drifts while I dictated a chapter that was set on a polar ice cap.

Many writers are curious as to how I can do this, but I don’t see any fundamental difference between thinking up a sentence then moving my fingers to type the letters on a keyboard, or just speaking the words out loud. I can now do my writing while out in beautiful Colorado scenery—it’s the best of both worlds.

Of course, some of my books were dictated under circumstances that might seem like adventures themselves: lightning storms or hailstorms in the Rocky Mountains, encounters with bears or rattlesnakes, getting lost in the Death Valley desert. But, since my heroes always make it to the end of the story, I found ways to manage for myself.

If there's no science, there's no story!

The science can be physical, sociological, psychological. The technology can be anything from electronic engineering to biogenetic engineering. But the stories must be strong and realistic, with believable people (who needn't be human) doing believable things–no matter how fantastic the background might be.

From the submissions pages of Analog magazine website.

Kurzweil, Gardner and Vinge discuss the Singularity:

RayKurzweil: We can imagine some bacteria discussing the pros and cons of evolving into more advanced species like humans. There might be some strong arguments against doing so.

RayKurzweil: If bacteria could talk, of course.

Gardner: From the bacteria's point of view, they might be right.

vv: When dealing with "superhumans" it is not the same thing as comparing -- say -- our tech civ with a pretech human civ. The analogies should be with the animal kingdom and even more perhaps with things even further away and more primitive.

RayKurzweil: Bacteria are still doing pretty well, and comprise a larger portion of the biomass than humans. Ants are doing very well also. I agree with your last comment, Vernor.

vv: Yes, there could well be a place for the normal humans -- certainly as a safety reservoir in case of tech disasters.

Biopunk, bio-clades, and genetic protocols.

"Post-cyberpunk science fiction continues to exfoliate into such divergent forms as the work of Cory Doctorow, Richard Morgan and Charles Stross. One form, which is the impulse to mix "lowlifes and high tech" in a hip, suspenseful fashion, might be dubbed "biopunk," from the cover blurb herewith provided by Kevin J. Anderson. Or, to use another term that I coined some 15 years ago, "ribofunk." This type of fiction features the noir stylings of cyberpunk ameliorated by the jazzy panache of tropical rhythms, all centering around advances on the biological frontier. Examples of practitioners of this subgenre would include Peter Watts, Linda Nagata, Kathleen Goonan and perhaps even Howard Hendrix. Now, Mark Budz arrives to add his voice, in a very commendable and admirable fashion."

Here are the tropes, developed already in another's mind, of the post-Goddess world of Gaia book two: clades, established in Empiricum, IAs, known as protocols still in my design; his patchwork earth includes humans still, whereas mine excludes them in favor of a diversity of microbes that Gaia generates. Interesting!

"Clade introduced us to the world circa 2100, which is dominated by weird new sciences and technologies centering around biology. Intervening between our era and 2100 was the ecocaust, a time when the vast majority of Earth's life forms died in a mass extinction event. Hastily, the world's "politicorps" and various agencies, such as BEAN—the Bureau of Ecotectural Assimilation and Naturalization—threw together the clade system: hundreds of artificial biomes whose inhabitants were molecularly bonded to their new environments. Moving from one clade to another requires a metabolic makeover and is discouraged. Now the Earth is a patchwork of oddball artificial life forms, and even the definition of humanity has changed. For instance, no human is considered complete without his or her Information Agent. These intelligent and quirky "IAs" are bonded to the physiology of the individual and whisper directly into their auditory nerves.

my Limitation

When I see people grievously wounded by their own consciousness, little more than animals that speak and pay bills and drive cars; when I see men sunk into aggression and women into childmaking, the young lost in poverty and the old distracted in isolation; when I see the lonely young men successful, and the lonely young women divorced; when I see, as after all we all do at sometime, the dead in their messy contortions that to see is to be tortured by the memory of, or their too-too-neat funereal posturing, and the living in their messy sweat of lovemaking or lovers' rage; when I feel anger and know it is poisin, when I feel ignorance creep like sweat across my unconcerned animal brow; when I - but who am I kidding that this cumulative sentence has a payoff that could be genuine and authentic? - when I, I said, feel myself slipping down into a lingering loss of self from which the only emergence can be the death of that provisional self that is created to cope with such a Fall - then indeed I am a Christian in my heart, outraged in the heat of my sorrow and overcome with sadness at the sacrifice of Our Lord, and lost in undiscerning ignorance forever without His Intercession. And this all is my Limitation.

I wash a caterpillar down the drain; a ride on a motorscooter; this must be Dad; social capital

Well today is my second day using an anti-anxiety medication. Yesterday I felt stoned. The hope that I could have somehow had Michael of California over after dark last night was dashed because I went to sleep as soon as the sun went down, and woke an hour after it rose. It was very strange to sleep for so long.

Last night as if I knew I would crash in the coming of the dark, I hastened as the sun sank to climb an apricot tree and pluck the remaining low fruit from it. A caterpillar fell on me, which I only discovered by an itch. I washed it down the drain of the shower.

I played about with a short story idea for a science fiction magazine, Analog, The First Cat On Venus. It was kind of cool.

The day before I had visited the library with Marc. I am a bit of an advocate of the library system here. Marc got 'The Greatest Management Principle in the World: The Servant Leader" which I copied a quote out of on love as volition. I borrowed several new buddhist books - the latest book of the Dalai Lama's speaking, a translation of Dogen, the Zen Patriarch, a CD of tibetan-inspired music. Yes it was nice and very exciting.

**** **** **** ****

Yesterday also Robert of Sheffield came to drive me into Town on his 90cc scooter/motorbike. It was breathtakingly dangerous to drive pillon on such a minute mechanism. I refused to get a lift home, as it was too likely to cause me an anxiety attack. Intersections: south road into anzac highway beside a bus, anzac highway into West terrace in multiple lanes - these were challenging. Long stretches: up through Pulteney Street, through Hurtle Square, past a barman mate who I waved to; down through the University with the greenleaf overhead dappled and steeped in lambent light - these were marvellous.

But it was a difficult day overall. I kept eating every few hours which grounded me. We lounged by the Torrens catchment in the Botanical Gardens, he reading the New Independent, I pretending to read the Dalai Lama's new book, but in fact watching a couple having sex ten meters away. When finally my desire that they continue uninterrupted made me turn away and actually read, up they got and left. I felt perfectly giddy and strange all day from the medication. I think I was grumpy with Robert too. He is irritating but honest. He knows next to nothing about science fiction (Terry Pratchett!), so I doubt he will be a good reader.

Andre Gide says (in his introduction to his selection of Montaigne for English readers) that the sentences that are most pleasurable to write are also most pleasurable to read. I do not know if this is true. But I know it is a pleasure to write well.

**** **** ***** *****

I visit my neighbours yesterday to pluck apricots. I walk through a shed stuffed with a faded blue Commodore and endless oily rags protruding from the wall like hands into a tiny sward of concrete with a wire gate.

The two dogs waddle over, unexercised and only glimpsed over the fence.

"Tiny is the big one!" the lady named Coleen snaps. "The little one is Gordon."

Tiny, black and brown, licks my hands with all the signs of owner-induced imbecility. Gordon does laps around my toes.

Coleen like to scream. She does not holler or bitch, but rather she screams. Names usually. She does so now to display her special gift. Normally she had a precise time of day to scream, just after sunset when everything is still; she does it in the backyard in the gloaming. But right now, in her presence, it is reassuring to see she hurts nothing as she does so.

I pick quickly and happily. A weasly eyed man comes out and smokes a cigarette to its bitter end whilst fossicking around to make sure I steal nothing. I show courtesy on the way out. This must be Dad.

**** **** **** ****

En route to home I return the step ladder to Sue's my other neighbour. Then I get a bag of apricots to give back to them.

Sue says no and I tell her they'll just give me a belly ache. She is about to give them to me (and I really want them!) when she says "Oh well I spose they'd like them at work" and that is that. I walk into my house and tell myself (aloud):

"Well Paul you just built yourself some social capital there. Good on you mate!"

Rejection

Rejection is not the problem; the sadness caused by rejection is. Fortunately, there is a causal link between emotional sadness and practical solutions.

If you feel sad all day because you've been rejected, the energy of courage will start to vanish, and the energy of a bright and willing committment to your goal will grow dim.

But if, while feeling sad, you resubmit your work to a new target, then your sadness will stay for less time. This is because there exists a cognitive link between rejection, sadness and your levels of courage and committment. But the exciting reality of this link is that rejection can actually foster courage and committment over long periods of time. Here's my understanding of the process:

If, when sadness arises after rejection, you can resubmit to one new target, the negativity will dissipate faster. But a little experimentation reveals that if you resubmit to THREE new targets, the negativity will vanish even faster!

But it gets bigger: if, whenever sadness arises, you grow your writing business, you will be less likely to suffer sadness over the long term, and you will be training yourself to see opportunity connected with sadness, enabling you to rise above negative emotions increasingly in your everyday life.

You could:

build a website
tidy your office
go to the art gallery
watch music clips and come up with ideas
write a weblog
put fresh flowers on your writing space.

The overall growth process here can be tracked by seeing how rejection appears over time.

FIRST rejection is an insurmountable obstacle.
SECOND rejection is an unsolveable problem.
THIRD rejection is a challenge which can be overcome with the right support.
FOURTH rejection is an opportunity to be taken and a test of courage.
SIXTH rejection is an opportunity to grow and learn.
and finally,
SEVENTH rejection has no intrinsic meaning in and of itself.

(This piece is completely rewritten from a writing magazine!)

rave about modern music, please ignore

paul says: (10:19:25 AM)
   God

paul says: (10:19:39 AM)
   got mozart's great symphony playing in the background

paul says: (10:19:59 AM)
   even a flustered bad rendition of it can't manage to screw up the music

paul says: (10:20:06 AM)
   it's bloody magnificent

Craig - says: (10:20:11 AM)
   loll

paul says: (10:20:26 AM)
   i have this view of classical music, right

paul says: (10:20:34 AM)
   the romantics discovered the vibrato, yeah

paul says: (10:20:52 AM)
   which is where the violins sorta wiggle to produce a more emotive and expressive undulation of tone

paul says: (10:21:11 AM)
   so the romantics wrote all this stuff with vibrato in it and people played it all their lives

paul says: (10:21:33 AM)
   and then, at the end of the C18th, they rediscovered baroque music

paul says: (10:22:05 AM)
   and even tho they didn't HAVE vibrato then, and they relied on structural principles to express emotion instead that worked fine, the moderns

paul says: (10:22:19 AM)
   always play older music with this fucking vibrato that screws up the strucutre

paul says: (10:22:22 AM)
   lol

paul says: (10:22:49 AM)
   so you get music like Handel's messiah, which is scored for 24 instruments and ten singers

paul says: (10:23:09 AM)
   being performed by over 100 musicians and fifty plus singers

Craig - says: (10:23:36 AM)
   owwww

paul says: (10:23:37 AM)
   all destroying it with funny quavering vibrato that was never in the original score and

paul says: (10:23:54 AM)
   in beethovens time it was used selectively (vibrato that is)

paul says: (10:24:10 AM)
   but even he scored symphonies for like 30 insturments

paul says: (10:24:36 AM)
   and now we use a cast of thousands to do his work and it's not as pure and light a sound as the original beethoven

paul says: (10:24:46 AM)
   i mean, have you heard beethoven?

paul says: (10:24:55 AM)
   it's fucken magic when it's well done

paul says: (10:25:08 AM)
   but it's become synonymous with german dullness and heaviness

paul says: (10:25:18 AM)
   which couldn't be further from the truth

paul says: (10:25:27 AM)
   anyway, that's my rave on modern music

It's 9:40 in the afternoon and I'm surfing the web from my mate Marc's house on sunny Kangaroo Island. I have already walked him to work and picked my way stiffly over the endless rocks of Christmas Cove to an upright rock, like a obelisk from Gaul or Easter Island, and lay back against it. My mind wavered with the intense light, too open, too intense, too rich. I closed my eyes and chanted the mantra of the Heart Sutra, the oceanic matrix of syllable and surf slushing about my mind as it emptied of content and became, paradoxically, content.

Marc talked to me last nite about some health issues. Turns out he lost 17 kilos by one itty bitty change in life: he went for a wee walk each day. And I myself am reminded that if I were simply to keep regular hours, walk and do yoga at the same time every day, I too would simply feel wonderful. Why do I not do these things without someone around to do them with me? Is it some kind of weird hidden belief or is it just accumulated unwillingness to move my body from having practiced not-doing for a few months?

It is safe to assume it is lack of habit, because that can be altered positively, and because it is some hidden belief, then the new habit will tend to make it more and more conscious. The point here is that I need to write stuff down as it arises so it's outta my head and onto the page, so to speak, while I get on with my day.

I have decided to stay home this Christmas. I envisage entertaining a few fellahs who have no interest in family this xmas. I have had bad dreams since my sister last rang yesterday. She has nasty theories so deeply rooted in childhood shit that one hopes these bleary ideations of shame and fear at best will go away.

John C Wright - more Homeric tropes

This is the passage of John C Wright that inspired me just now to download Homer's Illiad and read it. Gods and men, this is a great piece of writing. I speculate about the combination, now a traditional trope in Sci-Fi, of Victorian manners with Homeric themes and rhetoric. Perhaps this harks back to the nearest last time our Western Civilisation had a mode of manner that could approach heroic, but also the flat artifice of Victorian English manners is dry and creates a good sense of humor. Here in this marvellous passage our hero is at Neptune, out of the reach of the inner system internet, when he receives a call from the summation of computational power that runs the inner system:

"Suddenly, silently warm green light shone from every communication mirror. Here were images of forests, flowers, grainfields, gardens, covered bridges, rustic chemurgy arbors, golden brown with age.

"Midmost was an image of a queenly shape, garbed in green and gold, throned between two tall cornucopiae hollowed from the elephantine tusks, and, above her throne, a canopy of flowers of the type bred to recite prothalamia and nuptial eclogues. This was the image, when she appeared to the Silver-Gray, assumed by the Earthmind. This was neither an avatar nor a synnoesis, but the Earthmind herself, the concentration of all the computational and intellectual power of an entire civilisation, the sum of all the contributions of ever-operating systems throughout the Golden Oecumene.
...
And the Earthmind spoke, saying, "Phaethon, hear me. I am come to describe how to murder a Sophotech.""

Wow. As a clarifying note, the Silver-Gray school are those humans who imitate Victorian English manners, prothalamia are marriage poems, eclogues are farming poems, and I have no idea what "rustic chemurgy arbors" might be!

John C Wright's homeric writing:

Here is an example of the magnificent Homeric style of John C Wright in the third book, The Golden Transcendence. This story is about the only space colony outside Earth's solar system, which falls suddenly and mysteriously silent. Here the emissary from that colony, the Second Silent Oecumene, explains what occured there:

“At her height, the Second Oecumene had several hundred small artificial suns and nucleogenesis stations orbiting very far from the black hole, and tends of thousands of diamond habitats, belt upon concentric belt of asteroid mansions, as if the rings of Saturn, expanded to encompass an area greater than your Solar System, were made of inextinguishable fire and glittering fields of endless living jewellry!”

And the crushing conclusion, several pages later:

“The ultimate results of this you know. The Last Broadcast from our Oecumene showed the catastrophe which ended our tragedy. The nanomachine swarm absorbed all things. For ease of storage, all human minds were reduced to noumenal coded pulses,which in the form of electromagnetic energy, were shot into orbit around the near-event horizon of our dark sun. You know gravity warps space and can bend light? Our dark sun, deep in its gravity well, can bend light so far around the photons will orbit the singularity core in a stable circle, balanced precisely at the edge of the event horizon. Their time is slowed almost to nothing there. They are beyond all natural harm. For them, not even one second has passed.

“No one objected to this process. Our law had made them content.

“The Nothing Mentality had achieved its programmed goals. The human of the Second Oecumene were entirely safe. With no further purpose to its existence, and with no innate desire to live, the great machine extinguished itself.

“And the Silent Oecumene never made noise or music again.”

My day

I woke at 5:47 and crawled out of bed with the cat complaining. (My cat Shakti is a Siamese and instead of calling her incessant speech a complaint I will now call it an aria henceforth). I did yoga and slowly slowly woke. I got online and did a bit more googling on the word "meritocracy", which is my big passion at the moment.

I began to rearrange the house today. I put a feng shui fountain on my desk and put up a beautiful blue and purple drape over the door. I moved my armchair and dunny bookcase and 2 boxes of paper into the kitchen where I plan to throw much of it out. I moved my bookcase to the area of the house that is designanted as the "knowledge" area with feng shui, right beside my yoga mat. I put crystals and a little statue of Quan Yin in the corner of the bathroom, the wealth area in feng shui, and covered three of the four drains there to stop the outflow of "chi".

There remains however systemic problems. What to do about the paper everywhere mostly.

I have spent most of today with Shakti on my lap, and when I work she regales me with an aria, whether I am in the mood to be sung to or not.

I am working on a treasure map on my computer. A treasure map is a collection of imagery which indicate long term goals. The idea is to free yourself up to focus on the concrete day to day details by engaging your visual mind constantly with the long term context. It's now late afternoon and I have not gone out yet which is just about typical for my time at this house at the moment.

I should probably mention here that I have applied for a job on Kangaroo Island. Should I get it, my time here is short in this house. I will have to move and find a new place and so on and so forth. I will likely spend Xmas in KI and the new year there too handling the influx of tourists for the new season. It would be a very very BIG change for me!!!

I have a feeling that I could somehow make this place better, a vague idea I know, but honestly I know the dramatic increase in income would do more to make my life overall better than virtually anything, whilst the retreat to isolated KI would help me avoid temptations and better examine the forms of negativity that unconsciously hold me back

Holly Lisle's advice in writing

My day today

Today:

- Added a new site counter to find out what this sites doin'.
- Did a forlorn search for J S Mill's writing on proportional voting, to try and lend my frenzied writing on the subject a little context, without much success (what a tedious writer!)
- Reread the Shin/Pureland Buddhism text, the Tannisho, for the fourth time in four days and, yes, finally started to make sense of it in a dramatic kind of way. Spent the afternoon writing about Shin, and in the evening asked online what level of consciousness on the Hawkins scale it rates at.
- I played and played and played with the cat.
- I tried both Zen and Pureland meditation, and found the latter very inspiring.
- Editing my essay 'The moral context of great art', wondering at where I could find a publisher for such an artefact; I do not think I have written a piece so strange, abstract and ornate before that actually have a strong point to it.
- Took washing off the line that since the cat effectively stopped me opening the back door thoughtlessly, has been hanging outside for two days.
- Chatted online about my poor friend Matt, whose mental illness has caused him problems yesterday, today, and now for many weeks to come it seems.
- Reread "Postmodernism For Beginners" and found nothing much new in it, sad to say, except when they quoted Lyotard's work, which is as perspicacious as ever.
- Listening to LOTS of Mozart.
- Worked in the design documents for the two novels I am trying to construct, Return to Gaia, and Murder on Planet Pureland, unto frustration and beyond. It's a good sign of progress, eh.
- The usual "anxiety disorder" list of worrying, bustling, hustling, cussing, bumping into things, mini-resting, self-talking, deep-breathing, evading/avoiding, bleh blah bleh.

That was my day today.

Today:

- Added a new site counter to find out what this sites doin'.
- Did a forlorn search for J S Mill's writing on proportional voting, to try and lend my frenzied writing on the subject a little context, without much success (what a tedious writer!)
- Reread the Shin/Pureland Buddhism text, the Tannisho, for the fourth time in four days and, yes, finally started to make sense of it in a dramatic kind of way. Spent the afternoon writing about Shin, and in the evening asked online what level of consciousness on the Hawkins scale it rates at.
- I played and played and played with the cat.
- I tried both Zen and Pureland meditation, and found the latter very inspiring.
- Editing my essay 'The moral context of great art', wondering at where I could find a publisher for such an artefact; I do not think I have written a piece so strange, abstract and ornate before that actually have a strong point to it.
- Took washing off the line that since the cat effectively stopped me opening the back door thoughtlessly, has been hanging outside for two days.
- Chatted online about my poor friend Matt, whose mental illness has caused him problems yesterday, today, and now for many weeks to come it seems.
- Reread "Postmodernism For Beginners" and found nothing much new in it, sad to say, except when they quoted Lyotard's work, which is as perspicacious as ever.
- Listening to LOTS of Mozart.
- Worked in the design documents for the two novels I am trying to construct, Return to Gaia, and Murder on Planet Pureland, unto frustration and beyond. It's a good sign of progress, eh.
- The usual "anxiety disorder" list of worrying, bustling, hustling, cussing, bumping into things, mini-resting, self-talking, deep-breathing, evading/avoiding, bleh blah bleh.

That was my day today.