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ILONA ANDREWS

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Stories From the Writer Desk

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Sometimes when writers are working, our minds enter this strange place where reality is a bit distorted.

Me: Canadian High Society.

Google: Canada High Society, a community of cannabis connoisseurs.

Me, very tired and misreading: A community of cannibal connoisseurs? In Canada? They are so polite, why in the world would they allow cannibalism… Is this even legal? Do people donate corpses to them after death? … Oh.

Friend: Could you read this and tell me if it’s too violent?

Me: … Yes.

Friend: Really?

Me: She cuts her clitoris off.

Friend: Right, so it’s too much?

Friend: A wormhole is a transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum, an asymptotic projection of the Calabi–Yau manifold manifesting itself in Anti-de Sitter space.

Me: Yes.

Friend: Okay, so I know that in theory it connects two distant points in space.

Me: Yes.

Friend: But do you know what that bijection word salad actually means?

Me: No idea.

Friend: I have read three articles on physics and I don’t know either. I researched this all day, my brain hurts, I am tired, I wrote no words, and I still don’t have enough knowledge to bullshit so it would seem like I know what the hell I am talking about. Why am I doing this to myself?

Friend: So he throws him into a wall, and then the wall breaks, and the werewolf is like right on top of him, and my guy is on his back, and I think he should do that thing where you throw sand into the opponent’s eyes.

Me: Aha.

Friend: Do you think when the wall breaks, there might be some sand? Like would the mortar between the bricks crumble enough to make some sand?

Me: The wall is brick and it breaks?

Friend: Yes.

Me: Why doesn’t he just throw a brick at the werewolf?

Friend: …

Friend: …

Friend: OMG. I need coffee. Like a gallon of coffee.

Me: So what do you think?

Friend: I think you were tired.

Me: …

Friend: It reads like a movie script. What was he feeling here? And here? And over here? I am really invested in this couple and you made me so frustrated, I want to shake you until their feelings fall out!

Me: I’ve read it, it’s really good, there is just one thing.

Friend: Yes?

Me: Is the heroine diabetic, because she constantly wants to go to the bathroom?

Friend: ….

Me: It’s just that the need to pee is mentioned six times in the first 50K.

Friend: ….

Me: …

Friend: I had to meet the deadline, so I locked myself in my office with a giant coffee and wouldn’t leave no matter what until I made the word quota for the day.

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Comments

  3. Bwahahaha, that wormhole Wiki article is a danger 😀 .

    My former physics prof used to rant about it at length. She specialised in Calabi-Yau manifolds as a superstringer and would get so heated about how they are neither needed or related to wormholes.

    • My husband has gotten used to ‘chuckle-chuckle, heeheehee…you know that author I love and love their blog…well…’

  5. Re: Bijection

    In math (abstract phyics :)) a bijection is a function that is 1-1 both ways (as opposed to injection or surjection). Thus, if a = b, then f(a) = f(b) and if f(a) = f(b), then a = b. So it is a 2-way mapping.

    In re: wormhole I’d interpret that to mean linked (pairs of) wormholes, not 1 wormhole to many locations or many wormholes to 1 location.

      • Maths and funny are not mutually exclusive!

        How does a mathematician capture a lion?

        .
        .
        .

        He puts up a cage, sits inside and defines : „I am sitting outside.“

        • Maths and funny are indeed not mutually exclusive!! One of the best days I ever had in a work situation was the day I spent working a shift with three young co-workers who were math majors in college. Laughed most of the day. Good for the endorphin level!! (And I had not taken a math class since h.s.)

        • A statistics funny for everyone. ????

          What do cows say? Mu.

          (Mu is the math symbol for the average of something. Biostatistics 101)

      • My favorite math funny from my husband: His boss says that love is like gravity… so strong. My husband replies: and it decreases to the 4th power with distance!

      • As someone related to more than one person who majored in physics in college, when you say “I don’t understand [physics concept]” a physicist hears “please explain [physics concept] to me, I am bereft in the world without a proper understanding.”

        The upside is, you can always change the subject just by saying “quantum entanglement.”

    • Thank you – wish my math profs were as good as explaining. The abstract math (both for physics and high level math theory) is why our engineering professors had to reteach us what to actually do with all the math courses we had to take (and what the math meant). I remember thinking, ‘oh, so that’s what a partial differential means’ when we used them for thermodynamics. (Why going to a university that is tops in both math and physics can have a downside – your profs and fellow students can be too smart.)

    • Thank you for this! It’s been a minute since I had to worry about bijections, and certainly never in conjunction with wormholes. Had forgotten how delightful it is that “surjective” sounds nothing like what it means. 🙂

    • Oh. I rmb this. Like graph. If it always go up or always go down, it’s bijection. If it goes up and down, it’s not…….Right? Math major here but been a few years since I touch it.

  8. It might not be a real thing, but I seem to remember that research showed that people make better decisions when they need to pee… Darnit, now I have to go find a source or debunk for that ????

  12. And here was my lesson if the day: don’t eat or drink while reading IA blog posts, I spit out the drink when I read about the Canada High Society and the cadavers donation. ????

    • Honestly, if you were to dispose of a cadaver (everyone has different life needs, I won’t judge) would you not leave it with the very relaxed and polite members of the Canada High Society? 😀 😀

    • I am Cdn and have instructed hubby to leave my cadaver in the desert for the vultures. He has his own idea of having me taxidermied so that I will always be around ????. If all else fails I’ll tell him the new option is to send it to the Canada High Society!

      • Why would you leave it in the desert-around here you could leave in the middle of a field and the vultures would get it

      • Omg, we have the same conversations! ???????? My partner and I talk about how he wants to be disposed of (if he doesn’t go out in a fiery crash of flames in his Camaro, he wants a sky burial) and I’ve told him I want to be turned into mushrooms. ????????

  13. The sand would probably be better than a brick tbh.

    Like sand in the eyes is a pain, it hurts, getting it out is a nightmare and you can’t really see what you’re doing until you get most of it out.

    A brick to the head would hurt but it might only succeed in making a werewolf more angry.

    But then I am not a werewolf who has ever had a brick to the head so I could be totally wrong on that one.

    • Also, if you are on your back and throw sand up into someone’s face, you can close your eyes so that any sand ricochet doesn’t blind you. Throw a brick at the face of someone above you, and you are likely to get a broken nose when gravity returns it.

  14. Oh, oh Canadian high society, ha, ha. Not played on the fringes of those posh folks in decades, perhaps they did nibble at extremities ???? eh, drugs might have been used by others.
    Gosh lots of aching grey matter. Diabetes query, shaking feeling until they tumble out, hehe…thank you for sharing.

  16. Once, my husband and my kid were running errands. They passed by a building,and the kid blurts out, “Cannibal Dispensory?!?” They turned around to check the sign, which in fact read ‘Cannabis Dispensory’.

    We now regularly discuss whether the Cannibal Dispensory dispenses cannibals, or food for cannibals. Because we want to figure it out…. 😀

  20. OMG, I am laughing so hard! It’s all so true.

    I have to comment on the bijection word salad. I write space opera. When I was researching for the space travel in my series, I really tried. I read whole scientific articles on string theory until I had a migraine and no greater understanding than when I started. Then I had an epiphany. Do they explain hyperdrive in detail in Star Wars? No, it just works. I am writing space opera, not hard SF. My MC is not an engineer. I think somewhere I have a paragraph talking about the space jumps and otherspace and how ships go from one spot in the universe to another, and there is a sentence that literally says something like “Mercy didn’t really understand how it all worked and it made her brain hurt to try”.

    Sometimes you have to explain the magic in detail, and sometimes it is okay to hand wave it. I chose to largely hand wave it in this instance. And not one single reader review or response has ever said anything about it. No one cares. They care about the characters. They care about the romance. They care about the bad guys not yet being defeated in book 3 of a projected 9 book series, but no one cares whether I explain the science behind space travel. Yay me.

  22. As a Canadian it would not surprise me at all to discover that there is a growing underground cannibal society. They would just remember to say “Please” and “Thank You” and “Sorry” when reaching for the best parts! “Sorry I had to murder you eh, but I’m feelin’ a bit peckish there bud.”

      • First exposure to letterkenny, & it was glorious. Thanks Mod R, I’m now stuck in said wormhole, & it is glorious ????

        • Honestly they had me in the first 5 minutes of the first episode. Look for the “Does this onesie come in men’s” joke 😀

          So glad to co-opt another fan hehe.

    • But maybe they are a pacifist cannibal society?
      As its more of a food choice rather then a food procurement method choice, maybe they have deals with graveyards that are filling up too fast…a sustainable disposal system for all cadavers?

      • I would think that embalming fluid would ruin the meat? ???? Perhaps they only take the people who choose not to do that? ????‍♀️

  24. Pee six times in the first 50k words? Time to call the pee police! ???????? ????‍♀️

  25. Is the wall load bearing? We’ve fixed almost everything you can bodge in a brick house…. throwing a brick or sand might not be an issue if the impact disturbs the wall enough ????

    Love the cannibals, my 10 year old asked why people buy cannibal oil skin care products. After scratching our heads for a bit she produced the Avon catalogue with the cannabis oils specials.

  27. OMG–thank you for that laugh. I can always tell it’s time to stop when I misread things.

    Is it a bad sign that the word salad made sense to me? Probably.

    Math in general makes my brain hurt.

    And why is it, every time I find a pain-free position to sleep, I have to pee? Why? Is there some wicked seraphim cackling over a ‘pee’ key somewhere?

    Probably.

  28. “…I had to meet the deadline, so I locked myself in my office with a giant coffee and wouldn’t leave no matter what until I made the word quota for the day.”

    We write what we know, do we not?

  31. One vital piece of info is missing from this blog post!

    Is it the same friend each time?

    Because I am imagining you with one friend who is writing a novel where the small-bladdered heroine fights werewolves in wormholes before cutting someone’s clitoris off

  34. Does your friend need a physicist to talk too? One of my friends was a physics professor for decades and enjoys SF. I expect he’d be happy to talk about wormholes and superstrings until you cut your arm off to //// I mean until you have a firm grasp of the physics of wormholes.

  35. The Cannibal misread reminds me of a favourite ‘joke’ of our school language department which they use to remind students that just because they know a few bits of a language, they shouldn’t assume;

    If a Vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

  40. This is AMAZING! I’m at home recovering from a car accident and I really needed this laugh out loud! Thank you, thank you! (…and when is the next thing coming out?! I need to be able to count the days, possibly hours!)

  43. Wow. I finally understand why guys make that face and cringe when they see someone get kicked in the cojones. Because I just jumped, yelped and squeezed when I read this post.
    That last one is funny, though.

  47. lol at “Friend: I had to meet the deadline, so I locked myself in my office with a giant coffee and wouldn’t leave no matter what until I made the word quota for the day.”
    Brilliant what the mind does to cope…writer locks themselves into a room and can’t go to the loo…Writers brain adds toilet breaks in to the story as a mental release while the physical release is (or is assumed to be) denied.

  48. I don’t know why but the last one has me in stitches.

    Maybe it’s the cumulative impact.

  49. A possible requirement for entry into the Canadian High Society is cannibals eating cannabis along with the cadavers?

    Then we have a heroine who pees like there is no tomorrow while fighting a werewolf in a wormhole with a brick, while the author is furiously writing with a vat of coffee next to her to get the word count done.

    This would be a hilarious book mashup. 😀

  51. maybe the home used to be infested with rodents…and then when the wall breaks, the hero could throw rat poop instead of sand and/or bricks? Sigh, we are renovating our new-to-us home. took down ceiling dry wall due to a leak in the upstairs bathroom, a ton of dried rat poop came raining down. home-ownership is fun…

  52. Honestly, if someone were thrown into a brick wall hard enough to break it, the trauma would probably kill him on impact.

  54. I love this. My question is: Do you several interesting friends or one AMAZING friend?!?!

  57. You may not remember this, but about 2 years ago, you were standing next to me in my kitchen, helping me prepare dinner (I think I always put you on chopping/slicing duty for the fruit salad). I mentioned that I was having a really tough time with this particular scene where the action didn’t exactly make my hero heroic, but I still needed the scene. The alternative you suggested was so perfect and so simple that I think I just stared at you for a moment with a deer-in-the-headlights look before I finally said “I love you. Go sit down with your wine. I’ll finish the salad.” 😀

  58. As a card-carrying cannabis user in Ohio’s medical database, I have never confused “cannabis” for “cannibal”, but as someone who knows someone who desires cannabis and cannot get a medical card, I do know someone who would bite your arm off for some cannabis. Those of us who are legal to use it never give it away or share it, because we could lose our only pain relief that works. I’ve backed up a few times!

    But seriously, this entire post was too funny to even say it’s too funny. I can relate to needing to pee and thinking only of that. I can relate to not understanding diddly about wormholes. I can also see cutting off a clitoris as something that used to be practiced regularly in some societies. I also adore the man in the pictures. That outfit, that hair, those eyes! Someone’s photo shoot went very well there.

    You two are the gift that keeps on giving. I await your next product with anticipation.

  61. My physics teacher was working on his PHD thesis. Physics was the entirety of his world. He was trying to explain E =mc2 (I can’t make the 2 sit in the proper place. It means squared) and dropped a pen on the floor. He said earnestly that there was energy stored in the pen on the floor. I know that I just used an adverb and the word said together but he was very earnest. I managed to hold in my laughter. I stopped trying to understand physics and concentrated on memorizing the equations instead. I got an A and didn’t learn a darned thing. I loved Algebra as it was solving puzzles.

  64. ???????? “bijection word salad” ???????????? throw some Cosmic Ranch dressing on it and call it good. ????????????

  68. I love the last interaction; the subliminal effect of reality on fiction production.

    BWAHAHA

  69. I have read the original Mash books. The word “transcendental ” always reminds me of Trapper John saying he was into “transcendental meditation of my navel” Ever since, that word always meant to me as fluff thrown out as a red herring. So the wormhole theory, as above, struck me as fluff thrown out to disguise the fact they did not know what they were talking about. Not a physics person here, so if you told me that a wormhole was a bleach hole connected to a quasar, it you totally believe you. Totally!

      • When I tell you my mind was SPINNING with the possibilities ????.
        I concluded it was a cosmic bleach that dissolved through the fabric of the universe hehe.
        I can fix it for you if you want, but I personally think it’s great ????

  72. I think this is one of my favorite posts of all time. Thank you for sharing this! It really helped make me smile.

  75. What is the longest amount of time you were able to sit down and write? Does it make it easier that there are two of you writing, like a relay?

  78. Now that I have stopped laughing and am coherent…

    We were driving my 9 year old daughter to a class when she suddenly said,

    “Mommy, aren’t hookers illegal in this state?”

    We have to think a moment because we did just move to New York from the Bible belt.

    Us…”…….nooo, why do you ask? And how do you know what a hooker is?”

    She rolls eyes so hard there is only creepy white, she is 9 and we don’t have a TV.

    “The sign on the building said hookers here, reservations expected.”

    Me, “Turn the car around?”

    We slowly drive by small strip-mall.

    Sign at …restaurant? –

    TABLE HOOKAS AVAILABLE
    reservations accepted

    We can’t drive because we are laughing so hard and we can’t tell park from reverse.

    Gasping “Have to check her video games….”

    Child – arms folded glaring

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