My to-write list

It’s February already. January just flew away too fast, without a single blogpost. I was just to busy. Basically, I had three jobs. At daytime I did my regular job for BigOil, as usual. In the night I worked on the refurbishing of our house. Late night I was grading exams. It’s a Hell of a boring job, but I have to do it, since I have a part-time position in the university.

Now the exam-grading is done. Then I only have two jobs, and I hope I’ll get some time to write. I have many topics to write about. Just to remind myself, here are some headlines on my to-write list:

• The white gold
• Russia; good, bad and evil
• War heroes on the metro
• Mekka and Disneyland
• Jerusalem and Hollywood
• Some people still believe in God
• The importance if blasphemy
• Michel Houellebecq
• Haruka Murakami
• Management and leadership
• Monogamy
• I never got a Green Card
• Where does Satan live?
• Skiing in America
• My merits in battle
• Does size matter?

I don’t know in which order I’ll do the list. I’m open for suggestions.

Also, more than a year ago, I started on a one month blogging challenge; 30 posts in 30 days. I got half way through it. Maybe I’ll try to do the rest of it. But n

ot this month; February has only 28 days, it’s skiing season, and soon the Winter Olympics are starting up >:)

(The picture above is the huge Russian nuclear-powered ice breaker Lenin operating in the Arctic. I took the picture a couple of years ago. To be honest, I've never actually seen the ship. There is a big picture of the ice breaker on the wall in the reception of the Poliarnie Zori Hotel in Murmansk, and I took a picture of the picture on the wall, hehe.)

30.000 feet

It's been a while since I wrote anything here. Don't worry. There are plenty of good blogs around. You don't really need mine. I'm just writing it for my own entertainment.

I do most of my writing when I'm out traveling. This year I haven't been traveling much, so far. Before Easter, I spent a week in Moscow, working long days. Now I'm on the way to Milan, Italy, about to cross the Swiss Alps at 30.000 feet. 

The last three months have been quite busy. Too much to do at work, very interesting and important projects, but intense, and with tight deadlines.

Half a year ago we were reorganized. We've got new bosses, doing administration and micro-management rather than showing leadership. No problem, we get used to it. We just have to make up the visions and grand plans ourselves.

You can't really stop researchers, just slow them down, by setting up weird obstacles. I've come up with a new management model. How to utilize the various facets of corporate management in the optimal way. Maybe I will write a post about it some time.

Winter is the most busy time of year. It's skiing season, and we've been skiing a lot. I've got about 45 days on the slopes so far. The kids have more. The Easter was great, cold nights, sunny days, and great skiing conditions. April is the best part of the season. There's more to come, for another month.

Finally, I've got a new favorite author, the French rebel Michel Houllebecq. He's a very good writer; pessimistic, ironic and provocative, pointing to the sickness of modern society. Accused of being a pornographer, and pulled to court by Islamic organizations for offending their religion. That's a real author, with his mission. Recommended.

I've read four of Houllebecq’s books recently, just started on the fifth. So, I've done a lot of reading, but not much writing, except the science reports at work.

(April is the best time of the year for skiing. It's not me in the picture, but I know the guy quite well. The picture was taken and put together by one of his buddies.)

Apps

I'm working with science and technology every day. Therefore I'm not very interested in playing with gadgets outside office hours.

I prefer to spend my free time reading, writing and skiing.

Yesterday I made a great leap forward: I got my first smart phone. Not because I'm interested in smart phones, but simply because people expect me to read mail when I'm out travelling. There have been some problems and misunderstandings when I didn't (like messing up time and place for drivers to pick me up in Moscow, not a good thing to do).

So, now I've got a brand new HTC phone (that's what they give us at work). And where do I go to learn how to use it?

Answer: Ask the kids. They have a natural feel for how these things work (older boy has an iPhone4S; guess who paid for it).

The kids taught me how to download apps from the Android Market. There are thousands of apps, for doing all kinds of rediculous and useless things.

So far, I've downloaded one app: Kindle Reader for HTC >:)

(That's a picture of my new phone, downloaded from the HTC homepage. I vivited their site to get the user manual on a pdf)

The gambler

There's a book that I read almost every summer on the beach. I've read it more than 10 times now. The twists and turns of the story are hardly surprising me anymore. Now I read the book mostly to admire the writing.

My copy is a nice hardbound and leather-back book. It was printed in 1946, and I bought it 2nd hand from an antiquarian many years ago.

The book I'm talking about is The Gambler by Dostoyevsky. It's a relatively short narrative novel, just a little bit more than 200 pages. It's an easy and entertaining read, and a very suitable beach book, I think.

The story takes place in a German gambling town with the brilliant name Roulettenburg. The protagonist and narrator is a tutor employed by a poor Russian General who has lost his past fortune. The General wants to marry a beatuiful woman, but to be able to do this, he needs money. Back in Russia is the old and very rich Grandmother who is expected to die very soon. Every day the General telegraphs to Russia, asking about her health. He is impatiently waiting for her death, and to inherit her fortune.

One day, the old Grandmother unexpectedly arrives in Roulettenburg. She goes straight to the casino, to put her fortune (and the General's heritage) at stake by the roulette table ... and this is were the real fun begins. I say no more.

Dostoyevsky was addicted to gambling himself. In this novel he gives a brilliant and in-depth exposition of gambling psychology, built on his personal experience (and if you're cusious about Dostoyevsky, I recommend the biography by Geir Kjetsaa)

(That's my footsteps in the picture above. I had been out swimming in the chill and refreshing fjord, and walked accross that rock, on the way back to my towel and my Dostoyevsky book on the beach)

No country for old men

I'm back in the North, just for a few days.

Today they served sun buns in the cantina at work, to celebrate the return of the sun. The sun buns have some yellow egg cream in the center. Except from that, they're like regular buns.

The sun has been hiding behind the horizon since early December. Now we can see sunshine on the mountain tops at least. It's the end of the polar darkness already. The sun is gone for only 7-8 weeks. That's not bad, and I like the darkness. It has it's own mysterious charm.

Tonight I've been out eating, alone. That's not very fun, so I made it quick. I had a cheese burger and a Mack beer, brewed by the northernmost brewery in the world, according to the commercials.

(The brewery is located in the Paris of the North, a 4-hour drive from here, across a mountain pass, and around a couple of fjords, or less than 3 hours by the fast catamaran boat that runs on a regular schedule along the coast.)

On the way back to my hotel, I passed by the bookstore, and couldn't resist. I have become a fan of Cormack McCarthy, since I read The Road and Child of God recently. So I bought No Country for Old Men. Looking forward to read it.

But the first thing I'll do is to write a couple of scenes for my so-called novel >:)

(I wrote this piece of text with my own hands (and brain). I also took the picture myself, early in February three years ago. Then we lived walking-distance from that little hill I'm shooting from. My hotel is right outside the left edge of the picture. Today, I can state, with the best conscience, that I haven't stolen anything ... In Satan we trust >:D)

I have this damn novel to write

What the Hell am I doing? Probably, I’ve started something I will never be able to finish. Never mind; it’s not so important. Different from Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, I’m not “in it for the money”; but just for fun.

This is what happened: In Winterland, in the Easter holidays, it has become a tradition that normal, well-behaved people read crime novels. This Easter I wanted to be normal too, so I read a couple of crime novels. The books weren’t too bad; entertaining stories with well-constructed plots; but it was definitely not like Jean Genet or Ibsen or Dostoyevsky (who wrote great “crime novels” like Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamasov).

In a moment of exaggerated self confidence, I said, to my old lady:
- Bet I could write crime stuff like that myself.
Shit, I shouldn't have said that, because she immediately gave me the challenge:
- So prove it.
Now, I’m working on the plot, and inventing the characters, and personalities and names for all these mean bastards who make trouble for my hero; they even try to kill him. Then I need conflicts and tension, in every scene, I learnt from the writer-blogs I follow (thank you for these very useful blogs, such as Straight from Hel, The Blood Read Pencil, and Judy Croome). And all the time I find myself swimming in semicolons; I have to stop that immediately.

I had to make a few choices. I don’t have the time to do research (other than in geophysics), so I will use a setting and environment that I know fairly well. In about all the crime novels I have read, the main characters are police officers or journalists. Not so in my novel. My hero is a physics professor (what else, and yes, I know I’m not the first, Dan Brown’s protagonist is professor in iconology).

Then I have to choose the language. Chinese and Swahili are out of question, don't know a single word of it, and my German is very rotten now. Then I’m left with English or Winterlandic, don’t know yet what I will choose. Anyway, I will probably publish the shit chapter by chapter on my blog (or a parallel one) as I write.

Sorry, no more time for blogging now. I have this damn novel to write ... >:)))