That's my boy

Yesterday was a hellish day filled with extended travel via public transportation and mind-numbing amounts of governmental bureaucracy. We had to go from Hangzhou to the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai to apply for Tyler's proof of citizenship card and passport. By the time we'd arrived back where we'd started (not home, sadly) we were sore, cranky and exhausted. I did, however, learn something very important yesterday. My son is awesome. I can't tell you how proud I am of that little man.

Our day began at 5:30am. It was raining, and we had to catch a taxi to the train station on the other side of Hangzhou's downtown. We counted on at least 40 minutes in the taxi, and our train tickets were for 7:00. What we didn't count on was the 20 minutes it took to catch a taxi, or the taxi driver's inexplicable refusal to drive faster than 40km/h. We also didn't count on Tyler throwing up in the taxi. We had debated, when packing for the trip, whether or not we needed to bring a change of clothes for him. Given that it was just a day trip we decided that extra clothes would just be extra hassle to carry. He has been sick for a couple of weeks with a sinus infection that recently relocated to his chest/throat, but he hasn't been having any stomach problems at all. Boy, were we surprised. On the plus side, it did convince the driver to go faster.

We arrived at the train station, smelling of sour milk and wet-wiping each other's clothes as best we could, at 6:55am. I grabbed all the bags and the folded up stroller (the week before Chinese New Year the crowds at any train station in China are a concrete example of what 1.4 billion people actually look like - no chance of actually using the stroller there) and my wife paid the fare (plus a bit for the puke) and grabbed the baby. We then proceeded to, as they say, "haul ass". We made the train with almost a minute to spare.

In a rare moment of clarity and intelligence we had opted to take the new(ish) high-speed train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. According to the display at the front of the car we were soon cruising along at a speed of 308km per hour. The trip, which used to take more than 2 hours, now takes 50 minutes. I love that train.

Upon arriving in Shanghai we unfolded the stroller and wandered around looking for an open ticketing window. After a time we found one and stood in line behind 1.8 billion people to buy our return tickets for that afternoon. The consulate was only open until noon, so we bought return tickets for 1pm. Tickets purchased, we grabbed a quick bite of breakfast. As a bit of advice, the Chinese KFC version of a sausage and egg McMuffin has all of the weaknesses of the North American McDonald's version (the sausage and the egg, primarily) with the added detriment of not even being on a muffin - they use a regular bun. Gross.

Now fed and ticketed, we made our way to the subway terminal that connects to the train station. We only had to go 8 stops, but in those 8 stops I learned that Shanghai's subway system is clean, efficient, and, at 8:30am on a Wednesday - very, very crowded. We managed to get off at the correct stop, however, and made our way up to street level where we remembered that it was raining.

I would like to pause here to point something out. Tyler usually gets up at 8am. Here it was, 9am, and we'd already been on the road for 3 hours. He'd been gotten up 2 hours early and had puked in a taxi, but my stuffed-up, coughing, sleepy little 14 month old was his usual cheerful self. On the train he sat quietly and ate a bit of apple, and on the subway he held on to the pole with me so we wouldn't fall over when the train stopped (giggling the whole way), and now he was pointing at and calling our attention to the sights of Shanghai as we tried to hold an umbrella over his stroller and walk at the same time.

Note: I didn't take this picture. This is from the portrait studio we went to about a month ago.

After a few minutes of trying to determine which direction the Canadian Consulate was from our subway stop, we'd had enough of the rain and the crowds and hailed a taxi. We knew it was only a few blocks, but we weren't sure which blocks and didn't want to wander aimlessly.

I truly don't want to re-live the ordeal at the consulate, so I won't go into details. I will say that handing in two applications involved standing in a rather long line three separate times and took almost 4 hours. Also, they keep the temperature in the consulate at a balmy 27 or 28°C, which would be fine except that it was about 6°C outside and most places in this part of China leave the windows open year round, so you tend to dress accordingly (in many warm layers). We roasted. Tyler spent the 4 hours wandering around (with his mother) and saying hello to strangers, and playing with my car keys. We left the Consulate, papers properly filed, at 12:48pm - 12 minutes before the departure of our train.

Knowing we had no chance of making that train, we walked back to the subway entrance (now that we knew where it was). Tyler had fallen asleep in the elevator at the consulate, and napped in his stroller until we got on the subway train. We rode the 8 stops back to the train station with the 2.4 billion other people who were also riding the subway in Shanghai that day, sitting in the seat that an old lady had shamed someone into giving up for us. Tyler spent the whole time telling the old lady a story (he can't really talk yet, but he doesn't let that stop him).

Once at the train station we stood in line behind the 3 billion other people at the ticket window to change our tickets to a later train. We didn't have time to catch the 2 o'clock train so we opted for the 3 o'clock. We grabbed some lunch in a little restaurant in the train station, and Tyler played a game of "funny face/giggle" with the waitresses. All of them. I don't think anyone else was served food the whole time we were there.

We made the train with plenty of time to spare, and Tyler spent a large portion of the 50 minute journey playing peek-a-boo with the lady across the aisle. Once back in Hangzhou, we stood in line at the taxi stand behind approximately 9 billion people. Tyler spent the wait finding litter to point at and say "臭"(chou="stinky"). Traffic was lighter than we expected on the way back to my sister-in-law's place, and we arrived shortly before 5pm - almost 11 hours after we'd left. After supper, an hour or so of "chase-auntie-with-balloons" and a bath he almost lasted through the first two verses of "Baby Beluga" before falling soundly asleep for the night.

While it is true that after our very long day Tyler slept through until 8:30 the next morning, woke up enough to drink a bottle of formula and then went back to sleep until noon, it should be noted that he made it through the entire ordeal without crying, fussing, and without a single temper tantrum. Like I said, my son is awesome.

Sheepish grin, begin again.

The two months of silence following my last post may have clued you in, but allow me to confirm what you may have already suspected: this year's NaNoWriMo attempt was, again, a complete failure.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that. I finished up the month of November at a word count of 5155 words - somewhat short of my (admittedly hubristic) goal of approximately 200,000 words. I failed to complete the first chapter, never mind two novels. I didn't even come close to achieving my goals, so in that respect I failed. I did, however, learn an incredible amount about myself, the writing process, and how the one fits with the other. 

You may have noticed, in my last post, that I referred to my plans in terms of how many hours I had available. I ended up setting my writing goals that way - in terms of time spent. This was a mistake. "Butt in chair" is a vital concept for someone who wants to be a writer, but it is a prerequisite, not a goal. I will forever more set writing goals in terms of words on the page, because that is the only metric that means anything. 4,000 words is 4,000 words but 3 hours of buttchair time could be anything from several thousand words to none (psst, it was none more often than not). The goal is to put words on paper, not to sit in front of a computer for a certain length of time.

Goals were an important aspect of my learning experience in this year's NaNo. I learned that I had set crappy ones. The goals I set for myself in November were concrete goals, so I didn't fall into that trap, but they weren't the goals I really wanted to achieve. On the day to day side of things, I didn't want to spend a certain amount of time in front of the computer, I wanted to write a certain number of words. With my goals for the month, I came to realise that what I truly wanted to accomplish was not so much the writing of a novel, but the publishing of a novel. While the writing of a novel is a necessary (and thoroughly enjoyable) step in achieving that goal, it isn't necessarily the best first step.

One of the reasons jumping right into the writing of a novel was a bad first step for me is that I lack endurance. A novel takes a very long time to write. Weeks and months of grinding away at something without getting any meaningful feedback from anyone but yourself. It seems impossible for me to maintain the self-belief necessary to keep plodding away in the absence of feedback. The doubt begins to creep in: I've never published anything. Why would I invest this much time and effort into something without a reasonable expectation of success? Keeping in mind that my end goal for writing a NaNo novel was always to get it published, and also keeping in mind how difficult this is to achieve, these doubts had the not inconsiderable heft of truth and reason behind them.

Luckily for me I was, at one time in my life, a high-performance athlete. I know how to build endurance. I know how to build it safely, efficiently, and (most important of all) how to maintain it once you've built it up. You don't build endurance by going as hard as you can for as long as you can, until you drop from exhaustion. You build endurance by going as hard as you can, for short periods of time, as often as you can. As the time required for recovery decreases the time you perform for increases until you can go as hard as you want for as long as you want and still go out dancing that night. Mind out of the gutter, people.

With that strategy in mind, and with my newly refined writing goals in hand, I have embarked on a new journey.

TaDaaaaaaaa!

I am signing up for "Write 1 Sub 1". The idea is that you write one piece of fiction (of any length) every week and submit one piece of fiction (not necessarily the same one) for publication every week for a year. As the first week of January is pretty much over now, I'll be writing two next week and then at least one a week after that. I've got my market listings ready to go, I've got duotrope bookmarked, and I've got a list of story ideas a quarter of a mile long. I'm locked and loaded. Time to build some endurance.

The writing part is under my control. I will write a minimum of 52 pieces of short fiction this year. Submitting is likewise under my control. I will submit a minimum of 52 pieces of short fiction this year. I'm hoping to publish at least one of those pieces, but that is less under my control than the others so I'm not going to state it as a goal (just a hope). Write and submit, this I can do.

Now who's with me?

NaNo minus 13 (hours)

As of right now I have exactly 13 hours before I am allowed to start hammering out my NaNoWriMo novels. I am nowhere near ready. I have yet to finish my scene list, or most of my characters for that matter. I do, however, have about 6 free hours today in which to sort out those piffling details and get the jet pack (metaphorically) strapped on. I thought I'd take this calm before the storm to fill everyone in on my plans for this November; what software I'll be using, what strategies I'll be employing, what goals I'll be setting, and all that sort of thing.

I have been using, and will continue to use, yWriter for my planning and desktop based writing. I like the way it deals with scenes and chapters. I also like that it's free, and that I already know how to use it. I will not be using Scrivener. It's not that I dislike Scrivener, it's just that I am already familiar with how yWriter works and I'd rather spend time planning my novels (and blogging about it) than learning a new software package.

In addition, I will be using Evernote and Dropbox. Evernote is where I keep bits of ideas that occur to me when I'm not actually writing, and links to resources I might find useful while writing. Dropbox is where I keep my yWriter project file. This means I can access my WIP from either home or work with equal ease. Dropbox rocks my world.

I also just ordered my new toy tool. I should be receiving my brand new, shiny Asus Eee pad (Transformer - TF101) either this evening or sometime tomorrow (tomorrow is more likely, but I remain hopeful for this evening). I am likewise hopeful that I will be able to do the majority of my writing on this bad boy and sync up to the desktop via Dropbox or Evernote. I will resist the siren call of Angry Birds until December, I promise.

So. I will be writing my novels primarily on an android tablet and compiling on a windows desktop using a combination of Evernote, Dropbox, and yWriter. I have a brand new 5kg (11 lbs for you disadvantaged Americans) bag of raw coffee beans ready for roasting. I am good to go.

The observant among you  may have noticed I've been pluralizing the word novel in this blog post. There is a good reason for this. I will be pluralizing my NaNovel this November. Rather than settling for the 50,000 word goal, I've set myself a slightly different goal. It is my intention to complete the first draft of not one, but two novels this November (the second is sequel to the first). I am not setting a specific word count goal, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two novels together clock in at over 200K. My best guess estimate tells me that I need to average about 7,000 - 8,000 words a day to do this, but I already write 3,000-4,000 words a day just with emails, blog posts, Google+ comments, comments on other people's blogs, comments and critiques on deviantArt deviations and so forth. If I forgo the majority of that and concentrate my attention on my novels, I am already halfway there.

So. I will be using my new Eee pad, Dropbox, Evernote, and yWriter to write two novels in 30 days. As if that weren't enough, I will also posting the first of my novels online as I write it. If you want to read along, you will be able to find it at my deviantArt group. You'll have to be a deviantArt member to read it, but membership is free. I may or may not post the last few chapters, though I haven't decided yet. I intend to publish it down the road and I'm leery of giving the ending away.

What about you? What software are you using for NaNo? Where will you do most of your writing? Have you set yourself any additional goals*, or are you happy with 50k? Do you have enough coffee? Yak back in the comments below!



* I have created a circle on Google+ for NaNoVerAchievers (more than 50k or faster than 30 days). If you fit that mould, let me know and I'll add you to the circle.

Writer's Unblock

So there I was, more than half way through NaNoPlaMo (National Novel Planning Month - otherwise known as October). I'd gotten my main plot arc figured out, and a couple of characters - including my main character. Then I hit my first wall. It was one doozy of a wall. It almost killed my story.

No matter how I approached the story, I couldn't get a handhold on it. It was like glass; mocking, sarcastic glass. The story that had seemed so promising just yesterday was rapidly drifting away from me, and I wasn't even sure why. I'd spent hours and hours sitting at the keyboard trying to get some supporting characters on paper. They wouldn't come out of their shadows. I fiddled around with some setting concepts, but nothing really felt right. It was all too generic. About the only productive thing I accomplished in two or three days of "planning" were some really impressive trick shots in Peggle Nights. Productive...

Then, in my real life, I had one of those pathetic, deus ex machina, "and then suddenly the problem was solved" plot twists that we writers are supposed to avoid like the plague. The solution to my problem popped fully formed, like a Greek god, right into my head. The characters wouldn't form up because I didn't have anywhere to put them - I needed my setting first. The settings I'd been trying on weren't satisfying to me because I already had a better one in mind. The story was going to take place, was meant to take place, couldn't take place anywhere else but

Aedon (the world in the picture of the map is called "Aedon").

This was a world I'd created for my attempted NaNovel last year. (It's a good thing I took these pictures of it, actually, because when we moved this past February I forgot to take it down from the wall in the old apartment. It might well still sit there, confusing the lovely Chinese couple who probably live there now.) Last year's story was a very different animal from this year's papery beast, of course, but they both fit perfectly in the same world. Perfectly.

Last year's novel was set in Ergess. Nominally a constitutional monarchy, Ergess is actually ruled by a very politically active, polytheistic "state religion". A very expansionist state religion. This is in stark contrast to Olam.

Olam is ruled by a council of merchant princes. The political intrigue, byplay, infighting and actual details of their various power bases are incomprehensible to outsiders. Luckily for us, they are also more or less irrelevant to outsiders (and us). My story does not deal with them.

My story does deal with an always feared and generally shunned religious order of assassins (they do thievery, spying and a number of other nasty things as well, but they are really famous for the assassinating). What better place to plop down their main temple than a city-state where the only truly important questions are "How much?" and "When can you deliver?" It is a perfect fit.

I am going to have to change Olam from a large country to a smaller (and more easily defended) city-state. I am also going to have to move it from where it is now, staring across the river at the Viking Krallish capital to the tip of that northern horn. I was going to have to make those changes anyway, mind you, I just hadn't realized it until I actually went to use the place. It's still perfect.

Now that I think about it, though, I may want to make some cultural adjustments to the vikings Krallish and the Native Americans Horse Lords Furlanese as well. They are both just a wee bit... over done. This year's story will also have to take place at least a hundred years before the events of last year's story. Last year's story involves some major plot events that change the entire world in fundamental and irrevocable ways, so there can't really be any overlap. Aside from that, the world is totally perfect for this story.

What actually does make this world perfect for my story is that it is a world that I've already built. The heavy lifting is already done. Realizing this gave me some very useful insight into myself as a writer. In particular, I learned two things:

1. I am the kind of writer that needs to have a whole world built before he can get to know his characters or flesh out a plot.
2. I am lazy.

I am too lazy to go around building a whole world for every story I feel like writing, anyway. It took me weeks of late nights and early mornings to plan Aedon last year. It was the thought of doing that again this year that was pushing me into the arms of Bjorn the Unicorn. Now that I know where the action is going to go down, now that I have the context for my story, the glass doesn't look so smooth any more. I can see handholds all over the place, in fact, and I can't wait to get my hands dirty. Is it November 1^st yet? Rawr, and so forth!

(If you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, go to www.nanowrimo.org/ and find out)

NaNoWriMo: A November to Remember

Judging by the weather (and also the calendar) November is just around the corner. That means it’s almost time for… NaNoWriMo!

Just in case you’ve never heard of it, NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month”. They can be found at http://www.nanowrimo.org/, and November is the time when NanoWriMo’ers gather together online and attempt to do the improbable – write 50,000+ words of a novel in 30 days (that's 1667 words a day). Last year I participated and failed, but this year I intend to win! To help both myself and anyone else who is thinking about taking part, I have compiled a list of dos and don’ts. It’s mostly don’ts – having failed I have more experience on that side of things.

Do
1) Write every day
2) Plan your novel ahead of time

Don’t
1) Give up
2) Get too far behind
3) Edit as you go
4) Care if what you write is crap (you can fix it later)
5) Have a baby in November

Not to point fingers, but it was entirely my infant son’s fault that I didn’t finish last year. I was on pace the first 5 days of November, and then my wife went into labor. Tyler was born on the 7th, and I got hardly any writing at all done after that. I’ve double checked with my wife, and she assures me that there is virtually no chance of another baby this November, so I should be all set to win. Winning, by the way, simply means successfully writing more than 50,000 words in the time frame – you compete only with yourself.

I’m The Allergen at http://www.nanowrimo.org/ so go ahead and add me as a writing buddy. You are going to take part, aren't you?

I'll continue to blog about various things throughout November, but there will likely be a noticeable NaNoWriMo bias to my blog posts. I consider this a good thing.

Reclassifying the Past: From Fiction to Non

The past is a story we tell ourselves to account for the present.¹ That story, however, is in the process of moving from the 800s to the 920s; that is, from fiction to non-fiction, from literature to biography. (see here for more details) Today’s children will have such well documented lives that there won’t be room for the sort of creative filling-in of the blanks that has formed so many of my childhood memories. There won’t be any blanks to fill in.

Me as a toddler

My son as a toddler (last week)

My son, by the time he turns 1 year old next month, will appear in several thousand photographs and many hours of video footage. These photographs and video are digital, and much of it is online.  It is therefore easily searchable and viewable from just about anywhere at just about any time. This is unlikely to change. Years from now, if he wants to know what kind of clothes he was wearing, or what he looked like, or who he was playing with, he will likely be able to find out as quickly and easily as he could find out the scores from last weekend’s jet-pack quidditch game.

My Underpants Cowboy™ phase

The number of photographs of me that exist from my first year of life probably number in the neighborhood of a hundred, and that is only because my father has been an avid amateur photographer for most of his adult life. I would suspect that the average number for people my age is closer to twenty than a hundred. When I was a child photographs were much more a “special occasion” thing. Oh, and most of those hundred or so photos of me are on slides in boxes in my parents’ basement. Looking at them would currently involve about 35 hours of air travel followed by a day or two of sifting through boxes, setting up the (hopefully still working) projector, and clicking through pictures one by one. Enough time to play numerous games of jet-pack quidditch. Alas, there is no video of my early days – no one in my family owned a video camera.

My Sexy Underpants Cowboy™ phase

My recollections of my childhood are the product of a whole host of disparate elements: actual remembrances of an event here and there, remembrances of photos that I have seen, but not for a long time, stories that my parents have told me over the years about “that time you…”, stories I’ve told to other people about “that time I…”, and crap that I just made up at some point, and then eventually forgot that it never really happened , at least, not the way I remember it.

My first fish

The benefits of teamwork

The interesting thing for me is that all of it, every aspect of my picture of my past, is open to interpretation. It lacks the cut and dried factuality of the video and photographic evidence my son will possess.  Likewise, because it is open to interpretation it is also open to re-interpretation. The older I get, the more chances I have for revision, and the better my childhood looks to me in hindsight. The rosy glow of time (in cooperation with my inner storyteller) heals all blemishes and adds a healthy dollop of happy with a side order of excitement (that probably wasn’t much present at the time). I’ve forgotten most of the fights and arguments and heartbreaks I’ve had over the years. My son won’t be able to forget his because they’ll be chronicled in his twitter history and his facebook feed (or whatever service takes over once they pull a “MySpace” and die).

The girl next door.

My first wheels

And that’s the final nail in the coffin of the fictionalized (and idealized) past; social networking. If it were just the pictures and the videos, well, those can be ignored. It still would require an act of will to make that connection between that evidence of the past and the curiosity of the present. The nature of the social network, however, is to drag the past along and make it very much present in the present.

Then...

When I first joined facebook (well behind the trend, I have to admit) I did what most people do – I tracked down everyone I’d ever known who was also on facebook. I searched for all the names I could remember of people I’d gone to kindergarten with. I dug through their friends lists, looking for all the people I hadn’t remembered. I caught up on all the gossip of people I hadn’t thought about in twenty or thirty years, who were living in places I hadn’t seen in almost as long.

...and now

And then, eventually, I deleted them. I deleted most of them, anyway. I had to redo what time and nature had already done, and what I had unwittingly undone. My friends list had filled up with a bunch of people that didn’t matter to me. All those people I’d forgotten, I’d forgotten for a reason. They were no longer part of my life, and had probably never been a particularly important part of my life to begin with². For today’s children it will be exactly the opposite.

In the days before salmonella

I have to make an effort to remember the past, and naturally forget the things that cease being important because remembering them takes too much effort. My children will have instant access to a blow by blow account of most of the events in their lives, and will have to make an effort to “forget”. If they decide that some tidbit of information is no longer important, they will have to make a conscious decision to remove it from their “memory”. They probably won’t, though.

Remember when you could take a picture like this and not go to jail?

Just as it is more trouble than it would be worth for me to try and accurately remember all the details of my past, so it will be more trouble than it’s worth to sift through all the minutiae of daily life and remove the unimportant bits. So my children will be left with their stark, photographically preserved factual pasts. This worries me a little bit. It doesn’t worry me for any of the reasons that most older people are bothered by the lifestyle changes of “the kids today”. It worries me because I suspect that it is our tendency to idealize and creatively re-imagine the past that allows us to do the same with the future and that, to me, is the source of hope.

¹I’m fairly certain this is a (mis)quotation of something somebody famous once said but I can’t, for the life of me, remember who it was or find it online. If you know, please fill me in.

²If I haven't laid eyes on you in more than 10 years, and you are still on my facebook friends list, you can take it as an indication that I consider you to be an interesting person, and that I continue to be interested in your life and thoughts.

On the Importance of Creating

I had a conversation, a while back, with an old friend of mine. This friend was in the throes of the sort of existential angst that is so familiar to my generation. The kind where you ask yourself questions like, “What am I supposed to be doing with my life?”, “What do I want to do with my life?”, and “What the fuck is the point?” I offered what support I could, gave what advice seemed appropriate, and life went on. The whole thing stuck with me, however, in the back of my mind.

While reading the blog post of another friend (http://www.craigmelhoff.com/journal/2011/9/18/interface-to-face.html) dealing with the role of our generation in bridging the technological gap between the old guard and the new one, it occurred to me that this particular brand of depression seems almost entirely constrained to people my own age and younger. The image of my father, head in hands, wondering what to do with his life just doesn’t compute. That’s not to say that my parents have never felt a bit lost, or depressed about the turns their lives have taken but, and correct me if I’m wrong Mom and Dad, they’ve always had a pretty good idea about where they were going with their lives and why. I can’t always say the same about myself, or most of my friends.

Some days later I was watching the first installment of the wonderful series “Fry’s Planet Word” (viewable here to those in the UK. If you aren’t in the UK just... find other means.) and was struck by the distinction drawn between language use in chimps who can be taught sign language, and humans. The chimps, it turns out, don’t initiate conversation and don’t use language with each other. They are not linguistic creators. Humans are.

That’s when it occurred to me. The biggest difference between my parents’ generation and my own is how we spend free time.  My parents’ generation is much, much more likely to spend their free time in creative, productive pursuits than my own. They build things, make things, cook things, and grow things. We watch TV, play video games, and socially network about the things we watch and play. They impose their will on their environment (not to be melodramatic) while we do not. They create while we sit passively back and consume.

I worked, for a period of about 4 years, in a call center. That job almost killed me. I would walk in at the beginning of my shift and log into my phone, and that was the last act of volition I would perform for the next eight hours. We didn’t even answer the phone manually. You would hear a beep in your headset, and you’d be talking to someone. The complete and utter lack of self-determined action drove me into a depression so deep that I bear the scars to this day. For a period of two or three years after I was fired from that job I couldn’t bring myself to answer the phone. I got call display so I could phone people back, instead. I still suffer anxiety when forced to answer a phone, and am prone to not answer unless I absolutely have to.

These days my free time is spent in much more creative pursuits. I cook (as opposed to heating up food). I play music. I write speculative fiction. I also passively watch TV and play video games, of course, but in a much healthier proportion than I used to.

This is why creative, constructive activities are so important. They allow us to impose our wills on our environment. They allow us to express ourselves and, in doing so, force us to decide who our selves are.

What about you? What hobbies do you have that allow you to express yourself? What creative pursuits fill your time? How do you stay sane? Weigh-in in the comments below.