Ok, so let's see what and how and whether...

Tossing pennies into the void.

As in, penny for my thoughts. So, my mother passed this morning, peaceful and easy.

I get to try and deal with this as a son, as well as a father. Our daughter's a little younger than I was, the first time a close relative passed.

She's a teenager, so there's going to be resentment.

She's a teenager, so there's also time for us to be here for her to work through that resentment.

My mother suffered, as patients with a terminal illness suffer at the end. She was fortunate, though. Compared to others with her particular illness, the pain was low.

There are sometimes small blessings to a brain tumor. And in this case, the brain tumor appeared to cut off some of the pain centers. So the rest of the tumors, in breast and stomach and throughout her lymphatic system, weren't the torture they might have otherwise been.

We were there, and many thanks, because the hospice team were there to back us up. Hospice nurses, counselors. Whatever we needed, Houston Hospice was there for us. Angels in disguise, as all who work in that part of the medical field must be.

They made it a great deal less tedious, for us, but for my mother most of all. It's a long slow business, passing through the twilight region via cancer. Time passes in funny ways.

The long nights, for us listening to her breathe.

For her, the long days, thinking and coming to terms with the toll that the twilight passage requires. I don't think it's easy, or cheap, that passage.

And I know it's lonely. That's the one traverse we must all walk alone. No one else can walk that path, with us or for us.

And it's the one that seems to leave everyone behind. From our perspective sitting on the shore, at least. Where do they go?

Soon enough, we'll know. Whatever creed we follow, the answer awaits.

Just let it be enough, that when we get to that path, that there be love and support while we make the steps down the twilight passage.

I know that was a wall of text. And no, I'm not apologizing for it. Yet.

I'm still learning what this whole thing's about, that's all. There's a few
moving parts to it. There's the part where you, dear reader, need to be able
to understand and find links to my books, so that you can get the good reads
you're after.

And there's the part where I need a good way to organize myself. So that I
can find the links when I need them in order to put them in front of you!

Yeah, ok, so there's also the part of this where I'm crap at figuring all this
stuff out. I promise, that'll ease off. Work work work, right?

You're just getting here when I'm still learning how to make it work, that's
all.

Psst. Maybe someday, you'll be able to say 'I knew him when...'

A guy can hope, anyway.

Herein my Open Wounds series

Old homes, old castles. Old ghosts.

Ghosts don't just appear. They don't just wander in from the ether and take up a place at the table.

They come from open wounds. The parts of life that never quite heal.

Shame. Terror. Murder.

Imprisonment.

In a forgotten place, far away from the center of life, the centers of power, in a land of ice over fire, a castle was built.

Not as a home. Not to project power, or to defend territory.

It was built as a prison.

And this prisoner is not content to remain there.

What will his jailers do? What will they sacrifice to insure that this prisoner is never again allowed to inflict himself upon the innocents he feasts upon?

What won't they sacrifice?

Open Wounds (Open Wounds Book 1)

Long before jailer and jailed, they were friends. Monsters don't always begin that way.

A time of beginnings...

Names of power, legends of glory. Stories don't always start at the point where the heroes enter and vanquish the monster.

In this case, two friends will end up facing each other as prisoner and jailer, queen and ultimate subject. Their decisions in that place and time will shatter a distant corner of the world, leaving the fate of many to random chance and the viciousness of winter.

But first, long before they face off as bitter enemies, two children, on that verge between leaving childhood behind for the pathways of adulthood, must answer the most delightful question imaginable.

What's in the box?

Open Wounds is the first book in the Open Wounds series. It is available at Amazon as ebook and paperback, from Nook as ebook, from Kobo as ebook, from Smashwords as ebook

Passing Fancies (Open Wounds Book 2)

Far and away. Forgotten.

Almost. No single generation is long enough to erase certain memories from the world.

A time for testing. A time for betrayal.

Far to the north, where the ice grabs, and the volcanoes rumble, a queen has carved out a tiny kingdom. A borderland at the edge of an Empire, mostly forgotten by those who stand at the center and grasp for power.

Mostly. There are those who remember that the queen placed her kingdom at the edge of nowhere for a reason. Those that know that Megan built her kingdom to constrain the power of the leading magician of the age. The most powerful, the most insane magician of the age.

One of that mage's former cult remembers, and vows to free her master. She will do anything, and everything, to free her master and avenge the insult that has held him prisoner, encased in stone for a generation.

Will Megan, and the friends and family she's gathered around her, stop the cultist before she succeeds? Assuming first that they'll find out who she is...

Passing Fancies is the second book in the Open Wounds series. It is available at Amazon as ebook and paperback, from Nook as ebook, from Kobo as ebook, from Smashwords as ebook

Train In Tow (Open Wounds Book 3)

What routes open to you, when your faithful return to your bidding. No prison can hold you when the true believers will tear apart the world over the barest hint of your word.

A time when webs spin and grow.

Freedom, so close he can taste it. The prisoner knows, expands his reach, his grasp. To those who welcome his call. And to those who will risk everything to stop it.

Jane has listened to that call since birth. She's given everything to follow the trail that led her to this place of ice and snow. All that she was, that she might have been, has been sacrificed to free Chad from his imprisonment.

Jane has killed. She will kill again. Whatever it takes.

But her master has other plans now. Other means of getting what he wants. And Megan, the queen, is close, ever so close, to knowing Jane's secret. The queen, her daughter, her daughter's tutor and best friend. Each and every one of them has a piece of the puzzle.

They know. Justice chases her heels, and the path Jane travels shifts beneath her feet. Will she fall?

Or will her master throw her to the wolves first?

Train In Tow is the third book in the Open Wounds series. It is available at Amazon as ebook and paperback, from Kobo as ebook, from Smashwords as ebook, from Nook as ebook

I've danced around this a bit, but the big thing going on in our lives at the moment is that my mother is dying.

We have her at home, with hospice minding things. They're a godsend, of course. What the ladies and gentlemen of hospice care do for us every day is truly the work of saints.

The heavy lifting, though. They can't do that for us.

It's part of life, this time at the end. One way or another, we all come to the clearing at the end of the path. I'm just glad that my wife and daughter and I are in a position to be here for my mother and her husband.

It's a rough thing. But at the same time, I can't help thinking of the stories, especially from the late 19th century. Every family seemed to have a grandfather, or more often grandmother, who had 'taken to their bed'.

If you've seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Gene Wilder version of the movie, then you'll remember the scene where Charlie goes home to what seems like half the family on pallets under blankets. Waiting for the end.

Roald Dahl in the story, and the creators of the movie, do a wonderful job of showing what a good thing hope is for the family. The impact it has.

I've been through something like this a time or two before. Great-grandparents, grandparents. That particular sort of magic doesn't much apply.

But that doesn't mean the hope isn't there. Magic just occasionally takes a little different form. Not the one we imagine, or wish for.

Just the one we need.

I'm gonna make sure I give my daughter a kiss, more often than I might otherwise have. And my wife, and most of all my mother. I think they'll need it, over these next few days as we approach the end of this particular path.

And I know I'll need it more than they do. It's amazing where you can find magic, when you're not looking for it.

So close, so close.

So close I can taste it. One of the little hazards, I'm finding as I go along with this whole writing and publishing thing, is that 'almost-finished' point is momentous.

It has its own gravity.

When you're to the point where the copyedits look good, the formatting looks right... Backcopy yet to come, though. Little checks, here and there. Self awareness by accident, or by purpose.

The ultimate point is to try and catch the silly mistakes, as best I can. No process is perfect, but I can do my best. And make myself write notes down whenever I do something, so that I don't have to relearn it all over again next time.

That's a longwinded way of saying that I've ok'd all the formatting and copyedits on the next book, Book 3 in the Open Wounds series. I've a few more steps, short ones, but it'll be available soon enough.

Which will hopefully make me get going on adding a few more link pages...

oh, pretentiousness. I almost committed thee..

It's hell when you get a couple three hundred words into something and realize
you've gone off the rails.

I blame it on being half asleep. Yesterday was my daughter's first true
marching band performance, the first football game of the year, and we were
up way late packing and unpacking the band gear to get them back and forth
to the game.

And then she had to get up to go to a rehearsal this afternoon. So I figured,
hey, why not sit down and write a blog in response to someone else's essay...

Bad idea. Not because the question the writer was interested in
doesn't deserve a thoughtful read. But because I didn't have any business
carrying through with my response the way it was shaping up.

Thomas Mann, I am not. No pontification, dude, it's bad for the headspace.

Most importantly, a magician never reveals her tricks, so neither should I
tell you where and how I get a character's motivation.

See, that's the real value of the internet for a writer. I get to observe
the way other people think. Which of course means that I get to put together
characters based on how I respond to the way others are thinking. If someone
thinks this way, what would they do if... say, the monster comes along that
digs into those fears?

But that's my part of the writer-reader relationship. It's one thing to say
"hey, here's a cool thing, or a cool idea." It's another thing entirely for
me to dig into mindset and such in public.

Besides being pretentious, I'd really hate for you to find yourself reading
along in some story down the road, and then hear my thoughts again. Not the
recognition of it, but I don't ever want to cause you to break out of a story
because you can hear the gears spinning.

Professional courtesy, as much as I can make it. So let me stuff that crap
back into my head, where it belongs.

Ah, the stars, the stars.

Among the little things that will mean something far after we're all gone away from this time and place. Cassini is about to crash into Saturn, tomorrow around 8am eastern time.

Just about the time I'm headed to work, so I won't be able to catch the video in live feed. But, if these pictures from the history of the program are a good guide, they will be spectacular.

And the measurements they get on the way down invaluable. The team's going to be wrapping up, but they're going out with one hell of a bang, pardon the pun.

On another note, the New Horizons probe is in the middle of a calibration check, insuring that its hibernation mode is going correctly as it makes its way out to the Kuiper Belt and MU69. For the life of me, I can't find the link that I read this morning, but this one should give you at least an idea of what they're up to in that group. And what little surprises they've accumulated along the way.

Come on and join the light...

Which comes from the Who, playing as I start this.

The first time I've seen an official death toll from Hurricane Irma, all in so far she's done for 77 people since her path through islands up through Florida and beyond began. My sympathies go out to all the families, and all the cleanup ahead of them, mental and physical. All of this part of the world is still digging out from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey's, so we're definitely in a position to sympathize.

I'm caught up in copyedits at the moment, going over the e-book files for Book 3 in my Open Wounds series, going through to make sure that nobody's missed anything, or that changes are consistent with what I'm after.

Drip drip drip, the life of the writer. The rest of it's muddling along, work and family, dogs and cats.

And, I'm out of gas, wit has left me bereft in interest of finding something else to do. Until later, dear reader.

One of those days where if I don't grab the time now, I won't end up
writing for the blog...

Not because of anything but life. There are always things going on, but
rehearsal, meet-the-teacher, and the various assortment of other things
going on are going to make it unlikely I'll write any later.

So, now. And naturally enough, somewhat brain-dead, which is why I don't
normally try this in the few minutes of down time before I head for the
car and the commute.

Having said that. I wonder about a part of the autonomous vehicles that
are clearly coming in from the future to the now. I'm not entirely sure
how or when, but certainly for my present commute, being able to 'step'
away from the wheel and work on something for that period would not be a
bad thing.

It's time I otherwise wouldn't get to just noodle away at problems.

But there's an intermediate step before 'completely drives itself' and
the deadstick setup we're in now. That's the point where I can reasonably
well discuss a problem with the car/cpu. In the manner of 'hey, what's the
mean flight speed of a fully laden swallow?' 'What, African or European?'

Let's face it, there are plenty of days where running a Monte Python skit
just by asking is the best possible thing a car could do for you on your
way home.

Another random characterization noodle...

How are these equivalent, or not? Where's the overlap for the people who
would say it?

"Tell it to the preacher, and he's gone over the top..."

"Complaints don't do any good, and no one cares anyway..."

"Others can help you map out your anxieties, but you're the one who holds
the key for unlocking them..."

Semantically, no matter how well or poorly meant, there's pretty much nothing
to distinguish between them.

And the people holding those thoughts might disagree mightily about what each
was trying to say. Certainly, if many internet discussion are to be believed.

Jerry Pournelle passed away this weekend. He was a large figure in the world of sci-fi. For the writing, first last and always. Like John Scalzi (here), for me, Jerry's story with Larry Niven, Footfall, was the first big story by Niven and Pournelle that I fell into.

I came to know Jerry more directly through his website, Chaos Manor, one of the first working writer's websites on the web. Jerry was a computer writer from the beginning, before anyone knew what that particular career was to come to mean.

I didn't agree with him politically on very many things. I don't share many of those views. But, I still read and paid attention to what he had to say. Before he had his stroke, which slowed him down some, Jerry wrote and corresponded with many different people, from a wide variety of backgrounds and political outlooks, and even when you disagreed with his view, he was always happy to engage with you about it.

There were, ultimately, two big things that I took from Chaos Manor itself. The first one was his and his wife's computer program for teaching reading. When my daughter reached the age where she could benefit from it, I downloaded the Pournelle's reading program and showed my daughter how to use it. So, in effect, Jerry taught my daughter the nuts and bolts of reading. I am forever in his, and Roberta's, debt.

The second thing I took was from the essay "How to get my job". That's the other part of what he did, and the Chaos Manor writings only brush up against it. Jerry was always an advocate for the writer, first and foremost, and he worked hard behind the scenes to make sure that SFWA worked as a writer's organization, regardless of where you were in your career. I'm just beginning at the 'pro' part of being a writer, but I know that as I step along that path, Jerry Pournelle's work for the generations that came before me is going to matter to what opportunities I and my peers have to make a living at this gig. Here too, I will always be in Dr. Jerry Pournelle's debt.

Go forth, good man, and follow the path we must all travel. I hope to meet with you someday, and hear some good stories you've discovered in the meantime.

Information theory bogosity. Or, fun with numbers.
A modern computer uses a 64-bit word for
computations. Each bit in the word has 2 possible states, so at any given
time a word comes from a space of 2^64 possible combinations.

Further, let's be generous, and give the computer a main memory of 2^36
words. Thus, at any one time the total state space for a computer is a
state with (2^36)*(2^64) = 2^100 possible combinations. The memory here is 2^6
gigawords, or 2^9 gigabytes = 512 gigabytes of main memory (I said we were
being generous, we'll see why in a minute).

Now, DNA is a chemical word of length order 3 billion bits for humans.
That is, a human chemical word is in a state of 2^(3,000,000) possible
combinations. Further, there are on the order 40 trillion (40*10^12) cells
in a human body. This is approximately 2^40 possible words, so that there are
of order (2^40)*(2^100)^(10,000,000) possible combinations.

That is, to fully (with arbitrary fidelity) know every DNA state in a human
body would take 16*10,000,000 = 160,000,000 64-bit computers each with 512
gigabytes of main memory. To the orders considered here, the human brain and
the human body have no meaningful difference in the number of cells.

So, in one tortured pass at the numbers, specifying the DNA state  of a given
human body at any instance of time
would require over 160,000,000 computer cores each with 512 gigabytes of main
memory.

A computer that can address, and compute in a meaningful manner,
simultaneously, 1000 terabytes of main memory? For a current standard, it
takes most of a day to transfer 1 terabyte between two hard drives, even with
fast local access. And Moore's law stopped some ten years ago.

This is just to specify the DNA state. There are approximately 10 billion
proteins in each cell in the human body. So, to specify both the DNA state
and the *proteins that read the DNA and make the cell work* requires on the
order (10^10)*(10^8) = 10^18 = 1 billion billion 64-bit computers each with
512 gigabytes of main memory.

There are 7 billion humans on the planet now. So, in order to compute at
the equivalent to a single human body chemical calculation would require
on the order of 100,000,000 times as many computers as have ever been
constructed at the time of this writing.

General AI in the sci-fi sense doesn't seem very possible, given this. But
I wonder.

This may give you nightmares, or it might be your fondest dream. But, if you
look at computer-enhanced/expanded intelligence, then AI is pretty close to
reality, at least the first halting steps out of the laboratory, with
lightning and bolts in the neck and the Elsa Lancaster wig and everything.

It's called the Internet.

SlateStarCodex is one of my oft visited sites. Scott tends to put time and thought into interesting questions. Even when/if I disagree with any particular thing, there's always a good conversation involved.

Sometimes, though, there are bits and pieces missing from both the arguments Scott presents, and the commenters who noodle his arguments in the conversation that follows. This post on how, or whether, breasts and human sexual response generally, reconciles with what we know or don't know about evolutionary psychology, is one example that I stumbled on.

It's nothing major, and it took me a while to realize what I was missing. At least one commenter mentioned the fact that humans don't generally know by looking (or smelling, or whatever) when females are ovulating. Unlike the rest of the mammalian family. I thought at first, cool, that's something like it.

But then I realized that can't be the whole answer. And I searched the post and comments for the phrase "sexual maturity", and came up empty.

That is, in a species where noone can tell when a female is in estrus, the standard mammalian (lack of) visible breasts won't do. There's not much physical distinction between human females before and after puberty, structurally speaking. Breast size and hip size are the most immediately visible means of distinguishing.

Note, I don't say this is the only explanation. It just occurs to me that it should likely be an important part of the mechanism as a whole.

Don Williams and Walter Becker passed away this week.

I don't know if I'm odd for a writer, but I have a hard time listening to lyrics in music. That's probably something to do with being an instrumentalist. I started out playing various instruments as a kid, and the music, the sound, has always been more immediate for me than the words in the song. I have to work for the lyrics.

Except for musicians like Don Williams and Walter Becker/Steely Dan. Not that I've got Steely Dan lyrics memorized. But when Don delivered a song, between that voice and his persona, he delivered the lyric as beautifully as can be imagined. Lyle Lovett in this article points this out, as well.

The writer of that article points out that Don wasn't exactly loved in Nashville at the time for it. Simple, clean, let the song shine. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings had similar experiences at the time. Don was just quieter about it. It's interesting to think about people like Lyle and Guy Clark and the other Texas singer/songwriters that came after Don. As always, there's a link and a story there, a continuity that's not always obvious, but would definitely make a good listening project for diving into everyone's albums and following along.

Walter Becker and Steely Dan. Ah, there's a love/hate relationship. The hate was because *every* song was overplayed. FM radio loved Steely Dan, at least things like Deacon Blues. They were inevitable and ubiquitous.

But I came back to the albums. I'm a jazz player, first last and always. So Steely Dan went into my Pandora rotation, and the album cuts stick with me more and more as I listen to them. The real joy is that I can listen to the songs in that intuitive way I need for background, working music. And then I can turn around and focus on the words, and get a chuckle when I need to. There's always that wry smile waiting in the wings.

Ok, I posted Deacon Blues from Steely Dan, here's one from Don Williams, Lord, I hope this day is good.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was thinking about something else, similar to what I posted the other day about being able to listen to Layla and Pearl Jam's Black as songs in conversation with one another. Don Williams and John Lennon also have songs that are in conversation with each other.

John Lennon recorded God for the Plastic Ono Band album. It's famous for lines like "I don't believe in Jesus", among others. But notice the structure.

And then realize that Don Williams sings I believe in love is, pretty much, the same setup, the same call and response. He just doesn't belabor the point, and he's more direct about pointing out the difference between 'congregating' and God, for example.

Or, think about it another way.

A general computer is built from (in a simplified picture) a set of 2-state
transistors, on or off, the celebrated 0 or 1 bits. The integrated circuits
of cpu's are now consistently on the order of greater than 1 billion
(1*10^9) transistors.

Human DNA is consistently of order 3 billion base pairs, and base pairs are
also a 2-bit system, coming in two types (A-T or C-G), so 0 or 1.

Here's one key difference. We know how the circuits of a computer are
integrated, because we built and designed them.

We're only just learning how the circuits, or transistors, of DNA are
integrated.

And here's one very simple picture of how this learning is going to complicate
the idea of DNA as computer. A transistor doesn't have to be just a 0 or 1,
a switch. A transistor can also be an amplifier.

Genes aren't read-once, copy forever. How they are read differs depending on
the thermodynamic state in which they are read. Salt concentration, cell
crowding, cell aging, each of these and unknown variables change the result
of reading a gene over time. Thus, at the most extreme, cancer. But also
mutations, different cell types from the same genes, etc.

In other words, take all the wonderful incredible things that a computer can
do, and realize that DNA is significantly more complicated. We have a long
way to go to reverse engineer the circuitry of DNA, and even when we do, it
will only be the beginning, because it's a dynamically modifiable system.

Or to put it another away, whenever someone talks about the information content
of DNA, that's only the most basic, digital approximation. Chemistry is both
digital, and analogue.

Emergent behavior.

Now there's a phrase to conjure with. And boy howdy is there a lot of nonsense
around it. It's quite a bit like quantum mechanics and relativity, in that
pop notions built on the magic of the phrase run out way ahead of the way
it's used by the specialists.

So. Here's a thing. It can only go one step forward, or backward, and it
can only turn right or left. So, four possibilities, right? Four, and four
alone, simplest possible thing imaginable.

I can describe every pixel on your screen with such a scheme. It might be
clumsy, but that is, in effect, all that raytracing does. The pixels on the
screen know only on or off, and red/green/blue. That's it. Five little
possibilities.

And how I trace them is my business, especially if the processor does it
quickly enough for your brain to not notice. In the old days, you could
watch the line of resolution update migrate from top to bottom of the screen
as the little automaton did its business for each refresh cycle.

The things that can all be done with computer animation these days should then
tell you what possibilities there are for simple state machines. The phrase
'you can't explain this' is, in this context, more properly stated as 'I can't
explain this' or, 'I don't understand this'.

'I don't want to understand this' is often implied, of course.

(As ever, these sorts of noodling thoughts are, in the most important sense,
me noodling character in public. I'm a fiction writer, if you see me pushing
these sorts of thoughts around in public, then know that there's a character
who's going to exhibit some, all, or none of these traits in your future.

That, or there's an interesting reason *why* someone may or may not think
this way...)

A better day than yesterday, on multiple levels.

Well, at least tearing drywall is progress. I was pretty sure, before I
started ripping the drywall, how the water had invaded. Combine wicking and
exposure. I ripped enough drywall and insulation to confirm that's actually
what happened.

Then, I ripped some more. I know myself. Confirmation bias is a hole I'd
prefer to avoid under the circumstances.

Our daughter had a better day as well, she didn't come home from school and
rehearsal with a blinding headache, and she was in the marching rehearsal for
the whole session.

I'm sure you, dear reader, have similar days, up and down, good and bad. It's
the way our little world goes round. Something occurs to me, though.

Hurricanes are making their way through the Caribbean again, targeting the
islands. Irma's passed over the leeward islands and looks headed for Florida
as of this writing.

I'm gonna try and make sure I'm prepared to help out however I can, even if
it's just a donation to the Red Cross, or similar. The islands especially tend
to be forgotten when they get hammered by a storm, so I want to make sure I
remember them. We're all part of the family together.

Oy. As the saying goes, when the wolf gnaws, smile.
Among other things, apparently we didn't quite escape the hurricane as well as we thought we did. Two sets of the weepers on the brick façade for our house took on enough water that it soaked through to the drywall on the interior side.
Fifty plus inches of rain over a few days will do that. At least, that's my current assumption. I'll know for sure tomorrow morning when I start tearing apart the drywall to get to the real evidence underlying it.
So, gutter engineering is clearly in my future...
The good things today? The weather. The first front of the fall cleared us, so the next few days are going to be a pretty good break from the end of summer. Overall, the hurricane broke through the worst of the end of summer heat, so apart from the mess, there's been at least some immediate benefit from Harvey's visit.
There were a few other minor disasters, but nothing worth worrying over. Our daughter is fighting through a typical freshman ordeal, getting enough stamina going to get through full marching rehearsals with her high school band. My mother's health continues to ride downhill, though probably not at quite the pace her doctors anticipated.
A thousand little things, really, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm six feet on the good side of the dirt, I have a wonderful family, fine friends, no particular health issues other than middle-age spread, good stories to write and read ahead of me, and for every thousand little things, a million more to be grateful for. I'll take it, and twice on Sundays.

Random thoughts on things I've seen while scanning the internet... Ok, am I the only one who read this and immediately started singing "Let's Go Fly a Kite"? (i.e. a comment on Disney and P.L. Travers' talents and ubiquity, not on the suffragette banner itself, which I find fascinating. It takes a very real imagination to understand what you're looking at when you find something like this in a charity shop or Goodwill.)
Forget super models, red carpet premieres, the covers of magazines. Let's face it, if you're a dress designer, the most important model of all time is Vanna White. It's not even really close. Not to mention what she and Pat and the whole Wheel gang have done for basic literacy. The crossword in the New York Times still has a zing in the puzzle crowd, but the Wheel almost certainly has a greater reach simply via the power of tv.
This one will take some thinking. And when you get down to, I'm probably overthinking it. But still, something occurred to me about Pearl Jam's Black. Structurally, it sounds to me an awful lot like they're playing off of Layla.
Note, I do not mean copying. I mean that particular artist's goal of taking in a song, absorbing it, and then writing your response to it.
To hear what I mean, think about the piano break at the end of Layla. So, listen to Black fresh. Then listen to Layla. Now go back and listen to Black again, and listen for the piano, the lead guitar, and how they play against each other, thematically and dynamically. (I only have the youtube version of Layla easily available. If you have it, listen to the original album cut, and the echoes between the songs are more in relief to each other.)
The songs work very well as a conversation with each other, I think. Especially when you add in Eddie's lyrics. I'd be shocked if Eric Clapton hasn't listened to the song, he's famous for having a pretty wide ranging and eclectic ear. It'd be an interesting juxtaposition to hear them all talk about it, given the relatively subtle kinship the overall songs share thematically, if nothing else.

herein a list of amazon links for my Open Wounds series

Open Wounds (Open Wounds, Book 1)

Passing Fancies (Open Wounds, Book 2)
yes, this is simple yet, I figure we'll start out simple and just go from there.

Headed into Labor Day weekend, and I don't have a whole heck of a lot
to say.

Other than that I finished a story today. I'm starting to understand the
real reason that Dean Wesley Smith focuses on the butt in chair part of the
process.

As a writer, I'm going to spend a basic number of hours on a story. How many
depends on my process, where I am so far as learning to do it, the length
of the story, what have you.

But there's going to be a number of hours involved, one way or another. Just
the law of getting the words down on paper.

If you're putting your butt in chair hours in every day, whether at the point
where I'm only consistently at an hour or all the way up to some of the pulp
writers that managed eight full hours a day five days a week, you're putting
your focus in.

I got a story done this week that I was expecting to take a full five days.
Part of the reason it got done was I'm busy extending myself, working in more
time every day.

But the other part of it was that I realized, glimpsed the edges of some of
the things Dean says, about just recognizing what the story needs to be.

I can't do that if I'm not putting in the time every day. It's easy to say
to myself, 'hey, think about putting this in tomorrow, or focus on that'.

Easy to say, hard to actually accomplish. It's a lot easier to accomplish it
when you're sitting there, knowing you're going to be there as long as it takes
to get through each line that's going to come.

It builds, brick by brick. The confidence to know that I can do some things now
that I wouldn't have been able to do, just a few months ago.

Let's see what kind of stories I can tell now. What kind of stories are
waiting to be told, now.