Research for 'Asylum'

I decided to spend today doing some much-needed worldbuilding for a story of mine whose working title is Asylum. It's about a private mental hospital for supernatural beings. The term 'asylum' has gone out of fashion nowadays because it has too many connotations of Bedlam and mentally ill people being chained to walls and mistreated. I prefer to keep the term because an asylum is exactly what it is in the original sense of the word--a safe haven, a place of refuge.

It is set on an island in the mid-Atlantic that has been owned by one family of magically gifted people for generations--several centuries. The island is home to the owners' estate, the mental hospital, which is located on the estate grounds, a neighborhood of the owners' fellow mages, and a small town with a harbor and a residential area and arable land for the town's residents.

I had decided a few things about this island. I wanted it to be about 36 square miles in area, I wanted it to look a lot like Inis Mór in the Aran Islands of Galway Bay--rocky cliffs rather than beaches and not volcanic--and I wanted it to be in international waters so that no existing nation could claim it and so that it was not answerable to any national or international health codes. This hospital is not listed in the Wikipedia of its universe. From the air it looks like a secondary mansion built on the estate, sort of like the Old House at Collinwood from Dark Shadows.

According to Wikipedia, Inis Mór is 12 square miles in area and supports a population of 840 people. I decided I wanted my island to be three times larger for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted for there to be plenty of acreage between the asylum and the town, and I wanted the owners' estate to act as a buffer separating the asylum from the town. The owners' estate must be large enough to encompass home farms for both the asylum and for itself. I also needed for there to be enough acreage for cattle grazing, to include beef cattle, goats, and sheep.

So where does the research come in?

I knew that I wanted the island to not be volcanic. According to trusty DuckDuckGo, this means that the island must be tectonic--created by an uplift at a point where two tectonic plates abut against each other. I had wanted this island to be located about 200 miles off the eastern United States coast, perhaps near North Carolina, where I know a lot of other islands exist.

Those islands, however, are too close to the US for my purposes. They are what Galveston Island is to Texas, and that won't do at all. Run a secret mental hospital on a private estate in the US, and all kinds of hell will come down on you if that is discovered. Dealing with US medical regulatory policy is not what I want to write about, so the island had to be in international waters. I wanted it to be close enough to the US that a plane could get to the mainland within an hour or so. But when I saw where the North American Plate meets the Eurasian and African Plates, I discovered that my island needs to be much farther away from the US than 250 miles. In fact, it will be closer to Europe, way out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Another thing I had to figure out was cattle raising and land management. If the island is in the middle of the Atlantic, it can't easily buy its foodstuffs from the US or even from Europe; it will have to provide for its own needs, and items from elsewhere will be luxuries. This means extensive acreage being needed for home farms, cattle ranches, a small lumber industry, and mills. So I needed help from this handy site to teach me how much acreage I will need for raising cattle of various kinds.

I haven't done the acreage math yet, but it's something I know I must consider. So, lots of fun in store for me as I continue to build this little island world.

How Easy It Is to Be Culturecentric

I came across this question about visual acuity on Quora and eagerly answered it.

Oh, this is just converting to a Snellen equivalent, I thought and happily described the math needed to convert an acuity value of 6/9 to one of 20/whatever.  I did the math and derived an answer.  Voila!  I am awesome at Quora!  I so rock!

I decided to check my answer at this site, which confirmed my math.  But it also showed me that vision tests could be done in meters.  I know, what a concept, right?

So I added a qualifying paragraph into my answer, stating that I was presuming that 6/9 was measured in feet, but if it referred to meters, then some adjustments to calculations might need to be made.

Only then did it slowly dawn on me that, hey, most of the planet uses the metric system.  In fact, only the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia still use the imperial system, and Myanmar plans to switch to metric soon, if it hasn't already.  So this question about a 6/9 acuity probably didn't need a Snellen equivalent at all; the asker probably just wanted an explanation of how visual acuity measurements are derived and what they mean.

Egg on my face!  I sounded like a blithe, US-centric jerk who didn't even notice the eye-rolls--and that is exactly what I was.

So, again, I rewrote my answer and exchanged the presumptuous pronoun 'we' for 'I' in a couple of places where it desperately needed to be changed.  I added some commentary about being American to explain some of my presumptions and then gave the answer that was probably desired in the first place.

It's scary to realize how easy it is to write as if your culture is the be-all and end-all of the world.  It's scary to realize how easy it is to presume that of course, everyone thinks as you do--and all of this with no intention whatsoever of offending anyone.

Originally posted on LiveJournal.

Ignored Your Blog?

Today I started reading someone's blog post entitled, "Ignored your Blog for Months?  13 Tips for Getting It Back on Track" by Miranda Hill.

I chuckled, admitted to God, "Yes, I have so ignored my blogs," and resolved to at least let you all know what I've been up to.

What I've been up to is school.  I attend Western Governors University and am pursuing a bachelor's degree in Healthcare Management.  We also suffered a death in the family in December, along with another family member's ongoing illness, so December was pretty much a mess in terms of personal life and education.  I am now back on track with school and am looking to complete the second class of my current term soon--but it's been a struggle.  Including my current class, I need to complete 27 more courses to finish.

To do this, I have had to put all of my writing on hold.  Every once in a while I will, out of wishful thinking, look at an open submission call and think, Oh, I really want to write a story for that!  But I am deluding myself.  School really is taking all of my time and attention, and any time or attention I don't devote to school is stealing from it and from my professional future.

It's to the point where I'm thinking of quitting voice lessons for a while so that I can save the money and not have to commit to daily practicing.  I already have stopped attending Thursday night choir practices at my church--because I can attend the practices on Sunday mornings, when I wouldn't be studying, anyway.  I've stopped  visiting Eastern Star chapters that I don't belong to, because attending their meetings takes time away from studying.

Not writing, though, is driving me batty!  When I don't write, I don't generate ideas for stories.  I feel creatively dead at the moment.  I don't know how I ever came up with story ideas; that happened to some other person.  Every once in a while, usually on a Saturday, I tell myself, To hell with school!  I'm going to write.  MUST.  WRITE.  SOMETHING!  And so I do, just to get it out of my system--and it feels wonderful!  But I also feel guilty about it.

Sometimes I wish this were a creative writing degree--but I hate those, because I hate trying to come up with ideas and plots on cue.  I suspect I would fail miserably if I pursued a degree in creative writing.  But sometimes, I am so tempted.

So that is why I've been absent, why you've seen no posts from me on anything.  I still have bouts of wishful thinking and self-delusion.  One of those might turn into a finished article or two, but I'm not holding my breath at this moment.

Love to you all!  I will post here occasionally, to let you know how the studies are going, but for now, I have to make this sacrifice, because the degree is worth it.

False Logic

I am reading Robert W. Bly's book, The Copywriter's Handbook, to learn the art of copywriting--writing advertisement copy.  Bly has written an informative and eye-opening book, which many people in the advertising business consider to be the copywriter's Bible.  I am currently reading the chapter in which Bly discusses the concept of false logic.

Falso logic is not exactly false advertising.  False logic is a true statement that misleads the customer and plays upon the customer's desires.  For instance, take this passage from a freelance writing company.  They pay so poorly that they could be considered a content mill, except that they have sane turn-around times.

As you develop your skills and portfolio, your rate may increase - many experienced freelance writers receive in excess of $100 per article.

It is absolutely true that your rates 'may' increase.  And they may not.  It is also true that many freelance writers earn more than $100 per article.  But whether this particular company will ever pay that amount to a writer is anybody's guess.  The company never asserts that they will pay their writers that amount, just that others have.

I see false logic used a lot in the ads I read on the web.  It is implied when the fine print says, "Your results may vary."  So be careful of it.  Read advertisements critically, and keep an eye out for verbal sleight-of-hand.

Checking In

Hello--I'm checking in to let you all know that, yes, I know I haven't posted here in a while.  I am in mostly a fiction-writing hiatus for the best of all possible reasons--I am pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in Healthcare Management from Western Governors University.  I plan to submit a story to one fiction anthology later this year, but aside from that, any non-educational writing I do is likely to be articles about medicine.  I'm working on building a portfolio of medical writing so that I can start a content writing business.  Medicine was one of my first interests, and my love for it has not waned.

I am currently reading a book about copy-writing, which is a writing style that I want to learn.  It interests me because writing advertisement copy is completely different from the other kinds of writing I have done before.  At the moment I am in the stage of taking copious notes.

In other news, I resumed taking voice lessons last June, which makes me very happy.  My voice sounds so much better and is so much stronger now that I can hardly believe it.  It is now easy to sing notes at both extremes of my range.  I am so thankful to have found my new voice teacher.

I wish you all a very happy Labor Day weekend!

Microfiction on Zathom!

Three of my microfiction stories have been bought by the editorial team running the Zathom app, which goes live on Friday, October 20.  The stories by me are called "Masked," "Suspect," and "Two Weeks and No Utilities."

The third story is somewhat autobiographical, relating to 16 days without electricity that my husband and I experienced after Hurricane Ike in 2008.  The weather afterward was still hot and steamy in the mornings, and I'm sure we both looked like the great unwashed.  We certainly felt it. 

The first two stories are purely from my wild imagination, using words provided by Zathom's editors that had to be included in the stories.

Strayhaven

I am working on a novel idea whose working title is Strayhaven. It's an earldom in a fictional country called Comhar, which uses elements of Irish culture for its setting. I'm starting the world-building and plotting now. It is my hope to have enough of the pre-writing work done by November 1 that I can successfully complete this as my NaNoWriMo novel for this year.

I haven't posted to this journal in a while because I hit a creative dry spell and was doing nothing but RPG (role-playing game) writing.  A couple of weeks ago, however, I found out about a story-writing app called Zathom that is in development.  Once the app is rolled out, it will be a platform on which users can write flash fiction stories of either 55 or 415 words in length, using certain words chosen by the Zathom organizers.  For their roll-out, the designers were soliciting a whole slew of 55-word stories.  So I submitted about 24.  I will let you know if I sell any of them.  

The Zathom work has been somewhat of a jump-start for me.  it convinced me that I could still write and that I could still come up with interesting ideas.  I really needed that emotional shot in the arm.

Also helpful was reading an excellent book on writing by Marshall Dotson, called The Story Structure Secret:  Actions and Goals.  This is the kind of information I have been needing all of my writing life.  It has been of more help to me than even Donald J. Maas' Writing the Breakout Novel and James Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel.  It is because of Dotson's book that I feel able to work on Strayhaven and to feel that it has more than a snowball's chance in Hell of becoming a good story.  Dotson's book is giving me a very clear road map and is allowing me to see that I will be able to finish what I start.  That in itself is a great relief.