Lydia Schoch

There’s some kind of construction going on in my corner of the city today.

I’ve been hearing the buzz of an electric drill, the uneven taps of what sounds like a hammer, and the occasional, jarring thud of stuff being dropped.

So much for a peaceful day of writing.

After a decade in the city, I’ve learned to tune out the faraway sounds of traffic.  If this racket kept going for a few weeks, I’d probably get used to it. Right now my ears perk up every time they hear it, though.

I’d love to see what they’re working on. It sounds like quite a big project.

How do you tune out background noise when you’re working on something? Or do you like hearing certain things when you’re concentrating? What sounds have your ears adjusted to that other people might find distracting?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Girl Who Would Live Forever. This article has been haunting me all week. What would you do in this situation?

Black Sheep via RealSarahC. I don’t normally like to tell my readers what to expect when they click on these links, but this time I thought I should. This post is about living in a dysfunctional family as well as what happens to people who try to become healthier adults. It was excellent.

Yes, You Can Catch Insanity. It will be fascinating to see if this turns out to be true.

10 Words You Should Never Use via AndieDelicacy. Scroll down to these specific numbers if you want to know which words on this list make me cringe: 9, 7 and 2. The rest don’t bother me at all, although there are other words in the English language that do annoy me.

From The Worst Parents Ever:

This was the son of a well-off family escaping consequences by saying he’d always avoided consequences. It was proof of separate justice systems in this country, one for the rich and another for the poor, and Ethan became the face of wealth and privilege.

From I Know My Value via Whiteliphant:

I got my first anon-hate last week through ask.fm. Yay, I guess. I mean, I’m not necessarily happy that somebody I probably know hated-commented on something that I work very hard to keep alive, but as a best friend said (in quoting someone else): “You know you’re doing something right when you are pissing someone off”.

What have you been reading?

So, guess who forgot to write a blog post for today? D’oh.

I realized it a few minutes ago.

Luckily, I had just finished a fascinating TED talk by Nick Bostrom about what could happen when our computers become smarter than we are. It’s about 16 minutes long. I listened to it while doing other things. It’s not the sort of thing that requires you to watch the video as well if you really don’t want to.

Nick makes some good points, but the science fiction writer in me kept zooming back to the worst case scenario for all of the things he thinks will change when AI becomes superintelligent. He acknowledged the importance of giving the computers extremely specific goals. It still sounds like something that could terribly wrong in a heartbeat, though.

I know there are some science buffs who follow this blog. What do you think of his ideas?

This is a short film about a tall, clumsy puppet who doesn’t know his own strength yet.

I love the creative of these short films I’ve been finding lately. It’s amazing how much character and plot development can happen without any use of dialogue.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Your World Is How You View It via digbydigz. There’s definitely something to be said for looking at the world this way. I’ve never met this blogger, but something tells me I’d like her if I did.

Trash Food. This is really fascinating.

Adventures in Hydrocephalus via Apo_Papafrangou. Talk about an eye-catching title!

Nina Nestor Obituary. No, I didn’t know Nina or any of her loved ones. To the best of my knowledge, none of my readers knew them either. Why am I telling you to read her obituary, then? Because it’s hilarious. If any of you ever ask me to write a summary of your lives, I’ll try to be half as witty as Nina’s daughter. She did a fantastic job here, and I am truly sorry for her loss of what sounds like was an amazing mother.

The Devil Marries Three Sisters via prnancarrow. Who else remembers the fairy tale called “Bluebeard”? I noticed a lot of similarities between that one and this one. I wonder which one came first?

From The Glorification of Busy:

Some days mum is only out of bed for an hour, but gosh it’s snuggly to jump in there with her and put a movie on.  My children are happy…I did that.   And that is ENOUGH.

I AM ENOUGH.

And the thing is, you, who is reading this YOU are enough too.  I was always enough, and so were you.  Why do we think we need to do it all, to be enough?

What have you been reading?

Picture credit: Filosofias filosoficas,

I’ve been staring at a blank page on my monitor for the last 10 minutes.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas. I do.

There have actually been many of them rolling around in my head recently. After a long time spent scraping the bottom of my barrel of creativity, this is a welcomed surprise.

Here’s the thing about writing: the words don’t always listen to you, and the characters are even more incorrigible.

The expressions on people’s faces when you tell them that is priceless.

Wait, what? How? Can’t you make your characters and plots do exactly what it is that you want them to do, nothing more and nothing less? 

No.

Well, sometimes you can. I’ve written stories that slid out of my keyboard as smoothly as if I were transcribing someone else’s memories of something that really happened a long time ago in a faraway place.

You can’t count on that, though. Every empty page is unique.

I wonder if singers feel the same way about the notes they’re about to sing, or if painters sit and think about all of the possibilities before dipping their brushes into a brand new jar of paint.

Here’s hoping they do.

Over the weekend I was interviewed about writing, self-publishing, and my latest book, Waiting for Earl to Die and other stories, by Aleen on her most recent podcast at Less Than or Equal.

I’ve never been interviewed before, so I was a little nervous about what it might be like. It was a great experience, though! Go listen to our conversation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

I will be sharing exciting news later on today. Stay tuned!

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Murder of Creativity via SingleMAhoy. I really like this approach to life. It’s similar to how my parents raised their kids.

Wind. This reminds me of the kinds of stories that my friend Daphne writes.

The Assistant Economy. Fascinating stuff.

80 Mother’s Day Quotes to Show Mom You Care. A few months ago I shared a link to the love poetry generator on this same site. Now the bloggers who runs it are back with a long list of quotes about motherhood. Some of the quotes made me laugh while others made me smile. It’s impossible for me to pick just one to share with you. I loved almost every single of them!

Trouble at the Drive-Thru via RHTDaly. There are a few words I don’t like to say in public either because of how I pronounce them.

From Unfreed:

Only after Rene Lima-Marin walked out and the gate of Colorado’s Crowley County Correctional Facility shut behind him, on April 24, 2008, did he finally decide he didn’t have to worry anymore. He was 29 years old and a free man, released after serving a decade of what had first been a sentence of 98 years.

What have you been reading?

It was harder to see how natural selection could have produced allergies. Reacting to harmless things with a huge immune response probably wouldn’t have aided the survival of our ancestors. Allergies are also strangely selective. Only some people have allergies, and only some substances are allergens. Sometimes people develop allergies relatively late in life; sometimes childhood allergies disappear. And for decades, nobody could even figure out what IgE was for. It showed no ability to stop any virus or bacteria. It was as if we evolved one special kind of antibody just to make us miserable.

From Why Do We Have Allergies?

This whole article was fascinating. I hope you’ll go read it, especially if you have any allergies yourself. My thoughts on the topic in general are below.

When I was very young I wondered what it would be like to have allergies. My parents both had a lot of them and I was fascinated by how all of that worked. Well, maybe fascinated isn’t the right word. I definitely didn’t like to see them suffering the effects of a bad reaction, but I was really interested in why one person could be exposed to something without reacting to it while another one developed hives or had an asthma attack.

Eventually I developed some allergies of my own and they were annoying, not fascinating.

If I had to pick one allergy of mine to get rid of, it would be the milk one. It’s mild, but I’d be a much more adventurous eater without it. It would be easy for me to transition to a vegetarian diet if I could eat cheese. A vegan diet would be harder, although I have toyed with the idea in the past.

Seasonal allergies aren’t hard for me to handle. They’ve been so tame this spring that I’ve barely even noticed they existed.

My allergies to animals like dogs and cats are sad, but I don’t think I’d have a pet at the moment even if I was able to do so. My home isn’t set up for a four-legged companion, and I’d need to do a lot more research about finding the right one for my lifestyle and taking care of it properly before I made that kind of commitment. There’s so much I don’t know about this topic that I wouldn’t even be sure of what questions to ask if I had to decide right now.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the theory in this article turned out to be true? It would make all of the discomfort of allergic reactions worth it.

Here’s hoping.