I have told parts of this story before. There's new bits here.

Okay, the internet is a really small place.

I've mentioned nodal points before, unusual conincidences that have sent feelers into my future.

My example of this is usually Jenn and Scott.

I'm a Heinlein fan. I got mom to buy For Us the Living for me when it came out.

Either Fark.Com or slashdot carried a story I read about this book. It mentioned that on Electrolite (The blog of Patric and Theresa Nielsen Hayden) there was a big discussion of the book by some of the current luminaries of SF and some of the backbone people of NASA.

I read the whole conversation, but never posted.

This was where I first ran across Scott (go buy his book now, I'll be here when you get back and it is probably better than whatever you were going to read next anyway) Lynch.

I've got another friend who was half of why I joined Live Journal and who I was having a bit of an arguement with at the time (I think we both read too much and too little in the other's position, and I'd like to say the whole thing was entirely past at this late date) (whose webcomic you should go read. Go ahead, I'll be here when you get back.) and well, she made a public post about the topic of the arguement (not our arguement, but her own crusade for this particular matter) that quoted an essay by someone else (who I think wasn't entirely right) and was perhaps the least little bit hyperbolic about how the essay matched with her postion (which it actually didn't have a one to one match with, but it was close) and which inspired a huge lj arguement with various people some of which were rather quite nasty about the whole thing, way beyond what I (who was, you'll recall, still having my own headted disagreement with her, though at the time it had really petered off into occasional snarls and glares) thought was reasonable or necessary. I sort of maybe asked the people who were ragging her for citing an article in support of her thesis that wasn't just a restatement of her thesis what their majors in college were. And I might have mentioned that I was interested in going back and getting another degree but not wanting one where things like citing articles was an issue. I may have mentioned wanting a degree that I could finish without substantial effort. But I'm sure I was tactful about it (and no fair looking for the arguement that's cheating.) Well, that's where I met Jenn. Who was working at night job at a hotel, something that gave her lots of computer time during my main computer time times (I was in Oregon she was in the Midwest, the time difference was in favor of me actually catching her in her down times) so we ended up spending a lot of time talking via some IM client or another.

Jenn is engaged to Scott.

I ended up talking to Scott (via live journal) a fair amount.

In Scott's journal I came to interact with Elizabeth (Who also has most of a score of novels written and more to come, a total of 15 written, a few not actually on the shelves yet. Go buy this one, let me borrow it when you are done. I'm broke.)

Elizabeth is writing all sorts of things, and knows more about Dead English Writer People than I knew there was to know. She also writes about Spaceships and 50 year old women warriors with cybernetics that need updating and secrets that need hiding and about quirky networkded AIs who could probably pass the Turing Test with whatever it is that an AI would do to make it harder to accomplish a task done.) 15 books. That is a daunting figure. It is backed up by a ready grasp of science (which isn't daunting to me) and literary theory and history (Daunting! We'll see that one pop up again) and Automechanics (my worst subject on the ASVAB) (Some day I'd love to debate third wave feminism and particularly feminist epistemology with her. I bet she'd tie me in ribbons, but it would be all sorts of fun, if I had 3 months to bone up on the subject.) She is also writing things with Sarah.

Sarah has a PhD. in English stuff that I sort of faked my way through in Primary School and talked my advisor into letting me skip in College. This makes talking about the nuts and bolts of writing with her a daunting process. She writes books alone too. Go. Buy. Return. I'll be here.

Sarah talks about the nooks and crannies and the neat thiongs and the silly things about this wonderous glorious supergenre called Fantasy and Science Fiction. She claims that science makes her a little nervous, so she makes occasional mistakes in the discussion. "It is also the case that I, personally, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with hard sf--in the broad sense of science fiction which grounds itself in the hard sciences--due in part to my even more uneasy relationship with the hard sciences themselves. Personal unease and uncertainty lead (as ever) to overgeneralizations, and if I didn't want to unpack what I meant, I shouldn't have gotten in the ring."

Well I mentioned Nancy Kress, who writes Hard SF where the science takes a background and the people are fully realized.

Patrick Neilsen Hayden replies to my comment and talks about how people often miss that she is writing Hard SF

It turns out that he may well have planted the Kress==Hard SF meme in my head in, you know it, the Electrolite Thread that started this whole chain of events.

Oh, and the next post in that thread? It is about Cory Doctrow who is a major poster on a shared news/civil liberties blog called boingboing. Mr. Doctrow's writing is 1/3 at fault for why my eyes hurt right now. I spent three days ending 2 days ago staring at a screen reading the first 3 and some change years of that blog on a monitor attached to a messed up video card that makes long reading as bad as on the old monitors back in 93. The boing boing link of this chain doesn'g go anywhere yet. http://www.boingboing.net