The Cuba Street Garret

I am a stoic guy. I don't often get excited. About anything. When I first saw the Cuba Street Garret, I got excited.

What is the Garret you ask? It is a space in Wellington where writers can rent a small space, free of distraction and sit down to write.

It isn't just that there are private offices for writing or that it's a lovely space with lots of natural light and style that makes you want to take a clean, fresh breath. It's not that it's free from distractions like children or television or traffic noises. It's not that it's free from spouses asking for you to take out the garbage or do the dishes. That is just the start of the excitement.

This is a space that collect authors! This is people who write and publish. The idea of exchanging information with these people is intoxicating to me. The information doesn't have to be about writing either. It usually isn't, but doesn't matter and you always learn something new and go away feeling better.

In the interest of supporting something I find worthwhile, I am happy to talk about the Garret and get as many authors interested as possible. Come by, see what it has to offer. Contact me any time and I'll be happy to show you around. If you feel even 10% as excited as I do, you'll be happy you did.

Thanks to Douglas Wilkins, for first showing me around and thanks to Martin Haughey for taking the photos.

Evolution versus Creation debates

"evolution" is one of my google alerts. Along with "The Evolution of Special Effects" and "The Evolution of Tom Cruise" I see scientific articles/blogs on evolution along with blog posters taking pot shots at evolutionary theory.

One that I took note of was a Jewish Blog called Chabad, which had a short piece on evolution followed by various people agreeing or disagreeing with the original blog entry.

In my mind, the article had nothing to do with evolution and the facts of the theory, but of how morally speaking, believing in God is better than believing in evolution.

I don't actually know if this is true or not. I have no idea (in general, I think truth is superior to delusion). The thing is, does that have anything to do with whether evolution is correct or not? The big, bright, shiny word that springs to mind is "irrelevant".

What if believing the laws of motion allowed you to launch missiles into third world countries? Oh wait! It does! We shouldn't believe in them! My reaction in a posted comment said pretty much that. What does the morality of the question have to do with evolution?

The funniest thing about the blog is that as I tried to post corrections to people's misconceptions, the moderator seemed to get annoyed with me and started disallowing my posts. That was after quoting me incorrectly and then removing the comment when I corrected him.

I guess with a moderated blog, you can allow and disallow whomever you like and colour the responses in a certain light. As obvious as that is, I hadn't considered it before and thought that moderation was more about filtering out bad language and abusive comments.

I have rarely worried about evolution dissenters before, after all, what does scientific illiteracy really matter? These people still use computers, cell phones and cars, all of which were produced through the same science that produced evolution. No one seems to notice that and by posting on line, they are nearly self refuting.

Kiwiwriters returns!

Far less mysteriously than it disappeared, Kiwiwriters is back up and running, albeit with old data.

If you've joined the site since September, please create a new log-in account. I just realized that this is perfect if you were unhappy with your original username. Now's the chance to fix it!

And, if you haven't thought about any writing for the new year, may I suggest the 20k Novella challenge we are offering for January?

Kiwiwriters disaster!

Well, for the last week or so, Kiwiwriters has been completely down and out. Go to the link and nothing - just an error.

Now, since getting in touch with the hosting company, we realize that it's even worse than we thought. Not only is the current page no longer working because of a hardware problem on their main server, the backups are also corrupt.

The latest full backup that we have is from September! That's over THREE months old!

So, blog posts, discussion boards, news items, challenges, membership data etc.. etc... are all gone.

This entry is just to let you know, if you are a recent member, you will have to re-join kiwiwriters, since your username and passwords are all missing.

Sorry guys.

testing google maps

I'm helping someone to put a google map point on their blog.

So, I will test it here first!

Una is doing a yoga class at the Massey Memorial near Miramar on Sunday, Nov 29th.

It is at this exact location:


View Larger Map

That's it.

Oh the news! Where to start?! Nano, Twitter and a sci-fi reading challenge

NANOWRIMO

Firstly, it is Nanowrimo yet again, and here I am writing another novel (this will be my 7th - I've finished all of my Nanowrimos and SocNocs so far).

I've gone sci-fi again. This time, the story is set about 80 years in the future. The main character is Paul, a physical trainer. In the future where most people spend all of their time "inside", i.e. plugged into a virtual world, physical trainers take over people's bodies, exercising the limp and atrophied muscles that lay around while their owners are plugged in, which is most of the time.

Paul is a bit of a Luddite and spends as much of his time as possible "outside", living his life in the "real world" except where his job requires.

Paul is thrown for a loop when he lets someone take over one of his clients for a few minutes and the client ends up dead. He is then pulled into a civil war he never knew was happening where some people who spend their time "outside" are trying to bring down the network, which they feel is gradually leaching people of their humanity.

So far, I'm 1 day and 2300 words in. I'm quite excited about what I see as a good idea.

Funny story, I had a part of my whole novel idea (the "physical trainer" part) through October - it's an idea that's been sitting around in my brain for a few years, but I've never used it before. Then, I go to bed on October 31st, thinking about the story. While I sleep, my subconscious chews on it and when I wake up to write around 7:15 on Sunday morning, another story idea I had buried in my brain came up to merge with the first and I'm pleased with where it's going.

The 2nd idea , also a few years old is about someone living "outside" of the network when most of the world is plugged in. The outside is now a museum, where buses run and the infrastructure is maintained via high-tech trickery, but almost no one lives in the real world. It started with a scene where someone goes out to look around, day after day, week after week and is alone every day. One day, on a bus driving through empty streets, out of the blue, he meets another person who is doing the same thing as he is. This idea just seemed to gel with the first, so I've merged them together.

TWITTER
To change the subject - I've started to twitter. My username is traviscottreau (appropriately enough - I tried to put a dot in the middle to match my gmail account, but it wouldn't let me). I figured that I would use it to report my nano stats and keep in contact with other Nanoers.

SCI-FI CHALLENGE
And finally, a science-fiction reading challenge. I am a member of Shelfari, an on-line book club that I quite enjoy and while browsing on that site, I found a science-fiction reading challenge in one of the groups. There are 40 categories of books that you have to read in the next year. With a few double ups allowed (no triple ups allowed), it comes out to a minimum of 35 books that have to be read in the next year. I am keeping track of my progress on a google docs spreadsheet that I've made public for viewing. I'm quite excited about this, since I have a few sci-fi books at home that I haven't read and have been procrastinating about - why not add a challenge to get through them and announce it on my blog?

If anyone sees a category that I haven't filled in, but have a suggestion for, I'm more than happy to listen. I'll keep some progress on here and probably on twitter I imagine.

I am starting with "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, which counts as my "young adult" category in the challenge.

Evolution as simply as I can explain it

Evolution says that all life forms are related.

I have 2nd, 3rd and 4th cousins and if you go back further, my more distant cousins include everyone on earth.

In EXACTLY the same way, all animals are related to us if you go back even further, so are plants and bacteria. There is no difference in the relations except how far back in time you trace the ancestors.

Little changes creep in over time. We can easily see the physical differences between Chinese and Europeans. If you go back further, the differences are even greater and you have apes, monkeys, dogs, mice, worms and eventually plants.

Everything else is just details.